Posted on 02/16/2014 11:30:50 AM PST by Jet Jaguar
-97??
You can’t even go outside in that can you?
Yes, and you are probably already bi-lingual in Fahrenheit and Celsius, as us statesiders aren’t.
But if you are Manitoban you are good in my book. Saskatchewan too-—when I was growing up we knew the northern neighbors would do what they said.
Over here in Montana, where I am right now, I finally met a guy from Dauphin-—this was about 15 years ago. Growing up with CBC so close by I always heard the temps from up there (brrr) but one week when I had rented a fishing cabin, up near Yellowstone Park, there were a couple miners also staying at the little camp/resort.
They were working the platinum/palladium mine west of Billings. And they were the guys who drove the little drill locomotive, on rails, that had the grinder on the front and brought the rock down to make the mine deeper.
Scary stuff, they told me, especially on this mine, ‘cause the rock came down in big slabs faster than it was supposed to.
Anyway these two had been doing this their whole lives, traveling around the world, wherever the newest, best-paying mine happened to be opening up. And the first guy, taller, from Manitoba but I don’t know where, spoke slowly and with a northland accent but pretty easy on my North Dakota ears.
The other guy, the little guy from Dauphin—man, he spoke some kind of dialect half-way between Canadian, French and American and I could barely understand a word he said. He would ask me something and I would look at the other guy. “He wants to know how fishing was today.”
He would say something else, really short, and I would look at the taller man. “He said what kind of fish are they?”
Anyway I lost some credibility with the little guy when he asked where my fish were one morning. I told him (through our translater) that I almost always let them all go, that I was fishing catch-and-release.
The took about three our four exchanges back and forth to sink in for him. The last thing he asked me was, “Then what the hell are you doing out there?”
Of course my daddy was forever asking me the same thing.
At any rate they were a couple of the best. Deep-digging hard-rock miners, they would head into the mine at ten p.m. and come out about eight in the morning, dirty, tired, making the world go ‘round.
I admired them, they lived up to my boyhood image of Canadians, ay?
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