Halifax, Part 2

Weather was touch and go in Halifax, what with a hurricane passing us by, just off the coast. It was cool much of the time. Go figure. Nothing a windbreaker or a shell couldn’t handle.

We began another wet day shopping in the mall. I bought too much in Banana Republic before we repaired to Spring Garden Road, where I was much more discerning, much more reserved. We had lunch at “Your Father’s Moustache,” crazy name, great roadhouse, before shopping again, this time at MEC, the harbor front and Spring Mountain Road again. Apparently, this was our shopping day. But what are you going to do when the sky opens up and the clouds release a biblical torrent?

We ate supper at “Murphy’s on the Water,” treated to a lobster deal for having booked a tour with the Hopper. It was our first time eating lobster out of the shell, the way you’re supposed to. I had to admit to our waitress when our meals arrived, “We really don’t know what to do here. Can we get a bit of a tutorial?” She laughed and did just that. It’s amazing how people will bend over backwards to help you if you ask with a smile.

We strolled the harbor front and the city by night, relaxing at the Economy Shoe Shop over Bailey’s and a Propeller IPA before returning to the hotel where I took another dip in the pool.

We’d booked an excursion while on the pier so we woke early, waiting in the lobby for our pick-up. We’d opted for Day Tripper Tours, a small independent, on the say-so of the tourism table: small shuttles, fewer people, more places on the agenda than there were with Blue Line Tours, for the same price. It was worth it. Greg, our driver, was on time, affable and a font of local lore. He was also an old boy, mid 50’s, a tad overweight and characteristically and stereotypically jolly. He may have been gay. He was most definitely from New Brunswick. He told us so during our introductions. Not that he was gay. That he was from New Brunswick.

Along for the ride was an aged Toronto couple, the only others on the excursion: Anne and Nicholas, she a lover of churches, he a military history buff.

We went to Peggy’s Cove first, briefly stopping at a monument to the victims of Swiss Air 111. What can I say about Peggy’s Cove? It’s sparse, just a tiny fishing village set upon rolling rocks with its uber-famous lighthouse far out where the sea and land collide. The smoothed rocks roll, small pools collected in the nooks and crannies. Don’t kid yourself, it’s a hike, but worth the effort. And would have been even more spectacular if the sky was blue and not grey, were the wind settled and calm, the seas gentle. Damn offshore hurricanes.
Bev bought three watercolours from a local artist. That in itself was worth the stop.

We traced the coast, wending through storybook towns and skirting more rocky coves than we could count until reaching Mahone Bay and Lunenburg, where the Bluenose was built. It was not there, the Bluenose II, a bit of a disappointment, but it tours the world, so don’t count on it being there if you visit. We did visit the Fisheries Museum and crawl over and through a couple historic fishing schooners…but not the Bluenose. Late lunch at the Fisheries Museum, then we walked the streets of the World Heritage Site, taking in the array of colours nestled together. It’s brightly painted, much like most of the east coast, but the pallet of colours is so varied that you’d think that whatever paints didn’t sell were on sale and that the people who lived there couldn’t pass a good sale up. We took a photo from the golf course across the bay, the photo untold millions of tourists must take. I’m surprised the gold course hasn’t banned tourists from their site, altogether. It must be hell on the grass.

An hour’s drive brought us back to Halifax. A rather uninspired search led us back to the Economy Shoe Shop for nachos and personal veggie pizzas. I say uninspired because the city is teeming with places to eat.
The next day we had breakfast on the wharf at the Harbourside Market. We took the ferry across to Dartmouth to see what was there. A park, a lake, a rowing competition in progress.

We returned and had lunch at the Old Triangle Pub (I had a Garrison Raspberry Ale while there, very nice, I’d never had a raspberry ale before), then Bev went back to the room for a nap while I visited the Maritime Museum. There was a lot of history to take in, in such a short time: The Fall of Louisburg, the Age of Sail, the Age of Steam, the Explosion, the Titanic. What can I say? Ships of bygone days are beautiful, seemingly delicate constructs of masts and spires and line and sail, that weathered the same storms as those that sweep across the seas today. Their line and grace and woodworking, shame those we make today.

We had supper at Bubbles’, a horrific experience, at best. The ambiance was fun, but I was never a Trailer Park Boys fan, so I’d probably have rather eaten at the Lower Deck or the Split Crow, instead. My burger was fine, but Bev’s ribs wore a layer of barbeque sauce equally as thick as the meat.
My preferences were, in no particular order, The Five Fishermen, The Old Triangle, The Lower Deck, Your Father’s Moustache, with special notice to Murphy’s Restaurant out on the pier and the Economy Shoe Shop.

Special shout out to Cows, on the pier, a tiny little yellow shack that sat out over the water, its plastic cow hanging out at the entrance, luring the unsuspecting in. It was great ice cream, as good as Farquhar’s on Manitoulin.

I did drag Bev down to the Split Crow for a final drink. I don’t think she had a good time. It was packed in there, and service was slow if you didn’t take an aggressive approach to catch their notice. It was worth the effort, in my view; the music was phenomenal, the players obviously having played music since they could hold an instrument. Most people I saw played and sang better than almost everybody I’d ever seen, professionals included.

Then to bed, relatively early, by all accounts. We had a flight the next day to Quebec City, to take in the tail end of their 400th year celebration.

We loved Halifax, but we’d also had our fill of grey skies and periodic precipitation. That made the hours of glorious sunshine all the more satisfying, but there wasn’t enough of it. We wore shells much of the time, rarely out without an umbrella.

We hoped the weather the next week would be better.

It was.

Halifax

The exchange rate plummeted. Holidays outside Canada seemed ill-advised, far too expensive to ponder, so we looked within, instead. What I didn’t realize was that holidays within Canada were a pricey prospect, at best. Canada is not the Third World. Canada does not have cut-rate wages.

That said, I thought it high time that I saw more of my own country. I looked into the east coast first, wondering what I’d like to see while there. The east coast music scene was all the rage, then, so Halifax came to mind. Quebec City was celebrating its 400th anniversary. I couldn’t decide, neither could Bev, so I decided on both, one week in each. I did not know much about either. I expected to learn, and bought travel guides to do just that.

We flew to Halifax, arriving after dark, the city in silhouette, finding it curious that we did not have to clear customs, for once, and caught a cab to the Citadel Hotel, conveniently located on Citadel Hill, what I thought would be the center of town. It is, somewhat. That said, it’s at the top of Citadel Hill. And it’s a steep hill, at that. We crossed Angus L. McDonald bridge entering the city, one of those curious types with only three lanes, much like Lion’s Gate Bridge in Vancouver. Old bridges, those constructed before they saw the need to move inconceivable volumes of traffic.

We checked in, too tired to do much else than have a couple drinks in the hotel bar, curiously names the Botanica, chatting up fellow travellers, first a retired gent from Saskatchewan, then a young engineer from Halifax who was supervising the reconstruction of the hotel, one floor at a time, the 2^nd while we were in attendance, having discovered that when we pressed 2 instead of 3 by mistake and discovered the floor completely gutted, devoid of rooms, walls, and even a hallway, the loft space a tangle of hanging cables and haphazardly arrayed saw horses and stacked boxes of this and that.

We woke to rain, happy to see the deluge break shortly after breakfast, then touring the eight-pointed star structure of the Citadel fortress in the waning rain before heading out on the water with the “Michael’s on the Water” whale watching tour (whale wishing, more like it), gulls and cormorants wheeling overhead. I kept a watchful eye over the water, waiting for tell-tale flocks of birds that mark their presence (blame Moby Dick for that expectation) or plumes of spray or rolling humped backs until Bev overheard the crew note that there were no whales on sonar and told me so, then occupied myself with people watching and people meeting, instead. A European woman was deathly ill throughout, seasick despite what I thought calm waters (it wasn’t, not really) and our not actually being out to sea.
We ate supper at the Wooden Monkey on Argyle Street, midway up the hill, upon seeing that The Rolling Stones had eaten there in the past, the proof of it, the autographed menu, proudly displayed in the front window.

Economy Shoe Shop, by John Malone

Bev went back to the room afterwards and I prowled the city in search of the fabled Halifax nightlife and finding it in a jazz ensemble at the Economy Shoe Shop on Argyle and a folk fusion trio at the Split Crow (reputedly the first and oldest continuously licensed pub in Canada, if not this actual pub, as this one had only opened in 1978 and had adopted the original taproom’s name as its own) on Grafton. Both were great. Both were fun. And I bumped into people I’d met on the whale wishing excursion.

Never been to the Economy Shoe Shop? It’s amazing. It goes on forever, a whole block of buildings that are linked together, subdivided into little alcoves and intimate and cozy spaces. There’s a tree inside, obviously fake, the sculpture in autumn wane. Green and gold and orange leaves reach out over the tables, a sculpted bee’s nest and balloon hidden within its branches. The walls are brick and plaster, layered to hint at what might be rock beneath, crawling with equally fake vines and stings of lights. It’s loud too. Most working-class places are, especially with tourists and students in attendance, the noise deafening as it crashes into the walls and is funnelled up and down the narrow spans.

We had a late start the next day, touring the Sackville, the last surviving WW2 corvette, marvelling how small it actually was, deciding that it must have bobbled like a cork out on the ocean when asea, and wondering how the crews could stomach the passage.

Later we had lunched with an old friend of Bev’s. She hadn’t seen him in twenty years and was thrilled at the prospect of catching up. But he was standoffish. Polite, but distant, eager to eat and be on his way. Bev was understandably disappointed. But it had been twenty years, and people change, people close chapters in their lives as the years and decades pass, and sadly, sometimes we are one of those chapters.

We walked the Pier afterwards, watching artisans ply their trades, glassblowing, weaving, and such, browsing buskers and sellers alike, finding our way to Pier 21, the once fabled main entry into Canada for all immigrants, now the docking port for cruise ships. A warehouse flea market sat alongside it, rows and rows of crap on display, from flags to pints of maple syrup, souvenir spoons to kitschy clothes and wraps and umbrellas, pens and pins, everything Canadian you could think of, everything a cruising tourist could hope for, anyways, most of it made in China. I couldn’t wait to be free of it and on my way.

We hopped on the Happy Hopper, a refitted and touristy Vietnam War amphibious resupply vehicle, made up to look like a big smiling frog, to tour the harbour. Ya gotta do the hooky stuff when on holidays, don’t’cha? Ribbit, ribbit! (That’s me making a frog sound, by the way.) We boarded, we dove down the ramp into the harbour in a spray of seawater and chugged along at a snail’s pace while oohing and aahing the this and that that I’ve promptly forgotten.

We stumbled across the Five Fisherman afterwards, sitting down at out table just before the early seating was complete, surprised by the $33 early bird special, all you can eat salad and mussel bars included, the entrees listed cheaper than those same ones on the menu by themselves.

I took a dip in the hotel pool before venturing back out, eager to hear more east coast music.
Were the weather better.

But it wasn’t.

The remnants of a hurricane was skirting the Maritime coast, strafing us with periodic precipitation.
It seemed like it would never end.

Mining Games, Part 9

No sooner did I begin training to be a supervisor did I notice that all the engineering mine techs teaching me their respective skills had been hired within the year, or two years prior at the earliest. That perked my interest.

I went to speak with Luc Brousseau in Human Resources. “There was a posting for mine techs two years ago,” he said. I hadn’t seen it, I said. Could I bring my diplomas and transcripts in for their review? “Sure,” he said. “At the very least we’ll have them on file.”

Shouldn’t they already have been on file? They were, but I realized that there was no file for “employees with skills to be considered.”

I brought them in, Luc made copies, and before I knew it, Trevor Eagles, the Chief Engineer, was offering me a position. In engineering, steady days, weekends off, seniority intact. I accepted. All I had to do was give notice to my crew that I was leaving. I discovered that my Captain, Ron Maxwell, had a big part in my being accepted. He’d extolled my virtues, his having done so no small thing, apparently.
All I had to do was work off my notice, almost all of it supervising, my first and final stretch going solo. Thank God Kim Hicks was the cross-shift supervisor. He helped me line up my crew and helped me remember how to fill out SIMs, the program that charts payroll and work accomplished.

I set about doing my beat. No white hat yet. I’d yet to pick one up. And there was no need for one now, either.

Midway through the shift, the hoist paged me on the radio.

“What’s up?” I asked. They couldn’t see the skip. Bugs. Gremlins. And they couldn’t raise the guy working on the loading pocket level. I said I’d look into it. I called first, getting Pete first ring. So much for the hoist not being able to raise him.

“Can you take a peek into the shaft,” I asked, “to see if you can see the skips?”

“Sure,” Pete said. Moments passed and he picked the phone back up and said, no, he couldn’t.
Then the hoist paged me again. I thanked Pete and said I’d be right down to sort the problem out myself, and hung up. I called the hoist.

“Pete opened the cage door without calling me,” he said. “We were lucky the cage wasn’t in motion or it would have tripped.”

Shit. There are lots of laws and procedures about shafts and doors to shafts and open shafts and such. Pete should never have done that. He should have called the hoist before doing anything. But Pete was not a cage tender or a hoist man, so he wouldn’t have known them; but Pete did know one simple rule that everyone underground knew: the cage tender is the only person who shall touch the shaft doors.

 Keep thy hands off!

When I asked Pete to look into the shaft to see if he could see the skip, I thought he’d only walk around the shaft, peeking into it at points here and there to see what he could see. He didn’t. He just looked over the door and when he saw that he couldn’t see anything, he decided to open the door to get a better look. He thought that would be okay, he was in Oreflow, after all.

But it wasn’t okay. Laws dictate fall restraint or fall arrest when near an open hole. Laws dictate that “open shaft” need be noted in the log book. And those are only two of the rules and laws.

Now I had to give Pete a talkin’ to.

The hoist was all for giving him a warning slip.

I was less inclined. His was an honest mistake. And I believed that warning slips ought to be reserved for gross misconduct and willful disregard for the rules.

Why? Because I’d received warning slips for stupid things before and that only got me mad. I didn’t learn anything except that sometimes supervision gave warning slips to exercise and feel their power.

Like the time that me and my partner had received one for not doing a post-check on our crusher system conveyor. A post-check? We’d never heard of a post-check before. There were pre-checks, which might as well be considered a “post-check.” But a pre-check is really only a cover your ass check, to make sure you weren’t held responsible for the prior shift’s breakage.

Sean and I had the proverbial nightmare shift. The muck kept hanging up, constantly having to be washed down to keep it running. But too much water invariably migrated to the inner belt, causing it to go out of alignment. When that happened, mids and fines spilled inside, collecting in and around the tail pulley. Too much muck in the tail pully and it jumped the track. We did not notice that it jumped the track. When our cross-shift came on, the first to see the mess called his boss, and his boss and the captain wanted to rush down and take pictures, proof of Sean and my evil-doings. Buddy’s partner was livid when discovering that his partner had “ratted” out on us, saying, “They had the shift from hell trying to keep the muck moving, and you ratted out on them for trying to do their job.” He then worked like the devil to set the tail pulley back on its rails before the bosses arrived.

So, Sean and I were only cited with leaving a mess and not reporting it (hence the post-check BS) and for going up early without permission.

We deserved that last one. We were soaked and chaffing with grit and could not reach our shift boss. So, we went up early without permission.

But we were railroaded by the other made-up charge.

And the corrective discipline backfired. They needed Sean and me to do something to save our supervisor’s ass and we stepped back, stood by, and said “That’s so sad. Ain’t that a shame.” And we worked to rule for a couple months afterwards, too, just for good measure.

So, I didn’t see the need to use a heavy hammer on Pete for an honest error. I took Pete aside and explained what he’d done and why it was wrong, repeating the age-old wisdom of “the shaft door belongs to the cage tender and only he can lay a hand on it.” I had to tell him that I was giving him an informal verbal warning (there’s no such thing, only actual verbal warning notices and warning slips), telling him that if he ever did something like that again that I would have to formally discipline him.
”When you’re a cage tender,” I said, doubting that he ever would be one, “You can open the door to the shaft,” then adding, “but only when you have the cage. When the hoist has the shaft, hands off.”

Pete took it in stride. He even thanked me for taking it easy on him. He shook my hand.

I thought on all the things I’d seen my partners do over the years. Some had only the dimmest view of how to work safely. I thought that were I to have continued supervising, I’d have to deal out one or two actual warning slips from time to time.

I didn’t like that thought of that.

Not one bit.

I’d become The Man. I hated The Man.

Mining Games, Part 8, The Spare Supervisor

What can I say? I didn’t do this for long, only a few months. Then fate dealt a hand, as we say.

John Cayen had asked me to be his spare. He didn’t have one, and we’d been without one for almost a year, necessitating spares from other crews to be temporarily reassigned to our crew whenever our shift boss went off on holidays. It turns out that each of our supervisors had been asking the crew to take up the white hat for some time. Nobody had asked me.

Take that was you will. Lack of confidence? Perceived bad attitude? Maybe. I wouldn’t doubt it, were that true. I probably wouldn’t argue with that, either.

That said, I’d transformed from disgruntled employee with a bad attitude, seething rage, disinterest and a bug up my ass about authority, to go-to, Code 6, lead man. Crusher leader, cage tender, hoist man. I’d definitely come a long way. But I did not have many friends on the crew, either. There weren’t a lot of shared interests. There was a bit of an age gap with those who’d been on the crew prior to my joining and a bit of an age gap with those coming up behind me. Not to sound snobbish, but I’d also been post-secondary educated, most others (none, actually) had not. (You’d be surprised how much even one year in post-secondary opens your mind to other interests). I read, most others on the crew did not, although some were beginning to read some of the magazines I passed on to them, issues of the New Yorker, the Walrus, Harpers and the Atlantic. I found those tattered and dogeared magazines in the strangest places afterwards, belying my earlier statement. Miners do read, not all of them, but most do have something in their lunchboxes to pass the lonely hours they have to endure sometimes, like when guarding a blast: novels, magazines, newspapers (that may date me, but it has been a number of years since I wiled away the hours underground). I’d find those aged magazines in lunchrooms and rock-breaker booths, folded and rolled, their shapes long lost, sometimes with pages missing, the staples that once held them together rusted and broken, or missing altogether. Reading materials can make their rounds underground.

So, anyways, John asked me to spare for him. He enrolled me in Supervisor Common Core and began to take me on his beat from time to time. This meant that I was off the hoist. That saddened me. The hoist was one of the best jobs I ever had. But, upwards and onwards and all that. I spent more time on 2 Cage between those tutorial trips.

I loved 2 Cage. I was busy. There was never a dull moment, always jobs to do, schedules to keep. Hour passed in minutes. I had to keep track of the time, too; always mindful of how much time any given task was to take, and whether I’d be able to do another round trip before one of the scheduled “man” trips were to happen.

Note to self and all aspiring cage tenders: Never miss a “man” trip. Don’t be late, either; the boys are counting on them, and they’re scheduled for those times, too. The white hats demand them to be on time. So, don’t be late; you’ll hear about it! And don’t fall behind on garbage bin trips, either. And don’t skip or do fewer slime trips than need be done, either. And remember that Monday mornings and Thursday mornings are powder days (or were then), and that there’ll be flatbeds waiting to move the explosives off the stations for the powder magazines. Oh yeah, could you get this list of materials to these stations, too, while you’re at it. No yard man? That’s not a problem, is it? Remember not to stray too far from the headframe, lest you miss the cage calls.

I loved it. It was fun. It was fast. The shifts melted away. And I got to see the weather, or more importantly, the sun. Most miners never get to see that.

Then John left and Marcel joined us. Marcel was alright. He wasn’t John, but he was alright. He lacked a certain patience, though. He railed against what he called, “babysitting,” and grew angry when the guys I worked with complained about not getting raises, but also refused to “play ball” when asked to do the jobs asked of them.

Marcel and I were on the beat together one day and on our way to visit J.M.

Marcel was venting on me: “I got to babysit, now,” he said. “I hate having to hold a grown man’s hand.”

“How so?” I asked.

“I hate it when someone bitches about not getting their code when they don’t want to do the work for that code.”

I couldn’t believe my ears. Marcel was bitching about J.M., someone who always pulled his weight as far as I could see, but Marcel had a different perspective, I was willing to admit. I decided to wait and see for myself before making up my mind.

I could see the tension between them, straight off.

They got straight to arguing. J.M. wanted to get his Code 5. He did not want to man the cages. He couldn’t see why he couldn’t get the code, when he never had to man the cages, anyways. He had all his crusher licenses, and the crusher leaders never manned the cages. Why did he have to?
Marcel disagreed.
Before long, Marcel and J.M. were roaring, red in the face, their voices growing as hot as their words were.
“Whoa,” I said, stepping between them.
I asked each of them to tell me their story. No interruptions.
J.M. was claustrophobic when wearing the Scott Air Pack, something that had to be checked every shift, something that would have to be worn during stench gas releases. It’s a fire thing. It’s the law. The shaft could presumably fill with smoke. That might kill the cage tender. Not a good thing. Hence the cage tender having to be licensed on it and having to wear it. He could potentially have to wear it for hours. That freaked J.M. out.

I cut a deal with J.M. Did the job bother him? No. Only wearing the mask? Yes. Did he feel terror upon first putting it on? No. After a minute? Yes. I asked him if he would put it on every day, not attached to the tank, a couple times a day, each time keeping it on for 10 seconds more than the last time. He looked dubious but agreed. I also told him that he had to do this for a month straight, and not just a week and then we’d consider giving him his code.

I looked at Marcel. “Good?” I asked.

“Good,” he said.

I cut my first deal. I could see what Marcel meant about handholding and babysitting. I just didn’t know that I’d be doing it with him and not J.M.

Mining Games, Part 7

No sooner had I begun to get a good feel for 2 Hoist, I was shuffled to 4 Hoist. It was a bit of a shock. It was a double drum, double clutch, a completely different animal from a friction hoist. And where 2 Hoist sits directly atop the shaft, the hoistroom adjacent to it, 4 Hoist is far removed, the hoistroom situated in the administration building. This is not to say that the isn’t a hoistroom at the hoist and sheave like every other hoist, there is; but it’s only there for emergencies, never actually used. 3 Hoist was much the same. Its hoistroom was atop 2 Shaft, seated next to 2 Shaft’s.

Having the hoistroom removed from the shaft means that the hoist man does not feel the hoist. When operating 2 Hoist, you feel it. It’s right there. You feel the clutch engage. You hear it. The volume mounts, the floor shutters and vibrates, the headframe sways ever so slightly. It’s like driving a car; you get instant feedback for everything you do. Not so 3 Hoist, when it was atop 2 Shaft, not so when it was moved to the administration building when they were commissioning 4 Hoist to sit beside it. You couldn’t feel what was happening with 3 or 4 Hoist. You had to rely on cameras and electronic readouts. You had to trust your instruments. It could be eerily silent in there. Okay, it’s not silent in there. There’s a perpetual hum of electronics that slips into a state of white noise, and there are bells and buzzings and hoist signals, but they all fade into the background. And then there are the moments when all is quiet. The bells cease. The chirps and rings and buzzings cease. And everything is quiet. The silence is loud in comparison.

If only they all worked. 2 Hoist worked. 3 Hoist worked. 4 Hoist did not. It was new. It had bugs. Many of the sensors were installed wrong. The skips would get lost in the shaft. You could see them on camera, and watch them inch past the loading pockets, but the loading pockets would not detect the presence of the skips, so the hoist would send an alert, and we’d have to try to place them while in manual. Sometimes it worked straight off, sometimes it took twenty or thirty tries before the loading pocket magnets found the skip magnets.

And the main cage would trip when leaving certain stations, requiring hoist overrides. Etcetera, etcetera, etcetera.

And I was training on it. And I had only been given two short weeks to learn it. Keep in mind that it can take some people months to learn a new hoist. I’d only just been licensed on 2 Hoist, a friction hoist, a simple beast compared to the double drum. I did not have to rebalance when skipping from different horizons, I didn’t have to worry about rope stretch.

What I did have to worry about was that the hoist was full of bugs. Its hard enough to learn when everything works perfectly, its harder still to learn it when you have to separate what the rules and laws were when it was working fine and what to do when it wasn’t (and those fixes were not covered in the rules, not written in the procedures, sometimes not entirely legal, either), and keep them separate so as not to be confused when writing the test.

Closing in on the date I was to be handed off to the trainer for licensing, I thought I was going to have a stroke. I was on night shift, trying to memorize the double drum section of the Green Book, monitoring the skips that were “tripping on magnets,” and having to rescue the cage tender every time he tripped leaving the levels the cage always tripped on, bouncing between the hoist stations, all the while listening for his calls on the radio between alarms. It was distracting. It was harrowing. It was exhausting. More than once, Joe had to roll his chair over from 3 Hoist to assist me on one station or another.

Then, my exhausted mind lifted. It opened up. It felt like someone poured cool water over my mind. I was dizzy. I was on the tip of vertigo. I literally thought I was having a stroke. Joe told me to step back from the hoist for a while and relax. Thank god 3 Shaft worked like a charm, with never a hiccup, otherwise we’d never have been able to keep things going.

Then Joe handed me off to Marc and within the week I wrote my second test in so many months and I was expected to run that nightmare, hiccups and trips and all. But by then I was accustomed to it. I’d seen just about every fuck-up it could dish out, and I’d weathered them all. By-passes and moments of manual manipulation had become old hat. The millwrights and electricians continued to crawl over the hoist and the stations and the loading pockets and were beginning to root out the mistakes made by the shaft sinkers, righting the misaligned magnets, realigning the wrongly installed sensors, and little by little, it began to do what it was supposed to do.

And just when it came to pass that I’d be able to put my feet up and let Otto do the work (our nickname for Automatic…Auto…Otto…get it?), my temporary full time shifter, John Cayen (we went through a lot of shift bosses on our crew—Sly Beaupre, Joe Joliet, Doug Maki, Craig Watson, Marc ?, John Cayen, and then very soon we’d have Marcel Ouimette) asked me if I’d like to became the Spare Shift Boss for the crew.

I didn’t think on it that long, having made up my mind in an instant, but I did ask, “Why me?”

“Don’t take this the wrong way,” he said, but, I’ve been working my way down the seniority list, asking everyone in turn, and so far, everyone has turned me down. Nobody is interested. You’re last on the list.”

“That’s quite a vote of confidence in my qualifications,” I joked.

John laughed. “Actually, I think you’d be good at it,” he said, “but I had go down the seniority list. Do you want it?”

Joe sat looking on, his gaze bouncing between John and me.

“Sure,” I said.

After John left, Joe asked me, “Why do you want to do that? You just passed all your hoists.”

“Think about it,” I said. “How many shifters have we had over the last few years. Some were good, some not so good. John’s one of the good ones, but he’s only temporary. Think about it; who, or what will we get next.”

So, I was about be become a spare supervisor.

Mining Games, Part 6, The Hoist

Upwards and onwards. I was asked if I wanted to train on the hoist. I accepted. Why not? Clean air. Quiet rooms. An end to toil.

But we were short on hoist men, so I was fast tracked. It usually takes six months to train someone on the hoist. I was given two. Not a problem, you’d think if you’ve ever seen a hoist room. There are buttons and monitors and a single gear stick that can be manipulated either up or down. Simple. Not so. There are laws, lots of them, a book of them, and not a short book by any means, and you have to know them all. There are daily safeties and break checks to perform and be logged. There are weeklies. There are monthlies. There are annuals. And you have to know them all.

There are bell calls to memorize: call signals for levels, and the far more important universal shaft signals to remember:
1 bell—stop
1 bell—raise cage
1-2 bells—chair cage
2 bells—lower cage
3 bells—cage in motion
3-3-1—raise cage slowly
3-3-2—lower cage slowly
4 bells—blasting
5 bells—release cage to hoist
9 bells—emergency

If the signals are given from the counterweight side, they mean the same, but the motion is reverse for the hoist man.

And there is a fine touch on that stick that needs mastering. Have you ever driven stick and had to inch uphill? Did the car roll back a little before the clutch engaged? That better never happen when operating the hoist. You could kill someone. Oh, by the way, almost every time that hoist is in motion, there are lives at stake. There may be someone right under it on a platform. Someone’s fingers or arms may be in jeopardy. And twice a shift, there are only about a hundred lives resting on your fingertips. I’ve known competent guys crack under the strain while training and step away, saying they can’t do the job.

Oh, and by the way, there are different types of hoists, too. There are bucket hoists (sinking hoists); friction hoists; double drum, double clutch hoists. Double clutch requires rebalancing when skipping from different horizons to take the stretch out of the ropes. Too much information? Too bad. Learn it or lose it. Makes you think, doesn’t it?

And I had two months to master 2 Hoist. I had to read the Green Book (the Ontario Mining Act) daily, memorizing all those laws. And I had to develop a feel for that stick, first with the skips, then the auxiliary cage, then the main cage. My palms were sweaty the first time I lowered that double deck cage into the depths of the shaft, over one hundred souls aboard. They were my charge. They were my responsibility. They were my most precious cargo. They were my friends.

I had to give them a smooth ride. Engage that stick too fast and they’d drop like a stone, weightless for a moment, their stomachs lurching in their guts. Slow them too quickly and they’d weigh a ton, each of them, their knees pressing into their chins. Stop too quickly and the cage would bob up and down like a yo-yo, tossing them around like rag dolls clutching at each other for purchase and balance.

And I’d hear about it too. My cage tender would call me up with a “What the FUCK!” And rightly so.
But once you got a feel for it, it was a piece of cake. I’d watch them herd in on the main cage monitor. I’d watch the top deck cage door pulled down like the guillotine it was. I’d see and hear the shaft signals rung. 3-3-1. I repeated it back. I’d engage the hoist, raising it, watching that sickening height between the decks drift by as the bottom deck rose up to the deck floor, all those guys too close to its open hole, all the while. I’d hear the expected signal, ONE bell, as the magnet level indicator light snapped on, its red eye hot and brilliant on my console. The bottom deck guillotine door would crash silently open, and the last of my charges would flow into the cage. All the boys in, the door would crash down, the cage tender’s arm would reach out, and he’d signal for 4600. I’d repeat them, he’d signal TWO bells, and I’d repeat them. I’d wait two seconds for his arm to retreat back behind the door and safety, and then I’d engage the stick, ever so gently at first, then with a logarithmically heavier hand as it gained ever greater speed, until it topped out at 300 feet per minute, the preprogrammed max speed for the main cage, nothing as fast as the 3000 feet per minute the skips travelled at. That would be the last I’d see him and it until the cage rose to surface again. Down in the depths, there were no cameras. There were bells. The same bells cage and hoist used for as long as there were cages and hoists.

I kept a watchful eye on the depth meter, slowing the decent ever so slightly between 4400 and 4600 (there was no 4500, there were no odd numbered shaft stations, just 800, 1200, 1600, 2000, etc., 4000, 4200, and such to 5000), inching the final feet until I heard the single bell for me to stop the cage, just as my level light indicated that the cage had reached the level magnet, my hand on the stick throughout. It had better be; it’s the law. Don’t talk to me while the cage is in motion and my hand is on the stick. You better not. It’s the law. There’s a sign in the hoist room that reminds you not to, too.

Distract me and I might miss the level. Slow them too fast, stop them too quickly and they’d bounce and I’d hear, “What the fuck!” Give them a perfect ride and I’d never hear anything of it.

Why would I? It might be my job to give them the prefect ride, but the cage tender was the important one, the most important person in the Mine, as far as the boys were concerned. Everyone knew the cage tender. Everyone said “hi” to him at the mall, on the street, wherever they met him, baffling him, because he’d likely recognize one in ten of the well-wishers.

“Who’s that?” his wife would ask.

“No clue,” he’d say.

I know. I was that cage tender, once.

Once I was in the hoist, I was a ghost, a spirit up on high who everyone knew existed, but nobody ever saw, a mythical being, The Hoist Man.

America, Part 2

Hudson, Ohio

Brunch with Valerie and family complete, we were off to visit my cousin Kim. Four more hours on the road, the only thing of interest being watching bikers put on and take off their helmets at State crossings, depending on which States dictated that riders had to wear them. Why wouldn’t you want to wear a helmet? Is risking brain injury a thing there? Didn’t Gary Bussey impress the need to protect your head? Apparently not. Apparently, it’s better to taste freedom and feel the wind in your hair than to be a gibbering idiot after a brain injury.

Four hours later, we pulled into Hudson, Ohio, amid wide boulevards and stately elms and a noticeable lack of garish corporate street advertisements and neon. Only one existed, a decidedly ‘50s mom and pop burger joint drive-in, grandfathered in before the city could enact a bylaw prohibiting eye pollution. Even McDonalds blended into the ambiance.

We were met at the drive as we pulled in, thanks to Aunt Lorraine’s timely text.

Hugs, kisses, the grand tour.

No sooner had we pulled in and unloaded our luggage, we were urged to haste.

Where are we going? I asked.

Mentor Amphitheatre

We’re going to a concert, Kim said. What sort of concert? The Cleveland Symphony Orchestra was performing Oklahoma at the Mentor Amphitheatre. Kim’s friend arrived. We were shepherded into Kim’s van and within the half hour we were finding a spot on that grassy knoll, sizable picnic basket in hand. Kim unloaded the spread. Wine. Beer. Hot food. Cold foot. Salads, potato and macaroni. Fruit and cut veggies and dip. Desserts. It was like being served from the Tardis. There seemed no end to it. Throughout the feed, the Orchestra played live to the film Oklahoma, the musical soundtrack digitally removed, the dialogue intact.

The next day, we were treated to “A Taste of Hudson,” where participating restaurants of the area sold prepared tapas on the manicured lawn of the town square, each selection a dollar. Square white tents set in neat rows, washing the now packed space in reflected light, the heat adrift on a pleasant breeze. Families and friends milled about, crossing paths, darting here and there to seek their stomach’s content. We purchased prepaid debit cards, each loaded with twenty bucks, and all we had to do was stroll from tent to tent, picking out what struck our fancy, swiping the card, and nibble on what each business had to offer. I took the opportunity to try what I didn’t have ready access to back home. Indian, Tai, Arabic, you name it. If I couldn’t get it, I wanted to try it.

Our bellies full, our cards depleted, I wandered off to check out the rows of classic cars arrayed just off the square. Unlike in Timmins where ‘70s muscle cars rule the roost, all eras of classic cars sat in neat gathered decades. There were a few from the ‘70s, more from the ‘60s, even more from the ‘50s and ‘40s. There were fewer from the ‘30s, ostensibly rare, probably due to there being fewer cars then. I was drawn to those and to those from the ‘20s, coupes and sedans and perfectly preserved model A’s and T’s, their invariably black shells gleaming in the dappled shade. Supple leathers glowed, chrome flashed. They all smelled of rubber and leather. Proud parents stood by, certificates of authenticity displayed in their windshields.

Afterwards, Kim invited another friend to dinner. He was a pro football player in days past and looked it. Tall, broad, muscled still. He told tales of his glory days, full of past indulgences and steroids and anger, and how coaches and trainers would rile them up prior to a game, to whip them into a killing frenzy.

He said, he found himself slipping into a seething rage after a practice one day. It rose up for no good reason. It just rose. He’d been standing in front of the sink, before the mirror, and began to get mad. Why? He didn’t know. He just did. He got mad and grew madder by the moment. He gripped the sink with both hands and applied all his strength to it, his muscles tense and taut. He strained against the basin and ripped it off the wall. Water sprayed everywhere. He spoke like such things were a common occurrence in professional football.

Why was he invited? He too was a writer, and a published one, at that, albeit by a small independent press, invited to encourage me about pursuing my writing “career,” and on how to seek out publishers. How and why did an ex-football player become a writer? For the same reason why and how he became a knitter, to ease and tame the rage he’d been encouraged to sow by the sport he’d loved and pursued.
The next day was a lazy day. We had a full breakfast, we chatted. Mandy, Kim’s daughter, propped herself up between a chair and the countertop and swung back and forth like a swing throughout. She was active, filled to the brim with soccer and speed. Too much sitting set her on edge.

Kim spoke about her job and how taxing it was. She taught autistic children, a task so intense that when her one-on-one tutelages were complete, she was too exhausted to do much more than veg in front of the TV, oblivious within moments of turning off the tube off what she’d been watching. She spoke about her children, their soccer prospects, their education, and their further prospects afterwards. She spoke about her parents, our family, Cochrane, memories, and Rick, her husband, and how they met. She saw that he had a tie draped over his rear-view mirror, and that she preferred the prospect of a man who actually had need of a tie, regardless the event, yet one relaxed enough that a tie could be so haphazardly draped so over the rear-view mirror of his car. Rick and I kicked back at the pool, Rick training their new dog, each of us feeling out the other to see if we liked each other, I suppose. I liked him. I hope he liked me; I must have seemed a little unfocussed and maybe a little disgruntled to him, he being far more successful in his chosen profession than I was in mine.

We went back downtown, Bev looked in clothing boutiques, I browsed books at an independent bookseller.

We woke to the need to return my Aunt Lorraine to Indiana and to be on our way.

We had a long haul ahead of us. Fourteen hours for me until North Bay, four for Bev until home.

I was hell bent to be at it.

America

My family is not particularly close; or maybe it’s that I’m not particularly close to my family. Either way, I don’t see them much. My fault, their fault, nobody’s fault. Shit happens. We once lived close, most of us, the bulk of my family in Cochrane, with my family in Timmins. A few were further afield: my Uncle Derek in London, the Tishlers in Detroit. So, it’s no surprise that I only saw the Tishlers a few times a year. No matter, we were all of us close then, what with those frequent gatherings.

Even so, I was one of the youngest of my clan (only Robbie Tisher was younger than me), so I doubt that any of my cousins had much interest in me. And I was only four when we moved away, and they didn’t see me much after that, only on holidays and a few times every summer. As the years passed, we travelled to Cochrane less and less, and I saw my uncles and aunt and cousins fewer and fewer times, until I saw them no times at all, except at weddings and funerals. Except for Keith; Keith and I kept bumping into each other over the years.

Today’s technology can change that. Nowadays, everyone can see everyone else daily if they choose to do so

One day, my Aunt Lorraine asked me if I’d like to visit her in Indiana. I’d never been to Indiana. I’d barely ever been in the United States, except for those few times I’d been to ball games in Detroit or lingered in an airport for a few hours awaiting connections to points further afield.

What was there to do in Indiana, I wondered? I honestly didn’t know. It was in the mid-west, I knew that much, but I really didn’t know what that meant. Was it on the Great Plains? I scratched my head. No matter. It had been years, if not a decade, since I’d seen her or my American cousins, so I asked Bev if she’d like to go. She asked me if I did. Surprisingly, I did, regardless whether accepting the invitation precluded our travelling overseas that year. I accepted. We’d make a road trip of it.

And what a road trip it was. Bev and I split the driving: she drove the first four hours to North Bay and I drove the remaining distance, all ten hours of it.

We lingered in North Bay that first day, strolling downtown, browsing shops, having dinner at the Moose’s Cookhouse, then checking out the Northgate Mall. We slept. We got up early. We hit the road.
We crossed the border at Sarnia on the Tishler’s advice. Less traffic. Quicker passing customs. It should have been quicker. Traffic was moving along nicely, the cars inching along at a fairly rapid pace. Until the car before us pulled up to the customs agent. At that exact moment, the agents changed shift, and the agent who replaced the one in our lane decided there was something amiss or suspicious about the two young men ahead of us and got them to empty their car, pulling apart their luggage. You’d think that there would be a side inspection lane for that.

After watching customs rifle through their car and frisk the young men, we even declared the prepackaged bag of chips we were snacking on. The customs agent waved us through without a second glance.

The first thing we noticed upon crossing the border was that all the signs were in America Imperial. Distances were noted as 1½ miles, speed at 55 mph. Tim Hortons had disappeared mere meters from the border. There were McDonalds everywhere, their arches thrust up on high pillars, declaring their presence and position to passersby well in advance. And fast food was cheaper by far than back home. No wonder Americans are for the most part heftier than their Canadian counterparts. Junk food was so cheap!

We arrived in Leo after a marathon session of driving. I was exhausted, my mind vacant from staring at the asphalt track that stretched out before me for far too many hours at a stretch.

My aunt fed us, we chatted for a bit, we got the grand tour of the house, and we took the picture my mother wanted: Lorraine in front of her house. I took more than that; I took pictures of the views up and down the street, and of the lake across the road, too.

We watched a little TV while we chatted. I was surprised to see how many religious channels there were, each of them reminding me of the televangelists that graced our Sunday airways for as long as I could remember. Lorraine informed us that we’d be going to church in Fort Wayne with her and Valarie and family before brunch.

Church? I asked.

Lorraine explained that she’d made a promise to God while her granddaughter had been deathly ill and not expected to recover. If you heal her, she prayed, I’ll go to church. Miraculously, her granddaughter recovered.

Then she said that we’d be going to Ohio after brunch to visit my cousin Kim.

So, we were going to church. It was at a Blackhawk ministry. I’d never heard of the Blackhawk ministry, And I’d never seen such an exterior of a church. Or such an interior. There were no pews. There was no altar. There was a broad concave arc of plush benches that reminded me more of Vegas than of church. There was a Hammond organ on stage. There was a grand piano. There was a full R&B ensemble. The piano player wore Ray Bans and swayed like Ray Charles while he played. There were Halleluiahs. People rushed their children down to the stage to dance. And the sermon was telecast by the coach of the Indiana Colts. I leaned over to Bev and whispered, “I don’t think we’re in Kansas, anymore.”

We weren’t.

We were in Indiana.

I know. That’s very irreverent of me. I apologise.

We brunched with Valarie and family, afterwards. All her children were in attendance, likely because she told them they had to attend.

This may be the last time you’ll ever have an opportunity to meet your cousin from Northern Ontario, or some such. They were well behaved. They were all polite. They were all terribly disinterested. Who could blame them?

Valerie caught us up. Her husband was an exec with GM. Jim was interested in my Impala, having never driven one. His was a Buick Regal, or some such. I’ve known Jim since ’76, when he came up north to Cochrane to meet the family, or more specifically, to be introduced to Gramma. I liked him them; I like him still. But I don’t know him. I don’t know any of them, really. The children were attending this school or that, doing this and that. Sports. Arts. Charities. She taught deaf children to speak, how to enunciate. How to sign. She was terrible busy. I was floored. That was amazing. I cannot say how visibly impressed I was.

Brunch complete, they scattered to the wind.

And so did we.

I had another four hours to drive to Ohio. Hudson, here we come.