Tales To Make Your Blood Run Cold

Just over a year ago, newly separated, I left Toronto to start a new life in British Columbia with my six-year-old son. I supplemented freelance writing with cooking, cleaning – anything I could find in my small, artistic community. When it was settled that my son was to spend the summer with his father, I decided to use the time to find high-paying seasonal employment, work non-stop, and return in the fall with a nest egg.

I thought of tree planting but kept getting visions of athletic eighteen-year-olds zipping up and down hills planting saplings while I was still digging my first hole. I refined my search. I would go somewhere no one else wanted to go. That would pay a lot. I actually researched companies doing business in Baghdad. Finally, I hit on something closer to home, and, I thought, more civilized.

There is an “oil rush” going on in the Canadian North where hundreds of mining companies are short-handed. They offer attractive incentives to get and keep people. I decided to try working for a catering company in a mining camp.

The company’s conditions seemed ideal: I could drive there and back and be reimbursed for the trip; I could choose my own start and finish date; they would cover all living expenses while I was there; I would work twelve hours a day, seven days a week, and for every hour over forty, I would get time-and-a-half.

My friends thought it was a great idea. “Take your bike!” “Swim in a lake!” “Sock some money away!” they crowed. One described it as a “strategic solution” to post-separation financial turmoil. After all, it wasn’t forever; how hard could it be?

It’s a three-day drive north from Vancouver to the Alaska Highway then on to the oil fields. In some places, forest fires burned half a mile away from where I was driving. The last leg was a vomit-inducing truck ride so muddy I couldn’t see out the windows and had no idea where I was when I arrived. The camp was a bunch of trailers set in half a square mile of mud. At the edge of the mud were woods. And in the woods were Grizzlies. Some of the trailers had broken windows where they had tried to get in. It had echoes of M. Night Shyamalan’s movie, “The Village.”

Cooks who were probably sane in the city would, after a while, turn up for work seeming completely high, unable to discern the food they were preparing was too old or rotten to be eaten and blaming everyone else for it. I had a creepy suspicion that oil rig workers were trading in body parts for fat paychecks – their hands were missing thumbs and fingers; they stumped around on single legs; one guy had no fingernails, just blue stubs where his fingertips used to be - all accidents apparently sustained while working the rigs. The catering company was owned and largely staffed by a native Canadian band whose lives were the stuff of Shakespearean tragedy. Every other day I heard tales of deaths or suicides of children, drownings of friends, shootings, beatings and loneliness. Some of it happened while we were working there. And yet they all carried on with a grim fortitude that I’d never witnessed in the face of such pain.

For a few nights, I had to stay in a fifty-bedroom dorm alone. It was like staying in a motel all by yourself, in the middle of the woods, except the front doors won’t lock, and you have to go down the hall to the bathroom. At four a.m. the first night, I was awakened by an air-raid type siren blasting over the whole community. It was a fire.

It got to the point where I woke up every day wondering, “What weird thing is going to happen today?” Other times I asked myself what the hell I was doing there, feeling that I was too old. In retrospect, I realize it would have been even harder to take had I been a youngster. My geologist brother had summer jobs in mining camps that were inaccessible except by small plane. One year he said he witnessed a fellow student go “bush crazy,” running through the woods naked, screaming. He was flown out to a psychiatric hospital in Toronto.

There were some light moments - buffalo roaming around the parking lots, sunsets at midnight and the sometimes-humorous trials of trying to feed two-hundred ravenous men three times a day. One week, I got to cook for eighty kids and teachers who had gathered for a swim meet in the Northwest Territories. Still, the fun moments were overshadowed by the knowledge that they were - and always would be - rare. In the end, I made it through and got home to find that my little house seemed like a palace and that I felt blessed.

Robert Service wasn't kidding when he wrote “there are strange things done in the midnight sun by the men who moil for gold.” Indeed, the last frontier is not, as National Geographic would have you believe, under the oceans. It is in the Canadian North. That said, the experience is a useful reminder to single mothers that we all have to make some difficult, if temporary decisions. Indeed, there is something to be said for fighting fear with fear. My struggles up north made becoming a single mother pale by comparison. And that is a gift.