Chapter 3
Brad talked Vince into a beer. They tracked down the hotel bar and found a corner table to talk over project details. What the specs called Preliminary held top priority, yet they agreed that the Preliminary made up such a tiny component of anything you’d call a project. A hundred kilos of sulphur would be nothing more than an equipment functionality test. Any Phase mentioned after that remained undefined. Should have it done in the next few days. They’d be flying home in a week, as far as they knew. But looking at each other, they wondered why the client would bring them all the way to Africa just for that.
They both shrugged.
“Whatever.”
“Yup.”
“Brad, you got me curious.” Vince took a swig from his second beer. “How did you get into flying?”
Brad beamed. “You play crib?” He dug into his device bag, and tossed a game board shape of a number 29 on the table. “Work time’s done and now I will tell you my tree climbing story. But only if you fill me in on your life.”
“I got no life, but yeah sure. You got pegs?”
“Yes sir, check the bottom of the board. Here, cut for deal.” He pulled out a deck of cards and tossed them over in front of Vince. “High card deals. Sounds like you’ve played.”
“Maybe.” Vince felt a glimmer of the mischievous.
“Six cards to start, look at them all and keep four. Two down in the middle.”
“Right.”
Brad told of how as a child he would climb any playground equipment up to the highest point. When they camped up at Priest Lake in Idaho his father said right on to climbing trees, up high where branches thinned to twigs. He’d stay up in that treetop ‘til his butt felt sore—he didn’t know why. When the wind blew, swaying him around at times he felt like a bit of the breeze. Birds hung out up there, tweeting and scolding, and he looked down on them as they flew by instead of up.
“You flew the treetops.” Vince pushed his finger at the card deck.
“No.” Just a feeling, there, Brad told him. “That’s not flying.” More like something he could never put words to, but kinda like when you fit in with everything. Some kind of an up-in-the-air freedom, like those birds. You know, when you feel totally connected with who you really are. “You never feel like that?”
Vince glanced up, staring. “Not really. Maybe. No.” Authority had said not allowed, and you always listen to authority, he knew that. Except he spent that summer in Montreal.
“Cut?” Brad split the deck. He brightened when Vince declined.
“Well whatever they supplied us here for a balloon, you gotta come up. That Preliminary requires basic atmospheric tests and they have to take place at elevation. It’s cool, man, up there in the sky. You look down, I mean straight down! Like those guys that jump from the edge of space. I’d never go up where they go but still it’s a top down view of our planet. And if you like the balloon, I got my wing with me and another shipped and on the way. Come up for a flight, Vince.”
Vince looked at him, unconvinced. “What happened after the tree.”
As Brad dealt out cards, he told of his teenage discovery of gyrocopters. Only on a movie screen, but when he first saw that pilot in Mad Maks flying that little gyrocopter Brad was blown away. “Now that guy had it all. So much better to be a pilot up in the air than stuck down on the roads in the Maks truck. I never forget that image of a machine flying deep into the blue sky beyond the truck tractor. Why would anyone not want to fly? No way a kid’s gonna get a vertical prop unit, but wow!” A couple years later when he and his buddies hung out at the motorbike shop, he heard the owner talking about the weekend coming. A trial-and-learn guy was coming from Seattle with hang gliders. Now that turned out to be flying! He got his hands on a wing he could pay for then, and found a local hill for launching. His friends stuck with motor-biking, so he learned to fly trial-and-error on his own. Genius that he was, he trialed an install of wheels on the control bar to smooth out awkward landings. One time, he ran at top launch speed and tripped over frontwards dragging all the way down slope with those safety wheels just a spinning. No brakes, so he was dodging rocks all the way. Exhilarating maybe, but definitely poor design.
“We learn.” Brad grinned. “Some things by just trying them out, hey?”
“I suppose.” Vince picked up his cards, recalling the how-to of this crib game. He looked at Brad. “You got a lot of guts.”
Brad’s bright grin widened.
“I play first, right,” Vince said.
“Yup. Try it out ‘til it fits,” Brad said. “That’s what my dad would always say.”
“Four.” Vince placed said card.
Brad looked at him, following with his own four and pegging two points.
Vince laid a seven down. “Fifteen two.” He pegged. “So your father knew you did all this. And he told you great.”
“Never told him about that down slope drag, but yeah, dad’s great. We’re buds.” Brad nodded as he placed a King. “How about you?”
Vince sighed. “My father’s the Senior Engineer and CEO of GeoChem, that’s the company I represent here. He lives on an acreage out in Rocky View just north of Calgary.”
“Oh.” Brad raised an eyebrow. “A successful man.”
Vince stared at the cards dealt to him. This game had predefined rules, like every other game. Like life. “When you’re the type who needs to boss the company, you are the type who needs control. Of everything. My father wants to keep his son, that’d be me, in the company. He has decided he wants a family run business.”
They played out the rest of the cards, with no more pegging but for last card. Brad picked up his crib hand.
“My father had a lot of influence on my career.” Vince sighed. “He knows exactly what everyone else should do with their lives.”
“Fifteen two, fifteen four.” Brad pegged his points along the twenty nine route. “And the rest don’t score.” He threw in his hand, face up.
“You know,” Vince said, gathering in the cards for his deal. “I can tell you one thing I find interesting about oilfield engineering. There’s no linear equation, and I don’t have any stats either, but just looking around Calgary I could rattle off a long list of people working at their oilfield jobs who are not very happy. But you know what? They’re trapped in that world of unhappiness. They have a high income lifestyle coming with oil and gas work and they have no idea how to get out.”
“Sounds like a kinda suck-ass way to live,” Brad said. “And, sounds like you have an interest in people.”
“Yes and yes.” Vince said, touching his finger to the pain at his mouth corners. “The redesign challenge remains people. How would you reengineer people?”
“Oh yeah,” Brad said. “You got yourself one major design challenge there.”
As they pegged their way around the board, shuffling, dealing and strategizing, Vince felt a memory stirring. Yes, at times he’d felt free, almost like a bird up in the air. They ordered another beer and started a new game.
“You gotta come up to cloud base,” Brad said.
“Define cloud base. I’d venture there’s clouds at a lot of elevations.”
“Ten thousand feet. Above that, aircraft regulations require oxygen. You can go that high without oxygen, no matter where the clouds are.”
Brad continued his come-for-a-flight pitch to Vince. First things first, they would have to head over to the warehouse and check out what they had in storage for a research balloon. For balloon flight you had control over elevation but not much else. Now for paragliding, you had to find lift. You needed to know the atmosphere to ride up on thermals or magic air. Another way to launch easy and find lift off was from a cliff edge. “You’re hangin’ up there, and you look down, Vince,” Brad said. “Like a space station view, just a smaller piece of the planet.” Birds know the atmosphere. Raptors use thermals; they need them. That’s why they don’t migrate across the Gulf of Mexico. No thermals over the ocean. Other birds live an
d nest on a cliff so they’re always set for any next launch.
Brad’s eyes sparkled as he spoke. The guy looked set to explode with this insane inner joy, Vince thought.
“You know what astronauts spend most of their free time doing?”
“No.” Vince shook his head. “I don’t.”
“Looking out the window,” Brad said. “At their blue green home rock.”
Vince nodded, counting his cards and pegging.
“You mention planet a lot.”
“Yeah, I’ve been thinking lately. On how we live.”
Vince mused. He leaned back. “You ever live in a warehouse?”
Brad looked at him, blank.
“You know what women like my wife spend most of their free time doing?”
Brad appeared attentive.
“My wife believes in a committed consumer participation plan, that holds supreme reality in her life. Which means we live in a warehouse, and she keeps the consumer items shipping in and shipping out. My position is finance, I finance the whole operation by maximizing our household income. Thus—oilfield engineering.”
The home warehouse had a high turnover rate when it came to inventory, with regular stock rotation, Vince explained. Carloads of new merchandise rolled in at their Calgary home, from a set schedule of forays out into the shopping world. Shipping out remained an unresolved issue, which brought up the need for storage space expansion. “Then we need a new house. Often. And each time we move, we make sure we find more storage.” Which meant a larger house, Vince emphasized.
“That’s quite the analogy,” Brad said. “You tell a mean story, dude.”
“Yeah, whatever. I mean how did I end up in this warehouse? Well, there I sit in university Engineering class with high school voices in my head telling me over and over that’s where I otta be. I aced those math exams, so engineering they kept saying. My father’s voice concurred of course. Him and his dinner table business equations. Then along came my wife. She lived then as the pretty receptionist shopping at the time for the lifestyle that comes with an engineering income.”
“We all make choices.”
Vince stared at Brad.
“Well,” Vince said. “Not really.”
“No? Look Vince, for me, engineering teaches you how to think,” Brad said. “When you’re done with that, then you decide what to think.” He waggled a finger Vince’s way. “I do think about flight design, but I think about a lot more too.”
Vince scowled. He pushed the cards about on the table. “So, up in a tree you can be a free bird.” His finger stopped suddenly. “You know what I remember most, Brad? From engineering? First year and first year only they give you an optional class. You know what I elected? Archeology 101, The Origin of Humans. Now that was one fascinating topic! Did you know we all came from right here; that our species developed here in Africa? We humans came out more than once, you know, but always out of this place. Africa.”
Brad watched him, listening.
“I played this math game all through engineering with a running analysis of my grades. I don’t know why but back of my mind said keep minimum grades for grad school. I always put just enough effort into engineering to hit that admittance target. Most amusing part of engineering was tracking my own grade point average. Stress and strain equations were, oh god boring.”
“I bet that arky class helped with your GPA.”
“You got that right—I got an A.” Vince massaged the corners of his mouth. “And there’s no A+ on that grade scale.”
“Let me tell you something, Vince.” Brad leaned towards him. “That, my friend, was passion. When you put your whole being into something, that’s what it is. Not because of what some school teacher tells you. Or even your dad. You’re never gonna feel happy following directives. Unless you’re a soldier, which counts neither of us.”
“Yeah, well anyway I did fly free.” Vince sighed, staring. “Once or twice.”
“That archaeology class?”
“Nope, more.” Vince looked at him. “I worked one summer job in Montreal. Nights at a punk bar, Foufounes. Nothing to do with math, just wild dancing and a lotta French.”
“Cool.”
“Never forgot. So a decade of engineering, and I walk into my father’s office one day and quit. Kind of. I went back and did that graduate degree. Man, so many optional classes. I learned how to structure grammar in French. Of course who speaks French in an oil patch job? I heard that over and over. And an ancient civilizations class, so cool. My wife screamed of course.” He winced. “But I crunched the people numbers and wrote a thesis on human behavior. Anyways, I had that bit of free bird time.”
“Fits with your reengineering people idea,” Brad said.
“My graduate supervisor told me one thing I’ll never forget. In anthropology, there’re beliefs and there’s behavior. These two human factors correlate at times, but often they don’t. They are independent variables, and both measurable. Did you know that? People say one thing and do another.”
“Some might just say ‘no shit’ to that,” Brad said.
Vince stretched his mouth sideways, realizing he would have to work out the pain of this persistent unfamiliar smile. “But all the time at home it was, ‘What are you gonna do with a degree in arts? For christ’s sakes. Should have got an MBA.’ My father would say that. My wife went on a silent spending spree. She set us back a couple years on the next house mortgage. Oh well, that’s what I did.”
“Yeah.”
“I tell you, forget chemistry.” Vince went on. “We need a faculty of people engineering. You know you can analyze social issues, and evaluate trends in human behavior? You know human behavior is so complex you best run statistics? You can analyze a lot of the story of that species that came out of Africa.”
“You never switched careers?”
“When I said ‘kind of quit’, well, my father had a compromise. I do the degree, then I come back to the company. Anyway, getting a Calgary job in social science would not pan out. With maximizing income as primary to meet my wife’s lifestyle, engineering was the best option and holding shares in a private family business. Voila, GeoChem. Anyway, I want my daughter to see a good family model.”
“Is she seeing that?”
Vince shut his eyes for a moment. When he opened them, he was staring down at the table.
“Maybe you were meant for something else.”
“Yeah, no shit. No shit. Look, bottom line, I got a daughter, and I just want to keep her in my life. Just gotta toe that line and pay the bills.”
“You know, Vince, I got a feeling about this project.” Brad tapped his finger lightly on the table. “You just might get yourself a whole new line to toe.”