By Lucy

I might have been a little drunk.

Like usual, I couldn’t sleep for it. I gave up and crawled out of bed around 9.

I have a growing moral dilemma. When I made my plan to leave for a few years, it was under the impression I’ve had since I was a girl that I was disposable, interchangeable. That it would take a couple of years to ingratiate myself into organizations and no one would notice my absence, since I was here so briefly.

That is not bearing true. Soroptimists needs a leader, and I have concerns the club will fold before I get back. Rotary will trundle along fine without me, so no concerns there. The budding SIBS needs a lot of guidance, and I feel like I should be here for that.

Travelling also isn’t such a strong idea in my mind that I’d be destroyed by deciding not to. I could still take a month or two off a year and travel. The whole “circumnavigate the globe” idea was more of a practical “plane tickets home are expensive and no one will miss me anyway” thought, than anything else.

What I’m saying is, if there’s my ‘one opportunity’ to make it in the next couple years, I’d rather be here to grab it than let it slip.

Decisions, decisions…

I spend the morning packing and trying to make myself relax. Around noon, I get a text; Victoria is here.

Victoria was waiting by an SUV. She’s a bigger girl, with waist-length red hair and piercing blue eyes. She almost looks like my mother. I’m glad I cut and dyed my hair or people would be asking if she’s my sister.

“There’s no space in the trunk.” She says, opening the back door.

We slide my stuff in and Hanuman wishes me well and takes off.

“Nice to meet you.” I turn to her and offer her a hand to shake.

“I don’t do touch.” She says bluntly.

“Oh.” I sheepishly shove my hand back in my pocket.

Funnily enough, I don’t enjoy touch either, although I don’t hate it. Many a boyfriend has complained about the fact I don’t prefer to cuddle, hold hands, or canoodle.

On the drive, she tells me she has Autism, ADHD, and BPD. I feel my heart sink a little, but I’m stuck with her for 2 weeks now. Let’s not judge her yet.

Actually, she doesn’t seem that bad. She talks a lot, out of anxiety, but she doesn’t mind if I just nod along. She seems to have a strong personality, but says she cries a lot and doesn’t push back on jobsites because she’s afraid of confrontation. Almost the polar opposite of me, who seems meek but will tell people off at the drop of a hat.

“What job were you just on?”

I tell her about the situation at the mill. “I also just finished level one.”

“Yeah? Landon’s mad at me, I didn’t show up for my Red Seal when he scheduled it because the scheduled time was dumb.”

“Landon’s always mad at everyone. Since he does the schedule, you probably hurt his precious little feelings.”

“Right?” She laughs.

“What about Con College?”

“I have anxiety, I’d rather stick to what I know.”

That’s fair. I should probably stop suggesting people go to Con College, but I have a hard time letting go of a grudge.

It starts snowing quickly, but then you can clearly see the lines where the greenhouse effect of the city ends. The snow comes and goes in squalls.

We talk a lot on the drive. She smokes and drink her two large coffees. She think’s Nic’s dad is hot but Nic himself is a jerk. I can’t really comment on that, since Rosa is a member of the Soroptimists. Part of me debated emailing Rosa to tell her the other girls think her husband is a snack, but I’m not sure if she would take that as a compliment. She likes talking to Jasmine, but I couldn’t stand Jasmine.

I’m on the fence about if I like Victoria. I’m inherently paranoid around people with BPD; I provoke strong feelings in normal people, someone who’s already prone to it is a live wire around me. She talks a lot, and we’re going to be trapped in the same hotel room for at least a week, so if we don’t get along it’s going to be a very long week.

“Tell me about the SIBs.” She says.

I tell her about the meeting.

“I tried to start a SIBs before, but Evan told me we didn’t need one, because we don’t face any unique challenges.”

Stupid git. “Well, that’s going to change. I’ll get onto the board some way, and then they have to listen to us.” After a pause, “Bruce is on our side, too. He helped set up the meeting.” And I’m willing to bet they didn’t pay him for it.

“Oh yeah? What else do you have planned?”

“Well, I want to be a trainer, but Margaret says most halls want 5 years of experience after journeyman…”

Victoria snorts, “Probably just journeyman, here.”

Not outside the realm of possibility. “The hand that rocks the cradle is the hand that rules the world, after all. If I’m the one point of contact all the next generation at the hall has, they’ll be more likely to listen to me.”

“Devious.”

“Naturally.” Alastor would be proud. “And I can keep an eye on all the new girls.”

“I want to be women’s liaison, and mental health advocate.” She demands.

Hmmm… probably doable. I text Margaret; what’s the funding for advocates like? She says anyone who wants to hire someone within the hall can probably find some obscure funding rule somewhere, so that’s not an issue. It’s just having enough influence to make it happen. And careful reading of the consitution.

I definitely need to talk to Bruce more. He’s the only one doing the things that need to be done; trying to foster the love of the trades in kids, going out to remote communities like Moosonee to check on jobsites. If anyone can help me from within, it’s him.

This is starting to become a plan. Me, Victoria, Sofia once she gets her shit together… we can do this.

We stop just once; Victoria ran out of windshield washer fluid.

As she parks at the gas station, she says, “Are you coming in?”

“Nah, I don’t need anything.”

“Umm… New place.” She adds.

Oh, you want me to come in because you are anxious. “Why don’t you start with that?” I hop out of the car.

Grab windshield washer fluid, head out again.

Fort Frances is a small town, dwarfed by the much larger International Falls on the other side of the border, which follows the Rainy River. There used to be a paper mill on this side of the border, but they closed it to bow to the one on the other side. At this point, the town functions more as a waystation than anything.

To the hotel, before anything else, scope out the room and unpack.

The hotel is hilarious, it clearly caters to American hunters. Antler chandeliers, log cabin styling, a stuffed moose in the lobby.

The room is fine. I’ve seen worse, I’ve seen better. The fridge is a proper half-fridge and not one of the mini-fridges you can’t fit anything into, which is good. Two queen sized beds. One desk, and one comfy chair with a small table. I turn the heater on and it comes on immediately to 90, blowing air up the curtains and not into the room itself.

This bodes well.

The bathroom is hilarious. Wood paneling walls – and I’d bet not water resistant wood – acoustical panel ceiling, no extractor and what appears to be a dryer vent in the ceiling. The paint is peeling off the door. The sink looks pretty but not functional, and the shower faucet was installed backwards, so the hot water comes out of the cold and vice versa.

We check for bed bugs and discovered unvacuumed crumbs under the beds (we checked every day and the maid never actually vacuumed those crumbs), but no bed bugs, so whatever.

Unpack and grocery shop. Victoria wants to check out the small local grocer next to our hotel, which I don’t want to do but I am at her mercy. A place like that would be nice were we cooking for ourselves in a kitchen, not acquiring boxes of crackers and cans of soup to reheat in the microwave. We should hit Walmart.

Victoria points out the water tower, obviously shrouded in the hoarding, the tallest structure in the town by a country mile.

“We’re doing a loop around that before we call it a night.” Victoria says.

“Sure.”

I was right, this store is small and not what we need, although better than expected; used to hunters, I suppose. It’s called “The Place”, bafflingly. I find enough to last myself a couple of days. Shopping for a travel job is hard; you never know what you’ll need, or when you’ll be laid off.

We drive down to the water tower. There’s no parking lot, but we can just park by the side of the road. There’s a small portable building that presumably serves as office and lunch room.

“That’s a lot of stairs.” I say.

“16 flights.”

“Don’t do that.” I groan.

“I’m autistic, I can’t help it.”

“Is that ten foot gear?”

“Looks like it.”

I regret this already.

We drive down to the Chinese restaurant Kevin suggested. It’s a little dingy, but all-you-can-eat is 18 bucks, which is hard to argue with. Not a large selection, but enough for me. We have two plates each.

Back to the hotel. Unwind, lay out everything for work the next day.

We both shower and go hop in the pool. It’s heated, which is nice. The Jacuzzi is broken, which isn’t. I swim a few laps, but I’m wary of wearing myself out before work the next day. Victoria has no such concerns.

First day’s suck.

No matter how much you prepare for it, you always forget something. I forgot my gator, to keep my neck warm.

I drink my little protein shake. No competition, Soylent is 1000 times better, and cheaper too, but them’s the breaks. Victoria mentions hitting the free breakfast for a muffin and that’s not a bad idea. I wander down ahead of her in my union sweater.

I wonder how much I’ll end up babysitting her. I appreciate new place, anxiety, all that jazz, but I’ve got my own problems.

There’s a few boys in the breakfast room, in high vis. Must be coworkers. I scan the buffet table, debating if I should go up and talk to one of them. But which one?

A man comes up to me in sweatpants. “Hey, you here to scaffold?”

“Yes. Lucy.” I offer him my hand to shake and he accepts it.

“Kyle. What else have you done?”

“Oh, scaffolding here and there. Shutdowns at the mill, scaffolding out in Saskatchewan.”

“Great!”

“You work with this company a lot?”

“Yeah, they brought me here because they couldn’t get enough guys from your hall.”

Ahh… a southerner.

He points to one of the other guys. “That’s Drew. I dragged him up here with me.” Drew waves. He’s got pretty brown eyes with super long lashes, and a hipster man-bun piled atop his head.

Kyle takes a seat, having made himself a breakfast sandwich drowned in ketchup.

I wander back to the room, in case she needs some support. “Some of the boys are in the breakfast room.”

“Ok.” She says, like she doesn’t know why I came back.

Alrighty then, I’ll just go away… I wander back to the breakfast room, grab a muffin and a plate of what the hotel insists on calling bacon but definitely isn’t pork, a cup of apple juice, and sit with Kyle. He’s chatty and friendly.

Around 6:40, Victoria apparates into the room behind me. I introduce her to Kyle and tell a joke about not shaking hands to diffuse the tension.

Away to the jobsite!

The small trailer we use a lunch room would be adequate for the 6 of us scaffolders. However, there’s also 10 labourers, so there is quickly not enough room. There’s a photo-copied picture of someone’s hand taped to the wall, for some reason.

One of the labourers is a cool old guy who drives Harleys. Maybe I do have a type.

One of the scaffolders is some whiny little bitch from my old company, named Mike. He’s usually at NewGold with Tyler… why is he here, if they’re short-handed? He says he did one day at the Dryden mill and then quit because it was too dirty, which immediately put him on me and Victoria’s shit list.

The foreman… journeyman… team leader? is a quiet man. He throws a new pair of safety glasses at us, and a pair of gloves, but they’re just regular thin nitrile. Everyone will be eyeing my good pair of winter gloves very quickly.

“Alright! Whoever was told 6-10’s was informed wrongly! We are not taking a day off, working straight through.” He announces.

If he thought we’d argue with that, he was wrong. We all whoop. A day off is just a day we’re not being paid, and still missing our families. Plus, Sunday is double bubble off the bat.

The last member of our motley crew is Dave, Victoria’s buddy. He’s back from being foreman at Kitimat; he hasn’t humped gear or thrown a harness on for 2 years. Hopefully he picks it back up quickly.

We sign in and sign some basic toolbox talk stuff… wear your harness and glasses, etc… They ask who wants a dust mask. Sure!

Gear up. Company harnesses, yay. Mine had duct tape on it… let’s not peel that off to find out why. I’m just glad it’s my size and not hilariously large on me.

It’s weird… I’ve lived so many years of my life saying, “I’m not going to see 60, who cares?” Now I might. Now I have to be safe and stuff.

And now for 16 flights of stairs.

I do pretty good, but I let all the boys go in front of me. I have to stop near the top and catch my breath. My feet feel like they’ve been encased in cement. The first climb is always the worst, with all your gear, which weights 30-40 pounds.

Once inside the hoarding, the joy doesn’t stop. There’s a hole onto a small catwalk where the bulb of the water tower meets the stem. Then a ladder that honestly looks like someone welded rebar to quarter inch steel to make it. Another hole… off the ladder. Then more ladders, up to the top of the tower.

If you’ve wondered what the inside of a water tower looks like, wonder no more! Looks kind of boring, actually. But for me, it instantly reminds me of any boiler build. It’s warm in here, as the vessel and the scaffold retain heat, and dark. There’s strings of lights around, but they are not perfect and occasionally someone unplugs one by accident. The scaffolders all instantly turn on their headlamps; the labourers suffer.

“This isn’t going to take 2 weeks.” I point out to the foreman.

“No it won’t, but I’ll keep ya here for 2 weeks.” He says. Phew.

The first thing the foreman sets us to do is to tear down the scaffold in the middle, next to the pipe we climbed out of, to create a spot for a chain. Then we head up the tower and get set dismantling the handrail around the outside of the platform. The foreman reminds us not to overwhelm the scaffold and to be mindful about where we place gear, although it’s advice not being taken seriously.

Since they were sandblasting and painting the inside of the water tower, just about everything is coated in paint. Which adds weight, and also the extra step of having to knock the paint off so you can remove the pin.

The break schedule is that we take a half hour at 10 and another half hour at 1:30, which is fine by me. I’m not doing those stairs for a fifteen.

After break, time to chain.

There are three rules to scaffolding; don’t drop anything, don’t fall, and don’t slow down the chain.

The foreman places me at the top, handing gear to the labourer who’s at the top of the chain. I’m smart about it, trying to alternate stretches of heavy gear with pieces that are lighter or easier to chain.

At one point, I suggest a water break, but he passes me a water bottle and keeps chaining whatever is within reach.

Hmm… that’s not good. Both Victoria and David are in the chain, and neither of them have scaffolded in at least a year, so they have to be dying. I try a few more things before eventually convincing him to have a cool down.

By second break we’ve got the entire top floor down, and Kyle and Drew have decked out the next level.

Interesting choice. We wouldn’t usually bother decking out each level for a tear-down; decks are the heaviest gear, besides doubles, and the process goes a lot faster if you just send them down and walk on the ledgers.

During second break, the guy who bought my car sends me an angry message complaining about how much the car is costing to fix and I didn’t tell him, I must have known, blah blah. I block him instantly, not bothering to read the whole message. Did I know the car needed some work? Yeah, that’s why I sold it without a safety! But I don’t know what it needed, and more to the point, the garage he chose to take it to might be a charlatan who’s telling him it needs a bunch of repairs it doesn’t actually need, and I’m not his mother, so it’s not my problem.

After second break, it’s my turn to be in the chain. Yay.

My glasses keep fogging up because of the dust mask, so I yank it down to my chin. It’s not actually useful in here, anyway, its not a high enough caliber to protect us from anything in this vessel. I need to go to the store to grab some salt to gargle, and a spray for my nose, though, because I can feel the prickling already.

And a tensor. By the end of the day, my right knee hurts so much it is buckling with each alternate step.

“Let’s hit Wally Mart today.” I tell Victoria.

“I’m tired.” She says, yawning and stretching.

“You’re not going to be less tired, tomorrow. Today is better.”

“True.”

It occurs to me that we technically work from sun up to sun down. The sun rises shortly after 7AM, and sets shortly before 5PM.

I grab a couple more things; some more Gatorade, some jerky. I’m already too tired to feel hungry, but I am snacky, so picking ‘healthy ‘ snacks – like high protein – is a winning strategy.

As we look around for the tensor bandages, we find the ‘adult’ section of the pharmacy. There’s a selection of vibrators.

“Since we’re sharing a room, I didn’t bring one.” Victoria says.

I shrug. “I mean, you could always ask me to f*ck off for an hour. Me and Adrienne had that agreement.”

She laughs. “I’ll be fine, it’s only a week.”

Then we talk about which one of the boys we think is cuter.

Back to the hotel, shower all the dust off. What kind of dust is inside the vessel, anyway? Metals shard from sandblasting?

Flop in my cozy chair and wrap up my knee. Both my legs are black and blue, a combination of people hitting me with things, or me leaning on gear or hitting myself.

They were burning us out pretty quick; if they didn’t slow down, this crew wouldn’t last the week.

Relax on my laptop, or try to anyway. Victoria is still chatty. I suppose I could try to politely ask to be left alone, but I am scared of anyone with BPD.

The room is cold overnight, despite the heater claiming it is set to 90. I think it’s broken. It also kicks on noisily every 5 minutes.

I didn’t bother with my protein shake the next day, I just went down to breakfast and made myself a plate of eggs and sausage, and a tea in my mug. Kyle made his usual breakfast sandwich covered in ketchup, and we sat together at the same spot as yesterday. This is going to be a thing.

David and Drew are also in the breakfast room, but neither seem to be in a chatty mood.

“That’s a cool mug.” He comments.

“Oh, thanks. I have a matching tattoo, as well.” I say, pulling my arm out of my sleeve to show him my Majora’s Mask tattoo.

“Wait, you play video games?” He exclaims.

“Dude, you knew it was a Majora’s Mask mug and you just said ‘cool mug’?”

Kyle’s sort of cute, but pretty average. Brown eyes. Brown hair, slightly thinning. Permanent 5 o’clock shadow, a couple of tattoos. But we have witty repartee, and he likes the same dorky games I do. He’s sort of… what do the kids call it these days… a golden retriever?

Bad Lucy. Stop sleeping with coworkers.

Off to work.

Kyle is always the last to show up every day.

“The other day Kyle went to get ‘pizza’ for lunch and the blower wouldn’t work.” Bart rolls his eyes.

The… blower? Oh… he has an ignition interlock system. He’s been hit with a DUI too many times.

Mike’s going to be late today, he’s going to the ‘bone crusher’, meaning the chiropractor.

Today we are decking out, because Wednesday is supposed to be a high-wind day. Obviously a piece of plywood 10 feet by 2 feet some 100 feet up in the air tends to act as a sail. The guys are moving the decks from inside the hole to under the dance floor, so we have a platform to remove the beams and plywood.

“Who can deck out?” The foreman asks us.

We all glance at each other. Not I!

Kyle and the foreman get in a fight about 10 foot gear and I agree with Kyle, 10 foot gear is stupid in most situations. Most people can lift 7 foot gear, but that extra 3 feet just throws off your whole centre of balance – you have to have insane core strength to build with it all day. Sure, it takes longer and you need more equipment with 7 foot, but at least you can rotate out your crew and keep everyone fresh. A single ten foot ply deck is 52 pounds, to start – remember, all of our gear is coated in paint – repeat for ten hours.

Alright, nothing for it. Chaining 10 foot decks, a hundred feet up.

Turns out, these labourers aren’t used to scaffolding. They’re painters. So they did not stack anything properly and it’s all a glorious mess.

When the chain gets long enough that someone has to go out on the deck to keep passing, Victoria’s face goes white, so I go out.

Don’tlookdowndon’tlookdowndon’tlookdown…

Actually, it is pretty up here, if you can forget what you are standing on.

The biggest problem is that they are not fully decking out, a regular bay can take 6 decks and they’re just using 4. I guess it makes it easier – less chaining, easier to engage the wind latches – but it’s also nerve wracking when you can’t see your feet, you’re carrying a big heavy thing the wind keeps trying to rip out of your hands, and you’re trying not to hang yourself on your lanyard.

After noon, the painters all took off for lunch- they take 2 fifteens and a half hour, for some reason – so we had to start chaining gear inside the hole.

I didn’t even have time to get off the ladder before Mike, who was above me, decided to throw gear down. Literally, he apparently thought I had it – which I definitely didn’t, because I still had both hands on the ladder – and let go. Fortunately Victoria wasn’t in the way, and I said nothing.

As the chain kept going, I took every moment I was offered to strip off my gear and get myself set up. No point in chaining with 30 pounds of tools on my hips, and the decks grabbing at my belt. I tied off somewhere behind me as an insurance against doing a nosedive if something yeeted me off the platform.

The steel platforms were the worst, heavy and a cheese grater. I had my first pants casualty.

What happened happened both in slow motion, and instantly.

I heard, “Head ups!” and looked up instantly. A 7 foot steel deck, falling in slow motion, bouncing off ledgers on the way down. Not out of the chain; knocked off the dance floor.

I glanced down, to warn Victoria, who still hadn’t looked up. I realized she was already moving out of the way of the deck, so I said nothing. Calling to her now might cause her to startle into the path.

It hit the protection platform with very little noise. Without flinching, Victoria went to remove it, but it had hit the deck so hard it had imbedded itself. So she left it there.

We do dangerous things and people die. People die, and we move on to the next dangerous thing. The sooner that lesson sinks in, the better chance I have at surviving initiation.

-Divergent

“Are you ok?” The foreman calls down.

“Yes.” She calls back up.

“Ok.”

Distant laughter. The chain starts up again.

Wait, what? We don’t laugh off near-misses, especially not those kind! After a few pieces come down, I yell, “Stop the chain.”

It freezes. “What’s wrong?”

“She almost got hit, we’re not gonna stop for that?!”

“She said she was fine.”

“I am fine!” Victoria calls up.

“See?”

No, no that is not fine. Christ.

There’s only ten minutes left ’til break, but I’m already formulating a plan. The bus back to Thunder Bay leaves at 6AM. I could be home by noon and back on the list.

As everyone else files out for lunch, the foreman stops me. “Did you want to talk about what happened?”

I shrug. Now I’m the problem. “You said it didn’t need to be talked about.”

“We can talk if you need to.”

“Nope, I’m fine.” I lie.

At lunch, Kyle suggest getting a beach ball from Walmart and kicking it around the pool. Sounds like an idea!

I’m so tired already. My arms and legs feel like lead, and I can barely force myself to eat anything. I usually only reach this level of exhaustion after a week at a shutdown.

I text Margaret about the deck being dropped. She says it’s not ideal but it’s hard to say what a big deal it is. She tells me to go with my gut, but suggests giving it another day to see how things shake out.

After lunch, the painters are back, so we get moved around. I’m out in the hoarding, helping Ron, the old dude, move gear to the hoist. They have this little… elevator, thing, set up to move gear up and down the scaffold. I guess it makes sense, but it looks so delicate!

Me and Ron talk about bikes. Victoria comes over and starts being all BPD at us. “Drew is out on the hoist risking his life, let’s not take too long!”

We glance at each other and Drew. Drew has been out on the hoist all day and seems completely unbothered by it. Besides, he’s going to be on the hoist all day, no matter how fast we work, because there is just that much gear and only so fast the hoist can move.

I also argue with Ron, because gear going into a hoist should be loaded a certain way, and he doesn’t want to listen to me. At one point, I hand him a stringer and warn him it will be heavy. I smile when I remember Dan and Jared didn’t know what a stringer was.

“How do you do this all day?” He asks me.

I flex my bicep as an answer, and he laughs.

Work’s over, back to the hotel. Yesterday I made something in the microwave and it wasn’t very good. I’ve been hankering for some cheese, so I walk down to the hotel bar/ restaurant. I hate ordering out all the time on travel cards – you’re just wasting money – but I also know that if I don’t want to eat what I’ve got, I won’t eat, and then I’ll regret it.

Oh! They have mozza sticks!

The bartender/ waiter offers to bring them to my room, so I pay and go back to my room. I grab a Ziploc bag and fill it up with ice from the machine in the hallway. Victoria is in the shower, and the mozza sticks show up within ten minutes, toasty and actually a good quantity.

I still can’t eat much. I eat three or four of them, and then Victoria is done her shower. She heads to the pool, and I have a quick shower before filling the bath. The pool is all well and good, but I need a nice hot bath.

I become more concerned once I’m settled in the bath. My calves are swollen, almost the size of my thighs in spots, although my ankles are normal size. If my ankles were swollen, I’d go to the hospital right away ’cause that’s edema, but I’m not sure about this kind of swelling. Am I giving myself rhabdo? I don’t think I’m peeing blood, but I’m not peeing much at all, and the bathroom at the jobsite is an unheated portapotty.

Maybe it’ll go away.

After I’m dried off and picking at my mozza sticks again, I thought I heard a knock on my door, but I ignored it. A moment later, another knock.

This time I went to answer it. Victoria had been in the pool for close to an hour, maybe she left her key behind.

It was Kyle at the door. He was holding a soccer ball and a case of Flying Monkeys. “Hey, uh, I got a ball. Still want to go play?” He jerked his head towards the pool. “Victoria was asking where you are.”

Uh huh. Except Victoria knows where I am. You are a bad liar, sir. “Sure, I’ll come hang out. I’m not swimming, though.” I wink at him. “Flying Monkeys?”

“Yeah, you want some?”

“Nope, I just grew up in Barrie.” I grin, then I close the door in his face.

Hmpf… It was kind of fun having the hotel room to myself… I just made a tea, too…

Still, I would like to socialize. We haven’t been socializing much at work, the others tend to eat in their cars. Well, the break room is tiny!

I grab my mostly-empty Gatorade bottle – I shouldn’t bring a mug into the pool area – and my ice pack, and head up to the pool. Victoria is there, alone.

“Did Kyle come get you?” She asked.

“Yup.” I say, settling down into a Muskoka chair.

“He was being weird. I told him to just go knock on our door and he said he couldn’t do that ’cause it would be weird.” She snorts. “So I told him to tell you I wanted you here.”

Silly boy. Probably because he finds me attractive and he’s overthinking it.

Kyle shows up next, with his soccer ball. He drinks half a beer, stopping to offer me one, before stripping and hopping in. Yeah, I can see why you have a blower.

Drew shows up, then the foreman, who’s name I finally learn is Bart. Me and Bart refuse to get in the pool, me because I’m exhausted, but the other two jump in with Victoria. Mmm, eye candy. It is fun to watch a couple of well-built boys cavort around the pool in swim suits.

At one point I roll up my pajama leg to adjust the tensor on my knee, and Bart exclaims, “What happened to your leg?”

Huh? Oh… In my eye candy exploration, I failed to note I’m the only one wreathed in bruises and tensor bandages. I’m the only one broken.

Shit.

“Nothing.” I say, rolling down my pant leg in a hurry. “Just a tensor.”

The pool was fun. I keep eyeing the clock, but it’s hard to tear myself away when we are having a good time. The boys do things like ask us to throw the ball so they can try and catch the ball in midair while jumping in. A few times the ball gets kicked into the ceiling and we break a tile. Bart is a real stickler for the rules and complains that we shouldn’t have drinks in here – nevermind alcohol – but no one else is in here and if the hotel is keeping an eye on us, they say nothing, so who cares? We’re scaffolders on travel cards, rules are for other people.

“Bart, why are you the one complaining about boisterous play when you’re the one punting the ball into the ceiling?” Kyle protests.

Around 8:30, I call it, and everyone agrees with me. Kyle offers me a joint, and when I decline he says, “You refuse to break, huh?”

Don’t tempt me, boy. You’ll regret it.

I am enjoying this, as I always do on scaffolding travel cards, possibly more for this one. The boys from TO can’t bring my indiscretions back to the hall here. I only have to watch out for Victoria.

“You think my first instinct is to protect you. Because you’re small, or a girl. But you’re wrong. My first instinct is to push you until you break, just to see how hard I have to press.”

I liked Divergent. Just Divergent, when it was about the lines between selflessness and bravery and stupidity. When it was about a girl discovering how brash and bold she could be, in a place where they threw knives at each other and didn’t have guard rails next to three story drops.

“Somewhere inside me is a merciful, forgiving person. Somewhere there is a girl who tries to understand what people are going through, who accepts that people do evil things and that desperation leads them to darker places than they ever imagined. I swear she exists, and she hurts for the repentant boy I see in front of me.

But if I saw her, I wouldn’t recognize her.”

I wake up a few times in the night, from nightmares. I keep seeing the deck hitting Victoria instead, blood spurting out, watching the life fade from her eyes. But she’s still there, snoring peacefully.

Christ.

Should I have said or done something more? My first impulse is to message Bruce somehow and ask him what I should have done. Maybe I should have talked to the foreman about it… but I didn’t want him thinking I’m soft, or a rat.

My legs are still swollen in the morning. I text Emily and she suggest water, ice and elevation. Not that I’ve been drinking a lot of things to dehydrate me, but I do try to have two Gatorades at work because of my condition. Wednesday I swap out one of the Gatorades for chugging water instead.

Me and Kyle have breakfast together like normal. He’s late for work, nonetheless. He didn’t cut off his drinking early enough in the night and he’s still got enough alcohol on his breath the blower won’t let his truck start, so Bart has to drive him in.

For the first part of the day, we’re dismantling inside, which also marks the last time I’m inside the vessel. We’ve got most of the lifts down and the vessel narrows as it goes, so each lift is quicker than the one before it.

As usual, after break and before noon when the labourers leave for lunch, we chain gear down. This time, Bart gives us time to set up and it goes a lot smoother. I have Victoria below me and David above me, which is good because it means I never really have to take the full weight of anything.

After lunch me, Victoria, and David are out passing gear to the hoist again. Turns out, Ron and another labourer quit because the scaffolding gear was too much for them.

Bart is interesting. He’s from small-town Ontario like Margaret, grew up on a farm and has the hick accent to prove it, but he’s not a dumb brute. He’s been keeping track of who is comfortable with what, who’s skilled at what, and moving us around accordingly. He’s got sharp eyes.

David has a few issues under the surface. Apparently he used to be on steroids, or that’s what the rumor mill is saying. From what I can see, he’s chill, happily married with a baby, but there’s something going on because despite complaining about missing his family, he seems entirely too eager to be back on the road. This is a guy avoiding facing his problems.

There’s a lot of mullens and chickenheads on this job. We spend a bit of time joking about how no one can remember the hand signal for them. (We also can’t remember what the proper name for a chickenhead is)

After work is over and we’re all gearing down, Bart asks, “Where’s the nearest strip club?”

Victoria immediately nopes out of the conversation and goes outside for a smoke. I laugh, “Probably back in Thunder Bay.”

“There’s a bar out on 23 that has a stripper come by every other Friday.” Murray, the foreman for the painters, offers.

Kyle turns to me. “Wanna go?”

I frown. “To the strip club?”

“Well yeah, I don’t know what you’re into! Or, maybe it’s ladies night and they’ve got the Magic Mike dude in.”

I can not laugh hard enough to express myself.

When I finally catch my breath, wiping tears from my eyes, he adds, “I actually meant, did you want to go to the bar tonight?”

“The hotel bar? Sure.”

“We don’t have to go to the hotel bar.”

“You have a blower in your truck!

“What about yours?”

“My friend died from being hit by a drunk driver.” I say, crossing my arms over my chest. Might as well lay out that button right now.

“Ouch, alright, you win.”

Go home – Victoria lets me shower first, since I take short showers – get changed into my one pair of nice clothes, and knock on Kyle’s door. Drew doesn’t want to join us, and neither does Victoria, so it’s just me, him and Bart.

We head out to the Chinese restaurant first. It’s packed, but we find a spot to sit, and strap on the feed bag. Kyle pouts as he eyes the list of beers he can’t have, but he drove us down… for some reason. We could have taken Bart’s truck, after all.

When we get back to the hotel, Bart calls it a night, and me and Kyle go to the bar.

The same guy is tending the bar, and he remembers me. I ask him what his mixology is like, and he says he can make a long island iced tea, but he can’t because his idea of a long island iced tea is a shot of vodka in an iced tea (for the record, a proper one doesn’t even have iced tea in it). Still, it’s better than whatever they served me at Shooters.

“Bart said we should buy you a beer since you were the only one decking out, so there.” I say. “I’ve bought you a beer.

“Oh, yeah?” He shrugs. “It’s not that hard for me.”

“Still, I feel guilty.”

We talk about southern Ontario – I swear him to secrecy about me being a southerner – and nurse our drinks.

Some random guy wanders over, “Did I hear you say you were scaffolding?” He says to both of us, but mostly me.

“Yeah, we’re at the water tower.” Kyle replies.

“I’ve never seen a woman scaffolder before. What drew you to this career?” He asks me pointedly.

“I like money?”

“Ok, but, like, it’s such a male industry -“

“Yeah, but where else am I going to make 3k a week with basically no education?” I cut him off, irritated.

“Understood.” He says, cowed. Good, go away and leave me alone.

When we get to the point where you’d have to either buy another drink or call it, I’m ready to go – having more than one drink still keeps me up, for some reason – but then two drunk French guys wander over. They are clearly hoping I’m a free agent, but they’re also so drunk that they keep slipping back into French. When I reply in French as well, they ask where I’m from, and I reply that I’m Acadian.

Their eyes light up. “L’acadie!” They’re deer hunters from Kapuskasing, which, if you know you know. They’re so pleased to meet a real Acadian they order a round for the entire bar.

I feel rude, like I’m ignoring Kyle, but he’s amused watching us interact, so we go back and forth in French and English. Once our glasses are empty, they order a second round for the entire bar and insists the bartender puts on Celine Dion, and then the one guy takes my straw and uses it as a ‘microphone’. At one point he yanks me out of my chair to dance with me, and I allow him to dance for a bit before I shrug him off and go back to my chair.

“Alright, I’m going to settle up and head out.” Before I’m forced to dance again.

“Aww, are you sure?” Kyle says.

“Yes.”

The bartender glances at the guys from Kap. “You can go, they’ve got this.” He winks at me.

I wink back. “Thanks!”

Three drinks… I sleep alright that night, but I definitely feel the alcohol. The swelling in my legs finally starts to go down.

Y’know… if this didn’t give me rhabdo, what would? Or was I in the process of giving myself rhabdo, but I stopped it?

The first bit of the morning is me and David moving gear out to the hoist while the rest of them finish the tear down inside the vessel. When we go down for break, there’s a knock on the lunchroom door; a Bell technician is here. We send him to Bart, and Bart talks to him for a bit before summoning all of us to the breakroom.

“So, Bell doesn’t want to rent a crane to remove the dishes.”

I’d noticed before there are some Bell… I think the correct word is ‘mast”… attached to the outside of the scaffold, and wondered to myself how they were coming down.

“They want us to deck out to it.”

We all groan. “Can we just tell them no?” I suggest sarcastically.

“We can, but I like my job.” Bart replies.

So the rest of the day was chaining ten foot decks… again. Bart grabbed Mike to finish the dismantle inside the vessel, because Mike keeps dropping things, like his hammer.

Once we had a bit decked out, Bart partnered me with David. The technician wanted a handrail and toeboard, and probably a red carpet too, so my job was to keep David supplied with ledgers as he went around installing them. David’s face went a shade of whiter when he was told; he’s really not used to being back on the tools again, but he did it without complaining.

I pre-ordered some pizza, and me and Victoria went to Walmart again. I grabbed melatonin pills with valerian. I need some dreamless sleep. I keep seeing Victoria die.

After work, I cozied up in my chair with my pizza and caught up with Hazbin Hotel. It was Victoria’s turn to sit at the hotel bar with Drew and Kyle.

I will say, Hazbin Hotel is reaching the same problem a lot of these properties reach – the ‘God’ problem. By making your characters in Hell sympathetic, you raise the question of how and why God decided to consign these people to the pit. Incarnations of Immortality side-stepped it by saying that God got so invested in the “not interfering” pact that he is basically unreachable, and they dethrone and replace him at the end of the series. Hazbin Hotel is avoiding it in a common way; Heaven is being run by archangels, who are not perfect, although ‘God’ is mentioned a couple of times in passing. They’re gonna have some thorny questions to answer as the series continues.

You know what always baffled me about Christianity? Their whole schtick is ‘the devil’ gave us free will, which caused sin. I mean, the implication is that God created humans to be a bunch of unquestioning, unimaginative chucklef*cks who would never disobey him or have an original thought, basically golems to sing his praise. Why is that a good thing? Why do we aspire to that?

And they’ve changed it a lot as society marched on, but there’s no getting away from that being the original intention, because that’s what existed in older religions, like ancient Sumer and Babylon. The original flood story – before it was stolen and changed to Noah’s – was that the gods created humans to be their slaves, and the humans got too uppity and the flood was to wipe them out and replace them with something more complacent. It’s very amusing to watch people repeat that story and try to twist it in a way that makes ‘God’ a benevolent deity.

As always, I love me some Alastor. He’s come back from me complaining about characterization at the beginning of the season; now he’s in good form, tied to a chair as Vox’s prisoner but clearly still in control of the situation. He’s gone full Mephistopheles, unravelling Vox with nothing more than a well-placed taunt or sarcastic aside.

Victoria isn’t back by 8:30. I debate if I should go check on her at the bar, and decide against it. Kyle will be up later than any of us. It is weird for her to stay out, though, she’s usually pretty militant about light’s out. She’s been annoyed at me for getting back from breakfast 3 minutes late.

The melatonin pills work well, I’m glad. I don’t even really feel like drinking, and I’d hate to feel like I had to run back to the bottle.

Victoria didn’t get in ’til 10 the night before, but she was fine. At breakfast, I mention my concern to Kyle, who blows it off. “What would have happened to her?”

“I dunno, one of you spiking her drink? Or some rando at the bar?”

“Is that really something you worry about?” He says dismissively.

I slam both palms down on the table. “Are you serious? You live in downtown Toronto.”

He looks at me with wide eyes. “I’ve never thought about it before, but you’re serious, aren’t you?”

“It wouldn’t be the first time, even on a job site.”

“Shit.” He runs a hand through his hair, before looking me in the eye. “I wouldn’t do that.”

“I believe you.” I say, and it’s true. But his response also tells me that I can’t trust him to watch out for me or Victoria.

When we go in Friday, Bart is in a bad mood.

“I spent this morning on the phone with Vince.” He says.

“Ok.”

“He wants us back to help with the crane.” He says to Drew and Kyle.

They both groan. Another 20 hour drive for each of them. “When?” Kyle asks.

“Monday. We are done the tear-out, after all, and the painters are working away.”

“Wait, what are we doing?” David says.

Bart shrugs. “Probably going home. That was the original plan.”

Fantastique.

Friday is just decking out for the electrician and helping David. It’s tiring and boring and nerve-wracking. Bart, at least, hands out the nice thick winter gloves, so everyone else can enjoy not having their hands frozen to the cold steel.

At one point, Kyle drops a deck… again. Even as it is crashing to the ground, bouncing off every ledge for however many stories, Bart yells, “I didn’t see it.”

Get. Me. Out. Of. Here.

Chaining ten foot decks down the stairs is fiddly and tiring, so Bart comes up with the bold idea of having one of us standing on the hoist to receive the decks. Of course, at this point the only free hands are me and Victoria.

Bart looks at Victoria, who immediately goes white and shakes her head. He glances at me, “Well, you seem pretty fearless, since you’ve been walking around without being tied off.”

(To be clear, I was walking around the fully decked out part without being tied off, not on the ledgers. I’m bold, not stupid)

I’m not fearless, bravery and fearlessness are not the same. That being said, I’m not afraid of being on the hoist. It’s carried several loads up and down, and it has a carry weight of 2’000 pounds, and I’ll be tied off to the scaffolding, so I am safe. My concern is that I’m so tired my hands have been cramping as I pass gear. I might drop something… all the way down the scaffold.

Nonetheless, we need someone in the hoist, so I tie off and hop on it. It wiggles a bit from side to side, but once it stops moving it feels more solid than the scaffold. Just don’t look down.

After break, Victoria is apparently feeling emboldened by me, because she volunteers to hop in the lift.

We finish decking out both levels (the Bell guy protested having to climb down a ladder to the second level, so we decked out a second level for his highness), and handrailing. Go team!

I get a text from Paul. The mill recently decided they’re not accepting poplar chips anymore. Poplar is different enough from the other kinds of wood that it has to be its own mix in the digester. Apparently it causes extra wear and tear to the digester, because the mill has decided they don’t need to do a yearly shut-down if they aren’t doing poplar. I text Garry to let him know there isn’t going to be a shut-down next year, and he doesn’t reply. See, I’m only interesting when I’m interesting.

Whatever, that absolves me of needing to worry about being back in time next year.

The painters are painting inside the vessel now, and the hoarding quickly fills up with paint fumes.

I bring my tools down with me at the end of the day. It’s not outside the realm of possibility that we end up going home tomorrow morning, and I don’t see a need to have my tools with me even if we do return. We’ll just be chaining.

Back at the hotel, I do a quick pack-up while eating my pizza. Bart hasn’t confirmed tomorrow will be the last day, but if they need to be back in Toronto for Monday, they’re probably leaving Sunday. Around 6, I get a text asking if I want to go to Boston Pizza for a last shebang. Sure, I won’t eat anything, but I’ll have a drink.

I order some pepperminty cocktail thing, Drew orders the same, Kyle and Bart order not one but two cocktails each, with Redbull in them. On the walk to and from Boston Pizza, Bart is sucking on a pot vape like a soother. Maybe he’s like Leif, so full of repressed rage that he can only function stoned.

There’s five separate birthdays at Boston Pizza. I joke with Kyle that we should tell them it’s Bart’s birthday, and shortly afterwards he excuses himself from the table. Towards the end of the meal, the staff come out clapping and singing… and stop at our table, placing the slice of cake in front of Bart, who’s face is absolutely priceless.

Once the staff leaves, he thunders, “Which one of you did it?”

Me and Kyle, already dying of laughter, laugh harder. Both of us seem equally likely?

Travel cards do such weird things to your brain. It’s hard to remind myself that I only met these guys this week, and might never see them again. We’ve spent just about every waking moment together for the last 7 days.

Bart is definitely in some kind of loose, strange mood tonight. He starts babbling about universal basic income at one point.

When we get back to the hotel, it’s overflowing with unsupervised kids. They run up and down the hallways screaming, knocking on doors, being annoying.

I head into our room. Victoria is having a minor panic attack. “Have they been like this the whole night?” I ask.

“Yes.” She says in a small voice.

Ugh. I stomp out to the front desk. “The kids are knocking on people’s doors, this is unacceptable.”

The guy at the desk pales a bit. “I’ll go sort things out.”

Words are exchanged; eventually the parents of the kids manage to corral them into a different part of the hotel, although we are occasionally interrupted by a screaming kid in the hall.

Sleep was not good that night, even once the kids finally settled down. The problem occurred later; Victoria has some kind of neuropathy in her hands, so she woke up screaming in pain. She tried to muffle her whimpering with the pillow, but it wasn’t enough. I feel bad for her – that could easily be me – but I’m also tired.

“Christ, those kids were brutal.” Me and Victoria say, in the breakroom.

Bart shrugs. “I’ve seen worse. Haven’t we all done that? Kids will be kids.”

“My parents would have beaten me for less.” I say. Victoria agrees.

Saturday is an easy day. Since we finished decking out the day before, all we need now is toeboard. I tuck my hammer in my belt. Me and Mike monkey up the hoarding to strip whatever’s up there – we don’t have a lot of toeboard here. This quickly turns into me stripping the toeboard while Mike hands it down. He’s not an ambitious one.

At lunch, Bart comes in. “You guys are getting laid off after today is done. The hotel’s paid for tonight, so you can stay tonight if you want.”

The rest of the day is spent cleaning out the gear we don’t need from the dance floor.

Shortly after second break, David suddenly remembers something called “drag up”. Apparently we’re supposed to finish the day 2 hours early with pay, so we have time to pack up before we leave. I mean, technically we’re supposed to get 3 hours pay for Sunday as well, since they didn’t give us 24 hours notice, but I doubt we’re getting that. Nonetheless, David is adamant and all of us are pretty tempted by the notion. We send the last load down at 3:15 and head down the scaffold to tell Bart we’re leaving. He doesn’t look happy, but he doesn’t try to stop us.

I shower quickly and me and Victoria throw our stuff in the car and head out.

The drive occurs mostly in the dark. I’m tired; Victoria is listening to rap at an earsplitting volume to keep herself awake. With the time change, we get back to Thunder Bay shortly after 9.

I still have time to go to Cover Show 23, but I crawl into bed instead.