Post #297025 by Cammo on Thu, Apr 5, 2007 6:38 AM

I warned ya. Here it is.

Copyright Cam MacMillan 2006, 2007. All rights reserved.

the Bob’s Big Talk series
"Thunder Bay"

This took place what, forty, forty-five years ago?

My first job was with the Dow Chemical Company. They had a Thunder Bay office, it’s way up north past Sudbury, and I was hired to do odd jobs for a drilling outfit that was stitching the area. “Stitching” is drilling for gold and silver samples. You drill every mile in a big grid pattern, and stitch up the points with surface samples. Anyway, they hadn’t found any gold, and the guys had been at it for almost 6 months solid. These men were professional miners, big hard-drinking muscular guys, pretty rough. I came on a few weeks before they were scheduled to take a vacation, so my job was pretty easy. Mostly I handled the dynamite during the day, and later they let me clean their heavy equipment, the three-point drilling rigs that Hughes was making around that time.

Well, the guys all wanted to go back to Thunder Bay for their vacation. There was a big Forestry Potlach scheduled for the next week, that’s a fancy festival the loggers put on where they show off for the tourists. Maybe you don’t know, but miners hate loggers, and loggers sure as hell hate miners. When a miner finds a strike, like gold or silver, his company buys everything up and doesn’t let it be logged anymore. They don’t even let logging roads go through, that’s what the loggers hate, they can’t even get to the big trees. And the same goes the other way - if a logging company buys a whole forest, you can’t mine it, even if there’s the biggest gold mine in the world on it. They won’t even let you look. They’ll kill you if you try, there’s all kinds of stories about snoopy guys disappearing up north. Our guys from Dow just HATED those loggers. They wanted to go to Thunder Bay to wreck their festival, by winning the Sleeping Giant Race. That was a big obstacle course that was set up on the side of this mountain that looks exactly like a sleeping giant. The prize money was ten thousand. Five of the guys had pooled their money to get back to Thunder Bay for the week, and they were going the next day. They asked me to go too, to watch their dynamite while they were in the contest. It’s a rule that all dynamite had to be watched twenty-four hours a day, to keep thieves away. You get in a lot of trouble if you lose dynamite sticks. When we got to Thunder Bay, they even gave me a gun and a few bullets I was supposed to keep in my socks to guard the dynamite with.

I never saw the festival. The first day I just sat there at the top of Sleeping Giant mountain, beside the truck, watching that dynamite. It didn’t move much. After a while I figured that the dynamite didn’t need to be watched all the time. I left for a few minutes, keeping an eye on the truck, trying to find where the festival was, but I kept thinking, “What if somebody breaks into the other side of the truck and steals the dynamite?” I was really worried about that truck, and finally decided that I’d better just take the dynamite out of it and sit it on the ground where I could see it and still walk around. The Sleeping Giant Race was supposed to be that day, and I really wanted to catch a bit of it. I was just a kid, y’know? That festival was a real big deal. So I unlocked the truck and hauled this big red box out onto the grass. Explosives are always stored in red boxes, and this one had warning signs all over it. I think they got the box from Nova Scotia or Newfoundland first, because it had pictures of fish underneath the “DANGER” warnings. It still smelled kind of fishy, too. Then I walked over to the edge of the grassy field, where I could hear sounds of a crowd. There was nobody there. It was just the side of the mountain. The festival must be happening down the road a bit. I took out my pipe, and sat down for a smoke. In those days we didn’t have money for tobacco, but we just grabbed anything that was dry and stuffed it in our pipes. I grabbed a handful of dried thistle and smoked for a while. It was kind of depressing, I mean, I had come all the way to Thunder Bay, but couldn’t see anything! I wasn’t too sad, though, because at least it wasn’t hard work. That made me think of the dynamite, and I looked back to the truck but it was behind a grove of birch trees from where I was sitting, so I moved around a bit to get a better look at it.

Somebody was inside the back of the truck. I could see them bending over the other crates of dynamite. It couldn’t be one of our guys, because he would have called for me when he didn’t find me there. I pulled my gun out, and searched for my bullets. They weren’t in my sock. Up until then I was feeling pretty good about this burglar. With a loaded gun in your hand, it’s easy to be brave. Now I remembered that the bullets were in the glove compartment, locked in the front of the truck. I had to do something, so instead, I decided to bluff it out, pretending to have a loaded gun and hoped that Mr. Burglar didn’t have a real one himself. I quietly crawled closer to the truck, and got to within a few feet of the back gate. The dynamite box outside was still sitting there, right where I had left it. The thief must be going after the bigger box inside. Slowly, I looked over the edge of the gate, staring into the dark interior.

Right in front of me, staring right back, was the biggest, angriest, ugliest bear I’ve ever seen. It was a HUGE ten foot tall grizzly, and Mr. Bear was MAD. He had smelled the fish boxes, and was wondering where all the fish were. This was the end of summer, and bears were trying to fatten up for the winter. No fish. But here I was, his substitute lunch.

I’d never seen a bear before, nope. Well, yeah, in a zoo, but it was sleeping and behind bars. This one was gigantic, and it wasn’t sleepy.

I backed away quick, and the only thing I could think of was to grab the dynamite box on the ground and throw it at him. I picked it up, but a second before throwing it, I thought, “Hey, it’s going to blow up the whole damn mountain, and me with it, am I crazy?” and then I didn’t know what to do.

“GGGGRRRRROOOOOOOOWL,” the bear roared, and it came after me. I ran. Most people see me, they see a pretty skinny kid, you know? They don’t think I’m very good in sports, or in running or swimming, but that day I could have beat Jessie Owens in the 5000 meter. I ran across the field, down that mountain, somebody put rockets on my feet I ran so fast. The ground went by like I was in a racing car looking out the window, except it was me doing the running. Every time I looked back, there was that bear coming after me, it’s teeth dripping saliva all over it’s chest. I saw a big arrow sign that read “Potlach Race This Way!” and I ran where it pointed, and then there I was in a big crowd of people, but they were all screaming cause they saw the bear too, but that bear only saw me and maybe it was smelling that fish box full of dynamite I was still carrying. Then a gun went off, and I hoped it was somebody trying to kill the bear, but it was the start of the Sleeping Giant Race and everybody was running all around me but they were slow compared to me and the bear. We were doing 55 in a 25 mile-an-hour zone. We ran down that mountain, we swam across a river, we climbed through this narrow tunnel thing, and I kept following the little red arrow signs that were nailed into the trees that we passed. I tried to throw the dynamite at the bear a few times, but every time I turned around he got a bit closer, and if I dropped it, it would blow us both up. So we finally came out into this big area with lots of people and flags and a big band playing out of these huge loudspeakers that were almost as big as the bear, and everybody started cheering! I thought, “What the hell are they cheering for? If the bear eats me, are they going to cheer even more?” and then there was this long yellow band of ribbon in front of us, under a sign that said, FINISH, and I ran right through that ribbon, but it got tangled around my legs, and the other end of the ribbon got wrapped around the bear, and suddenly we were a ball of fighting, dirty claws and fangs and…

I threw the dynamite. It missed the bear, but kept right on going, up, up, up through the air and then down into the middle of a bunch of people standing around this big statue of that lumberjack, Paul Bunyan and Babe, his big Blue Ox, which was the whole center of the Logging Festival where all the awards are given out. The box came down and I don’t know if you know this, but you gotta be real careful with dynamite cause if you drop it, it goes BOOM. The box came down real slow, and me and the bear watched it coming down, I guess Mr. Bear was watching his lunch go away and I was watching to see what happens when a whole fish box full of 65Kg. per stick of dynamite falls 30 feet onto a hard surface. What happens is that everything within 100 feet of it goes away real fast. Anything within 50 feet of it disappears into powder, like magic. We were about 75 feet away, and I was blown so far I went halfway back up that darn mountain. Nobody ever saw the bear again, which is too bad ‘cause I was starting to get kind of fond of that rascal.

The best part was Paul Bunyan, though. He got the worst of the blast. The statue was made out of fiberglass, so even though it was like 4 stories high, it was pretty light, and it went way up in the air. It just launched. It looked like it was heading to the moon, maybe. It was still going up, up, up when I fell on my head. It had smoke coming out of it’s feet, and Paul went way on up into the clouds, turned around, and decided to come on back down. It smashed in a big explosion of splintered wood, fiberglass and red paint. I sat there on the ground, looking around, wondering if I had killed anybody and trying to look innocent when one of those logger officials dragged himself to his feet right beside me, pointed right at my face and yelled “It’s YOUR fault!”

I tried to run again, but my legs were too tired. Then a whole group of people came yelling right towards me. I tried to push them away cause I thought they were going to arrest me, but it was my friends from Dow and they were really happy!

“YOU WON THE RACE!” one of them shouted.

It turned out that I had run faster and better than anybody who had ever run the Sleeping Giant Race. In the 26 years of it’s history, the fastest time had been 18 minutes, 4 seconds. I had done it in less than half that time, 7 minutes 32 seconds. It was a world record. That means that not only did we win the $10,000.00, but I also got a $5000.00 bonus prize and a small extra stipend for every year somebody couldn’t beat the time. To this day I get a check for $82.00 from the Logging Association, cause nobody’s even come close to my 7 minute time. Jesse Owens even sent me a letter congratulating me, it’s down in my basement , you can see it anytime you want.

Maybe people were hurt or killed, I don’t know. There were a few people they didn’t find, but nobody could prove that they had actually died, so it never really came to anything. It was all an accident anyway, and everybody had seen the bear chasing me, so what the heck? The only thing that bothered me was that we couldn’t find Big Jake. Jake was one of the Dow guys, and nobody could figure out where he had gone. About an hour later he showed up in the crowd, with a piece of paper in his hand. That piece of paper was normal sized, but it looked like one of those little post-it notes in Big Jake’s paw. He gathered us together, told us to be quiet, and led us over to the huge round crater the dynamite had made.

“I’ve been at the assay and land office,” he told us. I didn’t know what he was talking about then, but those other guys from Dow sure looked interested. We were all standing around the crater, and Jake pointed down. We all looked, following his finger, and the whole bottom of the crater was shiny. It looked like pieces of a giant mirror had smashed and melted all over everything. Stinky Ed, the guy standing beside me, started to smile.

“Silver,” he said. “You got the deed?”

“Oh yeah,” Big Jake said back, real quiet. “It’s ours.”

Jake had blown the whole ten grand in prize money on buying the crater.

Well, I’d like to tell you my dynamite had discovered the biggest silver mine in the world, but it didn’t because that stuff wasn’t silver after all. It was nickel. Nickel is a metal just like silver, only harder and shinier. They use it a lot for coating things to make them look like silver, like car keys, but the biggest use of it is in making nickels, those 5 cent coins everybody carries around. Nickel isn’t as valuable as silver, but it’s used a lot. Nickel isn’t too rare, but finding this much of it was. And it’s needed everywhere.

I had discovered the biggest nickel mine in the world.

Actually, Dow Chemical ended up owning it. They bought all the land in 20 miles from that site, cornered the nickel market by buying up some mines in South Africa that were producing the raw ore, shut them down, and announced a few days later that they owned all the available nickel in the world. That made Dow stock go up 6.4%, which means they made 27 million in one hour. My friends and I made out great, Jake runs Inco Mining from it’s main office in Sudbury these days, he pulls down a good 6 figures for testing the coffee every morning, and we all ended up owning 0.5% of the gross profits. That doesn’t sound like much, but think about it. Look in your pocket, because that nickel in there beside the dimes and pennies came from our mine.

Stinky Ed and the guys wanted to build a big statue in Sudbury of me, the bear and a flying case of dynamite, but the city council voted it down and built this gigantic nickel there instead. You can still see it, the Big Nickel in the center of Sudbury, 40 feet high, made of our metal.

That’s the end of the story. There was some moral to it all, but I forgot what it was. We sure made a lot of dough that summer, though.