I am falling down, fools in a spiral,

Round this town of steam

Despite the occasional insights and the whole strengthening-of-character bit, the oil patch was mostly bad vibes. I used to hear my muse when I drank from the tap, inspirational ideas carried to mind through the water. Now I only hear static.

“I could have sworn the last conversation we had was you telling me how much you hate it when people don’t answer their phone or call you back.” I was confronting my boss on his hypocrisy; the mighty white board graph of oil companies and employee placements hung beside us, and I held his stare until his eyes dropped. I told him, “Respect is a road than runs both ways.”

He said he was busy; the oldest excuse in the book.

At least they’d been paying me standby to sit in this motel room and drink beers and write, waiting for my next conscription. My Cathedral-brand tote bag was sitting packed by my mud-caked boots at the door. I’d been replaced on the lease north of Hudson’s Hope. Shevko had woke me up, knocking on my door at 4pm to tell me the rig was flowing heavy and needed someone with more experience. I was learning quickly but apparently there wasn’t enough time to train me. I didn’t take it personally and the decision had been made before the whole near-death smoking incident. But Cathedral was short-staffed and in order to placate the requests for someone who knew what to do if gauge A did X, they had to make a move.

The rub was that the replacement hand they brought in was more shades of green than me, and I had to show him the ropes before I left. He was from Vancouver Island as well, and I would have liked to work with him. But instead I warned him about Shevko’s temper, wished him luck, and hopped into my ride back to Grande Prairie, shaking hands and smiling.

Brad the driver was also from the Island, about my age, and I had the first good conversation I’d had in days. We talked about Cambodia’s roads, how they remain in an infinite state of potholed decay due to corruption and the Bangkok Airport wanting to sell more flights. The highway into Grande Prairie was nearly as bumpy as the back roads, which went well with the bass from the conscious underground hip-hop that boomed from Brad’s speakers. He had left the Island because he needed to be part of a faster-moving pace - and selling pot wasn’t bringing in enough money. We talked about our respect for the people of impoverished nations, where the less you have the more you have to give; the self-sustainability of the workers in India who make careers from refurbishing automobile horns - entire shops filled with recycled car horns for a nation of honkers. People doing what they can with what they’ve got. And here, in one of the richest regions on Earth, we’re both taking advantage of our freedom of opportunity. Brad’s truck gunned up over the hill and the horizon was filled with the sparkling bed of jewels called Grande Prairie, glittering with promise in the cold winter night.

Cathedral had me loitering on standby for the next few days, paid to rot in my motel room until they found my next placement. My Jetta’s pampered warm-weather engine, clearly out of her element, needed a boost to get going before I made the jaunt to retrieve my guitar from Grande Prairie Storage Lockers. I made the mistake of not recording the padlock combination in my iPhone and had tossed the numbers out with the rest of my pocket paper trash. I figured I knew what three numbers to use and was experimenting with different sequences there against the corrugated metal door when a guy in a lumberjack jogged up beside me. “Can you give me a boost, man?” Another tradie out of luck like I was an hour ago. “My battery’s dead.”

Life is a wheel and of course I would. We got his truck running, recycling the power the tow truck had given me, and I asked him if he knew how to break into a padlock. He gave me an orange pair of work gloves and a crescent wrench and suggested I giver shit, which I did, whacking the hell out of the icy lock. He pulled up and gave me a hand, adjusting the wrench to pry the lock apart. A few well-placed twists of the wrist and the lock popped open. We slapped hands. “You see how that works?” He said, our idling vehicles mixing their exhaust. “You help me and I help you.”

“That’s the way it goes, man.” I nodded and he told me to keep the gloves and the wrench. I grabbed my guitar from the 5 X 10 locker that held all my worldly possessions, flipped my automatic key card at the gate, and peeled out of the industrial park. Young the Giant’s song “My Body” was on the radio again. It had become my theme music, my fight song; I heard it everywhere I went.

My body tells me no, but I won’t quit,

Cause I want more, cause I want more.

Oh, it’s my road, it’s my road, it’s my road,

It’s my road, it’s my road, it’s my road.

And it’s my war, It’s my war, it’s my war,

It’s my war.

His eyes are open.

His eyes are open.

In this land of pickup trucks and promises, the ongoing saga of man versus circumstance continued to play itself out. An army of workers battling hardships: distance from loved ones; addictions and interpersonal strife; the anti-natural results of oil field labour. The small-talk conversations with checkout counter staff resonated positive vibes, little slices of positivity, reminders to keep your outlook clean and your chin up. For the most part, there was a real sense of teamwork among the denizens of Grande Prairie; casual reminders that we’re all in this together, despite the overarching capitalist mentality of every man, woman and child for his or herself; despite the radio spots advertising the newest, biggest toy - the commodity that could put you ahead of your neighbours. Self-inflicted pyramids of status. Worth established not through the internal way of being, but from external showy things. Having spent the past four years on the Left Coast, the contrast between these two worlds, only a provincial border apart, was glaring.

But what is the purpose of hard work and sacrifice if not to enjoy the fruits of our labour? The thoughtful monk, isolated in his mountain monastery, may reach Nirvana, but what of the society he has left behind? He might say that since we are all One, whether we believe it or not, his so-called personal success is actually an act of elevation for the whole. Carl Jung might say his sublime understanding is a win for the entire collective consciousness. But this reality of gauges and charts is based on measurable statistics. This life is what we make of it. And in a nihilistic post-everything world, where god is in the details and we’re too busy to notice, it’d be rude of us not to take a little piece of the pie for ourselves.

While I was painting houses in Victoria, an elderly man from Amsterdam told me an analogy about societal differences: His son works in Fort McMurray and asks his neighbour to help move a fridge. His neighbour demands $100 to do what a neighbour in Victoria would do for free, out of a socialist obligation. Who is in the right? There’s something to be said about the environment that makes the man. Regardless of the value of work, people on the Coast have a sense of community. In fact, most socialist-leaning nations live by the ocean, as if there’s an enchanted balance in water that vibrates through the cells of man. Is it any coincidence that the percentage of water on earth, three-quarters, is approximately the same of that in the human body? The old man’s two cats had eye herpes, puss-filled afflictions that shook residue upon the walls; healthy coats and limited, contagious vision.

Did I mention we were flowing $30,000 a day on that single site? That’s almost a million dollars a month, from one minor rig out of thousands. “No shortage of money,” Shevko said. Amen to that, brother.

The company I worked for was called Cathedral, and they paid me $220 per night, plus $65 for expenses. Cathedral. Like they were divinely sanctioned to carry out missionary work on crude oil, converting it into a product. Despite the supposed intervention of divine hands to install supposed coincidences to save my coworkers from danger, there was little evidence of any god in the Backyard. Except for the Black Gold deity that Cathedral and its minions worship. Except for the silver Hunter’s Moon that glows the same for my girlfriend in Kitchener, my people in Red Deer or Calgary or Victoria. Except for the frigid winter wilderness fury that harmonized the ice crystals in the fir trees with the snot in my nose. Except for my lower back pain that had to be Mother Earth’s emphatic transference, my reciprocal punishment for taking part in the degradation of our planet.

There are no saints at Cathedral. Just money-hungry men seduced by the almighty dollar, willing to sacrifice their illegitimate children’s future for the chance to have the biggest barbeque on the block. And there I was, right in the middle of the Shit, guilty by association.

They bunked me in a Best Western suite that I shared with my day-shift counterpart where the blinds shut out all sunlight and I fell asleep in my corner-tucked and crisp bed around nine AM, watching sports highlights on a flat-screen TV. But my accommodations were last minute news; I had been told I was heading to camp.

I had researched enough about camp life to know that I was to lock my stuff and mind my own business, sort of like if I was going to prison. The advantage of prison, a blog read, was that at least there you could choose not to work. Everyone I spoke with warned me about the sketchy characters and sometimes scraps. But at least the work camps had three square meals and Wi-Fi and you could save your paychecks while doing time, instead of purchasing the discount grocery items as I was doing out in Hudson’s Hope, BC: Home of Dinosaurs and Dams.

Economic servitude is the new Black, and I had to formulate a jailbreak. Debt keeps people enslaved through the cuffs of interest; I was a Bachelor Degree-holding ex-student, current rig-pig, who felt an affinity with third-world nations indebted to the World Bank. The media broadcasts the holy slogan of Freedom, like it means the same thing to us all, but how can I ever be free if I am shackled by debt? I spent what amounts to a fortune for the average man on the planet to live a life of globetrotting debauchery and post-secondary masturbation. I had a hell of a time and experienced things the average man would be hard-pressed to dream up, but now I must pay the toll.

I was mostly disillusioned by the post-secondary institution anyway. All those scarf-sporting hipsters sipping their trendy lattes in class and accepting the given lecture as Truth. All that ego. I had signed up for the university of legend, the university of the 60s and 70s, where we tried on opinions just to see how they fit. Where we debated just for the self-indulgent pleasure of it. Where we really learned things. The University of Victoria was a glorified brainwashing camp, consumer-students receiving the gospel of said professor like he or she was the ultimate authority on the subject. Primed and prepped to be a willing subject of the Powers-That-Be. It made me so sick I could barely attend class.

But after contemplating the alternative, working labor for both heroes and villains, I found redemption at Royal Roads University. Forget a brain-laced enema of theory; I was learning practical knowledge from professors who gave a shit and classmates that I cared about. I met the love of my life on the first day of school, for fuck’s sake. But I was left with some survival skills on a horse holding saddlebags filled with fifty grand worth of debt. Me and my bubble of protection. I thought life would continue to fall delicately into place before me as it had in the past. But now I had a woman I finally wanted to make babies with, and a future I had to establish.

Kirsten wanted the same with me and Victoria was a gorgeous still-water swamp, where life moved leisurely and career work in the Communication field was hard to find. It was a beautiful world of insular networks and people working for the weekend. So in search of a faster-flowing river, we abandoned the life in Victoria we had come to know and love, and lugged a U-Haul to Grande Prairie, Alberta. Like the pioneers before us, we packed up our covered wagon and headed out to the Frontier, in search of treasure. In search of a life worth something for our future children. In search of something better.

She was down to go the hard yards with me, to make sacrifices for us, to stand by my side while I set myself free from debt. But as luck would have it, she got a job as Communication Coordinator for the school board of her hometown in Kitchener, Ontario. She was also hired at the Shark’s Club in Grande Prairie; a place Shevko said would undoubtedly provide her with multiple well-dressed high rollers propositioning her one night of passion for several thousand dollars. Men who have learned that everything has a price, and for the right offer it can be theirs. So despite my loneliness, I was grateful she took the job out East. And hell, long distance relationships are hard, but at least we got a solid cross-country road-trip out of the deal. Plus, we’ll always have our Skype dates.

Everything is connected, and life is a wheel.

I read the faded sign as we pulled into town: “Welcome to Hudson’s Hope - Land of Dinosaurs and Dams.” Two green brontosaurus were stenciled on either end of a massive hydroelectric plant. Past and future, with this rusting hamlet as epicenter.

“Land of Shit.” Shevko corrected. “Don’t blink or you’ll miss it.”

 It took me a while to draw the connection between dinosaur fossils and their oil byproducts. My first thought was about extinction. Exploiting our planet’s natural resources past the point of no return. Like the Delorean Time Machine in Back to the Future III, the train bridge up ahead is incomplete and we’re praying technology will save us all, before we hit that fateful precipice and magically teleport elsewhere or tumble down into a canyon fireball. I was thinking about dinosaurs roaming these very hills, each terrible lizard a cog in the Wheel of Life. Did those reptilian heathens summon their own demise at the forefront of a life-ending comet by merely surviving? Do we not deserve an even worse finish for our deliberate consumer greed and unsustainable habits? But here in the Backyard, it’s no place for theoretical debate. We’re here to make money, exploiting that sweet dinosaur juice that simmers somewhere beneath our heavy winter work-boots.

 My life as a Well Tester is eternal 15-hour nights under the hunter’s moon; sitting on a bucket, reading books in the roaring P-Tank; time punctuated in half-hour increments where I fill my chart with stats from gauges. Pressure differentials, oil and water gains, tubing and casing rates, temperatures and salinity levels. It’s grade-ten science class in a Siberian Gulag. Only instead of being shackled to a chain gang, I’m alone for the vast majority of time; my sole human contacts those intrepid part-time criminals and full-time rednecks.

Every five hours or so, I’d return to the warmth of the trailer where Shevko was looking at pictures of himself flexing on Facebook, and fix myself a dirty sandwich. Kraft Singles and plastic-wrapped bologna tossed on Wonder Bread with greasy fingers; mayonnaise spread with my pocketknife; my body craving vitamins and vegetables. I amped up my nicotine consumption to help pass the time. A sticky pile of Copenhagen injecting its fiberglass mellowness into my lip as I spat brown juice in a can. I inhaled the poisonous chemical smoke of your working man’s Canadian Classic cigarette, the nicotine and formaldehyde and all manner of inhumane toxins marinating my poor cells in a hazardous haze.

This one night I was buzzing out of my skull, a combination of sleep deprivation, hunger, loneliness and nicotine. I’d thrown out my back swinging the sledgehammer and phantom vice grips were squeezing their talons into my lumbar, sending electric flare signals down my legs. I stretch in hopes of the pain subsiding and check the clock for my next jaunt, a monotonous repeat through the same snowy footprints, out through the winter and back again in three and a half minutes. I had established my walking pace, on par with that of a Thai philosopher or a Greek carpenter. But the minute hand was at a quarter so I stepped outside the P-Tank door onto the gooseneck and pulled out a cigarette.

I glanced at the surrounding pipe-maze, imagined the natural gas and oil being separated beneath my feet and sent off through the woods to be processed. On an average day, this lease that I was monitoring produced about $30,000 worth of petroleum. I wondered what the equivalent is in pounds of dinosaur bones. How many stegosaurus constitute a barrel? And what will become of the skeletons of mankind in three hundred million years? Will an advanced reptilian humanoid population employ their lot of part-time criminal full-time rednecks to pump our remaining essence into a fuel source, full circle?

My thoughts veered from potential hazards to visions of the future and I lit up my smoke. The wind was gusting cold and I made sure to at least position myself so the ember blew sparks back at the door. I figured I was safe in my protective bubble, like smoking by the payphone at a gas station. That is to say, safe enough. I could spot three signs labeled with the international symbol for flammable. Still fantasizing about dinosaurs, I nearly flipped my spent cigarette into a bucket of water, but stomped it out under my heavy winter work-boot. On my next shift I would discover just how close I had come to death or disfiguration.

While Shevko was talking shop in the P-Tank with the day crew, speaking in jargon that passed for a foreign dialect to ears in an introductory level language class, I stepped off the gooseneck for a smoke. I exhaled up at the blazing flare stack flame and figured I was a safe enough distance away from anything to ignite. I was thinking about the gas line that I had disconnected the other day and the mirage of fumes that flickered like ghosts when I heard that Bosnian Juice Monkey yell.

 “What the fuck are you doing?” His hard-hatted silhouette was backlit by a stadium light and his elbows jutted off his body in that suitcase-carrying pose.

 “Smoking.” I ignorantly replied.

“Put that shit out immediately.” I figured it was only a matter of time before he channeled his rage in my direction, but I stamped it out in the snow and walked back towards him. “You could have fucking killed us!” He had a wild look in his eyes, like a moose on a highway.

The day supe, Mike, stepped out of the room and glared at me. Shevko told me Mike used to be a heavyweight coke dealer and was once the only member of his crew to not show up at a meet that went sour, because of a coincidence that kept him elsewhere. Someone on the other side got stabbed to death and all of his friends present got locked up. “Are you fucking retarded?” He asked me calmly.

What do you say to a rhetorical question like that? I felt like a retard, like the common-sense part of my brain had been fried. “Apparently,” was all I could muster. I didn’t bother to state my case that I hadn’t been told. That if you’ll remember, I’m mostly green and didn’t know any better. But I did. I had just reverted back to that protective bubble I’ve always believed in. A genuine it’d-never-happen-to-me moment.

Mike said, “Try not to kill anybody,” and walked back to his idling truck, shaking his head. Then Shevko explained why he snapped. We were working in a boobie-trapped tomb, he implied, where the Extinction Level Event explosion could come from any angle. The bucket of what I thought was water last night was methanol, and if even a spark touched its surface it would detonate like a jerry can of gasoline set ablaze. That explosion so near to the pressure tank would set it off next, and like a destructive set of dominoes the whole rig would go up in flames.

I wouldn’t even make the crawl back to the trailer.

Everywhere, explosions waiting to happen. Potential killer fumes and puddles dotting the surroundings like land mines.

Well it sunk in, and I imagined my girlfriend hearing the news that I’d been killed in a freak accident after all the signs that told me I shouldn’t be here. Currently I’m taking those signs as obstacles on my path to financial freedom. But if I blew my dumb ass up, I’d have to look back down on my body as I’m floating through the ceiling and know it’d been the former. I imagined what it’d feel like to be torn apart by a giant fireball at close range. Maybe something like a sadistic full body orgasm. My action-movie saturated mind might say it’d be a badass way to go out - but I want to live. I want to raise children and encourage the use of their natural talents so they don’t have to risk life and limb in the oil patch. I imagined my parents’ grief. Losing a child must be hell. I imagined living horribly disfigured with the guilt of knowing that my irresponsible actions had killed someone. Would there even be any bones left to recycle?

Later, I randomly watched one of Sam & Ivan Raimi’s first films, Darkman, starring Liam Neeson and Frances McDormand, about a well-meaning and emotional scientist who becomes horribly scarred in a lab explosion. Life is a wheel, and everything is connected. “Would you still love me even if I was disfigured, and a freak, and you couldn’t bare to look at me?” The real question the movie was asking, I think, was “could I love myself?” But maybe that was just my own projection. Regardless, it was a question I’d rather go without answering, personally, so I made a pact with myself to start being more careful.

I’ve said it before though: stop rushing things through and think before you act. Still, I’ll find myself zoning into an idea and accelerating my cruise-controlled body to quickly finish the task at hand. It must be a form of Attention Deficit Disorder. I’m often an Absent-Minded Professor; must have sipped absinthe in candlelit bathtubs in a past life or two. But eventually understanding will click into place in my brain and send shock waves through my chakras and I won’t make that mistake again. But still, I can’t help thinking that creating the vengeful Darkman character must have been a cathartic exercise for two insanely talented brothers who were surely often called Freaks, once upon a time. Isn’t it always the Freaks who tend to make the most history?

The rusted iron head of the sledgehammer arced through frigid air, an unnatural extension of my core flowing energy slickly through my arms and directly into the pipe joint’s sweet spot. The gear chimed its hellish bell and finally spun tight.   

“There! You see?” The Bosnian hulk in dark coveralls shouted and in the orange light from the scorching flare stack his carotid artery bulged through an ink dragon. He was called Shevko and possessed a ferocious intensity, most likely invigorated by the juice that he also dealt. “That’s why you never give up!”

Together we had solved a puzzle, assembling the labyrinth of flow-line pipe that transported crude oil through the wellhead to the pressure tank. My sledgehammer violently secured the last tricky angle, locking the service rig into working order. Beyond the rumbling and clanking of heavy machinery, the lease was peaceful, gusts of snow spraying like geysers across the silver hunter’s moon. 

Five or six conversations into our first drive North, charging down the turbulent back-roads in his supped-up Dodge Ram, he told me about a moonlit drug deal gone bad in a vacant park: a sixth sense of approaching danger and narrowly escaping a hit squad, sliding out as three big black Escalades with 26” rims pulled up. A simple meeting to deliver a message from a friend on the Inside had apparently turned into a near brush with violence from a group that was not to be trifled with. It was the United Nations, he told me with a glance from the corner of his eye.

Gnarly, I told him, but why would a bunch of diplomats from the world’s governing body be after you? This was one of the rare occasions that I made him laugh. As it happens, the UN was also the name of a fearsome gang marauding through oil country. They provide the drugs and guns for rig-pigs, and kill who needs killin’. Friends in high places or just different kinds of highs. Shevko looks about as badass as they come, so I took his fictional-sounding tale at face value. He said nothing about my commentary on whether life imitates art or art imitates life. Talking time was over and a hand emblazoned with a grinning skull cranked back up the System of a Down.

 Eventually I learned that Shevko has a ten-year old daughter with a crack-head to whom he pays child support. He grew up on a farm outside of Sarajevo and immigrated to Canada when the war with Serbia ignited in the mid-90s. He finds the never-ending, desperately materialistic Pursuit for the Bigger Toy ridiculous, and calls its adherents, “Nimrods”. He hopes to take his silicone-tittied girlfriend and move to a lake someday, buy a boat that’s just fast enough. Just strong enough.

 But I lost him on my oration about the excesses of capitalism.

 Then a moose popped out of the snowy ditch and Shevko slammed on the brakes. The massive beast was galloping across the road at a languid 45-degree angle, its long brown legs seeming to move in slow motion behind the hulking rack of antlers that glowed in the halogen light. The truck skidded down to 50kph and for a moment kept pace with the graceful animal, its body lined up directly with the windshield. Five or six seconds after it vanished into the woods, Shevko let off honking the horn. “What a fucking shit show.” He said in his thick Slavic accent, shaking his head as we carried on towards the lease.

 Just a few weeks ago, he’d hit one on this same stretch of road. One moment you’re leaning over the steering wheel in the dark before the dawn, squinting into the near distance through fourteen-hour-shift eyes. The next, a moose is crumpling your truck’s front end and you’ve went from 80kph to 5 in just over a second, as if the animal had a concrete foundation, and the moose is flying away, twenty feet through the frosty morning air and sprawling its wasted bulk at the end of your high beams. The moose tries to stand up but it’s flailing, in shock. It kicks its muscular legs a few final times. Frantic eyes search for understanding. Then it dies, as you unclip your seatbelt and stumble out into the snow to call 911. Just another casualty in man’s war against the environment.

Meanwhile, Shevko’s black market home business was booming. His ex-stripper girlfriend was processing more orders than ever, new unknown clientele referred by so-and-so, and he was beginning to sense the early stages of paranoia. I warned him about getting too big for his britches, reminded him of the tug-of-war between greed and moderation. I advised him to start using those disposable cell-phones you buy from Mac’s to make his business calls. The Big Brother satellite grid is omnipresent if you let it and pseudo-omniscient, able to record every cell-phone conversation and scan for key threat words. The technology is in use, I tell him, and while the chances of you getting red-flagged by authorities of a higher level than you may be slim, you’re better safe than sorry. Also, I said, you should think about investing your dirty money into the stock market. Laundering your ill-got means through a well-diversified portfolio. I stopped short of recommending my father, an investment advisor with morals. But Shevko considered my criminal wisdom sound, and the nod he gave me indicated I’d reached the front door to the House of Respect.

Felice Brothers - Rockefeller Druglaw Blues