What It’s Like Spending the Summer Paving Highways in Northern Canada

I found a summer job working construction, paving endless road beyond Alberta's northern rural municipalities. I watched every sunrise and sunset over fields of canola flowers and noxious (rumored to be psychedelic) spring wheat. Our work was under contract to a provincial project called "Building a Better Alberta." This is a story about the misadventures that come with paving highway in the land of black gold.

In the 88-degree heat of my first afternoon, I started my job on a 31-ton packer, climbing a six foot ladder onto the gripped, anti-skid plate platform of an enormous hull. Big push buttons, long shifters, pedals, wheels. The biggest thing I'd driven up to this point was a pickup truck. "Get on," was what they told me.

They called the machine "the wobbly." It rubs bumps out, packs soft asphalt dense, and finishes it. The wob's ability to maneuver any way other than straightforward and straight back was, at best, unwieldy as fuck. Half the time you're driving it backwards where everything becomes opposite, so you end up weaving into oncoming traffic, back over into the ditch, carving huge meandering lines all over pristine asphalt, and everyone is watching wide eyed wondering where the hell they found you. The thing operates 16 MPH (which is fast for something that size), so it's natural to be all over the place at first.

The cockpit has two giant seats on the left and right side that the driver alternates between, depending on which side of the mat is being focused on. I rolled along each specific stretch of highway on that dinosaur sized machine so many times a day, my eyes went googly: forward, back, forward, back, forward, back. All. Day. Long.

Paving a highway works like this:

Set-up starts before first light. Trucks filled with 20 or 30 tons of molten asphalt dump the mix onto the highway in front of the giant picker-paver combo.

The picker draws asphalt from the ground into the paver which pulls the mix through itself using a big auger to evenly spread it back onto the ground according to the desired thickness.

It all has to go fast before the mix cools because if that happens, so do nightmares. There is little room for error and shit is high pressure. It only took two weeks to get used to that stifling, weighty diesel, tar, oil smell.

The kid "training" me spent most of our time coercing the lady who drove the oil truck to yank her shirt up every time she wailed by. They called her Large Marge (though I changed it to Sweaty Betty). I'll never lose the image of those enormous, lumpy, misshapen angel cakes, plastered up against the driver's side window, dusty gravel rooster-fanning in tow.

That kid then left me to figure things out for myself, which lead to my first interaction with my boss, Mickey*. Mick was small, intense, and at times, terrifying. He barked more than he spoke or laughed. He ran the show and he also knew everything.

Before I started that job, I heard about the legend of Mickey. In season, the days gave us more light and the weather was more predictable, so Mick was able to drive his crew harder than anyone else, longest hours, zero regard for conditions. He didn't sleep, and he didn't stop the work machine unless something forced him, and he didn't let many things do that.

There were nine construction crew members, and usually five flaggers. Shit tended to go sideways daily. Once, one of the flag girls didn't shoulder-check, pulled the company truck out onto the highway off a side road, and had the front end torn clean off by another speeding truck. One of the truckers had a deer leap right through his enormous windshield. And the ex-Mormon (who brought his cat with him on the road) was near maimed by a mother lynx when he tried to pick her kitten up running down the side of the highway. There were countless times someone left something—their smartphone, or a brand new pair of sneakers—on the front of the paver, the rumbling motion causing said object to slide into the mix and get buried under the highway forever.

For the wob operator, there were no set times to rest your head, to eat lunch, or even to use the can. The mat can't cool before it's packed. If it does, it's gotta be done again. The supervising engineers watched like goats, literally going over every square inch of every 15-mile run to make sure every detail was perfect. Our contracts were in the millions.

Our crew of 13 worked from sun up to sun down two weeks on, two days off, three weeks on three days off. Previously, I worked the rigs, outdoors in -30 degrees, and it was a four-pack of crayons in comparison. Some had worked for the company over 20 years, some 30. Their strategy was, essentially: work insane hours making juicy bank six months of the year, spend winters somewhere warm and/or collect the dole.

Our social lives were railroaded by spending endless shifts in remote places for weeks at a time. The younger crew hung together and drank in hotel parking lots, downing hard lemonades on tailgates, bouncing across the highway to the peelers where the bartender dealt powders and sauces over the counter.

It was company policy that no personal relations were tolerated amongst staff, but despite being grounds for dismissal, everybody was banging everybody anyway. The flag girls, directing traffic out on the highways, were responsible for wearing head-to-toe neon and remaining lewd around the clock. They were a hot item out on the shoulder. Most were young, and single, others married, divorced, widowed, or whatever. Titty flashes and the middle finger were very popular. So were blow-jays and sex in crew trucks, and partner swaps in hotel rooms. Crew girls would show up to our room, get blind drunk, pass out sideways at the foot of the bed, and I'd wake up to a sweaty pile of naked coworker, rails cut out beside the beef jerky and blue Gatorade. I was invited to join a few times, but I stuffed in my earplugs and hoped the action wouldn't penetrate my dreams. We had to be up too fucking early.

Sometimes when I had distance from the paver and the other rollers, I'd pull my wob to the shoulder and explore abandoned buildings. There were stretches along the highway where seven out of ten of the farms were uninhabited. It seemed like the old houses were ditched in an eerie hurry. Some places had big old fishbowl television sets on brown shag carpeting, clothes still in the closets, dishes in sinks.

These farms were full-sized operations with layout for livestock, pigs, sheep, chickens. I pictured a government man tapping on the screen door one afternoon, offering a small roll of cash and, out of fear and intimidation or visions of the city, the fam took it and split.

We're all familiar with the story: Farming got corporate, and family-run operations couldn't keep up. But to see 20 abandoned farms along one old road wasn't only haunting, it hurt. And not just because my grandparents had to sell the farm I played at as a kid, just as these people likely did.

We paved past an old grain elevator built of wood with enormous baby blue writing that was faded to the point that you could barely read " United Grain Growers of Alberta." And I couldn't help but think about a day when that meant something.

There's nothing less sexy than sweaty geezers, ugly metal machines, fetid smells of tar and grease amalgamating, noise, jacked-up profanity, and aggression. But through all that, somehow I managed a hard-on all day from the vibrations of my machine. The girl who ran the roller in front of me could be a hassle, but with all that masculinity around, I needed her.

Chirpy was small-town and foxy. One of the hotels we stayed in had a waterslide pool with a hot tub. She came down to swim with me in a tiny, curvy, black bikini one night. Generally my only contact with another human all day was her tight jeans from behind.

But over the summer, Chirpy became like my little sis. She was young and outnumbered, and everyone hassled her because she wasn't interested in their advances.

One night I went to her hotel room to watch TV and we made out like high school. After, we just looked out for each other.

But strictly out of function, I sometimes jerked off on my machine, out on a highway in the middle of nowhere, huge empty skies, shimmering poplar tree line, imagining my hands all over anything other than my own pecker. One day on a summer long weekend, cars were backed up, stopped alongside us for miles. I stood at the back of the wobbly, its hot exhaust bursting at me in 95-degree heat, leaning against it like I was taking a piss, diligent at keeping my motion to wrist only. I locked eyes with some mom. She had tinted tortoise shell frames, halfway down her nose bridge from sweat, a slightly unbuttoned blouse, and bare feet up on the dash. I popped fast, all over the black skirting of my machine. I looked down. Nothing to clean it up.

They bunked me with a heavy-duty mechanic we nicknamed Porky when he was listening, and meaner things when he wasn't. His hair looked like a honey loaf, he was a little too into classic rock, and he could not figure out why girls weren't into talking with him about dirt bikes. We got along at first, bonding over "Radar Love" on the radio one morning. He shared his beef jerky and helped me with a few repairs on my machine. I was grateful.

Unfortunately it didn't take long before he gave me the murder-heart. He was new level obnoxious and one day we had a pretty severe screaming match. He loomed over me, probably four times my size (I am small), with balled fists while we squared off. He claimed I tried to kill him by knocking him off the wob, steering into the opposite lane of oncoming traffic while he was hanging on the side, catching a ride with me down the mat. I just wish I'd even thought of it. So that night I scaled a huge old iron train bridge and spray painted "Kill Porky" in giant red letters. Our crew drove past it every morning and every night for two sweet weeks. I apologized to him up on the truck one hot day while we shoveled asphalt.

One day I drove with Mickey in his red dodge, a vehicle I feared the sight of from the first day. We talked about the old days of paving. I'd guess he'd seen over 40 years of it by then.

"…They used to bring us cold, homemade lemonade on hot days, bake us cookies and pies, bring ice cream…when the paving crew showed up it was like the circus came to town, people were happy we were there to fix their roads…"

"And it's not like that anymore."

"Naw, nowadays we're in everybody's way, people are in such a hurry. Nobody has any fuckin' manners. We get the horn, the finger all day…"

"What do you think changed?" I asked him.

"The people," was all he said.

I thought back to the photos all over the office, of the men with big grins, standing behind a shovel or up on some tall machine, happy to be getting paid to be outside. Photos from decades ago, when workers wore nothing but daisy dukes and a mustache, in the sun all summer, getting exercise, working on a bitchin' tar tan.

Mickey reminded me of Napoleon or Rommel. He lead his troops from the front. He never sat in his truck delegating. When something needed dealing with, he climbed underneath or inside of some dangerous part of the machine and he fixed it. He was always covered in diesel, or grease or oil or whatever. There was something beautiful about it. The day I quit in miserable November, I walked up to him and said, "Mickey, I'm done." He screamed, "You gonna be an ignorant pussy?!" And because I didn't know how to answer that I didn't. "Fuck off then! He hollered. "Get lost! Go!" So I did.

And as I drove away from that site, I thought about one particular day working 15 hours of industrial noise, finishing, and taxiing that beast machine back to base while the dusk breeze tore tears out of my eyes. I think I understood why he called me a pussy.

*Names have been changed.