Back when 3-4 months of summer work could pay your rent, tuition, all reading materials, car insurance, groceries, my Dad would pack up his little shitbox of a car at the end of the spring semester and drive out to Northern Quebec, where a network of dikes and hydro-electric dams were being built in order to provide power to rural Quebec, Montreal, Quebec City, Maritimes cities like Halifax and Fredericton, and, if there was surplus power, the goal was to sell the excess juice to either New York City or the highest bidder.
NYC wanted our Canadian electricity because they could get more from a Canadian company then they would paying the same amount in USD to an American Hydro company. Remember now, NYC was nearly bankrupt in the 1970s. “Ladies and gentlemen, the Bronx is burning.” They needed every break they could get.
But none of this mattered to my Dad at the time. At least, I don’t think so. I wasn’t even yet swimming around aimlessly in his nutsack.1 I can’t remember if he did 2 or 3 summer at James Bay, but he did enough backbreaking labour to fuck up his back for the rest of his life. This would be his last year. Lifting stones is hard. There’s no way around it. That’s why slaves built the pyramids. You couldn’t pay anyone to build those fucking things. No amount of money in the world would have convinced an ancient company that it was worth it. But it wasn’t all bad. At the end of each day my Dad would be too tired to hit up the makeshift bar someone had set up outside the dorms that housed the men. So he was saving money. And he’d learned enough French over the past few to become conversant in it. He no longer stammered and could usually understand what he was being asked to do when the one foremen who refused to speak English or have anyone translate his bawled instructions. By the second summer, my Dad knew what the man was asking him to do. He was starting to understand French. And to speak it. It’s a dubious graduation, some might say, to rise from “rudimentary” to “intermediate” but it made my Dad pretty fuckin’ proud.
The James Bay Project had 11 hydro-electric stations in the La Grande watershed. I don’t know which one my father worked at, of if each summer he worked at a different one, but I get the sense it was one of the more remote ones.
That photo above is of La Grande River just outside Radisson, where the Robert-Bourassa generating station, the second-most northerly hydrolectric dam, is located. I have a feeling it was either this one my Dad worked at, or the most northerly one.
Places this remote my Dad likes to refer to as “Bandit Country” because all the road signs are handwritten. It’s funny. Something about handwritten road signs pleases him enormously. Years later, 2001 or 2002, we were on a road trip together, driving somewhere north of Algonquin Park where we’d just picked up and dropped off a monosyllabic hitchhiking farm kid, when we began to see hand-painted road signs. My father was jubilant.
“It’s Bandit Country!” he bellowed in delight. I wonder now if he was thinking about his badass Dirty Harry impersonation in Bandit Country, Quebec.
Here’s the story.
En route to whichever dam he’d be working at that summer, he had to stop for gas. against his wishes, at one of those infernal Full-Service stations. He hates Full-Service stations and I inherited that hatred. It is not difficult to see why. Unscrewing a fuel cap and filling a gas tank is not an operation that requires diligence, intelligence, or even basic math skills. In the late 1950s and early 1960s, gas stations started outfitting their pumps with stops that prevented overflow. So why the fuck do you have to sit there while someone else does it for you, and then expects you to tip them when you could easily perform the task yourself?
As my dad got out of he car a pimply teenaged Quebecois teen came bounding outside, all smiles and servility. But his gait and manner changed the instant he saw the Ontario plates.
At this point my father noticed that two old men were sitting in lawn chairs outside the station, both staring at him. They weren’t playing chess. Or even conversing. I suppose this is what passed for social engagement in rural Quebec in early 1970s Quebec. Sitting beside some other dude, looking around. Company in the void, I suppose? Two weeks of that and I’d go stark raving mad.
As the teen unscrewed the cap, inserted the pump handle and squeezed the trigger, he turned to the two old men and said something in rapidfire French, assuming my Dad didn’t know what he’d just been called. But, as I said, my Dad had put his time in around French guys. He knew the swear words. There are a lot more than just “Tabernac!” And men were always getting injured and cursing in French on the job.
Staring down this palefaced goon, my Dad realized he’d just been called the equivalent of a “slimy cocksucker.” The teen didn’t think my Dad knew any French.
The old men laughed and the teen laughed and then, emboldened by my Dad’s initial lack of response, the teen turned back to my Dad and asked him something totally fucking rude, like “do you suck cock?” even adding in “sir” at the end to make it seem like he was being a good full-service gas station attendant when really he was being a smug and bigoted jackass.
So then my Dad smacked the hood of his car with both hands and locked eyes with the boy. Suddenly the boy looked frightened.
Then, after a crushingly long wait, my Dad said quietly, Clint Eastwood style, “C'est assez.”
The two old men balked, jaws agape, then immediately pretended to be doddering old senile dudes instead of snickering jerks. The teen flinched when my Dad handed him the money for the gasoline. My Dad’s a big guy. You don’t wanna piss him off.
The teen ran inside the gas station as fast as his legs would carry him, immediately burst back out and handed my Dad his change, gingerly, like a kid feeding something to a tiger at the zoo, then turned and ran back into the station. Looking deeply uncomfortable now that their representative had abandoned them and was hiding behind the counter inside, the two old men began pointing out imaginary birds in the sky, just two senior Frenchmen passing the time. They weren’t worth my Dad’s time. He just shook his head and got back in his car and triumphantly drove off.
And that was that.
So.
What did my Dad say to frighten the boy so? “I’m gonna kill you if you don’t shut your mouth?” Or something similar?
Nope.
“That’s enough.”
That’s it. “That’s enough.” As in, you’ve had your fun, sonny boy, but you’re crossing a line here. Are you sure you wanna cross it?
Totally Dirty Harry style. My Dad isn’t a violent man but…who wouldn’t get their back up being called names like that by a trio of cackling jerks who think you’re too stupid to understand their utterances?
“That’s enough.”
Sometimes that’s all it takes. A vague, distant implication of a well-deserved ass beating. As I said, my Dad is a big man. Wide shoulders and big biceps. But even if he wasn’t a big man, you don’t mock somebody to his face cuz you think he doesn’t know your language. It’s a cheap fucking joke. The epitome of immaturity.
My Dad’s response that day likely contributed to a rapid maturation and improvement in his so-called “full service” repertoire. Service with a smile. And not saying savagely shitty things to a paying customer just because he’s from Ontario.
We’re all Canadians, kid. We’re all up here together. America’s hat, eh?
That’s me and my Dad in either 2003 or 2004. Believe it or not, he’s even buffer and healthier now. He’s become a major gym rat. Goes almost every day pretty much. I’m not sure what he did when gyms were shut down during the COVID crisis. Must’ve drove him nuts. He has workout equipment at home but I know my Dad just prefers going to the gym. The ritual of it, I guess. I prefer working out in gyms too. I’m a member at a gym called Hone Fitness, which sucks for me because “Hone” was the pet name I used to call my ex. So now every time I use the barcode thing they gave me to get into the gym I’m briefly reminded of my ex and heartbreak and etc etc, but I just try to channel it into doing one more chin-up this time, one more pull-up, one more concentration curl, every time one more rep than the last.
But we’re getting into MY story now. This is my Dad’s cool Clint Eastwood story. And you know why I’m inclined to believe it? Someone else told me that story, not my Dad himself. Usually when people tell stories in which they are the Man With No Name who says and does badass things and rides off into the unset before vanishing in a blinding white light of frontier justice par excellence, they are lying. But someone else told me that story, a man who’d known my Dad for at least thirty years.
I believe it. I love that story.
Up next a little later this week: A story about my Mom being a total badass.
I start back at O&B Sept 17 for a 14 hour shift. I am so out of shape, but I’m looking fwd to it anyway.
It’s ungrateful and impetuous to complain of winning a lottery before one was even born, the odds of my Dad’s sperm fusing to my Mom’s egg being astronomically low, but I still would have preferred to win a lottery after being born. ESPECIALLY now, with the incredible hardships COVID has put people through. I’m not suffering any more than the next guy, but I’m not suffering any less.
Actually, wait a sec, unless “the next guy” is battling acute depression and anxiety while tapering off methadone at a rate of 10mgs per week. (So this week I’m at 100. Next week will be 90. They say you can’t start to feel a drop of 10mgs until you are down to 40mgs, at which point you drop by 5mgs four times, getting down to 20. After that, you pretty much have to go down 1 milligram at a time or you’ll just be constantly dopesick for those last 4 weeks. If you have to go to hell, would you wanna go for 5 days? Or for 2 months? Easy answer to that one.