MANICHAEAN
11-06-2010, 02:22 PM
A BAR IN CANADA.
The Podollan Bar in Fort McMurry was my second home for what seemed like two unending winters & the briefest of warm months known to man. The beer was good and cold. Real cold. This was ok in the summer when daylight unnervingly disappeared at about 10.30pm. If you were lucky, you got to see the Northern Lights as you walked home. But the winters, that was something else. I would get back from the Oil Sands, slip into the apartment & then straight out through into the back door of the Podollan.
Ice & snow underfoot everywhere, so you did not hang around. But then, those Canadians, they were masochists. They literally embraced the winter. Minus 35 degrees outside & they get a beer mug out from the deep freeze to pour the beer into. They thought it was funny, just like ice fishing.
I settled in well though and became part of the crowd. Oil workers in big thermal boots & multiple layers of thick clothes sitting around a horse shoe bar watching ice hockey. What else! Despite the more than adequate size of the TV screen over the bar, that hockey puck looked about 2 inches square. It flew around at the speed of light, launched by padded giants with sticks and skates from something out of Star Wars Siberia. And could I follow the progress of that puck? Could I hell! It was like monitoring the trajectory of a bullet.
Friday night was chicken wing night, special offer. There could not have been a chicken capable of flight in Alberta State at the time of that weekly gargantuan event. And Sigi, the Austrian born Canadian would sit in the corner seat and devour them with a relish.
But it was the week ends that were best. For that was when Mandy & Brandy came up from Edmonton to serve behind the bar & it made everybody happy. I never did hear their real names, but rumour had it that they were an item.
If so, they were consummate performers. Mandy was a physical fitness trainer during the week. Slim figure, hipster jeans & a bottle opener tucked into the back pocket. I never saw her without bare, slim muscle toned arms & as she dipped & rose to retrieve the beers from the fridge, those oil workers moved their heads in unison and in concentration. A bit like Wimbledon, except on a vertical plane. Brandy on the other hand was, how can you say, well stacked. But she had the disconcerting habit of leaning forward when she took your order and she looked straight into your eyes. Little Madame! It was a game. She knew you could not hold her gaze!
The Podollan was the nearest I ever got to the Dodge City of the Wild West. Mandy & Brandy only did the weekends but they made big bucks in tips, the bar was packed & in a town where it seemed to be ninety per cent male, this close band of brothers staggered & slipped their respective ways’ home through the ice, replete with alcohol & fantasying about the two bar maids.
In the morning it would be Monday again and more snow was forcast. It would be back to the cold on site and the black ravens, the horizon edge of endless forests and a wind that was like a knife on your face.
The Podollan Bar in Fort McMurry was my second home for what seemed like two unending winters & the briefest of warm months known to man. The beer was good and cold. Real cold. This was ok in the summer when daylight unnervingly disappeared at about 10.30pm. If you were lucky, you got to see the Northern Lights as you walked home. But the winters, that was something else. I would get back from the Oil Sands, slip into the apartment & then straight out through into the back door of the Podollan.
Ice & snow underfoot everywhere, so you did not hang around. But then, those Canadians, they were masochists. They literally embraced the winter. Minus 35 degrees outside & they get a beer mug out from the deep freeze to pour the beer into. They thought it was funny, just like ice fishing.
I settled in well though and became part of the crowd. Oil workers in big thermal boots & multiple layers of thick clothes sitting around a horse shoe bar watching ice hockey. What else! Despite the more than adequate size of the TV screen over the bar, that hockey puck looked about 2 inches square. It flew around at the speed of light, launched by padded giants with sticks and skates from something out of Star Wars Siberia. And could I follow the progress of that puck? Could I hell! It was like monitoring the trajectory of a bullet.
Friday night was chicken wing night, special offer. There could not have been a chicken capable of flight in Alberta State at the time of that weekly gargantuan event. And Sigi, the Austrian born Canadian would sit in the corner seat and devour them with a relish.
But it was the week ends that were best. For that was when Mandy & Brandy came up from Edmonton to serve behind the bar & it made everybody happy. I never did hear their real names, but rumour had it that they were an item.
If so, they were consummate performers. Mandy was a physical fitness trainer during the week. Slim figure, hipster jeans & a bottle opener tucked into the back pocket. I never saw her without bare, slim muscle toned arms & as she dipped & rose to retrieve the beers from the fridge, those oil workers moved their heads in unison and in concentration. A bit like Wimbledon, except on a vertical plane. Brandy on the other hand was, how can you say, well stacked. But she had the disconcerting habit of leaning forward when she took your order and she looked straight into your eyes. Little Madame! It was a game. She knew you could not hold her gaze!
The Podollan was the nearest I ever got to the Dodge City of the Wild West. Mandy & Brandy only did the weekends but they made big bucks in tips, the bar was packed & in a town where it seemed to be ninety per cent male, this close band of brothers staggered & slipped their respective ways’ home through the ice, replete with alcohol & fantasying about the two bar maids.
In the morning it would be Monday again and more snow was forcast. It would be back to the cold on site and the black ravens, the horizon edge of endless forests and a wind that was like a knife on your face.