My first week up north, the two tradesmen and I were all on day shift together, since the plant wasn't running yet. On one coffee break, there was an Alan Jackson CD playing, and without realizing it, I started humming along.

"You like this music?"

"What?" I looked up and saw one co-worker grinning at me, and a second later realized that I had been humming. "Oh, I hum along to anything that has a tune."

"Kid Rock?"

"I said anything with a tune."

They say, here, you either like country music, learn to like it, or go nuts. I've learned to like it. After all, why make the effort to hate something when you don't have to? It would be easy to make myself miserable in so many ways here. Some people do. But I try to look at things in a positive light, because it makes my time up here more enjoyable.

Of course, country seems to have changed a lot since I last heard (and hated) it. They're not all singing about how they got their truck back, got their house back, got their job back - oh wait, that's when they're played backwards.

I need a love like that

My first run up north, I started to wonder if 90% of country songs were love songs of some sort - wanting, getting, celebrating, or losing love.

It made me feel very, very lonely.

I talk to my other half every evening on the computer, and a few times on the phone, but there are an awful lot of kilometres between us when I'm at work. It just isn't the same.

"Picture it as hell, then you won't be disappointed," said one co-worker, before I came up for the first time.

If this is hell, then loneliness is the main torment.

Even so, I got used to it, and now I mostly feel the loneliness in the last couple of days before I leave. Like right now... the signs are pointing to departure. My relief is here; we overlap for a few days at both ends of our runs. The 5-day weather forecast shows my departure day's weather. If it weren't for the ... flexibility of the company plane's schedule, I'd get right on the red-eye flight heading home. But delays of an hour, three, a day, are not uncommon, so I stay in a hotel and finish my trip in the morning - and am almost running through the airport when I land.

Almost?

Well, security usually doesn't like runners...