Memoirs of a RigPig 5- I was always meant to go to Newfoundland
It’s impossible for me to tell a story in a logical way. Why tell it in a chronological order when I can bounce all over the place and confuse the heck out of everyone. So where were we before I got side-tracked with out of order stories? Before I talked about the great Indian love story or the brutally fatal stabbing of my cousin? I believe I was narrating my stories from the rigs. They are not all going to be emotional you know. Anyway, this is what happened before.
* * *
I sat across from him and stared nervously, waiting for him to finish thinking about my request. My left leg, with a mind of its own, vibrated at full speed. I normally respond with a dirty aggressive look when someone next to me has a restless leg (you know the kind which shakes so violently that it vibrates the chair they are sitting on and the table the chair is touching and consequentially everything you own on top of the table?), but I couldn’t have stopped my leg if I wanted to. He sat there, fingers interlocked behind his head, legs stretched out and wide open, looking at the ceiling, contemplating and holding my future in his hands.
A few weeks earlier, I had been sitting in the same office for my final interview. My future was decided- I would come work in Calgary and be “land based.” This simply meant I would be working on drilling rigs on land as opposed to offshore. I was happy enough with that. I signed my final paperwork and headed home for one last trip. I needed to pack my stuff and move to Calgary.
Being extremely impatient, I figured “why wait for movers…best to just take everything I want with me.” It was a bad decision. One I would regret. In any case, my parents dropped me and six extremely heavy pieces of luggage off at the Pearson airport. They both kept brave faces (they can’t act to save their lives though). My mum’s lower lip trembled as she strained to keep a smile on. 18 years later, she still cries each time I depart after a visit. My dad’s eyes were unusually wide, his thin lips pursed so tight that they disappeared within his mouth in an extra effort to keep emotions under control. Dad later told me that right after I left, they wept profusely in their car, at the airport car park, which is saying something considering the atrocious car park rates there. I was always meant to leave. My restless wandering feet and I are not meant to stay too long in one place.
I had a meeting organized with my brand new manager. This was day 1 at my first ever graduate job. During the meeting, he started to tell me about all the drilling operations our company was involved in from British Columbia to Newfoundland.
“Newfoundland?” I asked, interrupting him.
“Yes, those are our offshore assets,” he replied.
“Newfoundland?” I repeated, more to myself than him. Weird sort of gears were turning in my brain. “I need to go there,” I blurted, shocking myself as much as him.
“What do you mean?” he asked.
“It means, I cannot take this job unless I move to Newfoundland. I can’t stay in Calgary. I need to go there,” I replied. My brain was going, “what the fuck?”
“Where is this coming from?” he asked quizzically.
“I honestly don’t know,” I said, hesitatingly. Years later when I questioned god (or the cosmos or energy or whatever you want to call the thing) about this, they told me that I was always destined to come to Newfoundland. I was meant to love it, but it wouldn’t love me back.
This is the interaction, which led to me staring at him, while he contemplated my future in his alpha male stance.
“Ok,” he said. “I can’t think of a reason why you can’t go there. I’ll arrange it.”
And then it struck me. I had 6 massive bags with me. I would have to travel back and forth between Alberta and Texas a few times for training before finally making my way to Newfoundland. And for the next 3 months that’s what I did, paying astronomical amounts in luggage fees. My fellow new graduates dubbed me “six bags.” Not the most imaginative name but so be it.
Many weeks later, I finally landed in Newfoundland with the six bags. I got more and more stares with each bag that I unloaded. Random people helped me load the bags efficiently onto one cart when they saw me struggling with the weight. One finally piped up, “you moving here or what my lovey?”
“Yes, I am,” I replied.
My cart full of stuff that I would hardly ever use and I headed out of the airport. The salty smell hit me even miles away from the ocean. At 22, I had just arrived in a city where I knew no one and no one knew me. I was here to settle down, away from my family for the very first time and I was not scared. It was close to midnight when I hailed a cab and gave the address of the hotel. He replied back in an indecipherable dialect. I smiled, perfectly content. This is where I was always meant to be. From somewhere in the universe, I heard a whisper, “Welcome home.”
