A Good Day's Work Read Online Free

the time-honoured way. By that I mean in a manner attached to the historic traditions, performed with the kind of pride that comes from doing something right and well, not just for the money, but for its own sake. I wanted to meet these people now because they are as endangered as the rare white-headed woodpecker. Like a Tilley hat—wearing anthropologist, I needed to see them in action in their natural habitat, because someday soon no one will know what a milkman or lighthouse keeper does in the same way we are puzzled by the notion makers and corwainers of olde. I wanted to observe those challenged breeds up close for the same reason that I wanted to talk to ranchers, locomotive engineers and travelling salesmen. The great forces of globalization, technology and what we have taken to calling progress are allied against them. Their time may be coming, just as it seems to be near for drive-in movie projectionists, blacksmiths and doctors who make house calls.
    The reporting for this book took place in the early twenty-first century, when the world was everywhere in turmoil and flux. These, then, are really wistful dispatches from a distant era and a simpler time. The world has changed shape since then, and Canada with it. But the men and women in this book, in the way they make their daily bread, have stood still. (A bold asterisk must follow that last statement, since the breadth of occupations for women has mushroomed in recent decades.) Visiting those people is like having your life played back to you. They make memories rush forward and bubble up. You see your neighbourhood and your childhood unroll before you in someone else’s experience.
    The urgency is great, because as Daniel Gilbert, the Harvard psychologist, points out, we’re reaching the end of nostalgia as the distinctive landscape of our past is replaced by a reality that is pretty much identical whether you’re in Pouch Cove or Portage la Prairie. We all know there’s no turning back in the midst of a transformation of the global economy every bit as significant as the Industrial Revolution. The factories close, the mines go silent, the last person who knows how to do something—catch a fish, fix a car, build a wall that’s plumb—hangs up his tools and closes the door behind him. It’s not a happy thought. That is just how these things tend to go. Which is why I need you to come with me now. There are a few people I want you to meet, while there’s still time.

CHAPTER
ONE

ACROSS THIS LAND

    N ORTH from Toronto, through tracts of industrial land and suburbs, they made for the hard edge of the Canadian Shield. Past strip malls, telephone wires, barns, farmhouses and electrical transformers. Beyond cattle and scattered horses, homes where hard-working country folk slept and saloons where ne’er-do-wells lurked. From their perch in the glittering steel engineer’s cab twenty feet above the standard-gauge rails, Craig Stead and Jordan McCallum have an unobstructed view of the frozen-in-time towns that snap by like postcards. The two men shift down and up. They hit buttons and pull levers. They talk into microphones and to each other. They look. They listen. They sound the horn. A couple of hoggers on the night train. Running thevarnish into the black as the land changes from gentle plain to upturned granite.
    Three hours ago their train hissed like a prehistoric beast in the rail yard of Toronto’s Union Station. The Canadian tonight has eighteen cars plus the locomotive, each of them roughly twenty-five metres long. That makes the train shorter than the CN Tower then looming over its right flank but still four football fields in length. Plenty of room, in other words, to carry the 172 passengers waiting inside, amidst the Belle Époque opulence of Union Station, to Pacific Central Station in Vancouver, British Columbia.
    The last time I was at Union Station, in the early 1990s, it was alive with humanity: