Photos under the title as usual
Bigfoot. Sasquatch. The mysterious hairy animal/ person/ whatever that roams the wildest places of North America. They found some hairs recently and the most sardonic scientist – a biologist or geneticist - I have ever come across was strong-armed by the media into testing them for DNA evidence of Bigfoot. He held a press conference when he got the results back, which had the entire country up in a heap, during which he told everyone in Canada to grow up for chrissakes, it was only sheep wool.
Unless it was a Bigfoot in sheep’s clothing, he added.
Really serious-minded scientists with tenure are great, aren’t they!
Despite this, the myth lives on apace. The Bigfoot website Queenie looked at today said: “It is a fact that, for over seventy years, people have been finding, photographing, and casting sets of very large human-shaped tracks. Most are discovered by chance in remote areas. These tracks continue to be found to this day.”
Well, not to take away from the serious and important work being undertaken by the Bigfoot people, Queenie went to Alberta last week and found some human-shaped tracks of her own that were very disturbing.
The environmentalists she works with/ on behalf of talk a lot about the ecological footprint. It’s a very interesting concept. Everyone has one. It is based on how much energy you use as a person. Canadians, generally, have quite a large footprint, between eight and twelve hectares each, living as they do in a car-based society that is very cold a lot of the time. And the fact that they are blessed with an abundance of natural resources – water, coal, oil, trees, fish, wildlife, land - means they can afford to be wasteful. One of my favourite statistics in this regard is one I sourced from the David Suzuki Foundation, which states that if everyone on the planet consumed resources like a Canadian, we would need four and a half planets like Earth to sustain us all.
Despite the wonderful work undertaken by Suzuki, Ron Coleman in GPI Atlantic here in Halifax, and others, these facts are not sinking in here. In part because they are too disturbing, they involve too much change for people used to a particular way of life. And in part because of the iron grip that multinationals have on Canada’s resources. And by default her lawmakers and protectors.
Queenie got a glimpse of the whole thing in action last week in Alberta and had a serious attack of the ‘shock and awes’. So much so that she cannot shake it.
Onto Isabella to get a load
After a bowl of cereal and the application of several layers of thermal clothing last Monday morning, she ventured out into minus 15 degrees Centrigade cold to spend the day in Himself’s truck.
Her name is Isabella. Named in earlier days, because Queenie was on a bit of an Isabella Rosselini kick at the time. She’s a brand new Western Star model with a hundred feet of trailer running behind her.
A big momma in other words.
After we filled the gas tank, we headed three hundred kilometres north on the road to Fort McMurray. It was snowing lightly but the cab was warm. Outside, the landscape slid past the iced up windows. A vast prairie of grass and canola stubble, the colour of butterscotch, lightly dusted with snow. Stands of bare poplars lined the road intermittently, huddled together like herds of bodiless zebras. Sometimes scrub clung to them, stringy and bare, its bark the colour of mulberries. Other than the trees, there was nothing to break up the emptiness of the land except rows and rows of hay bales.
We had four hours of this.
Past the gulag into the forest
A few miles before Fort McMurray, we turned off the highway and made our way through the Indian reservation that straggles along the edge of Lake Gregoire. IR No. 167 I think it was. They’re given numbers on the map, even though they all have names. Almost all of the houses fronted the lake, which stretched achingly white into the soft fuzz of a snowstorm on its far side. Houses, boats, barbeques, four wheelers, pick ups, trailers, toys, kayaks, bicycles, all the accessories of the Canadian lifestyle, lay about haphazardly, covered in snow. The sky had darkened and gave off an eerie violet glow that created a strange filter in front of the horizon.
We drove on and on down increasingly narrow tracks and took a wrong turn. Not pretty with a 100 foot of unbendable steel behind us. Finally, we found the forest, located at the back of a gas refinery under construction. After getting through tight security at the front gate, we had to skirt the edge of the building site to get to the wood loader.
It reminded me of a scene from a James Bond movie, I’m not sure which one, in which a weapons silo is being built in some Artic place. I counted nearly fifty cranes. Little machines were trundling to and fro, as well as all kinds of jeeps, half tons and other vehicles. There were no people in sight though.
Foundations for all kinds of buildings had been poured and were covered in snow while they waited to be finished. Rows and rows and rows of prefabricated buildings housed the thousands of men who must have been working on this huge site. I wondered where they were. None of the cranes seemed to be operating.
Never mind From Russia with Love. All it needed was a barbed wire fence and a gun tower and it would have been a gulag.
I kept expecting the whole thing to light up with a massive explosion, after which the young Sean Connery would run out of the blast in a tuxedo to hijack Izzy and drive her till her wheels came off. But we got round the site without incident and lurched onto a narrow track between the trees.
There were no signs to our loader, the D-Loader, just signs for the PK-Loader, so of course we got lost again. Eventually, we met an Indian driving a grader, who told us to go back to the 3km sign and follow the signs for the PK-Loader. Sure enough, even though it was for a different logging company (Russians who are so Orthodox they don’t allow their drivers to work on a Sunday, but who are canny enough to suggest they start work at 12.01am that night) we eventually found the loader and its operator, known for his bad temper, sitting in the cab glaring at us like a malevolent Buddha.
“You’re late. You know you’re supposed to ring dispatch if you’re late.”
“Yeah, well, we've been too busy trying to find the goddamn loader to call anyone.”
I could tell Himself was a bit stressed at this stage, so I said nothing. Apart from applauding his attitude with the loader guy. Of course I wasn’t allowed out of the truck, as there was heavy machinery and male stuff involved, which I would just get in the way of, so I stayed warm and took some pictures.
Stretching Izzy’s trailers out
The trailers weren’t at their full length, so they had to be stretched to take the trees piled up in the clearing. This seemed to involve quite a lot of motion, you know the sort. Getting in and out of the cab; and driving forward a bit and then stopping and getting out and swearing at things, and then getting back in again to lurch forward again, and then some more swearing. The bit of me that remembered going out testing with my dad when he was tired and busy kicked in reflexively, took over and made me as small and as quiet as possible.
Trailer one slid out nice and handy. Trailer two was more problematic. Eventually, he banged back into the cab, put his foot on the accelerator one more time, till the trailer suddenly gave and everything lurched forward with an almighty squeal and a sudden stop that snapped my head back on my neck with the force of a catapult.
Now I know why they call it whiplash.
I had cried out involuntarily. We both sat there for a moment. Then he went to look. Came back. The damned hole had slid too far past the other one and the fucking bar wouldn’t go through. He slammed the door shut and stalked off to kick something. I did what every woman should do when her man is fighting the malign forces of the entire galaxy single-handedly due to the stupidity of other men, specifically, another man he doesn’t like much; I sewed my mouth shut and took an intense interest in Izzy’s control panel for the next hour.
Every now and then there was another thump and a lurch as he tried to sort it out. But the stupid thing was immovable. Eventually he gave up, none of the other men present were being particularly helpful, and loaded her. With 63,000 kgs of 100ft deciduous tree trunks.
That’s a lot of wood. On a wobbly trailer. On a dirt forest track. I thought about unstitching my mouth to point this out, but then decided he knew best.
He finally got back into the cab. His hands and face were soooooo cold.
He was worried the trailer would pull apart too.
“Or the load might come forward”, he told me.
I hadn’t thought of that. I turned to look at the sheet of cracked plexi-glass that served as the back window of the cab and that was all that stood between us and 63,000 kgs of deciduous tree trunk. I was surprised at how unconcerned I was about the whole thing.
He wrapped the load with chains and straps to stabilise it, and ran a chain through the mismatched holes in the trailer pole and tried to call his boss to check whether it would be safe to move the truck, while I sat in the cab and tried to feel nervous.
Nope. Not a thing. I smoked a cigarette, and looked out at him and began feeling a bit disingenuous. I mean, here I was, sitting in a warm cab thinking I was incredibly post-modern by trying to existentialise the whole thing, while he was out there struggling with straps and chains and machines and a rude loader operator and his boss’s unavailability all at the same time in the freezing cold, so that he could get us home safely. I decided my best contribution to the situation was to not get nervous.
Eventually he got through to his boss who said the trailer would hold as long as it was loaded. And then ranted and raved a bit about the delay and time being money yadda, yadda.
They’re all like that out here. They’re exactly the same as the blokes you meet in Café Insane on a Friday night, except they all wear baseball caps and work boots and drive Dodge pickups. The bloke in Café Insane would be horrified to hear his Armani suit doesn’t cut him a swathe apart from a North Albertan cattleman or oilman or logger, but the obsession with the time/money interface, and the relentless search for a quick buck on the back of someone else’s hard work and ingenuity is the same.
Queenie takes a pit stop
It took us four hours to get to the mill, heading south down that road that runs from the North to Edmonton. It was beginning to get dark (a long drawn out affair in Northern Alberta) as we drove onto the main highway again. I really needed to use the bathroom, but I decided not to stop the truck in the woods in case the Furies played havoc with us. Besides, I had seen a couple of rest stops on the way up. With facilities.
After ninety minutes of being in a truck on a highway with a lot of trees being hauled behind you, I was a bit uncomfortable. So I mentioned it. We agreed he’d stop at the next rest stop. Or when it got dark. Whichever came first.
Well, the guy who comes round and rolls up the streets in Alberta every night at ten o’clock must’ve put them away early, because there was no sign of them on the way back to the mill. I held on for another hour or so. Yoga practice has its uses!!
Eventually, I started getting cranky. Then suddenly, Himself pulled up against some kind of large, square-shaped concrete bollard on the side of the road and said ‘There you go. No one will see you.”
I looked around. It was still light. We were on the only road into northern Alberta. Everyone was driving home from the Canadian Rodeo championships, so a steady stream of traffic was coming towards us. And it was a very small bollard.
“I could go in the woods”, I said.
“It’ll take you a time to walk in there”, he pointed out. “I’ve angled the truck so no one can see you”, he continued, with more patience than I deserved.
“Will there be bears still awake in the woods?”
“Probably. It’ll be fine here.”
“It’s a very small bollard.”
“ There’s tissues behind you in that box.”
I clambered down from the truck with a sigh.
Not see me, my ass! So to speak. Izzy’s wheels were as tall as my breastbone, for chrissakes, leaving a five foot gap under her that anyone in a car could see through. And it was so cold. And Himself had used the stop to get out to check the load strapping, so there wasn't a huge amount of privacy although he was on the opposite side of the truck.
Well, girl, I thought, it’s adventure you wanted… I took a deep breath and began to unbutton.
Just as I was getting into position a car screeched to a halt on the other side of the road. I stood up hurriedly and watched from behind one of Izzy’s wheels as the driver, a man, got out for a quick slash behind his car, then drove off in a hurry.
BASTARD!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
The unfairness of it! With a heavy heart, I unbuttoned my jeans again and bared my ass to the Albertan winter, and God only knows how many cowboys and their children. Just as I finished, a silent breeze (called up no doubt by the gods from somewhere north of the Hudson Bay) caressed my butt and I knew the meaning of ass-numbing cold.
As I climbed back into the cab, teeth chattering, Himself said he was very proud of me.
The ninth circle of hell produces shock and awe
A couple of hours later, the feeling was coming back into my gluteals, as we pulled into the entrance to the mill, which is owned by a Japanese multinational who shall remain nameless, because I wasn’t supposed to be there.
A line of trucks loaded down with trees queued patiently for the scales to have their lumber weighed. Himself got two coffees from the women in the weigh station. After being weighed – there’s a hefty fine if you’re overweight – we drove to an unstrapping station, where he had to unchain and unstrap the lumber before driving Isabella towards the unloading bay. This was located beside a stack of lumber the size of Croke Park. To say it was immense would be an understatement. A horizontal, leafless, branchless forest.
To one side, a crane as large and impressive as Belfast’s Goliath stood waiting for us. We drove underneath it and got out. Suddenly, its giant claw descended smoothly and noiselessly and closed itself around the first trailer-full of logs. Then they slid smoothly up into the air, with no more consequence than if they were twigs in Zackie’s hand. Smoothly, quickly, they were hauled along the transom of the crane and dropped into an enormous funnel to my left.
After a few seconds, there was a low grumble as something tore into the 33,000 kgs of deciduous tree trunks we had delivered to its fate. In a few more seconds I could see pulp and dust sliding down different chutes towards the paper mill itself.
The claw came back for the second load. They were smoothly dispatched the way of the first lot. We were free to go and get another acre of forest. And bring it back here.
We sat back into the cab. I couldn’t speak for the shock and awes. Himself looked at it through my eyes and as usual, found the words for me.
“Oh my, what are we doing to the earth?”
“Oh my, what indeed. And why?”
All so as we can wipe our asses with soft tissue when we need to.
Queenie found a mighty big footprint, don't you think?
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