What follows is the tale of a night spent working on the docks in Nelson Port, New Zealand.
The sun's going down and the tide's coming up, but the shifts of nature have no pragmatic purpose to the people in this place. The earth may be spinning, the darkness may blanket us all, and the cold Tasman breeze may kick up a few more knots, but regardless, those sacks of meal aren't going to move themselves. It's time for work.
8pm. Talley's Wharf. Nelson, New Zealand. I walk through a gigantic gate and down an immense docking zone, towards central base. Shadows in the distance, huge hulking figures like statues, some spitting, most smoking. As I arrive at the smoko, I see men young and old, some frail, some built like tanks, nearly every one of them very, very intimidating. The little ones are the talkers: young Maori boys for the most part, cussing and gesturing, constantly running their mouths about all manner of activities in their lives - legal and not. The big ones are just goddamned huge, big enough to play professional sports, me thinks. They stay quiet, only fixing me with their eyes, seemingly sizing me up. I just look at the ground. If one of them talks to me, I'll just turn around and walk out of here. It feels like a prison work release program because I'm surrounded by insanely large and very, very pissed-off-looking men, and nobody has smiled once since I got here. I think it's going to be a long night.
My contact told me to ask for Bull or Wattie, so I bite the bullet and ask the biggest guy I can find if he knows where I can find Bull, hoping he'll say "Yeah, that's me" and we will both smile and I will have a moment to share with him later when I'm on the stand testifying against one of the workers. No dice. The man just points to the door and says what I figure out 4 minutes later is "He's through there". Most of the time in this country, I have no problem cutting through the accent, but that's because I've been dealing primarily with New Zealanders involved in travel and hospitality. These aren't them. They curse non-stop, and use almost exclusively slang. So as I stand trying to figure out what "Aye, Bully's frough dere, eh?" means, I take a leave and throw my lunch in the fridge.
A few moments later, Bull steps out from the "office" (I suppose there's a desk in there somewhere, but it looks like a bar urinal with pictures of ships on the wall). I know he's Bull with one look. Easily topping 350, decked in an extremely tight tank top and sweat pants gone rotten with sea salt, he's got a cigarette dangling from his lips, and he's fishing another one out of the pack (no pun intended). He labors to the picnic table that doubles as "office furniture" and sits down breathing alarmingly heavy. He begins giving out assignments to everyone, usually with one or two words, sometimes with simple grunts and gestures. One of the talkative kids he tells to "gear up for meal", to which the kid screams out profanity and saunters to the booth to get his overalls. He turns to me, asks me my name, says "Ok, Brew, you're Team 3, with this guy." Before I can point out his mistake, a wiry, scruffed, middle-aged man walks up next to me and introduces himself as Stephen. He rolls a cigarette, looking up at the fading night sky. Bull glances around and says "Alright. Now who's got wheels?"
We load into whatever transport we can find and drive to the other end of the port, a wharf revealing a towering ship packed to the gills with frozen foods. The sun is down now, purple light reflecting off the clouds and seagulls chattering and screeching, growing impatient. We're shown to a truck-sized container and are told we have to fit 650 sacks into it. We wait in silence, and soon enough, the forklift arrives, driven by Ben Kingsley himself. Completely bald, with a very small patch of beard, and cursing every other word, I find it strange that Don Logan from Sexy Beast has gone on to drive lifts on the docks in Nelson, but before I can comment, he asks me where I'm from. "Aye, a bloody fookin American, getting a bit rough in there, in't it?" I drop a sack of fish meal on Stephen's foot. "Must be all that fookin wrestlin' yous got over there!" Later, after discovering he hasn't had a break for over 2 hours, he proclaims to us "Aye, Dougie's taken 2 fookin smokos, I'm sittin here bloody fooked with nay a smoko in 2 hours, waitin on him takin his sweet time, and fook it all, I'll just fook off and the fook with all of them, I'll be right down the road straightaway, know what I mean?" He explains to us that he used to do what we are doing - lifting 66 pound bags of dried fish meal and stacking them to the ceiling of the container - but he then decided it would be easier to just drive the forklift around instead. Stephen acknowledges this by falling into a violent coughing fit that doubles him over. Later, he tells me that a few years ago, he injured his back so bad on the job that the surgeon told him he was never going to walk again. Stephen replied "Fookin watch me" and walked out of the hospital 2 months later. He works without a back brace, explaining that if he gets hurt again, "the boss men are going to have bloody hell to pay".
We work for an hour, then we get a half hour break (dubbed a "smoko" here, for reasons unknown), then we're back on, and repeat. It sounds like a nice rotation, but the half hour break is absolutely needed. By the end of the first hour of work, I'm already wasted. We unload an average of 8 containers of sacks every hour, each with around 25 sacks. That equates to 100 a piece, which means I'm pretty much constantly lifting 30kg bags of nasty fish meal and positioning them so we can fit more into the truck. When smoko comes, it comes with huge relief. We head to the trailer for some Milo drink and whatever food we brought with us. A huge sign above the garbage can proclaims "If you don't want to use this rubbish bin, DON'T use this smoko!" I glance around the tiny room and every table is littered with trash. Half eaten chicken bones, empty McDonald's wrappers, sandwiches unwrapped and attracting flies, chipbags and soda cans literally cover every square inch. I look at the nearly-empty garbage can, 9 feet away. It stands at the entrance to the trailer, meaning these men must've just finished whatever they were eating, dropped it on the table without a second thought, and walked out the door for their shift. No wonder the seagulls are going crazy. They know that just through this door, it's paradise.
"Fook these bloody fookin overalls!!" An old man has stumbled into the trailer and proclaims this to no one in particular. He strips off the one piece suit - designed with Hannibal Lecter in mind - and throws it to the ground. He turns to me. "THIS is how I want to work!" He is standing there before me, dressed in a filthy undershirt (a size too small, naturally) and a New Zealand knock-off of Umbro soccer shorts. He's about two quick awkward movements away from giving us all a peep show. He flies towards the door yelling "And if the boss men don't like it they can take a hard shit!" The whole encounter has lasted 25 seconds, but it will burn my brain for weeks to come.
We throw sacks of fish meal all night, one container after the other, moving around the wharf and loading them into whatever they tell us to. Bull oversees the whole operation, and like he's in the Usual Suspects, he's smoking every single time I see him. The work that we do depends on a lot of different steps and people, so if the kids in the hole don't load the sacks faster than we can unload them, we've got heaps of down time. If the driver accidentally runs over a brick and has to get another forklift to lift his forklift off of it, then more down time. When the crane operator nearly takes an entire pallet over the edge and into the yawning sea, even more down time. All of it provides an opportunity to watch the sun rise behind the mountains. It shows itself briefly, then disappears beneath the clouds, the day waking under an overcast sky covered with ominous black spots. It's 7am. We have an hour and a half left.
Towards the end, we've separated the men from the beasts, as it were. Stephen and I are demolished, now leaning against anything we can between containers - which are being delivered faster than we can keep up with. However, at 8:00, a gigantic man emerges from the hole. He strides down the ladder like he just got to work, and proceeds to more than triple the pace of both Stephen and I. He lifts sacks like they are pillows, tossing them 5 feet, one on top of the other, at an unending pace. He's an absolute machine. He's spent the entire night inside the ship without a whisp of fresh air, picking these huge hulking bags off the floor and tossing them up onto the deck, and now he's down here loading them off as if he's just going through the motions. At times, I just want to stand back and watch him go, but I feel compelled to at least help a tiny bit, so every now and again I grab a sack and set it down, trying to not get in his way. He sees me nearly defeated with exhaustion and says "Take a small break bro, you've been doing this all night, no worries." Yeah, but so have you. "Aye, no bother to me though, is it?"
Quitting time comes at 8:30am, and we all shuffle towards the trailer to grab our stuff and catch a ride back to the carpark on the other side of the port. Bull gets everyone around, thanks them for the work, and tells us that there is going to be a second shift that afternoon, at 2pm. God in heaven above. As we split up, he comes around asking us if we're going to be there. Almost unanimously, these men agree to come back in 5 and a half hours to do this again. When Bull gets near, he looks at me and sees a broken man covered in sweat and fish meal, arms cut through from the vinyl coverings, hunched and panting. He just raises his eyebrows in questioning. I say "I can't". He nods. I've never seen someone less surprised.
We go our separate ways, gathering up our things and heading back home. To most, that means a short nap and then back at it again. To me, I'm going down for the count, a 10 hour day sleep in which you could fire a shotgun in the room and I wouldn't be bothered to even turn over. The shift is over, the day has begun, and the clouds start to burn off. Soon, sunshine beams off the Tasman, and I stare out towards the wharf, hoping to holy hell I never find myself back there, but wondering just how far I could push myself if I absolutely had to.
Then sleep comes, and I dream of fish meal.
No comments:
Post a Comment