Near the HOGSBACK, Alta.(Staff) – After a day on the dusty trail in 30 degree heat there is nothing better than to undress and climb under a shower with 16 other men, women and children, all perfect strangers.
“We may all have been strangers when we got here, but that soon changed,” said Karen Rispen of Three Hills, Alta., when describing the shower trailer that accompanied the Western Stock Growers Association Centennial Cattle Drive last month.
Separated by plastic
The trailer provided 17 shower stalls separated only by bathroom variety plastic curtains that offered limited privacy – unless a good wind was blowing, the main door opened a crack, a curtain wasn’t slightly torn, if the bathers didn’t slip on the floor, kids didn’t run around pulling curtains open, shower neophytes didn’t try to leave early or fellow washers weren’t over two metres tall.
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The sign outside the converted highway tractor van was explicit in its instructions, “No peeking without permission.”
The bathers trooped into the 15-metre-long van partially or fully clothed, but barefoot. Curtains would be drawn between the participants and clothes stripped off.
After a shower of two minutes, the water would suddenly come to a stop, then resume, marking the one minute warning to “get the soap off” before the next group of hot, sweaty bodies would be eager to experience again what it felt like to be clean.
Everyone’s a comic
One-liners filled the shower van as inhibitions dropped like shorts to the floor:
“Hey, whose horse is this?”
“Just ignore the six-foot-five guy beside you, Miss.”
“I just dropped my soap under your curtain, so I’m coming over to get it.”
“Hey you, put that mirror down (pick that mirror up)!”
“What do you mean, they’re out of water?”
“Open the door, we’re drowning in here.”
“Oh I’m sorry about the curtain, I thought you were my wife, husband, sister, brother, cousin, father, mother, friend, a boy, girl, someone I know, don’t know, etc.”
“I’m feeling claustrophobic. I need to get out of here right now. I’m going to make a run for the door and I promise not to look.”
Linda Stuber, co-owner of the oil and gas well service company that operated the shower, said the conversion from freight van to shower took only four days and a lot of volunteer labor.
“The water was heated by a Medicine Hat company and we haul it through the base to the day’s site,” she said.
The dust was washed from 100 bodies every hour from 2 p.m. to 10 p.m. every day, leaving only a few hours for a team of people to pack up and haul the unit to the next site. Each morning another 20,000 litres of 35-degree water had to be hauled from Medicine Hat.
“These are 14-hour days for us but you sure do get to meet all the people here and the ones we don’t see here we probably wouldn’t want to,” said Travis Stuber, as he controlled the flow of water to the trailer.
