French Fries are Not French

This is a story from over two decades ago, when I was at the end of my teenage years, working at a fast food restaurant known for their square beef patties and a cold beverage called Frosty.

Location: Calgary, Alberta, Canada

Temperature: -35 degrees Celsius (-31°F)

The local meteorologist, Darr Maqbool aka Uncle Darr, predicted that the weather would take a turn and it would be a bad one, so everyone listened to him and stayed home, except me who came to work with a clean shave and a double spray of Polo Sport. The food court was empty since the early afternoon, there were a few people who lined up in the morning at Tim Hortons to get their morning fix but afterwards it looked like a dead zone.

Tom Anderson, the manager at Wendy’s picked up the phone and cancelled most of the shifts for the day, except Tiffany Mason’s. But when he put the phone down, and went to the front of the store, the phone rang. He asked me to pick it up. It was Tiffany, and I put her on speaker. She said she wouldn’t be able to make it. Tom offered to pick her up, but she said she was nursing a cold and didn’t want others to catch it.

I offered to stay longer and cover for her. I knew that Tom knew that I couldn’t do what Tiffany could for him (she looked like Pamela Anderson’s younger sister,) but Tom agreed and said, “Sure, why not? I don’t want to be alone in this horrible weather.”

At around four o’clock, Tom said he was going home because the roads looked slippery, and he didn’t want to risk it. His winter tires weren’t that good. He locked up the cash and all the valuables in his office and showed me what to do and how to lock up after he left. He told me that I wouldn’t need any keys because once the shelter was down, it would lock in place.

An hour and a half after Tom Anderson left, I made a double patty burger for myself and the janitor who arrived to start his night shift. I threw in half a bag of fries in the oil, let it sit for a few minutes and sprinkled salt on it. Instead of boxing it, I poured the fries straight onto the tray and Victor, the janitor, said they were perfect, even better than the ones his wife made at home with real potatoes and not those chemical induced bites they called French fries. We spent the next 40 minutes eating burgers, fries, and nearly expired chili. Victor told me he was from Malta and immigrated to Canada with a dream to revolutionize the medical system, but his degree was not valid, and he decided to take the job of a janitor so that his wife could continue to cut potatoes and make fries for their two sons and a daughter. I told him that French fries weren’t invented in France even though people thought they were. Victor didn’t believe me and said that I didn’t know what I was talking about.

I cleaned up everything, signed out 6:00 pm on the time sheet and pulled the shutters down right at 5:30 pm. I put on my toque, my gloves, a fleece, and then the Columbia jacket my cousin had given me. I told Victor to enjoy the night and walked out the door in freezing rain.

There were hardly any cars on the road, not a single bus in sight, but I waited inside the bus shelter. According to the timetable on the pole, the next bus was scheduled to arrive in five minutes, but it didn’t. I thought I must have missed it and waited for the next one, which was supposed to come in 15 minutes but that one didn’t show up either. I felt uneasy because I already pulled down the shutters at Wendy’s and Tom Anderson didn’t leave the keys with me in case, I needed to go back in.

I wondered if the bus drivers at the Calgary Transit were told by their bosses (who must have listened to the local meteorologist, Uncle Darr,) to call it a day, even though buses usually ran no matter how bad the weather got. I put the hood over my toque and walked back to the building.

Victor took me to the wall phone, which was hidden in one of the closets. I called home to see if my cousin could pick me up, but no one answered. I called my uncle’s work but he was gone for the day. I called home a few more times, but it kept ringing. I wondered where everyone was in this harsh weather. Victor mentioned that the next day’s flights might be cancelled, and I remembered that one of my cousins was scheduled to arrive that evening from Zurich.

“They must have gone to the airport,” I said.

“In this weather?”

“Yes, my cousin is coming back from Europe today,” I put the receiver back on the wall and walked out into the food court.

Canadians knew about ice storms, but no one experienced ice rains like those during the first week of January 1998. The freezing precipitation kept Victor and me inside the building for the next 80 hours. We pulled anything and everything through the shelters, whatever was left on the counter, a few muffins, packs of condiments and croutons for salads. We drank stale coffee left by the morning customers and I was glad that Victor hadn’t done his job of cleaning up because otherwise we would have gone on a forced hunger strike.

For the next six days, the water equivalent of the freezing rain and ice pallets exceeded 100 mm in some places - more than a two-year supply but not a single drop made it to the stomach of Victor or me. Calgary wasn’t the only place affected, Uncle Darr reported on A-Channel that the geographical extent of the storm was enormous and stretched from Georgian Bay to the Bay of Fundy.

When I finally made it home, My cousin hugged me for 30 seconds. I thought she would cry, but she didn’t. My aunt made me a large bowl of soup when I came out of the shower and my uncle told me that the storm claimed as many as 35 lives and brought down millions of trees, 1000 transmission towers, 30,000 utility poles and enough wires and cables to stretch around the world three times.

“I thought I was gonna die,” I said.

“Speaking of death,” my uncle said, “I saw an ad for burial plots the other day, and thought to myself this is the last thing I need,” he chuckled, picked up the remote from the coffee table, and turned the TV on.

Darr Maqbool presented the weather forecast on A-Channel, my cousins and I cleaned the dinning table, and my aunt put her hands on her waist, “you better listen to Uncle Darr,” she stared at her husband, “or I’ll have to buy that burial plot for you.”