by MICHAEL IPPEN
Christmas Eve at the District of North Vancouver Waterworks Department is always—no matter everyone’s best intentions—a masterclass in clusterfuckery.
Every year it’s the same routine: the water and sewer field crews return to the yard by one in the afternoon, after a morning spent driving around doing as little as possible. There’s iced and jelly donuts from Safeway’s that somebody brings from city hall waiting in the waterworks barn. The guys say it’s the only day of the year the big bosses think of us Ditchpigs (unless something happens to piss off the mayor).
“Ditchpigs” is the name we gave ourselves a couple of decades back. When a disgruntled taxpayer, annoyed at the crap job the guys did when they fixed a leaking pipe under his driveway, let fly a stream of profanity, proclaiming we were filthier than the swine he used to look after on the family farm in Saskatchewan. Old Len, the foreman at the time and himself Saskatchewan born and raised, arrived on site and, after the guys told him what the homeowner said, broke into laughter, took a drag off his Players Plain cigarette, nodded, and added: “I can’t lie, you are a bunch of filthy buggers. Guess that makes us all Ditchpigs.” And the name stuck.
I started in 1977. A Shiny Bum, they called me, initiating me into the club after a particularly muddy, reeking sewer repair at the bottom of an unsloped, unshored trench that broke every safety rule we never felt the need to follow. Membership in the Ditchpigs is for life, unless you quit—or worse—become a manager, but I am getting ahead of myself.
Back to Christmas Eve day: the hired equipment operators we use throughout the year drop off wine and beer via the back door so the bosses don’t see, but as most of The Suits migrate to the works yard by noon, they get first pickings anyway, leaving the Black Label and Extra Old Stock beers for us. We don’t mind: “Coldest beer in the fridge,” Sad Sam always says.
Us Ditchpigs sit around scratched and coffee-stained picnic tables in the waterworks barn surrounded by repair clamps, rolls of copper pipe (the few that haven’t been stolen to be sold at the scrap dealers doing cash deals on the waterfront, beneath the Second Narrows Bridge), and pipe cutters that look like massive ships’ wheels, to tell the same stories we’ve told every year. Like the time our current foreman Chuck ran over that old lady’s Yorkie because he desperately needed a smoke and knew Sad Sam would give him a couple because he needed a full-time job, what with his looming divorce. Chuck didn’t know he’d dragged that mangled pooch half a dozen blocks between his rear dualies until we pulled its broken body from between the tires, and all he could say as he stared at the mangled shape was “Fuck my ass,” like he always did when things went sideways. We called him Ground Chuck after that. (The foreman, not the deceased pup formerly known as Mr. Tim).
Or how Company Man passed out the time he crossed the line to Blaine, Washington to get a tattoo of a cobra coiling around a bloody scimitar. Rod tells the story himself after his third beer and doesn’t get that we’re laughing at him, not with him. Typical brown-nosing Company Man.
After thirty minutes of polite nodding and quiet sidebar conversations, Freddie gives the Italians a wink that they’ve done their due diligence. They rise, shake hands, shout out Buon Natale,and leave. They have to get across the bridge to their families scattered around Commercial Drive. Little Italy as the Vancouver neighbourhood is known. They’re the smart ones, or maybe just the mature ones. They work hard and don’t complain (where any of us can hear them) but once the shift is done, they grab their lunch pails and thermoses and are out the door like they’ve been shot from a cannon.
Not so for us Canadians,as the Italians call us. It’s not meant as a compliment. We bitch and complain about anything and everything all hours of the day, and the one day of the year we get to leave early, we hang around in this dump of a barn sharing the same worn out stories and bad jokes like they’re losing lottery tickets, with us peering at the numbers hoping against hope we find something—anything—a morsel missed the numberless times we checked before.
But there’s free jelly donuts and beer!
We stay until there’s a fight or a table gets flipped, or somebody’s angry wife calls the switchboard wondering where Shaky or Hollywood or John the Elder is. Most years it’s dark when we finally drag our asses out of the barn. One year, when I was a rookie foreman (and technically no longer a true Ditchpig and for that crime to be forever treated with suspicion), we got a call for a plugged sewer in the heart of Deep Cove. I asked for volunteers. Crickets. I grabbed Val (the whiny junior laborer fresh off the boat from Latvia who was desperate to get his term assignment extended), and headed out to do the sloppiest repair, the both of us hanging over the middle of a steep and raging creek as we cut out the broken section of pipe. We fixed the leak and got back to the yard in record time.
Crossword Bob, the engineer who took over after our superintendent Fucking George retired, was sitting against the wall, his forever toothpick jammed into the right side of his mouth, while the hardcore Ditchpigs (led by John the Elder, who used to be a semi-pro softball pitcher) threw jelly donuts at the wall around his head. To his credit, Bob never flinched as the smashed donuts painted a strawberry halo around him, though he was too frightened to suggest that the guys find another outlet for their liquid courage.
I slammed a garbage can down on the cement floor so that it rang like a gong. “Clean up this shit and fuck off home.” I was genuinely angry, as much for being left out of the game as for the mess they’d made. They did, reluctantly, and John never forgave me for spoiling his fun. I was on Ditchpig probation after that.
The year after—1988, I believe—was better, at least for shit going off the rails. Denver (on account he was a dead ringer for the singer John Denver, even down to his wire-rim specs), had the honor of taking home the waterworks truck for emergency calls. He should not have been driving. After polishing off a half sack of cheap beer he fell asleep driving up Keith Road hill. He sideswiped four parked cars, peeling open the side cupboards of our service truck like a sardine can. The police arrested him at his home. They found him asleep in the cab, a shit-eating grin on his face, the engine still running, brass fittings, tools, rags, and broken pipe-locating equipment forming a trail to his driveway. I had to take emergency calls that Christmas long weekend, while Denver slept it off at the jail. I imagine his wife and kids were disappointed. Neither was he popular with my wife, our newborn son in her hands as I walked out the door to investigate a frozen water service Christmas morning.
The following Christmas Eve day Denver did us one better. He served as a punching bag for Steroid Ed, the bodybuilder with arms thicker than a fire hydrant, a brain smaller than a walnut, and a fuse shorter than a pygmy shrew’s dick. Denver emerged from behind the cement mixers and power rodding machines with broken glasses and two missing teeth. Ed tried to deny it but his busted knuckles blew his alibi. I fired him for that, but none of the Ditchpigs thanked me, not even Denver, who became a hero for getting Ed off the crew.
* * *
Now that our children are grown, married, and moved away, I don’t need to take vacation days over Christmas. “Let the young guys have the time off,” I say, acting the caring and considerate supervisor. But the truth is, with the kids gone it’s just the wife and me, and, after forty years of marriage, we seem to have run out of things to say to each other.
After four on Christmas Eve day I wander through the deserted old barn, between shelves still sagging under the weight of long-forgotten repair clamps destined for pipes that have long been replaced. I inhale the musty-sweet smell of mildewed cardboard boxes and rancid bearing grease. When the few others (a clerk, an inspector, and a lost bylaw officer) who are still at work aren’t nearby, I sneak a shot of whiskey from the hip flask I started carrying a couple of years back.
It’s times like this I kind of miss Denver, Ground Chuck, Sad Sam, John the Elder, even Crossword Bob. Half the crew are dead, the other half retired. One of those futures awaits me, I know, and lately I’m not sure I have a preference. I toast to their memories, lock the barn door behind me, adjust my coat collar against the cold as I cross the empty parking lot. My truck engine sings: the stereo fills the cab with the first verse of In the Bleak Midwinter as I point the headlights in the general direction of home.
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Michael was born in Vancouver, British Columbia. He started writing fiction at an early age. His short fiction works Guy Fawkes Day, and Late Fruit, have been featured in Island Writers magazine and his piece Holding Back the Big One, won critical praise from the Victoria Community Arts Council. Michael is also working on a collection of creative nonfiction pieces based on his years in municipal waterworks. When not writing, Michael and his partner Stephanie can be found roaming through their garden, grandson in tow.
© 2026, Michael Ippen
Halfway Down the Stairs 