Cheers to the school-crossing guards, sanitation workers, canal-flooders, window-washers, cell-tower builders and other winter workers.
“And there sat Sam, looking cool and calm.” That line is from Robert Service’s story The Cremation of Sam McGee, about a Yukon prospector who froze to death in the arctic cold.
Freezing has always been the way I least want to depart this coil, and I actually repeat the line as some strange coping mantra when I’m outside in frigid weather. I said it aloud on Monday morning as I trekked a dark, cold kilometre to the newly opened Limebank transit station. I said it in my car on Tuesday as I watched linemen string wires across Bank Street, and later, at home, when I heard about the poor man who had met his end on Elgin Street in a -20 wind chill. I said it on Wednesday as I walked a few subarctic blocks from my home to Hopewell Public School to meet a school-crossing guard.
With that in mind, I pay tribute here to the people in Ottawa who brave the icy chill so that you and I can be comfortable.
For instance, those hanging off the end of garbage trucks — which, as a kid, I thought would be a cool job (but maybe not THIS cool).
Or the roofers whom we annually reach out to when the temperature approaches 40 C during O-Town’s muggy summer. Think of them when it plunges toward -40 C.
Or those who brave the wind tunnel known as the Rideau Canal to plow and flood, or the ones who, once that’s done, skate up and down, ready to administer First-Aid to the stumblers. Or the linemen, window-washers and tree surgeons. They’re doing God’s work, one and all, in windchill that forces the rest of us inside.
For 10 years, crossing guard Andrew Spicer has stood at the corner of Bank Street and Sunnyside Drive, shepherding Hopewell School students across that intersection, 40 minutes at a time, twice a day, five days a week. He hasn’t lost a student, but he’s twice suffered frostbite. He’s also witnessed numerous collisions, and on two occasions was struck by vehicles — one that ran a red light on Bank Street, the other making a right-hand turn.
Evening Update
“Twice a day may not seem arduous,” he says. “But it’s contingent on weather, which has a lot to do with how enjoyable the job is. Imagine it’s -40 (his record is -41 C) and you’re holding a stop sign and the wind is blowing in your face, you kind of get a feeling of just the temperature itself, just how cold it is. And it’s almost like Bank Street is a wind tunnel.
“So you try and make the best out of the job, and for me, it’s always greeting people. ‘Good morning.’ ‘Hi.’ ‘How are you?’”
(According to Jamie Kwong, executive director of the Ottawa Safety Council that oversees the city’s school crossing guard program, most of the guards’ shifts last between 40 minutes and an hour. Some run up to about 90 minutes, with a handful lasting up to two hours. Crossing guards, fortunately, are given heat and cold training, and provided cleats for snowy and icy conditions.)
“You’re helping the community,” Spicer adds, “and I think that’s what motivates a lot of the crossing guards to be out in that temperature and interact with the community. It takes a special person to sit in -40 with a smile on your face.”
In outdoor jobs, according to Nick Mongeon, “you can get old pretty quick.”
Mongeon owns Torque Telecom, a telecom construction company for which Mongeon and his staff spend a good deal of time on top of — or rappelling along the sides of — high-rise buildings, affixing satellite and other communications equipment.
When he started in the business about 25 years ago, his job entailed erecting cellphone towers, mostly in rural areas. That was great in California, Arizona and Nevada, he says. But when he started his own company in Ottawa, it was far less enjoyable. “Building towers in rural winter is not cool,” he says. “When you’re up on a tower and it’s cold, you can’t really hide from it.”
Even being atop a downtown office tower doesn’t offer much protection — a stairwell or elevator room, briefly, but the work still has to get done. Meanwhile, improvements to gear are of limited help: heated gloves, for example, need to be removed for much of the job. And it’s worse, he adds, when he has to work on the side of the building. “Going over the edge is different because you’re sitting in your harness and your circulation is cut off. So you’re freezing, and you’re not going to go up and down, up and down, to warm up.
“I’d rather work in +40 than -40, any day.”
The telecom industry, he adds, is federally regulated, not provincially, so there are fewer labour-code protections. And it’s not unionized, so companies like his have to scramble more to complete projects. “You can’t always not work when it’s really cold. It’s a bit like the Wild West.”
The job attracts those from the ranks of rock-climbers, arborists and ex-military. “Guys who like ropes and knots and heights,” he says, “and most don’t start in the winter; they start in the summer.”
“It’s a different breed who do this. You’ve got to be built different to work winters at 300 feet.”
The rest of us should be thankful that there are people built differently, so we can stay in our homes during weeks like this one — so far Ottawa’s coldest of the winter — with our wifi and hydro both working, comfortable in the knowledge that our kids will get home safely from school, our garbage will be picked up, our construction workers will continue to toil, our rink-flooders will go about their tasks.
Thank you to all the winter workers. Here’s to you, Sam, all cool and calm.
