Rick Ranson

“Grace, I’m driving you to Aunty Tara’s Christmas Party tonight, and if I get drunk you’ll be driving me home.”

“Papa, I’m only fourteen.”

“Great! If we get stopped by the cops, they can’t take away your licence because you don’t have one. They can’t take something you don’t have.”

By this time I’m getting the stink eye from daughter Becky, Grace’s mother.

“Hey cut me some slack here. In fifty years time Grace will be a Grandmother and she’ll be able to tell her Grandkids. “You think I am crazy? You should have met my Grandfather!”

Becky just shook her head.

“Come on! I’m building my legacy here!”

“Merry Christmas Dad.”

“Merry Christmas Beck. Besides, we’d have to put blocks on the gas and brake pedals so her feet would reach.”

“Lord help us, everyone.”

 

“Fast is fine. But accuracy is final.”    Wyatt Earp
He actually said;
“Fast is fine, but accuracy is everything. In a gun fight, you need to take your time, in a hurry.”

Through the years I’ve developed an ‘ear’ for expressions, interesting and odd things people say. It’s become my hobby. From an old native right off the reserve saying that his girlfriend is so skinny it’s ‘like dancing with a pile of moose antlers’, to an Engineer at NASA saying ‘We don’t do anything very quickly around here’ if it makes me smile I keep it in my several notebooks.

“I’ve met more interesting artichokes.”

“I’d rather rub a cougar’s ass with sandpaper than fight with Bob Probert.” Hockey Player.

“My hockey team looked like a Work-Release Program.”

“People talk slowly to him.”

“You ride the tiger, you might end up inside it.”

“He sounds like a Wizard, casting a spell at Hogwarts.”

“She sucked me into her nothing life.”   A little bitter maybe?

“Like pouring gravy on a salad.”

“You don’t dance like Michael Jackson you know. You dancing looks more like some pissed-off rooster.”

I got notebooks upon notebooks just full of these sayings. One day I’m going to put them all together in a story.

And finally…

“He’s so stupid he’d make a snow angel in a dog-park.”

I spent years working as a pressure welder all over the Canadian and American high Arctic.  From Cape Dyer on Baffin Island Canada to being a drillship’s welder offshore north of Dead Horse City, in Prudhoe Bay Alaska USA.

From Hall Beach, Cambridge Bay, Jenny Lind Island, McKinley Bay,  Cape Hopper,  Broughton Island, I welded anything and everything that crawled , floated, pumped oil, water, shit, and a whole lot of ship’s bottoms.  I had so many adventure I wrote about them in my first book Working North.

So I know what I’m talking about when I say that making a pipeline across the northern part of the Western Canadian Provinces and shipping our oil from Manitoba ports to the world through Hudson’s Bay can be done.

But it’s not going to be easy.  Let’s take a look at three possibilities; Churchill, Port Nelson, and York Factory.

Churchill is a deep water port, with a cement dock and a established town with all the infrastructure there already.  Sounds good right? Maybe not. That Churchill River just roars into Hudson Bay right through Churchill. It’s way too fast for any large ships to navigate.

Churchill is surrounded by 150Kms of muskeg, swamp. There’s a reason the Polar Bear Express train can only go 40Kms an hour. The whole dammed train sinks a couple of feet into the muskeg every time it passes. If that train ever stops for any length of time EVERYBODY sinks.

Building a pipeline to Churchill will have to entail each and every stanchion anchored in the muck to contain a mini ice plant that generates it’s own ball of ice so the pipeline won’t slowly sink into the muskeg. On the other hand the Alaska Pipeline does it so why not?

A service road beside that pipeline is why not. There’s a reason there’s no roads built up there.  It’s a swamp!  There’s places where contractors have over the years added 15 – 20 feet of gravel to spots and every spring the road just keeps on sinking .

Churchill’s out.

Port Nelson is only about 50 Kms from an all weather heavy-duty road that ends just down the way from Sundance, a heavy industrial hydro site. Putting an all-weather gravel road from Sundance to Port Nelson would be a summer’s work. There’s no muskeg to speak of, Port Nelson has a rail line (although old) already to it.

Except that Port Nelson has no harbor; not just a bad harbor, NO harbor. In the 1920’s there was a storm that piled ice floe on top of ice floe, and the wind and waves pushed the ice and what was left of the crushed town about a quarter mile inland. They’re still finding metal way back in the scrub from that storm.

And that river is about four feet deep at Port Nelson. They’d have to have a entire fleet of deep water dredges so that any ship, not even oil ships, to get anywhere near the Port.  People may ague that New Orleans had that same problem and they solved it way back in 1825 by building underwater dams that ran 90 degrees to the Mississippi’s flow forcing all the water into a 100 foot channel. The now re-directed Mississippi dug a  thirty-foot deep channel all by itself in a year.

Except Port Nelson is open to the Hudson’s Bay and we have ice floes that can be 60 feet deep, taking out any underwater dams re-directing the water.

Port Nelson  or someplace more sheltered would be problematic but possible.

York Factory was the solution the Hudson’s Bay Company tried when Port Nelson’s drawbacks became apparent. It’s still on the Hayes River Delta, somewhat protected from the gales and ice floes of the Bay, on the south side of the Hayes.

York Factory,  even though it’s on the same side of the river as Gillam it needs a bridge or two and an entire new road across the Hayes because of the three ports it’s got absolutely no infrastructure there.  But of the three this one is the most do-able.

One day if we dream big and have the guts, a day will come when there will be a wide highway,  a pipeline beside it, following alongside a navigable Hayes River to Hudson’s Bay. Barges could putter along all the way from Winnipeg across Lake Winnipeg, to the locks at Norway House on top of Lake Winnipeg. Then those barges would follow the Hayes with the highway and the pipeline beside it downriver to York Factory and the other cities springing up on Hudson’s Bay.  Then all our manufactured goods and minerals and oil, would be loaded on to ocean going ships then off to be sold around the world.

 

 

 

 

East of Winnipeg, on highway 15, there used to be a house. A white house, sitting off away from the highway in a field of green grasses. Unlike other farmhouses, with cheery trees lining the approach and colourful flowers surrounding the yard, this one stuck up naked and alone; like a fire hydrant in a new development.  Every once in a while there’d be a farm truck in the yard parked beside the framed house. But usually there was nothing else; a white faded farmhouse sticking up alone in a field of green grasses.

One day I was driving my Mother-in-law Ruby Mason into Winnipeg. Ruby Mason taught just about everybody’s parents in Transcona, just outside of Winnipeg. This day I was driving her into the school where she worked. The high school was named after father Murdock.  We drove passed that lonely farmhouse all alone out in that Manitoba field and she shared  a story.

Seems during the war there were two brothers from Germany that during the war pretty much lived in a tent out in the forest because the American bombers during the day and the British bombers at night would bomb their hometown into craters. They called it ‘Bouncing the rubble.”

After the war ended the two young German farmers decided that they would leave Germany and try to restart their lives in either Australia or Canada because Germany was completely devastated. The one brother Gunther, asked a pretty  girl from his school to come with him to start over in Canada; she eagerly accepted.

The other brother tried the same tactic with his childhood sweetheart.  Except her parents told him he wasn’t good enough. He was going to be just a farmer; a dirt farmer out in the woods of Canada. Their daughter was made for better things, so go away and live with those, natives in Canada.

The three of them came to Canada and were able to put a down-payment on two sections of land 25 miles east of Winnipeg. But it was the best land around, The land they bought was almost on the beaches of that ancient Lake Agassi that used to cover the central prairies of Canada. So their farms were completely sandy loam.

There wasn’t a rock on their places. There was enough sand mixed into the Manitoba gumbo so if there was too much rain the water would sink, and if there wasn’t enough rain the water would wick-up from underneath. In all the years they farmed that land they never had a crop failure due to too much or not enough moisture.

The one brother and his wife started a family. And out of nowhere the younger brother got a letter from his old girlfriend in Germany. Seems word of their success had gotten back to their old hometown and now her parents had second thoughts that he might be acceptable husband material.

Except the letter was typed.

Several letters went back and forth between Anola Manitoba and Germany. Finally he re-popped the question. Would she come to Canada and marry him? Turns out she typed that ‘No’ you have to come back here to Germany and marry me on the day you arrive.’

It was a minor point so the young farmer acquiesced. He boarded the Transcontinental to Halifax then steamship to Hamburg then onto a train back to his old hometown. The day he arrives , his wedding day, he was almost assaulted by his new in-laws who now were so very happy to see him.

At the wedding ceremony his wife was acting very strange. Not like the vivacious girl he fell in love with ten years ago, She was distant, unresponsive, but Hell everybody else was so very happy to see him he chocked her actions up to wedding stress.

The wedding ceremony was quick.  He barely had put his suitcases down from travelling and he was hustled into the church. The groom hardly got to talk with his old sweetheart. Her family bustled around and seemed to be always between him and her

After the ceremony everybody disappeared. Like right now they disappeared. He was finally alone with his new wife. He tried to talk to her. No response.  When she sat , she sat. When her arm was raised she kept it there as it slowly dropped to the armchair. She stared off into the half distance, non communicative.

He sat there chair to chair, knees touching,  for a full half hour trying to talk to her. She never responded. He left her at the inn under the watchful eye of the innkeeper and went and pounded on his new in-laws door.

“She’s had scarlet fever. Just a touch though. She’ll get better. It’s just temporary.”

It wasn’t temporary. She was fried. They had planned this for months. None of the typed letters he got in Canada were from her. Their problem was now,   his.

He brought her, his new wife, back to Canada. And she spent her entire life, winter and summer, staring off into wherever her mind was at, in his white, sparse, two story farmhouse out in a Manitoba field. He worked the farm for thirty years and would clean her, bath her, feed her, talk to her, change her clothes, and care for her. But in all those years she just stared off into space.

He would leave the TV on when he went out to work the fields though. She seemed to like that.

In the 1976 Montreal Olympics Nadia Comaneci won a basketful of gold medals and scored a perfect ’10’ on a couple of her routines. She went on to dominate the sport and eventually retired, got married and settling in the USA. Nadia Comaneci is now in 2019, a 58 year-old wife and mother of a teen-ager.

And the City of Montreal just finished paying for those Olympics.  Forty-three years of pot holes in their roads, bad snow clearing, slow to no public services,  fire and police services suffering; all because the city had to pay off it’s 1976 Olympic Games debts. Because Canada might have forgotten the 1976 Olympics, but the banks didn’t.

Forty-three years, almost half a century of low-grade, day after bleak day, of suffering.

Didn’t the 1976 Federal Government have any idea of costs? Did they not realize what every Canadian knows from their cradle to their grave? That debts always have to be paid back?

Who was the Prime Minister then?

Oh.

On a related note Prime Minister Justin Trudeau has (at last count) made over 2,600 spending pledges, totalling over $12 BILLION dollars.

Forty three years will be 2062 AD, if our Great-great-grandchildren are lucky.