I was clutching the hand of Jordan, my Husband of just over 2 months, as we rattled along in the cramped dusty back seat of a Ford pickup truck, on a pothole covered, seemingly endless gravel road, in the foothills of the rocky mountains outside of Cochrane Alberta. The two burly men in the front seat, our new bosses, chatted small talk on the way as we drove. We were miles from civilization, it was late in the afternoon, and if I didn’t know better we could have been driving towards some concentration camp, never to see our family and friends again.
Looking over at Jordan and feeling the firmness of his grip on my hand told me he wasn’t sure what we had gotten ourselves into either. He told me later that at that moment he was worried that he made a big mistake- this wasn’t the place to take your newly minted bride.
Just 48 hours previous we were in the quiet hamlet of Port Alberni BC, working our simple summer jobs at a gas station and pizza restaurant, and living with my parents to save money for the upcoming year of college. Some family friends had gotten summer time work in the oil exploration industry, and the company they worked for needed workers desperately. The wage was an average wage but you got your living expenses paid for and you made a lot of overtime income. If we took this opportunity it meant we could bank a lot more money for the school year ahead.
In order to take the positions with this Oil Exploration company, we had to be in Alberta in two days, completely outfitted to work. It was a whirlwind effort to quit our jobs, get our supplies and drive to Alberta. The original plan, after doing some training, was to start the following week. However, the crew we were assigned to needed people right away, and a few hours after doing some online training, there we were riding along in the back seat of that pick-up truck headed into the boonies!
Jordan has often related to me that after our first full day doing the work: after the 20 kilometre day carrying 50 lbs on our backs, after hearing the filthy language of the guys he worked with, after being covered in mud and sweat, wearing wet boots from walking through creeks we had to cross- that he was sure that we needed to head back to BC and hopefully salvage our jobs or find new ones. He was mostly concerned about me. I had been working on a different crew for the day so he was imagining the worst for me.
Well it was a tough day. We were on crews laying down and picking up geophones and cables. A geophone is a metal cylindrical spike, 8 inches long, the width of a relay baton. Geophones are attached 6 to a cable and each geophone cable attached to master cables that run to a makeshift recording shack. Geophones help us get information to determine what is beneath the surface to know if there are oil or other mineral deposits. Picking up an laying down kilometres worth of this equipment was exhausting. This work was considerably more physically demanding than making pizzas. After being on the mountainside for 10 minutes I was covered in sweat, and wondering how I would make it through 10 to 12 hours of this in the 30 degree day.
After getting out of the helicopter at the end of the day, I made my way over to Jordan. Jordan didn’t say much until we were back at the hotel and cleaned up. When we finally talked he told me he was sorry for bringing us out to Alberta, and that he was making arrangements to get us back to BC. He said he couldn’t stand to put me in an environment like this, he felt like he let me down, and that he would let our bosses know in the morning.
I can thankfully say that conversation with our bosses never happened. Sometime that night or in the morning I told Jordan I thought I could do it and that we should see how we felt after our first week. We made it through the week, getting stronger every day. In fact, we went on to work 10 weeks (or so) straight, with no days off until we had to come back home for school. That was 7 days a week, 12-15 hours each day: in the mud, rain, heat, in the mosquito infested fields of Saskatchewan, in the foothills of the rockies, up every morning to be on time for our lunchbox safety meeting at 6:45 AM, sometimes with wet socks sometimes with dry socks, wet boots or dry boots, eating lunches we could only buy from gas stations (yuck), grabbing muffins and cereal on our way out the door at the hotel’s continental breakfast station. Not just one day. Every. Single. Day.
It was AWESOME!
I say this in hindsight, of course. While we were there, we were always amazed that we could exist in a life that consisted of hard mental and physical labour with no days off.
Here’s some of what I learned:
- Hard work NEVER kills anyone. It only makes us better people.
- I can do hard things and still be happy.
- The challenge of physically demanding work is actually won in the MIND: it’s 98% mental.
- Prayer, living a clean lifestyle free from hard drugs and alcohol, made it so we outlasted many of our colleagues who would burn out and quit.
- Good, honest, labour, is never below us. Those who do the work we often term as menial- are often made of the best stuff inside.
I carry those hard trekked miles into everything I do- they are deep in the soul of Hero Maid, they are deep inside of me.
Tracy Clarke