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(Continued from part two)

Christine, Claudius and other striking municipal workers occupy a circle of fold-out chairs, trading jokes and work-related horror stories.

They are each wrapped in blankets against the cold, which is damp but still. The temperature reads 13 degrees Celsius.

“The next few hours are the longest,” Christine says. “We’re just bodies here.”

At 2:30 a.m. a rented van pulls up to the site. After a while a man climbs up to where this small group is sitting.

“How’s it going guys?” he calls out.

“Cold and miserable,” says Christine. “How are you?”

“That’s the consensus.”

The man is wearing shorts.

He says he is making rounds of the 20 other overnight picketing crews in Scarborough.

By the fire Dave is talking with two other picketers, a man and a woman.

“I think CUPE’s hoping for a short strike,” says Dave. “They can’t afford to keep us out here for long.”

“We’ll be going back with a bitter taste in our mouth,” says the woman.

“But I love my boss,” says Dave. “He’s a cool guy.”

“I want to go back to work,” says the man, “but I’m not looking forward to it.”

“Where are you?”

“Parking tickets, North York.”

“That’s a wild one,” says the woman.

“When I go back it’s going to be a nightmare.”

Later Dave says, “So how long do you guys think we’ll be out here before they finish, or we’re legislated back?”

“I didn’t even know we’d be going out,” says the woman. “Maybe I was in denial or crazy or something.”

The man estimates six to eight weeks.

“The weather’s going to be key,” says the woman. “Once the heat hits the city’s going to go crazy.”

“What we need is more people like at Christie Pits.”

Dave agrees. “What those guys did was beautiful.”

It’s a little after 4 a.m. when a woman pulls up in an SUV.

“I’ve got recycling,” she says as she carries over one of her garbage bags.

“We don’t take recycling,” says one of the management.

“I got up at 4 a.m. to dump off my recycling.”

“It’s in all the papers. We don’t take recycling.”

“I’ve got 12 bags of recycling. What am I supposed to do with it?”

“Where’d you hear we take it?”

She pauses. “Sunnybrook. I went to Sunnybrook and they told me to go to Bermondsey.”

“Well we don’t take recycling. It’s in all the papers.”

A city bylaw decides how many garbage bags the transfer station can accept from each vehicle.

“First week was unlimited,” one picketer says “That was smart. Get those guys working. Then it was three bags. Next night, two. And now it’s four. Jesus, what next? So disorganized.”

And then at 4:30 a.m. a faint line of blue showed along the east horizon across the road.

The sky lightened as if in a dream. Power lines inked their silhouettes into the dawn sky.

Four picketers stood smoking and chewing gum in the orange light of street lamps. “Black Betty” played on the radio. The white moon hung like bleached bone.

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