I ride in the back seat of a freightliner. I try to lie down, spread my weight across the seat and absorb the rough bumps of the road. The pain in my back is something new. I fell fifteen feet straight down, a pipe wrench in each hand.
The snow fell in great fat flakes. So big you\could see their individuality. Dinner plates might be the correct way to express the majesty of their size. In ten minutes, ten inches had fallen. It felt natural and expressive of the nature of the setting. Old growth Tamarack encamped the lease road where the Freightliner parked. A large track hoe had cut stairs in the earth, leading to a deep grave pit where we set our boring machine. We climbed down after it. The snow began to fall as innocuously as a smart cough from a friend you’re standing too closely with. No matter where you turned, the big fat snowflakes kept on falling.
The depth and scope of the job was proportional to the labour attended to hand spinning the rods, one at a time, to create a chain of pipe. A second smaller hole had been carved down into the tundra on the other side of the lease road. A large boring plug had been attached to a pipeline pipe ready to be yarded one length at a time to the other side. I had been spinning rods by hand all day when I was politely requested to fetch pipe wrenches from the Freightliner. I climbed in my monkey suit to the truck to fetch the monkey wrenches. Having accomplished the task, I turned around, wrenches in hand, where to my great shock the bank had given way. I fell straight down fifteen feet to the muddy, snow-covered depths of the grave. I absorbed what my body could take with my knees, the concussive force rolling up my spin to implode in the back of my ribcage.
I tried to inhale. Sharp piercing pains lambasted my lungs. I tried to scream out, but my voice was not there. It was as though the pain engulfed my body and soul. I whimpered and expressed my discomfort with solemnity on my face. Standing, I crawled out of the grave, one earth cut stair at a time. I was no longer a part of the team, I was apart, shamefully hiding in the truck with my sorrows. My boss was none too pleased at his discomfort of me hurting myself. The job bored on, finishing with a fury. My broken body unable to respond to the countless hours of complaining which were to come.
“You know, you seem okay. I think with a little rest you’ll be right as rain.” One of my co-workers informed me. So odd that they knew what would fix my body. Meanwhile, my breaths were short, hard, painful, echoing the broken back and now my broken spirits at having hurt myself.
My boss grabbed my leg, like some sort of egoist with a crippling fear of what my pain might do to him. “Come on, it’s not like you really hurt yourself,” he would say. “I’m sure you’re not as bad as you let on.”
The tears in my eyes began to show. When I didn’t sit up, had nothing to say for myself, and couldn’t really breath too well, they began to realize that their dreams of no WCB were waning. I was a product of some school of thought that we work through the pain. We accept and endure, we never complain, we only ever man up and keep on keeping on. Though in my mind I knew this was not the case today. Today, I had suffered a life altering blow. I was hit where I couldn’t just walk it off. I was hit in a way where I didn’t know what to do.
Hours upon hours of course oilfield roads and crude talk in the early spring reminded me every waking moment of the grueling ordeal a sharp and sudden fall can have on a life. I wanted to cry. I wanted to talk to my parents. I wanted to know what to do, but no one tells you what to do. No one prepares a youthful soul for what to do when you’re being abused at work. When a persons can do attitude is over-stepped by a person in power who knows how to control a young, eager mind.
I finally landed at my door, a thousand miles of broken dreams shattering on the floor. I crawled from the freightliner, collected my belongings, and carried my broken carcass in through the door. I could not raise my head, nor my hand to wave good-bye to the pieces of shit who took such good care of me. I dropped everything at the door, took a goodly dose of Tylenol and meandered my broken body to my bed.
A thousand phone calls are what I imagined it would take to find a chiropractor and a doctor to look at me. When one says, “WCB” the world magically reacts so positively. The Doctor, like any good drug dealer, offered me a taste and sent me to a pharmacist for the rest. Informing me of the potential to see a specialist, or at the least, a physiotherapist. A scribbled note of hardly legible writing opened that door. The chiropractor was on the fifth floor.
I thanked God when I entered the stout brick building seeing a bank of elevators. There were no receptionists in this foyer, so I pressed the button and waited stoned, dazed, broken, and in pain. What a tremulous combination for a young spirit to endure. The elevator was courteous to deposit me directly to my floor. I stepped out into a small, neat corridor and was suddenly turned around. A meager old man with a striped shirt, brown trousers, a flat cap, and a walker said, “Down this way Kid.” Like a guardian who knew the way to redemption. I wandered past him and his lady friend toward the place he indicated. When the old man with the walker reached the elevator bank, he casually turned to me and yelled, “Hey Kid!”
I turned to see him pinch the two middle fingers of his right hand, extending the two outer, raising his hand in the air. “You know what this is?” I paused, uncertain of what it could be. The old man said, “This is the bull, you mess with it you get the fucking horns!”
His elevator arrived, he turned and disappeared from my life forever along with his lady friend. I still ponder what the old man with the bull horns said to me on that fateful day. I try not to mess around and get the horns, but there are circumstances in which I have been gored by my own curiosity.
The grueling hours of physiotherapy and the chiropractor helped to solidify my body and rectify my pain. I wish that I could say their work was finished when I left there, but my body is a work in progress, the pain lingers. I try not to fuck around too much; I don’t want to find out. It’s truly a wonder how one small misstep can impact your life forever. I think one of the most valued lessons I learned on that beautiful Spring Day is to be honest with yourself. Don’t chase dreams of money despite your best intentions. I remind myself we all face limitations, life should be lived, and there is no remorse in regretting a life lived. The pale horse of death has come to knock upon my door, I choose today not to answer.