inspecting the gas line from Turner Valley to Calgary, 1930's & 40's
Larks coax the sun from under Okotoks.
It bursts and flares above Black Diamond,
spilling light and lava winds in the valley.
I walk the buried pipeline, from Sheep Creek banks
north along the trough of Turner Valley
where gargantuan gas candles rival the dawn.
I trace the line, dredged, laid and back-filled years ago
by twenty ready men throughout the sun's day-arc,
welding-flux and tar sweating from their pores.
I look for leaks, marks of faulty welds or rusting pipes.
Monday morning departure: alone,
with fifty pounds of gear and rations
to drive my boots deep in the mud of my trail.
Still chill air, but the piston syncopation
of legs, lungs and heart will run my furnace.
Strange to walk a blowing grassland as though the first,
the interloper amongst bison, antelope and coyotes.
A pheasant breaks from groundling brush,
rising on panting wings to painting sunlight.
Ground squirrels run, unaware of, just inches down,
a metal pathway, tar- and burlap-wrapped
only months or years ago, grown over.
Grass, clay, shale, limestone, pipeline:
all parallel and one. Epochs amalgamate.
Flowing gas is like another sediment
running horizontally along with me
as I move sideways in time
through my slim stratum, day and life.
I leave behind the gash in ordered time
they call Sheep Creek.
Water on boulders there ripples in pebbling waves,
revealing, as clustered moments, reflections of the burn-off.
They flare this liquid sunlight from the ground
as though it were an ancient myth:
inexhaustible, inextinguishable, eternal.
The myth of men converging from the prairie,
adapting broad abilities to narrow skills,
married as much to rig machinery
--pulleys and chains, pulsating--
as to their women.
I turn to catch last sight of Turner Valley town:
houses below the rigs
like shrubs among fir and lodgepole pine,
but of slats and uprights, planks and timbers,
flat-sided, angular, storied of man's labour.
Once, his labour was the only power,
his food the fuel, his sweat the grease;
nothing came between hand and tool.
Then fire made work from wood, made wheels walk.
Interrupted wind or water's gravity
ground the flailed grain, blew the forge,
spun the wool, shuttled the weave.
Ernie Latham knew the interruption.
He came to join the crews
in nineteen twenty-five and worked full-range:
truck driver, tool dresser, Turner Valley driller.
He moved as drilling moved, camp to camp,
tar-paper shack to shack for eleven years
before he found stability: her name was Lily
and they moved to their own tar-paper shack.
Then another and another;
At last a clapboard house with cellar, water,
And no toes of breeze between the cracks.
I turn my knees to Millarville:
a thinning forest of rigs,
fewer houses, lower glow at night.
By mid-morning the track of buried pipe
has sprung my legs like sparrows,
bounding down the valley floor in easy stride.
Rock outcroppings mark the way,
show where strata comb the gusts of wind.
Imagine the strata deep in the earth
--tines of limestone, lines of shale—
damming a river of oil
that would flow like a black tornado.
Trap the oil, burn off the gas
as though its wind were endless,
man’s fingers always further than his reach.
McKellar, Norman, Tourond, Richardson, Downes,
and thousands more in the tapping or trapping,
brewing or piping, the profligate sweating,
lives expended slowly or all of a sudden.
I check the valve-box at intervals
along the way: pressure high or worrisome.
A drop reveals a leak somewhere:
a geyser, a soaking of ground,
or frozen cone in winter,
a scurry home to report.
"Gentlemen: a leak--as though our industry were not just leaks--
gas or oil is spewing the sky, the globe,
the mind's eye. I mind the pipeline,
I mind the lack of completion,
the jerry-rigged society,
where man to man or woman
ties tourniquets of afterthought
after the blood, the oil, the care, has drained.
But not just yet: some flow remains,
its destiny the metropole,
the new cosmopolis of Calgary.
Not just yet, so I continue trudging,
fording creeks and mudbanks,
head down with care of glance
and footfall like a prairie sandpiper.
Sometimes between the foothill peaks
the wind impales me from the front,
impels me from behind
as though I were a liquid flow in a pipe.
We all do that—
flow at speed if the way is marked,
no deviation possible, no leaks available
to offer questions, a way around.
Straight on—draw the fuel, mull it,
send it on and waste the rest,
like an ancient king dispatching armies
till the last one standing holds the proper flag.
I reach the half-way hut at Priddis Corner
as the modern sun descends,
drills its bright bit down to the hidden reservoir
where I too will hide in the dark
in my narrow bunk, dreaming wide,
forgetting that I am still not yet half-way.
Like night-flares the cinescope of dream
reminds me that I have been to Persia,
or could have been, an oasis of oil
appearing much the same as anywhere;
or that I’ve seen and heard, in Trinidad, the lilt
of how they speak of how black this gold is.
Or Pennsylvania. I remember, from before this age,
picking at the face of coal, prying loose
a furnace-hour’s fuel, piece by piece,
from the guts of Appalachian hills
or the deep, dark rills of black coal curd
beneath the hills of Wales. I don’t know,
but I see the Chinese men of Xinjiang Uygur
crushed in a dust-clap burst and fall of coal.
Felling trees in a Baltic forest, the axe and adze
cutting and cleaning the wood for the fire,
I think of my own small hearth and the halls of royals,
kept warm as amber by my cold labour.
I dream of tallow like a woman’s flesh,
glowing from the flame she cradles.
Fear is the smoke, guilt the soot
left behind by the stifled burn,
the incomplete combustion of kindled hope.
But morning rises in my dream
and bursts at the cabin window.
A splash of cold water, coffee gulped,
and I head to the sun, just over the ridge.
As I advance through birches the birds fall silent,
yet echo still within the cave left by the dream;
they are the voices reminding me
of where I was headed,
what questions the pipeline posed.
It offers an answer, but the question is more than just:
where to? but: where from?
Is this liquid not still sunlight, its first form?
A primeval epoch evaporating into air, and gone?
Pushing through underbrush, high grass,
I am in a tundra village where even kindling
must be scouted, trekked-for,
until they bring a sun-run lean-to,
solar cells a-slant on poles
to bring the light of day to indoor night
and the sound of the south to the north on a wave.
An infold of the outcrop gives me passage,
and I am out of the trees, out in the sun.
There is a wind. It washes the cheek, waters the eye.
In the tide of tears I almost see wind turbines,
tall ships on a prairie ridge,
sails unfurled in the mountain wind,
spinning: long rush of air mass passing the prow.
The promise of voyaging,
not to a region—tropical, terrible;
but to a time where time is not draining,
but filling.
The moist earth of the path is soft,
gives way to my boot, absorbs the heel
in a decade of leaves’ decay.
How far down does the trace of trees disappear,
forget itself in the darkening compost?
Drilling rig rock cores come up warm —
by degrees with greater depth —
and that alone is a heat to be harvested,
a difference to be advantaged by deft hand and mind.
Some day more men with heavy boots will work that mine.
But I digress.
This line is to be walked —
not as an end, for it is just a line —
but as a way, a long direction
to sustain the drilling for a source that cannot leak:
cannot, because the leaks become the stream.
Calgary comes into view right on time.
Now I do not resent the people there, for they are on my mind.
- 2006
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