Hilary Peach’s work as a boilermaker — an industrial welder — has taken her across North America for almost 30 years, including stints in Greater Victoria and Nanaimo. Her memoir, Thick Skin, takes readers to such unseen corners as the bottom of a cargo ship and the upper reaches of a steel plant. It also highlights the challenges women still face in today’s male-dominated skilled trades.
EXCERPT
In the middle of the industrial hustle of the Esquimalt waterfront, two enormous, blue gantry cranes tower into an even bluer sky. They travel slowly back and forth on railway tracks, picking up heavy objects and moving them from one place to another along the side of the dry dock. Everything is huge, and the busy forklifts weaving in and out of the roadways seem tiny. Two workers stand under one of these cranes, shouting into the industrial noise. To one side is a cluster of old single-story buildings that house various shop activities — the carpentry shop, the paint shop, the electrical shop, storage buildings, and sea cans full of tools. Next to the cranes is one of the welding shops, with large steel tables outside, their tops made of slats of flat bar, set up for cutting steel with the oxyacetylene outfits. On the other side of the crane is the dry dock, then the walkway, a few more buildings and some stacked up ATCO trailers, and beyond that is the ocean, stretching to the horizon, dazzling in the afternoon sun. One of the cranes groans, kicks into gear and begins travelling, a steel dinosaur with big blue legs. It is empty, its hooks pulled up to its belly, on its way to pick up a shipping container.
Running parallel to the crane tracks, between the buildings and the sea, is a huge, rectangular excavation in the side of the bay, surrounded by a steel railing. It is a hole in the ground, lined with concrete, as long as two and a half Canadian regulation-sized football fields, end to end, and as deep as a three-story building. They call it the ditch.
The Esquimalt Graving Dock is the largest hard-bottomed dry dock on the west coast of the Americas. It is where enormous ships — freighters, tankers, ferries, cruise ships, cable-laying ships, and barges — are taken out of the water for refits and repairs. There is a giant, movable wall at one end, called the caisson. It opens to the ocean, and when it is open, the dry dock floods and fills up to sea level. As long as the caisson is open, the water level goes up and down with the tides. Ships are floated in through this opening, and positioned over dozens of large blocks that are under the water. Then the caisson is closed, the water is pumped out, and the ships are landed on the blocks, fifteen metres below sea level. The caisson is as watertight as it can be, and keeps the ditch from flooding while work is being done.
The whole thing is built of concrete. Manlifts, welding machines, and other equipment are strapped, lifted, and flown down into the bottom by cranes. Workers go down through hidden stairwells built into the walls, on either side. To get to the bottom, you descend through a concrete entryway on the sidewalk, sixty-six steps down a secret passage, where there is a door. It is an eerie feeling to step out on to that concrete expanse, three stories below the sea, with the ocean on the other side of the wall, while people are busily racing around in forklifts, moving equipment. It is an even eerier feeling to put on a harness, clip into a man-basket, and ascend beneath the hull of a 200,000-ton cruise ship, where bright pink barnacles the size of dinner plates cling to the hull.
[BREAK]
For a few years in the early 2000s, I worked there, dispatched out of the Boilermakers, Iron Ship Builders, Blacksmiths, Forgers and Helpers, Local 191, in Victoria. I’d moved to the island to take a job welding aluminum ferries at a fabricating and machine shop in Sidney, near the airport. It was a big project that lasted a couple of years, and when it ended, I was in the union and put on the dispatch list for the shipyards.
The work was mostly plate welding, running a wire-feed machine. There were not many women working in the yard. There was Judy, an excellent welder who was a few years older than me, but she was often on the opposite shift. And there was Sue, one of the crane operators. Every day was a little bit terrifying, and I was inexperienced, which meant I was not always assigned the best jobs. But many of the jobs in the shipyard were lousy. It rains a lot in Esquimalt, sometimes for days or weeks at a time. We were issued the cheapest yellow rain gear, which tore easily, and I spent a lot of time standing or kneeling in four inches of water on the decks of rotting barges, with 450 amps of electricity running through an electric air arc gouger. My work day often consisted of ten hours of self-inflicted shock-treatment.
Eventually I figured out that if I put plastic bags over my socks before they got wet, and surgical gloves under my leather work gloves, and stabbed the electrified carbon straight down through the water at the lowest point where I had to cut out the deck plate, I could make a drain hole. If it was draining at the lowest point, and I started gouging at the high points where the deck plate was bubbled up, I wasn’t actually standing in the water, and got shocked less often. I didn’t know that the shipyard should be building me a hoarding so I wasn’t welding in a downpour, and that they should be providing rubber boots that weren’t a size 12.
[BREAK]
The summers were all big blue skies and shining water. Sometimes I was sent to the bottom of the dry dock and told to climb into the basket of a man lift. My partner would operate it, flying us up the outside hull of a ship to weld on some lugs, or to cut them off. But the winters were rain and wind, then snow and ice. If you were excellent at your job, which I was not, or good friends with supervision, which I definitely was not, then you could score a job inside the ship in winter, warm and dry. They occasionally did put me inside, balanced on a plank tacked to the side of a cargo hold, or sliding along in the double-bottom of an oil tanker. Usually that happened when the rain stopped, when the sky was a brilliant blue and the sun flashed off the water, when the guys on deck wore dark glasses and worked with their sleeves rolled up.
The caisson at the end of the dry dock was not completely watertight, and there was always a big puddle, called the moon pool, at that end. One afternoon I arrived for night shift and a crowd of guys were standing at the railing looking down into the enclosure. At the bottom was a young sea lion, a big male, roaming around the inside of the dry dock, trying to find a way out. He had been caught in the enclosure, swimming around when the caisson closed, and when the water was pumped out he was stuck there, at the bottom. You could see a track circling the perimeter of the enclosure, from his body dragging over the concrete. He had been in there for hours, desperately trying to find a way back to the ocean. The nightshift workers would have to cross the gangway to board the ship, or work on shore. No one would be down in the bottom that night.
“But what about the sea lion?” I asked, over and over.
[BREAK]
When it was dark, I crossed the caisson to the far side and started down the stairs. I popped out at the bottom just as the sea lion was turning a corner, coming toward me. He stopped abruptly, about ten meters away, and we looked at each other. He was panting, and I was hypnotized by his huge brown eyes. Then I started talking to him.
“Hey,” I said. “I just came down to tell you what’s going to happen. Because I asked around, and I thought you might want to know. Here’s the thing.” He moved a little ways away, then stopped, facing me. I explained that the next day they were going to drop a basket down into the bottom, with a crane, and people with long poles were going to herd him into it. He was not going to get hurt, just directed into the cage, then lifted out, set down on the other side, and released.
“I know it seems unbelievable,” I said, “and it’s going to be scary, but that’s what’s going to happen. And you’ll be fine. You won’t get hurt. They can’t do it at night because the animal people aren’t here, so you have to wait until tomorrow.” He bobbed his big head and moved a little closer. I stepped back toward the stairwell. “So tonight,” I told him, “you just need to relax. Nothing’s going to happen tonight. It was a hot day and you’ve been doing laps for hours. You need to take it easy.” The sea lion huffed. I told him to go to the moon pool and cool off, rest up. Everything was going to be OK. Then I retreated to the stairwell and climbed back up the sixty-six stairs to ground level.
When I got back to my workstation my foreman asked where I had been.
“I was talking to the sea lion,” I said.
He looked around, then said, “What are you doing here? Why don’t you go home? Get married, have some babies. This is no place for women.”
The sea lion finished his lap, then went to the moon pool and lay down in about two feet of water. I’m sure it had nothing to do with our talk, that he just went there because it was starting to get dark. When I left at dawn, he was almost invisible, lying in the moon pool in the shadow of the caisson. The next day they moved him out.
They used to say at the shipyard that you would never advance if you didn’t have the ring, by which they meant the masonic ring, the one my grandfather and uncles had. The one where there weren’t any women in the cabal. I don’t know if that was true, but I do know that you needed thirty days on the same job to get seniority, and that I was consistently laid off on my twenty-eighth or twenty-ninth day. Like the sea lion, I was destined to go around and around, doing laps at the bottom, until someone flew me out in a basket.
Excerpted from Thick Skin: Field Notes from a Sister in the Brotherhood by Hilary Peach (Anvil Press Publishers, 2023), reprinted with permission of publisher.
>>> To comment on this article, write a letter to the editor: [email protected]
