The 5 Cent Murder

THE 5 CENT MURDER

A Canadian novel by author Alfred Cool

Copyright © 2012, 2016 Alfred Cool

Second Edition

All rights reserved.

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This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, businesses, places, events and incidents are either the products of the author’s imagination or used in a fictitious manner. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, or actual events is purely coincidental.

DEDICATION

To all those who ever laced up the caulks …

Chapters

Dedication

Don’t Miss the Flight

The Fraternity of Working Men

Chain Gang

Freedom Above All Else

Monotony

Blood on the Caulks

Logging Talk

The Stabbing

Movie Night

Life Lessons - Part 1

Life Lessons - Part 2

Life Lessons - Part 3

Money Lesson

Thank God for TV!

Run to the Store

Card Luck

True Confessions

My First and Last ‘A’

Camp

Into This World We’re Born

Run or Die!

Camp Ain’t Incarceration

The Bullbucker Tells a Joke

Knuckle-Dusting with Walter

Black Eyes and ‘Roids

Chasers Don’t Sweat!

Splicing

The Chow Line

Thirty Days

Lawrence Wakes Up Grumpy

‘Sack

The Union Party

Union Meeting

Bergen’s Fire

Zit and His Finger

The Fishery’s Cabin

Carleigh

Until We Meet Again

Double Time Double Cross

The New Guy

The New Dead Guy

Understanding a Brute

Knife Fight!

The Flight Out

Lounge Decompression - Goodbye and Hello

About the Author

Appendix I - A Logging Primer

Appendix II - Vernacular

Don’t Miss the Flight

I cannot recall if Dennis Braggs, my soon to be logging mentor, was as hung-over as I was when he flew into camp. But how could I know that? We had never met. Somewhere there was an embarrassingly long book filled with all the things I did not know, and in that book was the fact that Braggs and I were on a collision course with death. For sure that was true, but that is also hindsight. No crystal ball here. I live in four dimensions, moving along a linear time line, living it out not knowing what is coming. Maybe that is the best part…

• • •

The worst part of that day began with loud pounding on my hotel room door. Mister. Mister! You will miss your plane. You’re late for the plane. Roop, the Pakistani janitor, was my wakeup call. Jesus, this whole hotel stinks of stale cigarette smoke. I took the room the night before after spending hours in the bar at the Quinsam Hotel, on a desperate mission to snuggle up with any woman equally desperate enough to take me home.

Okay, okay. Like an idiot, I spent the last of my taxi money on booze. If I owned a watch, it would have told me I was late. All my plans were in jeopardy; I needed to be on that plane.

In an instant I was out of bed, pissed at myself for sleeping in, had hit the can, and lifted my hockey bag over my shoulders. Grunting with its weight, I grabbed my ridiculously heavy leather caulk boots and left the hotel on the run. Anxious and not quite in tip-top shape, I jogged beneath a bright blue May sky toward the Island Air seaplane dock at the farthest end of the Campbell River spit. All that stood between me and the seaplane was a mile of Highway 19 in Campbellton, then two miles of dry sand. At least it’s not raining. Every plane I heard take off while I ran had me wondering if I had pulled the big screw-up. The hung-over run seemed to stretch on forever but I hustled along anyway to the ever-narrowing end of the spit. This strip of land was the last vestige of town life I would experience before I flew away from the real world and into the months of logging I had signed up for.

As I ran, I recalled everybody was having fun in the bar. Well, anyway, I was. Typically, I succeeded only in drinking what amounts to buckets of draft beer and shots of what tasted like gasoline sold off as Tequila. After all, no one goes into camp both unrequited in love and sober, so I covered at least one of my bets. All I accomplished was to be hangdog miserable, late-night stupid, broke, and left to stumble back to my dreary, 1950’s version of a hotel room. Just before sprawling face forward onto the bed, fully clothed, I soothed my wounded loneliness thinking, it’s better not to show up in camp with the clap anyway.

When I finally arrived at the seaplane base, I heaved myself through the waiting room door, footsore from jogging in cowboy boots. I had tossed my cookies before entering the pale, beige Formica décor, then checked in with the clerk, whose countenance was just slightly less pale and blasé than the reception area. Sweating and bleary eyed, I rated not so much as a second look from the paper-pounder. I was just another logger heading into camp. I was hustled outside, along to the seaplane dock toward the waiting Beaver, sent out the door with, We held the sked for you. Your pilot is waiting for you at the plane. Have a nice day. My heels clunked hollow steps on the grey dock boards as I considered how much of an imbecile I was to go into camp in this shape.

Walking toward the plane, I saw my steps generated small riffles on the water, which expanded across their universe through the same kind of wharf sludge that accumulates around all docks. Maybe it could have been the light off-shore breeze or the float plane causing the wave action, but either way, a sickening brew of seaweed, broken chunks of brown kelp, wood slabs and sawdust, cigarette butts, white Styrofoam coffee cups, and other detritus carpeted the brackish surface of the green-black water. We are a messy, littering society.

Daunted but determined, I continued toward the vibrantly yellow plane. I was pleased my eyesight returned to a normal focus after my ignominious entrance. The plane was literally glowing in the sunshine. She floated impressively next to the dock, a powerful metal workhorse ready to be unharnessed to challenge the skies and deliver me away from the sewage and slop of town. Looking past the dock, I thought she looked fine against the background, which is where my destination, my future, and my karma waited. The blue sky, blue water, blue-green, snow-capped mountains of Central BC were always an inspiration and an invitation to me. From there, you could approach, if you had, sometime, such a great notion, the moraines and ridges of the Mount Waddington massive.

Floating passively on the water, in the clean air and morning sunlight, my ride rolled easily and radiated confidence on the gentle swell. Even as the finicky pilot attended to her, even as the clinging surface flotsam of the backwater slough oozed up against her silvery aluminum pontoons, she was above it all, built to fly away from here. She was greased, squeegeed, and gassed up for the aviator-glassed fly-boy with gelled, jet-black Superman hair. He wore a fleece-lined, black, faux-leather bombardier-style jacket over a starched white shirt. His shirt collar displayed stitched gold pilot wings that caught the morning sunlight. Black RCMP pants and FBI Hush Puppies completed his ensemble, shouting volumes of Ready to serve you, sir. His nametag said Rick. My smiling pilot said, with a bubbling effervescence I was in no shape to reciprocate, Good morning, sir. Ready to go?

Yeah, sure. I know … I’m late. Sorry. Off we go all right. Good day to get on the bomber.

No problem. It’ll be a little cold in there at first, but I’ll turn the heat on for you right away. Give it a few minutes to warm up. He wore reflective aviators. It was like talking to a major kitchen appliance.

I placed my hockey bag of camp clothes and work gear, including the forty-pounder of Rye rolled up inside my towel, at his feet. I dropped my leather Dayton caulks on the bag. Rick grunted lifting it into the doublewide, side cargo door to stow it.

Wearing only my jean jacket for a coat, I was cooling off from my run now, shivering, and shaking, becoming even a little embarrassed. Before climbing in, I paused a moment. The cool morning air smelled of salt, heavily creosoted wharf logs, seagull crap, kelp, and fuel. I inhaled a last great gulp of town air to clear my senses, remembering the B-52 shooters I had quaffed as well as the Tequila and beers. Resigned and wilting, I climbed into the plane, where I sagged submissively onto a green, flop down seat and belted in.

Well, there’s always hope on the horizon, I thought with a miserably pitiful attempt at reviving, having a go at the lighter side of the current shape of things in my little world. I consoled myself, knowing, by tonight, few would remember my performance, so it did not much matter anyway. That hung-over platitude would have to suffice for the duration of the flight as the disjointed film-clips of the night before were already re-playing; I could not seem to blot them out. Once through the highlight reel is enough already. I could think up a batch of ribald lies for the boys later.

The dock flunky untied us then he shoved us away from the float toward the twinkling surface of the open water; the pilot had already climbed into his bucket seat. He cranked the ignition, firing up the Pratt & Whitney power plant. It blubbered and kicked over hard, blasted stronger snorts, grabbed metallic lungs-full of air, as the propeller slowly began rotating spasmodically, blowing out thick black exhaust. Soon it revved up to a purring rhythm as we idled ourselves away to make our escape.

The propeller became a blur, and then disappeared entirely. The engine was roaring now. We were bouncing along, picking up speed past the last of the breakwater at the end of the spit. The plane vibrated and rattled like a plane built in the ‘forties should. We were skipping over the ocean, until we detached free from the surface in an easy climb away from Campbell River, streaming droplets of our last connection to town behind us.

I was officially past the point of decision, finally on my way to whatever life had in store for me.

Why is it, I mused, always such an easy flight into camp, when your jean pockets are empty, but always a nail biting screamer on the way back to town? This question was only rhetorical because I already knew the answers. First of all, most of us fly into camp in the springtime, as I was, and come out during the fall or winter stormy season. But in my life, I always suspected there was more going on. Change has a serious payback component, where choice is a seductive siren flouting promises or disasters on the rocky shores of my life. As if that were not enough, I was convinced there was a cosmic joker in our expanding universe who exists, primarily, to mess with me.

When I look back at it now, if I had known what was coming, I wonder sick as I felt that day if I would have forced myself to get mobile, run three miles down the beach, and get on that plane. If I knew then I was about to up-end my middle class, turn the other cheek, golden rules nurturing, and involve myself in another man’s death, would I have run to this flight? Many, many would not have, but I know I would have, but I also met Carleigh, and I would do anything for her. This time the pay-off was worth the down side.

My hangover still felt like a chunk of broken glass was floating at the top of my spine, slicing, and cutting away at my soaked brain. I was suffering through what was definitely a world-class hangover with absolutely no one to blame but me. I was glad I was the only passenger on this air buggy, a brightly colored canary yellow deHavilland Beaver. Though the pilot was navigating a scheduled run, the second of the day -- as your basic flight jockey, he was confidant, grinned a full set of Cheshire-cat Colgates, and filled the cabin with the smell of bargain after-shave cologne.

I felt as though I was flying through the looking glass again. How, indeed, do we find ourselves in the moments we are living today? Fate, Karma, predestination, bad luck? I do not know, but choice or no choice, it is about change and everything is always changing, and there is no scurrying around it, no rock to crawl under, no way out, so live with it. I was already on the flight, so the coming events were set in motion.

I considered the pilot again. West Coast airmen are crazed air cowboys. Every day they mount their broncs, cut in and out of the worst of the worst the coastal mountains can throw at them. The planes themselves consist of an unrelenting, loud motor, wings, and floats offering only the rear flop down canvas bench seat or one of the six side-mounted, tube-frame seats for the passengers. These are no-frills, dependable, cargo planes and are the only planes I trust to strap on and get through any storm upside down, backwards, or three days late back to the ranch. More than once, I had depended on these bombers in just about all those conditions and made it through.

Glancing out the window, half-dozing, the heater brought warmth to my legs, I lied to myself sleepily, like a drunk driver in jail, I’ll never drink again. Well, maybe never for a while, at least. Far below us, the calm waters of the fjords were occasionally patterned riptide currents or boat wash wakes. The ocean glistened and twinkled with the wave motion and reflected pristine British Columbia sunlight so bright, I could spawn an epileptic episode.

On the sunny side of the plane, blue-green coastal mountain crags, gouged, broken, and scraped over by ancient glaciers, reached for the sky. The process left behind range after range, from horizon to horizon, of pristine peaks and valleys, all of them with a ragged, silver river ribbon in the center of the floor. Uneven tree lines showed in the few logged valleys -- but most were still asleep, locked in by deep snow.

I had the hazy reflection that maybe we were stationary up here, balancing tenuously on the tip of the finger of fate. If so, the joke was on us ‘cause the mountains beneath us were being slow-rolled, a great tectonic Rolodex, flipping us endless new horizons of peaks, sidehills, and valleys. My cosmic joke theory deteriorated fast though when I looked at the pilot grinning and loving it all, cruising along at a hundred and fifty miles an hour on the gentle up-drafts. Besides, the finger usually pointed at me alone -- that is how I see things. I always pay; my exuberance last night became my debt load today. Fortunately, the balance in my universe always corrects itself, and today it was adjusting smack dab in the middle of my hangover. But you must have some fun on the way through.

The mountains, my workplace, like an endless tide relentlessly drew me back to their desolate, vast, majesty. Probably a scene a guy in a different frame of mind would want to paint. The pilot began gaining altitude to negotiate a high pass, no doubt, and sailed us up toward the bluest of skies.

I glided along on my dozy thoughts and began to enjoy the familiar feeling of promise, though the old tug-of-war between defoliation versus income convoluted that glow. The polarity of that politics was too much for me at that moment. At least I have a job. Succumbing to my memories, I began to drift off to the sway of the plane and soothing drone of the engine. I was actually looking forward to working as a riggin’ rat again. Headin’ into camp, I felt like the last man catchin’ the last buckboard back to the ranch, aggrandizing the romantic aspect of the life of the backcountry range hand. [1]

Speaking of romance, like everyone else, I promised to myself to conjure up epic lies about my last night. The notions of regret for what I had just left behind are rooted in the real possibility it was for the last time. A guy could die at this job, as had hundreds, maybe thousands, over the decades. So why take this job? I could not deny I was in a pure financial state of grace -- I was officially flat broke. What did Joplin sing? Nothin’ left to lose… and free as a bird. Well, I’ve attained that Zen moment. Gotta be freedom in there somewhere? And there was nowhere to land except in a logging camp way the hell up the crack of some sound off Knight’s Inlet. Flying into camp can feel more like Take a left turn at oblivion and work your way into chronic back pain.

It was crazy and not even well paid work, for sure, but was somehow simpler than facing my lack of other options. Hemingway was not right. He said something like, if you’re young, you’re stupid, and can’t see the danger, or worse, you like the danger ‘cause you know you’re close to something that could be big excitement for you. Yeah, right, and war is fun until you catch a bullet or watch a friend’s head explode. Anyone who said that went to war an idiot and sure as hell never logged. It just does not sound like anything any one of the riggin’ rats I know would dare say. I mean, why mess with your luck?

Now, on the other hand, life can be good and affordable with little to fall back on. I like it when the rules are simple: Do not kill maim anyone else and do not let them do that to you. That is straight up. And that is about all most of us have at first, on the way through, or at the end. And Hemingway? Well, he was sitting up in the stands, nice and safe, half pissed on Spanish red, enjoying the ‘spectacle’ of bulls goring the guts out of horses, then being cut down in their prime by made-up Nancy boys hiding swords behind capes. He applauded that? No wonder he drank himself into a blown out liver and insanity, then brutally chased it all away with a mouthful of shotgun pellets. He glorified the bullring where the blood meets the sword. Reality is more like grab the bull by the tail, ready to face the situation, as I have heard said, and find your way out of the jackpot. I believe in even odds, fist to fist, face to face. It’s a different experience, Hem, when you’re weapon is a typewriter than when you’re at ground level, not sure whether to hold on tighter or let go.

I know the secret of how to stay alive; learn something new about logging each day. That accumulation of logging expertise directly increased my chances I would stay off the Compo stat sheets and would find work. If I pulled off the dodge long enough, I just might get to spend the wad of cash I was about to earn, maybe even in a sunny climate, eyeballing senoritas in any one of many cantinas all winter. I knew enough about this line of work to know being involved provides the best survival odds because it is much safer to know than to not know.

And what you have to know is the bight. At first, the bight is disguised, but it is always continual and everywhere. Logs can roll on you, steel-cable lines can slice you in half, your crummy can slip off an icy or muddy mountain road, the plane might ditch on the flight out, you can be poisoned in the cook shack, you can get maimed or killed in a fight, you can slip and break a leg. It was all so easy. Often, the bight is immediate; such as when the thousands of feet of cables start whipping back and forth because of the tremendous counter-weight of the logs. When this happens, the cables themselves fly so fast they are invisible to the eye. They make a terrible whoove whoove sound of cold tempered steel slicing through the air so fast they are invisible. If you are in that bight, it will be the last sound you will ever hear. Sometimes it is better not to have too vivid an imagination. It behooves the logger, if he wants to keep his name in the survivor column, to see the bight develop before it is that fraction of a second too late. Dead is a state, they tell me, that is known to last a long time; in logging, the causality can and does occur and disappear in an instant.

I have to confess, I was way less conscious about slaughtering the pristine, primeval BC rain forest and much more interested in living through my hours, days, weeks, and months on the sidehills, so I could get back to the sweet life on the outside. I enjoyed the adrenalin too, spending the day dodging crushing logs and thousands of feet of murderous cables whipping wickedly around me, slapping the ground, scraping over rock bluffs, flipping logs around like pick-up sticks. The impressive strength and the controlled torque of the massive power plant on the yarder, capable of stretching tempered steel cable past the breaking point, reeling in massive logs, sometimes cracking and splintering them in the steel grip of the choker’s noose during the relentless drag to the landing. In the wake of the turn is a rush of pungent, wet Cedar or Spruce spray and a freshly gouged mud trail across the once-mossy floor of the fallen forest; that is something you do not forget. That is the winning side. Snapping one-inch steel cable has an impressive bang, too, and there is something powerfully visceral and addictive about being in control of all that raw, torqued-up muscle.

My lack of sleep was beginning to overpower me as I stupidly gazed out the window and listlessly considered in whose hands I was putting my life for the next few months. I knew better than to try to think anything through on a hangover, but knowing better meant little to this hammerhead.

I wondered who I might be working with. At the top of the heap on any logging crew is the Hook Tender, or hooker, for short. Always a self-made, tobacco chewing, hollow-eyed, cursing, hung-over streak of mean whose guts every Rigging Slinger worth their wages hates because the hooker has the job the rigging slinger wants. In fact, think worse and be more aware of your riggin’ puller because, to a man, they are wannabe hookers who have the life and death of the chokermen literally in their hands.

You see either of these men in a bar, ask yourself why they always sit back to the wall, whether drinkin’ alone or at a table telling lies to each other? Know you are not like them, and you probably do not want to know them. It is like wearing a suit made out of meat and being near a hungry pack of wolverines.

Many of these men are either just out of jail, avoiding court, and a certain jail term, in jail and on work release, or in the middle of finding some way of getting back to jail. You never bring up that one thing, except I did with Braggs. I wanted to know what kind of mayhem he wrought upon society. It would take us a couple of weeks to become good enough friends to talk about it. When things got out of hand, it was good to know he was in my corner. Jail was always a touchy subject in camp.

As for other hookers, tread lightly. And never show fear. Like a guy packing a gun does not necessarily make him a fighter, I saw many men in that job who were nowhere near making the grade. But until you become one of them, it is appropriate to adopt the mantle of grudging respect and self-survival. Offer no comment, for nothing is as useless to a veteran as a greenhorn choker-rat who cannot tie his boots properly and could not pull milk out of a cow’s teat, let alone keep a spot on his riggin’ crew!

The first few weeks on any work gang can be tough on the uninitiated, let alone breaking in on a logging sidehill. My story started way before I ever laced up the caulks…

The Fraternity of Working Men

I had already been through the working-man test by my sixteenth year. My parents flew me out to Toronto for the summer, giving me a break from my crowd. I had learned about all I needed to know concerning teen cruelty and clique dynamics, humiliation, bullying, and soul-deflating penury doled out by drunken, barbiturate-addled teachers who sucked the life out of my youth because they had consigned themselves to a life of hell. My mother was then in her sixth year at SFU -- working on a four year Political Science degree -- and showing no signs of ever leaving that Masada of higher education. At her most ironic, she solved my Gordian-knotted confusion about the world, saying, You need a haircut, then a job. Just imagine my surprise when I talked my way into employment on a wire gang with CN Telecommunications in Toronto! My running away from problems at my parent’s house seemed to have paid off when I got lucky finding the job as a groundman, a grunt working on a gang. Somehow my mother had nailed it. I did want a job and to be in the working world. Besides, I was finished with highschool.

Our crew was one of several maintaining the telegraph lines strung beside every CN track in Ontario. At first, we labored in Tobacco country -- the southwest of the province -- in deep, leech-infested bottomless swamps along lonely tracks, but later in the summer we hung high off windswept pre-Cambrian rock bluffs north of Sudbury. Wherever we were, we raised forty-five foot poles with brute force and without the benefit of winches, trucks, or any modern mechanical lifting aids. We hung cross arms, strung, moved and splice endless rolls of wire, terminated services and scavenged copper wire, moved sections of poles to accommodate new sidings, repaired winter and storm damage, and cleaned up after train de-railings. That kind of thing kept us busy enough.

Our bunkhouse was an old, converted CN passenger car. The green-stained brass plaque mounted on the rusty, red siding by the door read, CANADIAN NATIONAL RAILWAY - 1921. It spoke minimally of past glories. Of course, by the time the car became our home, far removed was any elegance and finery that related to the past glory of the CNR, and only a bare shell remained as our abode. The only semblance of a storied opulence, when rail transport truly defined Canada’s golden age of travel, was our own chef and maître’d, Bob.

He was a worried, little, balding man in a white apron who hands were always nervous. Unfortunately, Bob’s culinary expertise was limited to the school of boil it ‘til it stops moving, then boil it some more, and it’ll make soup. Bob doubled also as our spiritual adviser. He was of the Jehovah Witness persuasion and was always desperate to forge his way toward the top of the list of those few who eventually accepted into JW heaven. I am sure he felt closer to his rapture when, each day after I had started working on the gang, he would leave a religious pamphlet on my pillow in a vain attempt to bring me along to glory with him. It took me some weeks to convince him I would never make the Jehovah short-list and I was uninterested in waiting at the end of the lineup.

Eventually I had to tell Bob to stop. Throwing the umpteenth pamphlet I’d found on my bunk down on the only table in the bunkcar kitchen, I said, Bob, would you please stop trying to make me part of your fucked up religious cult? We had returned to the bunkcar for lunch and to pick up another load of wire we were stringing along another rail spur we were upgrading. Bob looked up at me with hurt, childlike eyes. The sun reflected off his balding, forty-something skull, but it was not too distracting as he was a small man and his bald spots were not yet fully developed. I knew little about Bob – which exceeded what I wanted to know -- other than the fact he could not cook. He demonstrated this failure on a daily basis by never deviating from boiling the taste out of everything. Why do you believe in that shit anyway? I persisted like any other sensitive teenager might.

Do you really want to know? The poor man still thought he was reaching out to a potential conquest.

Ron and young Bob, two Toronto students working for the summer; Irish, the well-traveled quip from Dublin; Charlie, the blockhead, moose-strong redhead from Nova Scotia, and Bill, the whina from Regina, and oldest guy on the crew to never be promoted, were gathered around by now, sensing the unlocking of the secretes of the universe. I said, Sure.

It’s because of the wonder of it all. He waved his arms in a big circle over his head, speaking as if a Ouija board had spelled his name and now the letters floated in the air and he was therefore compelled to launch into the voice of the rapture.

It was too much. We all laughed at him. The spell was broken, and Bob turned away angry. No JW short-list for me! Something of the nastiness I had learned in high school actually cashed in there. He spooned his soup inside the large pot on the stove, muttering to himself, probably doing the math and coming up with the number 144,009. We ate voraciously and then left to finish off the afternoon. After that day, no religious pamphlet ever arrived at my pillow again.

My first day on that crew was a blur. At noon, I stepped off the train in front of the depot at the little town of St. Thomas, arriving from Union Station in Toronto. The trip took about three hours. I wandered out of the train station to the parking lot where the crew waited for me. Without much of a greeting, I got in the line truck and we drove out to a remote siding surrounded by pastures of furrowed fields. Our foreman, Hughey, immediately honored me with a nickname; I was the kid.

The highlight of that afternoon was not so much a triumphant celebration of my arrival, but my dropping the steel tip of a sixteen-foot pike pole on Anson’s head. I knocked his hard hat off and into the swamp in which we all stood. Anson, the sub-foreman, was retiring the next day and preferred, as he said to me, to go out with both his ears attached, same as they have been for years.

We, or more particularly, the crew, did a lot of post-holing around in waist deep swamps, lifting the impossibly heavy and often submerged telephone poles out of the muck to raise them. As a result of almost taking Anson’s ear off, Hughey relegated me to observer for the rest of the day. So, I watched the crew to learn something, for Christ’s sake.

I did indeed learn something -- the rewards of silence. I offered to the men standing in the thigh-deep, complex quagmire of chemical run-off draining from both the fields and the rail lines a simple observation; I suggested it would be an easier job if the poles floated. A resounding silence ensued, as they peeled fetid reeds and black leeches from off themselves, after having just grunted as one and with impressive effort raised a pole. The volatile response I received educated me to my lack of understanding of the vernacular and profundity of cursing, and the rightful attitude any new guy should undertake on any crew. A lesson I never forgot -- which I still recall began with Shutthefuckup! and neither have I forgotten the shower of leeches thrown at me.

Seven men made up our crew, not including Bob. Hughey never lifted a thing except his pencil, which he used professionally to point out things others should lift. As I said, Anson was retiring the next afternoon, so it was five of us doing the work. I was green and did not know how to lift, so it was really only four lifting for that afternoon. Clearly, I would have to develop back, leg, and arm muscles -- not to mention a propensity for swamps and leeches. It became clear to me how useless the new member was to the crew. Get the fuck out of the way, kid. is not your basic inspirational pep talk, I can tell you. However, I made it through my first half day, and though emotionally scarred, I was physically unscathed and felt pretty confidant I had made good fulfilling the duties of silently standing around and observing the crew working.

After a supper of boiled hock, with long hairs still attached to the frightening animal parts, boiled potatoes, and