I saw this sign when I was down the mine this morning:
Alas! I didn’t have my camera with me, but I doubt I’d have had the presence of mind to record it anyway, what with the ever-present threat of escaping 3m green slimes.
Double alas! I saw no dwarves. Presumably they were all far away from the main shaft, hewing away at the face, singing about gold.
SCENE: In the jeep, on the way to work, just before 7:00. Local radio is playing. Werewolves of London segues into Norwegian Wood.
Yarb: Yes! This is one of my favourite Beatles songs.
[Pause while Norwegian Wood plays out]
Billy: The Beatles, they’re British aren’t they?
Marathon is full; there is no room at the Zero 100 Motor Inn, to which we have decamped from the Travelodge. The woman at the desk asks if two of us, Billy, Grant and I, would mind sharing? We stand in front of her like moai. I wait, hoping Grant will speculate as to her intake of crack cocaine, but come to my senses and tell her yes, we would mind. So the resolution of the conundrum is deferred until the arrival of the next guests, and will be deferred again by them, and squeezed, like a reluctant blob of toothpaste, along the tube of evening until the final misfortunate maintenance crew rolls up.
For this is why Marathon is full, why the Travelodge is full, and the Harbour Inn, and the Zero 100 Motor Inn, and every other inn and barracks and manger in Marathon: the pulp mill is shut down for annual maintenance. From all over Ontario and beyond, a rag-tag band of maintenance men have converged on this small town on the back of the leaping tiger that is Lake Superior.
And I don’t see why, if Jesus is going to visit this world again, he shouldn’t choose this point in spacetime for his reincarnation. In a trailer round the back of the Wayfarer Motel, a female maintenance man, marginally less hairy than her male equivalent, leans back in a tiny bathtub, sweat gluing her mangy locks to her shoulders and face, pushing, while her crewmates drink beer and talk hockey, and say “Christ, you sure are taking your time in there”; and around this time three wise men show up in town, but these three wise men are idiots, guided not by a star but by the crazed commandment of a deranged maniacal direktor, and bearing not gold, but platinum corporate visa cards, and not frankinsence but roll-on deoderant, and not myrrh but a bottle of the roughest vin rouge Canada has to offer and two cans of stout.
SCENE: I and my travelling companions are having a fry-up for Sunday breakfast in the nowhere town of our present exile. Billy and I are talking about the people at our previous employer, a subject to which Grant is unable to contribute, not having worked there.
Billy: Hey, do you remember that secretary, Sherry? The one who was really into feng shui, and then went off to work in marketing for the mall?
Yarb: Yeah, I liked Sherry, she was cool. She was a big fan of pro cycling, and I remember she would always tape the morning show of that day’s Tour de France and bring it in and play the highlights in the boardroom at lunchtime.
Billy: Yeah, her. Man, she was a fucking idiot.
Grant: Was she a big fan of Lance Armstrong?
Yarb: I think she was more of a Tyler Hamilton fan, but I’m sure she had respect for Armstrong, yeah.
Grant: Ha! He’s gay!
Yarb: What? Lance Armstrong is gay?
Grant: Yeah, he’s totally gay! Everyone knows that!
Yarb: Are you sure? Is he out?
Grant: Sure, of course.
Yarb: Lance Armstrong came out of the closet? When? I thought he was married to Sheryl Crow?
Grant: HA! He WAS married to Sheryl Crow, not any more! That’s ’cause he’s totally frickin queer! Anyone who goes round with a saddle up their ass all day has to be!
Yarb: So anyone who rides a bike is gay?
Grant: Anyone who rides a bike in frickin tight shorts like that has to be gay.
Yarb: I don’t agree. There’s nothing gay about riding a bike. And Lance Armstrong definitely has not come out, that’s bullshit.
Grant: Maybe, but that doesn’t change the fact he’s a homo.
Billy [after a pause]: Well, I agree with Grant [pushes three uneaten sausages to side of plate].
Today I learnt two facts about my other travelling companion, let’s call him Billy. I haven’t mentioned him before because he’s really just a regular guy, not like Grant at all. But this morning, on the drive to work, I found out that Billy, a chartered professional, natch, had never eaten any fish but salmon, and had never read a book of any description. I tried to explain my surprise. “Wouldn’t you think it was weird” I asked him, “if I told you I’d never eaten any meat but steak?” Yes, he agreed, that would be fucking weird. I suggested he read a book about fish for a doubly-novel experience, and he said he might just do that. I suggested “Moby Dick” and Grant, speaking for the first time from the back seat, suggested the taxonomically more apposite “Jaws”. Compared to Billy, Grant is a superliterary epicure, a gourmand, a regular A.A. Gill.
We drive on, watching the road spool under us, dead straight across the seeping muskeg. We cross the Pic River in mid-thaw, the consistency of a slurpee. A lemon slurpee, as the ice is old and dirty and weary-looking.
Or rather, the consistency of the lemon slurpee of my imagination. I’ve never had an actual, real slurpee. So, for Billy with his fish and his books, read me and my slurpees.
Tankers, lowloaders and semi-trucks passing on the highway. Long intervals of silence. Dodge and Ford pickups parking at the motel, maintenance crews getting out, talking, stamping their boots, and silences inbetween. After a while the hockey comes on TV in the next room, and mixes with my sad Sibelius, and then the sounds of my own dreams.
Last night this happened: the waitress came over to my table with a beer, and as she put it down, she said quietly but clearly, without looking at me, “scarred for life”, and then she walked off before I could respond. Grant in a rare moment of insight speculated that she might have been “a Jehovah, from the Jehovah place across the road”. Do the Witnesses have a problem with booze? I don’t know. But she did look like she could use a blood transfusion; she was pale and very slight, with lustreless ginger hair. She didn’t come back after that; some bloke took over the table, the usual small-town lunk.
I’ve invented a new snack: the caviar dog. It’s a prime wiener coated with a 1/3 inch layer of fish eggs, served on a stick. I’m going to try it out as soon as I get back to civilisation.
I’m in Marathon, ON, a town of about 4,000 people on the North shore of Lake Superior. A small town lives and dies by its slogan, in my opinion, and Marathon has not one but two of them:
Built on Paper - Laced with Gold!
and
Superior in the Long Run
The first is an allusion to the two sustaining industries - a worthy effort, but hard to take seriously with that recherche exclamation mark. The second is nothing short of a masterpiece of small-town sloganeering - a brace of blunt puns thudding into eachother like sumo-wrestlers which, read literally, offers the admirably honest suggestion that in the short run the town is inferior, or, at best, average.
I’ve barely scratched the surface of Marathon so far - just a hurried kip at the Travelodge and a breakfast of donuts from Robin’s - so it’s too soon for me to comment on the whether the place’s superiority is indeed confined to “the long run”.
Glued to the doorhandle of Grant’s office is a grey plastic tag bearing Grant’s name in white letters. The office is a square, with a wheeled swivel chair for Grant and two non-wheeled, non-swivel chairs for unspecified guests.
Grant’s desk is three sides of a smaller square: one side along the back wall, under the window, one abutting an interior wall, and the third facing the office door. The desk accommodates two large drawers, suitable for holding racks of folders, and three small drawers for stationery and knick-knacks. I know this not because I have examined the drawers, but because my own desk is identical; as to the actual contents, I am ignorant.
The surface of the desk is strewn, though not completely covered, with sheets of paper. Some are daisywheel printouts, with odd lines highlighted in orange; some are first, second, fifth or eighth drafts of reports, stapled carefully in the top left corner and then folded savagely to page 12. There is one manuscript page, consisting of what looks like a phone number and various inscrutable acronyms and abbreviations; all the writing is huddled close in the top left corner of the page, the rest of which is blank.
There are a few other items of office equipment on Grant’s desk. A stapler. A box of staples. A hole-punch.
A brace of heavily-handled Grisham paperbacks stand on the desk mid-way along the interior wall, surrounded by empty space; it is as if they are the founding seed of a great literary repository, though they have been solitary for months. Their spines are cracked with white and the corners of their covers are scuffed. There is also a calculator of Brobdingnagian proportions. The only other concession to recreation is a poster on the wall opposite the window, depicting a snowboarder in full flight, grabbing the nose of his board, tinted goggles ablaze with a furious sunset, a haze of spindrift blurring the inspirational alpine backdrop. It looks like it might be a promotional poster of some sort. Apart from this, the walls are blank.
Grant’s laptop is wired up to a conventional, desk-based keyboard and monitor. The “3D flying objects” screensaver is on.