by John Demont
The hard-working ones, like Bill and his wife, Blanche, do okay. “Let’s put it this way,” he says as we head for the top of Clayton Park, a leafy, established Halifax suburb. “Each one of those cases is worth four dollars and this van is loaded to the back five days a week. I could buy a motor home for sixty-five thousand dollars. I bought this van. I bought another van. I own a house and a camp. I didn’t finish high school, but no one in this family has ever wanted for everything.”
He parks, jumps out, opens the back doors and climbs into the back of the van, which is separated from the front by a partition. A tinfoil-like insulation lines the walls, which are otherwise adorned only with a 2009 printing company calendar. The refrigeration system hums, rattles and cools. The boxes of product reach to the ceiling and extend right out to the doors. (In the fall of 2009 the Farmer’s line included various kinds of milk, cream, yogourt, juice, sour cream, margarine, butter, cheese and various other spreads.)
There’s nothing haphazard about the loading process: the night before, Bill calls in his order to the dairy. At midnight a forklift carries his load out. Single-handedly, he fills the back of the van in the order in which he expects to unload it: first the big boxes of cream and yogourt for the waterfront restaurants that he will visit at the end of the day; last the one percent milk for the homes in Hammonds Plains at the start of the route. All told, it takes one hour and twenty minutes to load the van up. The hardest part of a long, physical day.
In a perfect world, because of such loading precision he wouldn’t have to shift cartons around after hopping into the back of the van. He wouldn’t have to squeeze himself into impossible spaces. He wouldn’t have to contort his body to reach things that weren’t where they should be. He would simply grab the first box he saw. Then, like a running back hitting a hole, he would cradle the milk in the crook of his arm and take off in a bandy-legged trot up the driveway. The first time I see him do this I think he’s showing off. But he jogs back too, marks something down in his worn-out scribbler, then guns the van a ways down the street, stops and does it all again.
Like many of us, there’s part of Bill that loves the night. The way stars glitter and how sounds—the rustling of trees, the buzz of an electrical transformer—expand to fill the air. Most things and people look better in the dark. The mundane becomes mysterious, sad, maybe even a bit magical. Before the streetlights blink off, for example, Bill might glimpse a raccoon waddling across a lawn or a deer kicking through the leaves. Once he found a drunk lying in the middle of the road and called 911 for the person’s own good. Another time he got rousted by a police squad car after asking a girl walking along the side of the road whether she needed help.
Don’t get the wrong impression: if this part of the world is any indication, home milk delivery is now mostly the indulgence of comfortably off, two-income families willing to pay extra for the convenience of not having to drive to the supermarket. Cars with plenty of warranty sit in the driveways. Though wilderness lies at the end of the cul-de-sacs, chaos seems distant and unknown. From these homes hours from now husbands, wives and schoolchildren will emerge, flinging on their coats, blowing kisses and slamming doors.
It will be 5:30 before a few early-morning joggers and the occasional paper boy—now, of course, a middle-aged man or woman—start to materialize. Until then Bill’s only company are the hurting songs on the radio and the counter folk at the doughnut shops where he stops for his many coffees—usually in a travel-go mug and always three creams and no sugar (“I’m sweet enough!”)—a quick pee and some small talk about assorted thoughts and concerns: “Damn, Bill, you seen the construction up by the overpass?”
Today it is clear and dry with the temperature in the low single digits. But summer is definitely over. You get the feeling that you’d better grab the good days while they last because the Nova Scotia winter approaches. We drive down hills so steep that on icy winter days his brakes have given out, letting his van slide into ongoing traffic. We glide into dead ends that stop so abruptly they surprise you. As we weave through subdivisions that I didn’t know existed, modest prefabs and spruced-up century-old homesteads materialize in the van windshield. We pass an old cemetery. Then seconds later creep down a street of tract housing without sidewalks, where no Egg McMuffin wrapper has apparently ever blown.
When people think of this country, the impenetrable Canadian Shield and veldts of undulating prairie may come to mind. The truth is that four out of five of us dwell in urban enclaves strung out along the Trans-Canada Highway, trying to raise a family in a place where meeting a mortgage doesn’t require the sale of a kidney. Connection to the broader community is hard in places so young. Human contact is fleeting amid suburban sprawl where people seldom move around by anything other than car and scant places exist where neighbours can actually meet.
Know that I’m nostalgic, not wistful, about my childhood. The reality was that it was necessary to talk to a few people in the run of a day: the guy behind the meat counter, the light meter man, the bank teller, the lady handing out stamps and penny candy at the combination post office–five-and-dime store up the street. Now it’s possible to run your daily errands with an almost total lack of social interaction: you can pump your own gas and bag your own groceries. I now buy most of my Christmas and birthday presents, books and CDs online. I personally make 99 percent of my cash withdrawals through an ATM and, increasingly, pay my bills online.
I know, I know. Out in the burbs where Bill today works, a postman still slides the mail in with a click through the letter slot. Someone folds up the daily newspaper and flings it on a front step. The Internet, though, is already on the verge of making those folks obsolete too. Anyone can see where we’re headed: all this cutting out the middleman may make economic sense, but even commerce, on some level, is about more than just dollars and cents. Something is lost when simply pointing and clicking can accomplish everything that needs to be done in the run of a day.
Bill may not know the names of all his customers, but he knows their addresses, their order numbers and their tastes. Some have been customers for so long that he finds himself rummaging through the back of the van and getting their order without even thinking. With the insomniacs he exchanges small talk born of a mutual fondness for the time between night and dawn. The bed-bound slackers like me get the occasional note. That’s still a more real human connection than a disembodied voice from a call centre in Mumbai.
At a time when customer service means a big “how d’ ya do” from the Wal-Mart greeter, it does the heart good to know there are still guys like Bill here. It’s more than yearning something that provides a fluttery feeling behind the breastbone, reminding you of childhood. Milkmen aren’t museum pieces. They do something essential at a time when much of what passes for work lacks value or is so far removed from the people it benefits that the link is impossible to make. Ask Bill if he feels “fulfilled” and he just shrugs. After all these years he’s come to hate the brutal days. And no one would confuse what he does with the utilitarian art of the craftsman.
But spend a little time with him and the complications of his job are obvious: the juggling of orders and coddling of customers, the creative problem solving, the muscle power and stamina, the mastery of time and space. It’s hard, demanding work and Bill is good at it. “I could work fewer hours,” he says. “But I want things done right. I want things done a certain way. If that takes a little longer—well, then it takes a little longer.” Bill likes being his own boss. And dealing with customers gives him a kick. In his work—as for his father before him—there’s also a direct relationship between effort and reward; the more milk he delivers, the more money he makes every week. “Do I find my work satisfying?” he asks, repeating my question. “Yeah, I guess you can say I find it satisfying.”
BILL is still trying to make up lost time as he pulls his fully loaded dolly up the nineteen stairs to the downtown pub’s door. Inside, a talk radio jock and The Guess Who blare in compet
ition over the rattling and wheezing of an industrial kitchen. He moves stiffly around in the cold locker, humming as he rearranges the shelves to make room for cream, milk and sour cream. After doing some quick calculating, he bustles back outside and climbs into the van. “I can’t get at the sour cream!” he exclaims. “Boy, did I goof. Sour cream, sour cream, where are you?”
It’s light by now. Spring Garden Road, one of Halifax’s main drags, looks the same as any other major thoroughfare in a twenty-first-century Canadian city: a young Asian woman in a tailored suit clicks by on high heels; a woman in an Islamic head scarf makes change at the newsstand; a twentyish guy—trim as a nail, olive skin—fiddles with his iPod as he steps past the panhandler sitting on the sidewalk. If Bill turned in a circle, he would see a Turkish restaurant, a brew pub, a martini bar, a cell phone store and a bookstore with Malcolm Gladwell’s latest thumb-sucker in the window. A film company with an Academy Award under its belt is headquartered not far from where Bill rummages. Within a couple of blocks of his van—which has a handwritten cardboard “Farmer’s delivery van” sign in the window—a hot yoga class is under way and someone is buying a single espresso that costs as much as this book.
Years ago I lived in a well-off section of Toronto. Occasionally I would see a middle-aged man in Old Country peasant clothes walking through the neighbourhood, ringing a bell and pulling a small cart. He was Italian, I was told by one of his countrymen. A knife sharpener now living with a daughter, perhaps; a man who longed to be back in his old Sicilian village practising a trade passed down from generation to generation.
The scene was totally incongruous, like he had stepped through a crack in time. And I get a bit of the same feeling watching Bill, still doing a job that hasn’t essentially changed in 150 years. Civilians pay no heed as they walk near him. If they knew he was a milkman, passersby might stop, rub their jaws, say “Really?” and smile at the very quaintness of the notion. Tom Cruise doesn’t star in movies about men who wear ball caps, smell of bad milk and use the service entrance. Nevertheless, Bill and the kitchen help, cleaners, deliverymen and other nameless folk who work behind the scenes in the service industry allow our everyday lives to function with a semblance of order. Our ignorance of what they do shows how well they do it.
This responsibility digs furrows into Bill’s brow. At 10:30 a.m. he’s still running late. To make things worse, instead of printing bills, his printer voids them, wasting reams of paper. “There’s not enough paper. Not even close,” he moans after another botched attempt. “I don’t know what I’m going to do. Why did I take my spare paper out of this van? Oh man, the paper I’m going through. I don’t have time for this. Man oh man, what else can go wrong?” Soon he finds out. As he’s on his knees filling a refrigerator in a mall convenience store, the owner leans over and tells him that he’s completely out of milk at two other outlets he owns farther down Bill’s route.
You can see the walls of the store narrow and feel Bill’s pulse begin to pound louder. A year ago he lost the illusion of invincibility. One day Bill’s face went numb, he suddenly started to drool and couldn’t speak. His doctor said it sounded a lot like a stroke. He fit all of the criteria: early sixites, stressed, a few pounds overweight. Night work of any kind is bad for the health. Women who work the night shift have higher breast cancer rates. Night shift workers are at a higher risk of accidents, sleep disorders, bone fractures and digestive problems. Scientific evidence even shows that the disruption of the body’s circadian rhythms can make a person’s metabolism go haywire and lead to hormonal and metabolic changes that even increase risks for obesity, diabetes and heart disease.
Bill’s tests were inconclusive. Even so, he decided to do a better job looking after himself. On the dashboard sit a nice juicy apple and a heart-smart bottle of water, plus the alarm clock he uses when he has time for a short nap in the cab. “I know I can’t do this forever,” he says. “But I’ll keep doing it until I can’t do it no more. I’ve been paying into RRSPs for years. If I have to stop, I’ll be okay.”
We shall see. Bill likes to fish for trout at a lake near a backwoods cabin he owns with a friend. He plays golf. Once he was a good enough ten-pin bowler to compete in tournaments in the United States. For now, all the fun has to wait until retirement. After his twelve-hour days Bill heads home and has a bite in the bungalow he shares with Blanche and their two grown-up children. He watches a little television—“I have no interest in sports, news or politics, but man I love karate and kung fu movies”—and is in bed by six. Six hours later he rises and does it all again. On the weekend mostly he rests.
It took chronic back trouble and two knees badly in need of replacement to get Blanche to quit working. Now Bill is searching for his own exit strategy. They’re debt-free; if they watch it, their savings should see them right through old age. He just has to find someone willing to take on his route. Because these people need their milk. For nearly five decades that duty to his customers was something for Bill to hang the entire workday on. His daughter, a sculptor and children’s centre worker, and his son, who works in retail, have eschewed the family tradition. He can’t just quit.
Bill is joking when he asks me if I’d ever be interested in giving the job a shot. Too physically hard. Too many hours. Too much of the wrong kind of stress for someone who gets all flustered if an editor sends an email asking where the heck the story is. The end may be drawing nigh for jobs like this. But what finally wipes the garden-variety milkman off the face of the earth won’t just be the vagaries of economics; it will be because people willing or able to do the job no longer walk the earth.
I ponder the apparent inevitability of this as we plunge deeper into Halifax’s business district. We stop at a caterer’s, a steak house, a hotel dining room, a tourist shop and a faux Italian trattoria, where Bill moves like a ghost past all but his service-economy kin. By now, his mood has lightened: the invoice machine is working again; he’s bummed some printer paper off a passing Farmer’s van. The back of this truck is finally clearing out, making it easier for him to manoeuvre around. Somehow those lost minutes are being found. “I’m happy, oh I’m happy again,” he sings before breaking into an “O Canada” expansive enough for hockey night at Maple Leaf Gardens.
There are still all those empty fridges to deal with farther down the line. But you must take the good with the bad in this kind of work. Bill moves milk. It’s not finding a cure for cancer. Nor is it ever likely to be on some magazine editor’s list of “jobs of the future.” A pessimist might see him as the last of a dying breed. Bill says, “Not yet, buddy. Not yet.” Then he punches the van into drive and clatters through the weak afternoon sunlight. The bleary-eyed guy who brings the farm to the citified kitchen table. The beat-up working man who feeds my family. Nobody is ever going to erect a statue to a man like Bill Bennett. But I have to tell you: after all this time it’s a pleasure to finally make his acquaintance.
CHAPTER
FOUR
WATERING HOLE FOR DREAMERS
BY the time he heads south on Broadway Avenue, Stu Cousins, a man of ritual, has walked the dogs. He has breakfasted. He has sat in the swivel chair before his desktop computer. There—on his favourite bookmarked websites—he has checked the buzz on the new releases in the long list of musical genres that he favours. If he likes what he reads, Stu points, clicks and listens to a couple of cuts. If he likes what he hears, he places an order. Either way he brews a chai tea in his travel mug. Then, on gimpy knees, with music playing in his head, he exits right out of the front door of the eight-hundred-square-foot house that he shares with his wife, Dayna Lozowchuk, their four hound dogs and their six thousand records and CDs.
Stu veers left at the corner of Broadway, which even in late morning has more diverse life forms than you’d expect to see on a commercial drag in a former temperance colony. Plying his migratory route, he waves, says hi, occasionally takes in a little neighbourhood gossip. For seven blocks he walks at the nice clip of a man w
ho spent a couple of decades jumping when clients said jump but who now has the luxury of acting in a manner that acknowledges that things that really matter don’t have to be rushed. At a point where the Saskatoon traffic convenes coughing and wheezing from three different directions he stops.
Stu reaches into his pants pocket and pulls out a key. It’s nearly eleven. But, as he notes, “vinyl collectors aren’t known for being early risers.” So, no one is standing there waiting at 628-B Broadway as he unlocks the glass door with the metal security grate. From the entranceway the fifty-three-year-old pulls a sign adorned with Bobby Dylan’s mug onto the sidewalk, proclaiming to the world that the Vinyl Diner is open for business. Then, in brittle prairie air, he stands tall, a touch stooped and a bit on the angular side. An empathetic face dominated by dark-rimmed glasses, straight lips and a nose that tapers. From a couple of pictures rounded up on the web I know that Stu, at some point, wore his brown hair short and blunt. Today it’s shaggy and swept eastward, more front man for The Sheepdogs than account manager for Saatchi and Saatchi, which is what, in fact, he used to be.
Stu looks around. He observes. For a couple of seconds he takes in the traffic speeding by toward the airport that commemorates Prime Minister John G. Diefenbaker, and the football stadium named after hockey immortal Gordie Howe. He watches cars and trucks head toward the bridge across the South Saskatchewan River to the booming downtown where the mining companies that give the provincial economy its snap are headquartered, and out toward the highway leading west to the ghost towns left when the rail lines stopped running. Then, as he has done Monday through Friday for the past sixteen years, he heads up the stairs.
Past posters for big-name acts and artists I’ve never heard of, he walks over skanky carpet where the smell of pipe tobacco mysteriously lingers. The higher he climbs, the more the vintages of the artists on the walls recede in time. Until, at the second-floor entrance to the shop, a man who bought his first LP at a Woolco department store at age thirteen faces the covers of albums that hit the stores before he could ride a bicycle: The Times They Are a-Changin’, Abbey Road, Summer Days (and Summer Nights!!), Surrealistic Pillow.