The Blob that ate Fort Liard

No good deed goes unpunished; they say. I know it is true. I once scraped the side of my new car on a telephone pole when I was giving a friend a boost. “What’s a telephone pole doing in the middle of your driveway?” I asked as I surveyed the damage. “Holding up the telephone wires.” Eddy answered sardonically. Ask a stupid question… Another time I delivered some groceries for a customer and when I came out the company truck wouldn’t start and I had to walk back to work two miles in the pouring rain. Another time; well you get the point.
“Hey Barry; the bottom half of the pallet isn’t ours!” I said as I removed the last box of frozen foods. “What?” Barry said angrily. It was nearly midnight and he was tired. “This bread dough is for the IGA Bakery in Ft Nelson. I’m not going back that way. I am headed to Ft Simpson to drop this trailer and then I am Bob tailing it back to Edmonton. I knew his switch (the other driver who usually drives while Barry sleeps) was MIA so I knew he was tired. “Can I leave it and have the other driver pick it up on Thursday?” I looked into his eyes they were underlined by dark circles. We depend on these drivers in the north. We depend on them and we take care of them. “Sure Barry. I’ll keep it here, it will stay frozen like a rock. “Here meant the unheated loading dock at the back of the store. I could close the inside doors in winter and use it as an emergency freezer. Barry helped me pile the cases against the outside doors. At forty below they would be frozen better than in a commercial freezer. The boxes were about two cubic feet. That is to say about as big as an ottoman. There were a dozen or more of them. “Thanks man, you rule!” said Barry as we finished. “Yes.” I replied “But only here in my tiny kingdom!” I wished him goodnight as my assistant Ron and I went home for a few hours sleep. We had to be back here in less than eight hours.
“You ever hear of a comb?” I asked Ron next morning as I knocked on his door. This was our routine. Each morning I walked past his door on the way to work. Each morning I knocked d and waited for him to get ready. He never combed his hair and seldom shaved. “Only in legends” Ron added laughing. He was a cheerful kid. I say kid but in fact in calendar years he was only two years younger then me. In temperament he was light-years younger than me. He was like Peter Pan, he never grew up. We walked the short distance to the store in the crisp morning air. Ron was shivering. “How come you never wear proper clothes?” I asked for the hundredth time. “I want to look cool.” He replied. He looked very cool in a spring baseball jacket, unzipped with baggy jeans and sneakers to finish the ensemble. He was shaking like a leaf. I unlocked the deadbolt and pushed the front door in. As quickly as I had entered I ducked out and flattened against the side of the building. “What’s wrong?” Ron asked his eyes wide. “It’s as hot as the fire of hell in there!” I said loudly. Doubting me or wanting to see for himself Ron walked in. He was back out like a shot. He dropped to his knees and gasped for breath. “You weren’t kidding it’s roasting in there!” He was panting for breath. “What happened?” He looked at me like he looked at me for all things. I felt like a Father to him sometimes. I looked at him, my mind racing. “If I had to guess I would say the high limit went on the furnace.” I replied. Wait for it, I thought. “What is a high limit?” Ron asked. I knew it. “A high limit is a safety feature that shuts the furnace down when the thermostat fails.”
I was working out in my mind what to do next. The thermostat and emergency cut off switch were in the back room. To get to them I would need to shut off the alarm which was in the office. The place has very hot and the air was not breathable. “You stay here and keep the door open. I will crawl to the back down low where the air is cooler. I will shut off the alarm and kill the furnace. “I took a deep breath and made my way in. I shut off the alarm but had to make my way out immediately. I was bathed in sweat when I hit the minus forty air. I gulped huge lung full’s of air and sat on the step. “I can’t even hold the door open.” Ron said. He too was bathed in sweat. I made another dash and this time I killed the furnace. I returned outside, hugely relieved. “That’s killed the heat source. At least there is no more risk of fire.” We sat on the steps and cooled off. “It will take hours to cool down in there.” Ron said unhappily.” I have orders to do today. “I thought for a minute. “We could open the front and the back doors and turn on the fan.” I replied. The store was equipped with a huge fan that was meant to keep the place cool in summer. It didn’t but it kept the flies busy.
We waited twenty minutes for the temperature to drop a bit and walked in. It was like there had been a fire or something. I hadn’t considered what the high temperatures would do. There was a pool of molten shortening and lard on the floors in the grocery department. I picked up an Aero bar it was liquid inside the wrapper and dripped from the ends of the packaging. My mind paced. Every item in the store that had chocolate in it would have to be thrown out. Granola bars; chocolate bars, cookies lots of styuff went into the bin. But the shock I got when I opened the front door that morning was nothing compared to the shock I got when I opened the receiving doors. I had forgotten the favor we had done the night before.. I was trying to ventilate the place when I swung open the inner doors only to be confronted with what can only be described as “The blob that ate Fort Liard” for there in the previously unheated porch was a blob of bread dough eight feet high, ten feet wide and eight feet deep. As I opened the door it surged forward like a living thing. Which; because of the millions of yeast in it; it truly was. It flowed toward Ron and I; albeit it was a slow flow. We dashed back as a wall of dough slumped into the room and surged across the floor. We were up to our wastes in the stuff. The empty boxes stuck out of the mass like flotsam in some giant flood. “No one in head office is going to believe this!” I said looking at Ron. “I don’t believe this!” He said holding one foot in the air and picking dough out of his sock.
Our eyes met in one long glance and we realized how ridiculous each of us looked. We both began to laugh. We were standing up to our waists in bread dough roaring with laughter when my friend Rick, jack of all trades whom I had called to help fix the furnace, walked through the door. He looked at the two of us. He looked at the sea of bread dough. He shook his head. He turned and left. Ron and I laughed louder. Rick returned to the room. “I just had to be sure I wasn’t dreaming!” He added and he too began to laugh. Then we got snow shovels and dug a path to the receiving doors. We dug them out and opened them. The store was cooling off now. We pushed the bread dough onto the snow where it froze. Rick filled a dump truck with it using his Bobcat loader. We hauled “The Blob that ate Fort Liard” to the dump. Like I said no good deed goes unpunished. But look at it this way I am still telling that story over twenty years later, so it may have been worth it.