A Good Day's Work (12 page)

Bill Bennett Sr., who worked twelve-hour days and was married to the same woman for forty-five years, had no time for servicing bored married ladies. By the time his only son started tagging along on the route Bill was driving a step van, so called because of the ease with which it allowed the driver to step in and out from behind the wheel to make deliveries. It was built by the Detroit Industrial Vehicle Company. DIVCO produced trucks for bakers, laundrymen, even paper boys. In the 1950s and 1960s, anyone who delivered anything probably drove a DIVCO truck. Starting in 1937 until production ceased in 1986, DIVCO trucks were essentially designed the same way: an all-steel body, a bumper-less, streamlined bulldog front, a drop frame that allowed the driver to drive the van while standing instead of expending all that energy getting in and out of a seat.

My guess is that Bill Sr. drove a Series 1 DIVCO van, the main milk truck on North American roads during the late 1950s and early 1960s. It packed a six-cylinder, seventy-five-horsepower engine. The controls, including the throttle and brake, were on the steering wheel. When packed to the roof, it could hold fifty-seven cases of milk bottles. Pedal to the metal, this model could near fifty miles an hour.

I never saw one drive anywhere near that fast. I remember them anyway. I was a child then and the world I recall—the clothes, the homes, the avenues, the storefronts—was pretty much the one I see when I look at old pictures of DIVCO trucks today. The street is always empty, it is always Saturday
morning and the sky is forever streaked with blue. Nothing bad has ever happened and no one anyone loved had ever died.

I'm not alone in this fantasy. At vintage auto shows all across North America, cars nuts ignore the sparkling Mustangs and Corvettes and surround stubby, reconstituted DIVCO milk trucks. They ooh and aah about the paint jobs, the movable seats, the classy grill, the vintage AC systems that blew huge amounts of cool air into the yawning interiors. Then their eyes glaze over in a haze of desire as they rhapsodize about bygone days. “You take a DIVCO to a car show, it always draws a crowd,” Les Bagley, director of the DIVCO Club of America, which has 750 active members nationwide told me. “You could have a '57 Chevy sitting right next to it, and it would still draw a bigger crowd.”

NOWADAYS Bill Jr. drives a Ford van with a V-6 351 engine under the hood. At about two tons, it is a fraction of the size of the one his dad drove in the 1960s and about half as big as the one Bill himself captained in the eighties. Vans are shrinking out of necessity: declining family sizes mean fewer kids and fewer kids mean fewer milk drinkers. Juices, power drinks and designer coffees have eaten into milk's market. As well, most of the recent immigrants to Canada come from countries where milk has never been a traditional drink. The upshot is that Canadians now drink about half as much milk per capita as they did twenty years ago. But it's the rise of the supermarket that really killed the milkman. In the United States, 80 percent of retail milk sold during the 1950s was
home delivered. Today it's less than 1 percent. In the United Kingdom and Wales, doorstep deliveries now account for 10 percent of milk sales. No such exhaustive statistics are available in Canada. But it's safe to say that the downward slide has been just as precipitous here.

In 2008 Farmer's Dairy employed six hundred people, but very few of them delivered milk. Farmer's, which started in 1921, at that point had just seventy to eighty vans delivering its products across Nova Scotia, Prince Edward Island, and Newfoundland and Labrador. The dairy is a farmer-owned co-operative, which means the profits go back to the farmers who produce the milk. That's admirable. But it also means that drivers are independent contractors who are paid a volume-related commission and don't receive a salary, paid vacations or any other benefits.

The hard-working ones, like Bill and his wife, Blanche, do okay. “Let's put it this way,” he says as we head for the top of Clayton Park, a leafy, established Halifax suburb. “Each one of those cases is worth four dollars and this van is loaded to the back five days a week. I could buy a motor home for sixty-five thousand dollars. I bought this van. I bought another van. I own a house and a camp. I didn't finish high school, but no one in this family has ever wanted for everything.”

He parks, jumps out, opens the back doors and climbs into the back of the van, which is separated from the front by a partition. A tinfoil-like insulation lines the walls, which are otherwise adorned only with a 2009 printing company calendar. The refrigeration system hums, rattles and cools. The boxes of product reach to the ceiling and extend right out to the doors. (In the fall of 2009 the Farmer's line included various
kinds of milk, cream, yogourt, juice, sour cream, margarine, butter, cheese and various other spreads.)

There's nothing haphazard about the loading process: the night before, Bill calls in his order to the dairy. At midnight a forklift carries his load out. Single-handedly, he fills the back of the van in the order in which he expects to unload it: first the big boxes of cream and yogourt for the waterfront restaurants that he will visit at the end of the day; last the one percent milk for the homes in Hammonds Plains at the start of the route. All told, it takes one hour and twenty minutes to load the van up. The hardest part of a long, physical day.

In a perfect world, because of such loading precision he wouldn't have to shift cartons around after hopping into the back of the van. He wouldn't have to squeeze himself into impossible spaces. He wouldn't have to contort his body to reach things that weren't where they should be. He would simply grab the first box he saw. Then, like a running back hitting a hole, he would cradle the milk in the crook of his arm and take off in a bandy-legged trot up the driveway. The first time I see him do this I think he's showing off. But he jogs back too, marks something down in his worn-out scribbler, then guns the van a ways down the street, stops and does it all again.

Like many of us, there's part of Bill that loves the night. The way stars glitter and how sounds—the rustling of trees, the buzz of an electrical transformer—expand to fill the air. Most things and people look better in the dark. The mundane becomes mysterious, sad, maybe even a bit magical. Before the streetlights blink off, for example, Bill might glimpse a raccoon waddling across a lawn or a deer kicking through the leaves. Once he found a drunk lying in the middle of the road
and called 911 for the person's own good. Another time he got rousted by a police squad car after asking a girl walking along the side of the road whether she needed help.

Don't get the wrong impression: if this part of the world is any indication, home milk delivery is now mostly the indulgence of comfortably off, two-income families willing to pay extra for the convenience of not having to drive to the supermarket. Cars with plenty of warranty sit in the driveways. Though wilderness lies at the end of the cul-de-sacs, chaos seems distant and unknown. From these homes hours from now husbands, wives and schoolchildren will emerge, flinging on their coats, blowing kisses and slamming doors.

It will be 5:30 before a few early-morning joggers and the occasional paper boy—now, of course, a middle-aged man or woman—start to materialize. Until then Bill's only company are the hurting songs on the radio and the counter folk at the doughnut shops where he stops for his many coffees—usually in a travel-go mug and always three creams and no sugar (“I'm sweet enough!”)—a quick pee and some small talk about assorted thoughts and concerns: “Damn, Bill, you seen the construction up by the overpass?”

Today it is clear and dry with the temperature in the low single digits. But summer is definitely over. You get the feeling that you'd better grab the good days while they last because the Nova Scotia winter approaches. We drive down hills so steep that on icy winter days his brakes have given out, letting his van slide into ongoing traffic. We glide into dead ends that stop so abruptly they surprise you. As we weave through subdivisions that I didn't know existed, modest prefabs and spruced-up century-old homesteads
materialize in the van windshield. We pass an old cemetery. Then seconds later creep down a street of tract housing without sidewalks, where no Egg McMuffin wrapper has apparently ever blown.

When people think of this country, the impenetrable Canadian Shield and veldts of undulating prairie may come to mind. The truth is that four out of five of us dwell in urban enclaves strung out along the Trans-Canada Highway, trying to raise a family in a place where meeting a mortgage doesn't require the sale of a kidney. Connection to the broader community is hard in places so young. Human contact is fleeting amid suburban sprawl where people seldom move around by anything other than car and scant places exist where neighbours can actually meet.

Know that I'm nostalgic, not wistful, about my childhood. The reality was that it was necessary to talk to a few people in the run of a day: the guy behind the meat counter, the light meter man, the bank teller, the lady handing out stamps and penny candy at the combination post office–five-and-dime store up the street. Now it's possible to run your daily errands with an almost total lack of social interaction: you can pump your own gas and bag your own groceries. I now buy most of my Christmas and birthday presents, books and CDs online. I personally make 99 percent of my cash withdrawals through an ATM and, increasingly, pay my bills online.

I know, I know. Out in the burbs where Bill today works, a postman still slides the mail in with a click through the letter slot. Someone folds up the daily newspaper and flings it on a front step. The Internet, though, is already on the verge of making those folks obsolete too. Anyone can see where
we're headed: all this cutting out the middleman may make economic sense, but even commerce, on some level, is about more than just dollars and cents. Something is lost when simply pointing and clicking can accomplish everything that needs to be done in the run of a day.

Bill may not know the names of all his customers, but he knows their addresses, their order numbers and their tastes. Some have been customers for so long that he finds himself rummaging through the back of the van and getting their order without even thinking. With the insomniacs he exchanges small talk born of a mutual fondness for the time between night and dawn. The bed-bound slackers like me get the occasional note. That's still a more real human connection than a disembodied voice from a call centre in Mumbai.

At a time when customer service means a big “how d' ya do” from the Wal-Mart greeter, it does the heart good to know there are still guys like Bill here. It's more than yearning something that provides a fluttery feeling behind the breastbone, reminding you of childhood. Milkmen aren't museum pieces. They do something essential at a time when much of what passes for work lacks value or is so far removed from the people it benefits that the link is impossible to make. Ask Bill if he feels “fulfilled” and he just shrugs. After all these years he's come to hate the brutal days. And no one would confuse what he does with the utilitarian art of the craftsman.

But spend a little time with him and the complications of his job are obvious: the juggling of orders and coddling of customers, the creative problem solving, the muscle power and stamina, the mastery of time and space. It's hard, demanding work and Bill is good at it. “I could work fewer hours,” he says.
“But I want things done right. I want things done a certain way. If that takes a little longer—well, then it takes a little longer.” Bill likes being his own boss. And dealing with customers gives him a kick. In his work—as for his father before him—there's also a direct relationship between effort and reward; the more milk he delivers, the more money he makes every week. “Do I find my work satisfying?” he asks, repeating my question. “Yeah, I guess you can say I find it satisfying.”

BILL is still trying to make up lost time as he pulls his fully loaded dolly up the nineteen stairs to the downtown pub's door. Inside, a talk radio jock and The Guess Who blare in competition over the rattling and wheezing of an industrial kitchen. He moves stiffly around in the cold locker, humming as he rearranges the shelves to make room for cream, milk and sour cream. After doing some quick calculating, he bustles back outside and climbs into the van. “I can't get at the sour cream!” he exclaims. “Boy, did I goof. Sour cream, sour cream, where are you?”