The
cult of the expert with the hegemony of bureaucracy. Father
Robert McTeigue
Back in the 1990’s I worked as a registered nurse in a series of
Calgary hospitals. My first job was on the gastrointestinal surgical
floor at the Holy Cross Hospital which was on the southwest side of
the downtown area. In those days downtown was pretty quiet,
especially in the early morning, and I loved riding through the
centre of the city on my bicycle on the way to work dodging and
weaving across traffic lanes as the wind blew through the deep
valleys created by high rise buildings. Soon enough the wards and
patient treatment areas at the Holy Cross Hospital were moved and the
entire series of buildings was given over to the bureaucracy that
managed the regional health department. Bureaucracies have two jobs:
the first is to maintain the bureaucracy and the second is to grow
the bureaucracy.
Cycling to work at the Holy Cross was a continuous juggling game
as I worked shifts. Night shifts I drove both directions being too
tired to cycle home at the end of the shift and unwilling to ride to
work at 10:00 pm at night. Day shifts were easy, I cycled both
directions, while afternoon shifts Doug and I had a system worked out
whereby he drove to his office job downtown with his bicycle in the
back of our wagon. He would park near the Holy Cross Hospital,
unload his bicycle and ride across town to his office. After work he
would ride home, while I would ride to the Holy Cross for my
afternoon shift, throw my bicycle in the back of the wagon, and drive
home at midnight when I finished work. So we both carried changes of
clothes in panniers on our bicycles as well as massive amounts of
food to get us through our respective work days.
From the Holy Cross, I moved to work in the Multiple Sclerosis
(MS) Clinic at the old General Hospital which was on the east side of
the city down in the Bow River valley. There was no more shift work
so I could cycle everyday, which I did, rain, shine, winter storm,
minus 30 degree Celsius days, through afternoon thunder and hail
storms and along the unplowed and frequently icy streets and paths of
Calgary. I could make it to work in about an hour if conditions were
reasonable, but I had days when it took me at least 1.5 hours to get
to work due to icy and snowy conditions (this was before the pathway
along the river valley was plowed in winter and studded bicycle tires
had not been invented).
Coming home I almost always had to ride into the Chinook winds
which blow through Calgary year round. These warm winds (warm is
relative) sweep down over the Rocky Mountains to the west and
generally blow at a steady 25 to 30 knots. Getting home to my house,
which was uphill from the river valley and to the west was almost
universally into a steady head wind. I had days when it took me 1.5
hours to ride home as well, and, as I frequently ran out of food, I
often had hypoglycemic attacks while riding that made me vulnerable
to falling off the bicycle into the road traffic.
My clearest memory of the craziness of my bicycle commute
obsession was falling into the bus trap between Scenic Acres, where
Doug and I lived, and Silver Springs, the next suburb to the east.
Bus traps are big trenches dug in the ground that can be spanned by
the wheels of a full size bus but a car or regular vehicle does not
have a wide enough wheel base to span the trench which is about a
half a metre deep. They are used to stop cars and private vehicles
from zooming around urban neighbourhoods. I was riding to work on my
usual route which took me past a bus trap on a road between Scenic
Acres and Silver Springs on a snowy day in the early morning. As I
rode past the bus trap, my bicycle hit black ice and slipped
sideways. I fell into the bus trap and the bicycle landed on top of
me. At that moment, the number 37 bus which I took on occasional
days when even I wouldn’t cycle, chose that exact moment to come
rumbling along the road, and I managed to get both my self and my
bicycle out of the bus trap just seconds before the bus drove over
the trap. I had given serious thought to trying to lie flat in the
bus trap because buses, like trains, are slow to stop, particularly
if the driver is not expecting to encounter a human and a bicycle at
rest in the bus trap. I can still remember clearly the look of
extreme consternation on the drivers face when he realised he had
almost run over a cyclist.
There were lots of other crazy days. One day, riding up the
penultimate hill on my way home, I hit black ice again and flew off
the bicycle out into two lanes of traffic. Another day, after a
terrifying ride down icy and snowy roads to gain the bicycle path
that ran along the river valley I found the entire pathway covered by
a glassy, solid 5 centimetres of ice, as smooth and slippery as the
local ice hockey rink. The Chinook winds had melted the snow on the
path but the banks on either side of the path had prevented the
melted snow (in other words, water) from draining away and, as night
fell, the entire pathway for at least five kilometres had frozen
solid with 5 centimetres of hard water ice. Crampons would have been
more use than a bicycle. I pushed the bike all the way to work. I
was a bit late that day.
Multiple days were marked by thunder, lightening and hail during
the summer months. Sometimes I just kept riding, other times the
hail was big enough that I would have to seek out shelter until the
storm passed over. Strangely, I never really worried about being hit
by lightning perhaps because I had been hit by lightning on a climb
of Mount Athabasca already.
Winter riding required multiple layers of clothing such that
moving was difficult. I had lined lycra tights which had a goretex
layer stitched to the front (a unique item made by Mountain Equipment
Coop which were absolutely brilliant but of course disappeared from
their inventory when the bureaucracy took over and the only thing MEC
reliably sold was yoga clothing). On very cold days, I wore another
pair of full goretex pants over the top of these, and put shoe covers
on my leather hiking boots (sneakers were too cold) which MEC also
made at the time. The shoe covers also were a genius item but they
too disappeared once MEC became a store that sold almost exclusively
barbeque clothing (a term coined by my mate Robin Tivy). On top, I
wore a long underwear (prolypropolene at the time) long sleeved top,
a lightweight fleece, then another jacket (home-made) that had a
thicker fleece layer with a windbreak layer stitched on as an outer.
A muff for the face (otherwise you would get frostbite), a homemade
beanie (called a toque in Canada), my bicycling helmet, a headlamp
(plus lights on the bicycle), and two pairs of mitts, an inner fleece
layer and outer wind break layer. It took me about half an hour to
dress and undress at either end of the commute. Ski goggles were
sometimes useful to prevent your eyelashes from freezing.
The most batshit crazy thing I remember about this time was an
online survey tool that MEC developed and published on their website.
This was, of course, the early days of the internet, so it was a
pretty rudimentary questionnaire which purported to measure your
environmental impact. Mine, disturbingly, was rated high. You might
wonder, how it could be high considering I never drove a single
kilometre during the week and prepared all my own food. I even did
my weekly shopping on foot, carrying a large backpack up to the local
store and bringing it home loaded with the weeks groceries. It was
big backpack (80 litres – I still have it).
I don’t remember the exact wording of the quiz or the summary
response but the gist of it was I was an environmental disaster
because I was using up too many calories riding my bicycle to work
and walking to the shop, and the recommendation was, unbelievable as
it might sound, that I should drive to work! Such is the madness of
bureaucracy and the environmental movement. Interestingly enough,
within a year of my starting work at the old General Hospital, that
group of building also became the home to more bureaucracy and our
entire clinic moved to the Foothills Hospital. This had the
inadvertent effect of lowering my environmental impact because I
could cycle to work in a mere half hour.
