The End, Prompting a Beginning

I was fraught with indecision upon leaving UWO for the summer. What was I to do? Was I to return and complete a degree? I wanted to, but I wondered what I would gain by that degree. Teaching seemed the logical end to a degree in social sciences. There were other options, I suppose; but I couldn’t imagine what they were, then.

The question as I saw it was: what did I want to do with my life? It was a stupid question to be asking myself at 23 years of age; but there I was, asking myself just that. Were I to continue, my life would have been very different, I imagine. Would I have been happier? That’s the million-dollar question. There are no guarantees, either way, so, asking myself those questions now is pointless. Regrets are pointless. Had I really wanted to continue, I would have.

The truth is, I was tired, tired of being a student. And I had a lot of regrets weighing me down, even back then: leaving high school after grade 12; entering the Mining Engineering Tech. program in HSM; Roxanne; Debbie; leaving Sudbury; taking so long discovering where my interests lay. Were I to stay, I was looking down a path that would take me to 29 or 30 before I was at its end. And then what? I didn’t want to be a teacher. I didn’t want to be a professional student, either.

Had I paid placed attention, I’d have noticed that the commodity markets were in the toilet, that interest rates were still sky high, that the economy was in a tailspin, despite the decade of greed and trickledown economics we’d just run amok through. We were on the verge of the ‘90s. Recession loomed, and economic disparity and jobless recoveries would become the order of the day. I was oblivious to it all. I was still a kid, still a student, and the real world was as much an illusion as it was something that happened to others.

So, all that summer a debate raged within me. Should I stay or should I go? Luckily, I was debt free. I had that at least for which to be thankful. Months dragged on without my having made a decision, which, in itself, was rather telling. I was aware that my high school friends were graduating, where I was contemplating beginning anew. My high school friends were getting jobs and moving away. My college friends, too. I was floundering with indecision. Finally, in the spur of the moment, without even much cognitive thought, I decided that I was not going back, that I would get a job and begin my life, such as it was.

The only problem with that, as far as I could see, was that the mines in Timmins were not hiring. And that I was terrified of the prospect of moving away. No safety nets. Starting over again from scratch. Apartment hunting. Furniture buying. Moving expenses. Learning to navigate another community, this time without anyone there that I knew. I suppose my father exerted a little moral suasion in the job market again. I suppose he wasn’t enthused about the prospect for my moving away, either.

When I applied for full-time employment at Kidd, I was informed that I’d have to wait six months before returning, as I’d been hired on as a summer student, on the pretense that I’d be returning to school. If I weren’t, I had taken a job from a “real” student and that there was a penalty to pay for that. The Dome, and the other mines I’d applied to hadn’t responded to my applications at all.

So, I settled in for a wait, telling myself that I could apply for part-time positions and see what would happen with Kidd in six months; if they didn’t hire me I could always head back to school, or steal my daddy’s cure and make a living out of playing pool, etc. There was always that in my back pocket. I was secretly hoping then that exactly that would happen; school, that is. The prospect of working for the rest of my life was horrifying, now that I’d committed to it.

I found a job. Not a full-time job; a part-time labour job with ERG Resources, a division of Giant Resources, reclaiming tailings. Less mill work than field work, I was to man water cannons and pumps away from the mill, cutting away at old mine tailings for reprocessing. We’d left a lot of gold in the tailings in the old days, fully 40% of it unrecovered, and with gold prices surging in the ongoing recession, it was worth the cost of a mill to do just that.

It was boring work. I thought it pointless at the time. Okay, it was not pointless. It did serve a purpose. But it did not engage my mind much. I worked in a heated booth, recording a limited pattern into the unit for replay, and watched it cut away at the tailings for about 15 minutes, and then I reprogrammed the unit again. I read a lot in between. I could have operated the unit manually continuously, but I’d have rather cut my wrists.

There was more to the job than that. I did perform other jobs on occasion, like manning the screens, pulling off the scrap that was exposed on a shaker feeder. At other times, I helped out at the mill. My shift boss was adamant that I not waste the company’s time sitting with the operator, so he instructed me to wipe down the handrails. I was also told not to stray too far from the mill operator, either, in case he had need of me. He did one time. He told me to climb a certain ladder already in place and open a gate valve, wait 20 minutes, and then close it. Why? I had no idea, but that’s what he asked me to do, so I was off to do just that. The ladder was leaning against the pipe the valve fed, fully 20 feet above the floor. It took me 20 minutes to open, all the while expecting to fall off the ladder to the floor. Once I did open it fully, I began to close it without waiting the extra 20 minutes; it had taken me so long to open, I was sure it didn’t need to be open much longer. My task complete, I returned to the operator’s booth, where I was told that was good enough, and to put my feet up and not to bother with cleaning handrails anymore, because that was stupid. So I slept, instead.

The worse shift, the most pointless shift, was when we (myself and another part-timer and a contractor) were instructed to hose a thick spill of gold-bearing carbon into a pump leading to the “carbon-in-leach” cycle. Someone had already begun to do just that the shift before us, but there were three of us and only one hose. We set about getting more hoses and connecting them, and as each was, we began. Every 20 minutes the surge tank exceeded its capacity and overflowed, much like a geyser. The walled-in retaining area began to fill and we were forced to race for higher ground, a high rung on a ladder, in this case. We noticed that there were a lot of ladders about, each propped up against a tank. We tried using one hose less after each spill. Finally, we ceased using any hoses at all and waited out the expected 20 minutes. The tank overflowed yet again, without our having contributed to its capacity.
“This is stupid,” I declared.

I set about looking for a comfortable perch. I collected burlap and created a nest just above the high-water mark. I set my now unused hose next to me and nestled in with a book, keeping an eye out for my foreman. The others tried to work for a couple more spills, until they too were convinced of the futility of our task. So long as too many water cannons were operating in the field, there would be a spill every 20 minutes, regardless what we did.

Kidd called a couple months later, offering me employment in January. I accepted. Days later, ERG served me my layoff notice, about two weeks before Christmas.

The question of whether I’d be returning to university had been made.

I was 24-years-old. I didn’t know it just then, but the beginning of the rest of my life had been laid out before me.