Summer Wages
A couple of weeks ago I spent a bit of time in a Northern Ontario mining town. Well, mining and forestry, to be exact. A real place where real people make their living doing real things.
These days, times are good and wages are good. There’s a demand for the gold and nickel and copper and silver, and for the lumber from the forests. But it hasn’t always been that way, and the town shows the wear and grit of days when miners and workers got by on half shifts.
Today the automobile dealers can’t get enough stock of high-end shiny pickup trucks with all the bling, and the “toys” are in every driveway– snowmobiles, Seadoos, ski boats, campers, four wheelers– anything a working man could dream. Almost all on credit. Here most everyone lives from paycheque to paycheque, even if they are rather good paycheques.
I couldn’t help but think of lines from Ian Tyson’s Summer Wages (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o43TMGS9MU4) , “The dreams of the season are all spilled down on the floor”. Lots of money, earned the hard way, gone in moments. And then back to hard, dangerous, physical work where everyone knows of someone who came in on the shift and never went home.
These are the realities of our national wealth and prosperity– tough men and women extracting the riches of our land in hard and dangerous work.
This is neither an ode, nor a critique. It’s simply to acknowledge the real men and women outside our shiny big cities, men and women who actually “get ‘er done”. Without them we wouldn’t have our shiny big cities where we can wear nice clothes in air conditioned offices. They deserve our respect.