FAT FRIDAYS & THE MAD WHACKER

A "sorta" mill story

Photo by Jon Butterworth on Unsplash

Fat Fridays and The Mad Whacker

I never know what I’m going to write when I sit down to write about the mill. It’s as much of a surprise to me, as it is for those who pay to read it (all 7 of you.) The wife and I have been doing day trips this past week because she’s on holidays and we didn’t make arrangements for Europe. We’re dying to go back, because there’s so much we haven’t seen, but instead of driving through the Tuscan hills, or skimming over the canals of Venice, we’re here, at home, doing day-trips.  It’s not a bad thing. It could be worse…we could be in Cleveland instead of Vancouver. (If you’re a Canadian, replace that with Surrey.)

When the week started off, we jumped into her Veloster and made our way to Horseshoe Bay and the ferry terminals there, heading for The Sunshine Coast—through the Straight of Georgia, and into the Salish Sea. When you look at a map of Vancouver, and you go “North…ish,” past Bowen Island, and Keats Island, you get to the small town of Gibsons. That’s where the ferry docks. It’s still on the mainland. It would cost a fortune to pave your way to it, so they put in the ferry.

It’s one of those places where people have summer homes and vacation destinations. The islands rise up out of the sea with faces of sheer rock and trees. Houses are perched on cliffs, or hug the shoreline, and each beach house has its own personal dock. Howe Sound is always full of boats—of all sorts. Sailboats and yachts, speedboats, fishing boats, charter boats, even canoes and kayaks. There’s fishing, crabbing, prawning, you can even pick up octopus. It would be a nice vacation drive, except that you’re going North, and if you don’t pay attention, you’ll end up in Alaska. We haven’t explored it because my wife’s not a “camper”. Our destination was to spend time with Alan and Gabby, and that’s all that mattered as far as the wife’s concerned: a bed, a flush toilet, and a shower are her basic needs.

The wife brought along the fixings for Jambalaya. Al donated a bag of BC Spot Prawns—I don’t think he so much “donated them” because my wife said to him: “Al, we need prawns,” and he went down to the freezer and got them. Living on the ocean, he has the obligatory little speedboat and goes out daily with various crab traps, prawn traps, and fishing rods. (Fishing season has just started and he’s already bagged a 12 lb Spring Salmon.) But, prawns in hand, she made his favourite dinner for him.

The thing about visiting someone you’ve worked with for over 30 years, is that you have a lot of memories you can rehash. Al was into kick boxing when we were younger, so is nose is flat and broken. The wife teases him when he says something stupid (and who doesn’t do that after the third or fourth bottle of wine) when she looks at Gabby and says: “I think he’s had one too many kicks to the head.” She always agrees.

He laughed we he asked me about the mill stories I was writing. He doesn’t read them, but Gabby does. He asked me if I could get into trouble for naming names. I told him all the people I’ve been writing about so far have already died. That had us talking about the guys who have passed. Whose death was the most tragic? Whose was the most shocking?

Not the sort of questions people normally ask, but not a bad one, considering. When I first started at the mill, there was a man, Frankie Takas, and he had cancer. He had it before I started working there, went into remission, and then it came back and he died three of four years later. I never got to know him like I did others. It sometimes reminds me of that Jim Carroll song: “All My Friends Who Died,” or whatever it was called. It was basically a list of friends who died, most of them through overdose, some suicides, some murdered, all sad. Not that my friends died of overdoses, murder, and suicide, but they were all sad. Some died at work of heart attacks, one had a brain aneurysm while driving a forklift. Dieter had Early Onset Alzheimers at 54, and died when he was 57; Sonny had ALS, and lasted two years. Reg was diagnosed with stage four cancer, had a stroke when they told him, and died three days later—a week before he was supposed to retire. Phil had an epileptic seizure when a cop pulled him over and told him he had a burned out tail light. (As an epileptic, he wasn’t supposed to be driving.) He got out of his car, looked at the tail light, had a seizure, fell into the oncoming traffic and was run over by a dump truck.

I’d say the biggest killer was cancer, though…

I think I told you that I was going to put my Mill stories behind a paywall. This one is longish. So I cut it off at almost the halfway point. $5/month and you can read the rest of it. I made it long so that the 7 paid subscribers I have will have something worth reading. All of them are going to be long, because that’s what I do.