Powerhouse

The Complex

There are nine buildings on the complex, not counting the doctors residence and B Unit, which have been stripped of salvage and boarded over.

Of the remaining nine, three are hospital buildings, one is an old hospital that was converted first into a nurses residence and is now used for staff offices and classrooms, one is a recreation hall, and one is a shops building for the trades.  Then there is the powerhouse and its retired mates: old powerhouse and old laundry.

According to their foundation stones, most date to the early and mid-1920's.  Although the centre of the complex is not much more than a sprawling empty lawn with a few walking paths and separated scatterings of teenager elm trees, the buildings give the impression of having been spun off to the edges.

 

Near the centre of the lawn and accessible by a spur from the walking path, a cairn marks the front entrance of the original hospital.  It tells that the hospital was founded in 1886 and shows a steel engraving of a massive, heavy-browed brick rectangle. 

Del the night watchman has intercepted me, twice, coming away from the cairn and pulled off his rounds for conversation.  He has been here for 37 years and has another 18 months to go.  He exists inside the hospital's Chevy Suburban.   He is expecting, with dread and growing resentment, that they will replace the Suburban with a minivan, in light of the rising cost of gasoline.

He says that the first hospital spanned the main width of the grounds, from almost all the way back to B-Unit and up to A-Unit at the front of complex. 

"None of this was here, then"  he says, catching the various stands of trees in his gesture.  "The Main Building came right by here where we're standing.  Everything else was kinda built in around it.   I have a picture of it hanging on my office wall, if you want to come and see it," he says.  He'll make this offer again next time he sees me at the cairn.  He is a short man with disproportionately short arms.

The cairn is set with a few of the original building's bricks, which are yellow and so soft and smooth that it is impossible to imagine them as part of the scowling behemoth in the engraving.  I lay my hand flat against one and get an image, not of the past, but of the profoundly disabled residents I have seen today on the geriatric ward.   An image of the ward's silent electric locking system.  An image, from the archival photos hung in the old nurses' residents, of a nurse standing in an austere resident dormitory.  The nurse had been bending over a medical cart on her left and was beginning to straighten and turn toward the picture-taker. A patient lies in a bed behind her.  The bedclothes are pulled up high, so that all that can be seen is two dark pin-point eyes and dark mop of hair. 

Like the nurse, the pin-points are fixed on the camera. 

Soft Hands

Working on boiler piping, my soft hands tear four times in an hour.  Everything I touch is tinged reddish-brown.

Coveralls

He is a lean man on a compact frame, wirey and hard with a lifetime of farm work. 

He is the only engineer here who wears coveralls all the time.  The others wear coveralls only for dirty jobs--like cleaning the boilers--and otherwise they stick with work shirts and jeans, and leather belts for their pocket knives holsters and key rings.  To see them out in the complex, they could be anybody: your neighbour on his way home to cut the grass. 

But winter and summer, easy work and hard, he wears a blue-grey coverall.  He rolls the sleeves to his shoulders and leaves the front zipper open just higher than midway up his chest.  The waist rides on his loosely hips and murmurs a sensual virility into his movements. 

He is handsome, except for his teeth.  His hair is steel grey and black, trimmed short around the sides but long enough on top to be pushed back when he is thinking, or over-heated, or bored.    Weather, and age, and companionship with his demons have worn a gentleness into his face. 

When he fails, he fails to the appeptites of his body.

He lost his 18-year-old son to an accident, some years ago.

He serves as a lay-preacher in his home congregation, and although he has not had a moment of revelation, there is a cleric's softness in him that he takes for The Call.   He is studying toward ordination for more than a decade.  He retires next week, with well over 25 years in as power engineer, and will go to Saskatchewan in the Fall to start on the last credits he needs at seminary.

Power engineers manage steam, but the trade's true demand is for a soul who can sit with the boiler, day and night, season through season.   So although it is not usual for power engineers to become luthern pastors, it has long been a holding ground for those who were and those who will be. 

He is standing on a scaffold 12 feet in the air, in front of the piping at Boiler #3's top drum, replacing the feedwater stop valve.  Pressure and age has welded the screwed-joint piping tight.  He is using a 36 inch pipe wrench, extended by a 4-foot persuader to break the union.  His hard hat is dull yellow.  His feet are braced wide on the scaffold and he is throwing his entire strength into the wrench.  His forearms strain under the sleeves of the coveralls, and at his neck, his collarbone and the tendons in his throat turn to steel.