The Teardown Shift

It takes three weeks to build the immense site for the Edmonton Folk Music Festival, and another thre weeks to tear it all down and pack it back into sea cans for storage. Folk Fest Volunteers are expected to help with teardown their first year and each alternating year thereafter, but my team (Greetings, aka the Tarp Lottery) has a plum gig where none of our shifts overlap with performances, we pitch in every single year. 

My tendency has to book the Monday off after the festival, sleep in a bit after a couple of egregiously early mornings, and then do the teardown shift on Monday afternoon, thus maximizing my use of days off from work. But it does mean I am usually pretty bedraggled and footsore when my four-hour shift begins, and this year it was beastly hot to boot.

Teardown duties for unskilled hands like myself usually involves taking down  and packing up the multitude of tents, collecting scaffolding and stage parts for later collection, and removing the perimeter snowfence.

Gallagher Park (home of the Edmonton Ski Club) is pretty big, so there is a lot of fence to take down. This involves a crew of 8-10 people first using snips to cut the top level of snow fence off of the metal posts, then rolling up that mesh (about 4' wide and up to 30' long) and zip-tying it for later collection, then repeating this process with the bottom mesh. Next, the zip ties holding the top half and bottom half of the fence posts is snipped by one person while another keeps that top post from swinging loose and clobbering another volunteer. 

The last step is using a post removal tool, a simple but clever lever sort of affair that weighs about 35 pounds to remove the 6' picket post that has been driven 2'-3' deep into the ground. This year the clips went very quickly and I knew rolling the mesh on the ground would devastate my back, so I lugged over the post remover and started uprooting them. 

It is sweaty but strangely satisfying work, especially when a stubborn post has been driven particularly deep, or into a hidden seam of clay. I got about a dozen out by myself, then another volunteer came over to assist so we could take out the other half a bit more quickly.

When I was done, our crew boss, Ross, asked how I felt about doing the opposite - with the perimeter fence down in our area, another fence was needed to keep people from wandering onto the site while disassembly continued.

I said I'd never put the posts in before, but was willing to learn, so Ross got me to grab a hardhat and ear protection, as well as the post driver. This is a capped pipe with handles that feels like it weighs about 25-30 lbs. Ross broke down the process for me - a partner holds the post in place and leans it towards you so you can put the pounder onto the end of it, you then straighten the post out to your E-W perspective  while your partner keeps an eye on the N-S angle. Then you lift the driver up a couple three fet and let it drop - no downward motion required. 

But you will need to lift that hefty bugger up and drop it about a half-dozen times per post, and there were about twenty posts to drive, each about five fet apart.

Ross went over to the crew dismantling a tent to get me a partner and came back with Sage, a girl who was maybe 15-16 years old and maybe 105 lbs counting the hardhat and water bottle. She gamely picked up the first post and leaned it over for me, and we got down to it.

By about the fourth post, my sheen of perspiration had reasserted itself, and by the tenth, I was not lifting the driver as highly nor as swiftly as I had been at the start. Sage, bless her heart, said, "if you're getting tired, we can switch out," which sounded like a grand idea.

I grabbed the next post and leaned it away from me like James Brown with a mic stand, and she boosted the driver up to chest-height, adjusted her grip and placed it onto the post. We straightened it out, and she lifted the driver, dropped it, and then repeated it with a little bit more height. 

About five posts later, the awkward driver was not coming up off her chest with its initial alacrity either, but without a word of complaint. Against my better judgement, I suggested I was probably rested enough to switch back, and so we did. 

By the time we finished, the crew attaching the mesh had caught up to us and were able to secure the new, smaller perimeter with this shorter (4' instead of 8') fence.

After a short hydration break, I was paired up with someone else to remove more posts around main stage, and that accounted for pretty much the other two hours of my shift.

The whole time working out in the 29 degree (humidex) heat, I expressed gratitude that this was not my chosen profession, and apologized to my body for what I felt was sure to be agonizing recovery the next day, or perhaps the day after. 

Surprisingly though, there was only a little bit of stiffness the following day and nearly none the day after.

But gratitude for having a desk job remained unwavering.