Synopsis

When the pipeline is first proposed, RITA, a sharp-dressed overseer from the Steelex Corporation, has a smile on her face as she lies to the good people of HARDWELL. She promises, "a breath of fresh air," and "a boom to the local economy," knowing full well what they'll truly be getting. What she says doesn't matter anyway, Steelex's prior lobbying efforts and the dissenting voices she had silenced made the town hall pitch a formality from the get-go.What Rita delivers to Hardwell is KILOMETER 72, a campsite for the traveling construction team assembling the pipe. The "fresh air" the city unwittingly breathes in is a steady import of contractors looking to blow off steam in the off-hours. Some are upstanding company men with families, many are charming troublemakers indulging in the quasi-anonymity that comes with working hundreds of kilometers from home. While substantial, the boom Rita described is felt mostly by the local bars, strip clubs, and dope dealers.Fortunately for the town of Hardwell, not everyone stationed at Kilometer 72 is a womanizing, drug-addled thug. ASHLEY is a good soul with a cool to her that makes insane pressure look weightless, even in juggling her role as peacekeeper among her crew and the responsibility of facilitating Steelex's build. Her steadiness is a useful skill, but a double-edged blade as it's often hard for her to see how close she is to buckling. For years, her exceptionally thick skin has allowed her to hang with the close-knit team of crude, hot-headed engineers she calls a second family. As she steps into her new position as project foreman, the pressure to prove herself is higher than ever, lives are on the line, and her team's worksite near Kilometer 72 is their toughest assignment yet given its hostile terrain and erratic weather.Her team might be tight, but none of them are aware that Ashley had planned to hang up her hardhat for good before she got the promotion. As a young single mother, the allure of wiping months' worth of debt clean with a few weeks' intense work has always been a no-brainer. Lately, though, the weight of leaving her pre-teen daughter AVA to live with her motherWENDY has sunk deeper into the fabric of her being. Watching her kid grow up in bursts is a miserable side-effect of the short-term profit Steelex provides, and the gap between the two of them is widening as Ava awakens to what Ashley does for a living.As a 3rd generation pipeline worker, Ashley is at war with her personal history and Cree ancestry. She knows her efforts with Steelex contribute to the rape and decimation of natural systems her forebears honored religiously, but she's compartmentalized her feelings by convincing herself that her actions never impact her or her family directly. Her conviction to ride out the job at Kilometer 72 is shaken when the ripple effects of the pipeline's toxicity seep into her mother's home half a world away.One of Ashley's earliest memories is wandering her family's ancestral woods with her mother. Each of the trees had what Wendy called a "prayer flag" tied snugly around its trunk. Wendy would mesmerize young Ashley as she filled these small, colorful squares of cloth with sacred tobacco in gratitude to the spirit world. In return, she claimed the ghosts of the forest would protect the land from harm while anyone brazen enough to disturb them would incur the wrath of mother nature. Ashley believed what Wendy had to say until the day she returned to find her peoples' territory had been leveled into a graveyard of stumps, the prayer flags stamped carelessly into the mulch. Her faith was rocked as she waited for the company responsible to face consequences, but none came.Nagging at Ashley's conscience as she wrestles with her decision to leave this life behind is the unshakeable feeling that mother nature has manifested her wrath in the hearts of people opposing the pipeline's completion.As if the job itself weren't dangerous enough, Hardwell has become a staging area for the sabotaging efforts of the increasingly desperate Green Movement. Every day that Ashley and her team inch the pipeline closer to the border, the activists' efforts to halt it grow bolder and more violent.Spearheading the Green Movement is the snake-hipped, sexual force of nature that is QUENTIN. He and his fellow protestors have garnered support from much of the country despite their less-than-legal approach to thwarting Steelex's progress. When he's not busy quenching his thirst for polyamory with his Christlike magnetism or stoking the coals of his internet popularity to draw sympathy to his cause, Quentin and his cult-like crew are busy undermining Ashley's equipment and personnel. When Quentin's messiah complex takes a firmer root, his actions become more disturbed, unpredictable, and lethal.Whenever Ashley reports project delays up to Rita, she unknowingly puts demonstrators, stubborn townsfolk, and even her crew in the crosshairs of mortal danger. Rita enlists GRADY, the gleefully bloodthirsty captain of a local motorcycle gang known as THE SOULS OF TYR to fix any problems that arise in the course of the project's completion. Grady takes pleasure in the art of hurting people, especially when he's paid handsomely to do it. In exchange for his bullying, Rita promises him a "maintenance contract" once the pipeline's been finished. The fraudulent union jobs Steelex would set aside for members of Grady's gang will ensure a steady stream of income to expand his operations for a good, long time.Despite her lack of integrity, Rita is a victim who got caught too deep in a losing game, herself. She may posture as Steelex's architect of misery, but it soon becomes clear that her plays are motivated by the unseen hand of OSMOND (Neal McDonough), a major Steelex stakeholder and aspiring politician. Because his campaign hinges on the pipeline's fulfillment, Osmond is blackmailing Rita into the kind of cooperation that makes a moral compass trivial. Too removed from the situation to care, Osmond puts Rita's life at risk when he informs her that the back-end job offer to The Souls of Tyr was yet another false promise all along. Unsure of where to turn, she knows it's just a matter of time before Grady learns he's been deceived.Back before things got complicated, Ashley knew a few of her crewmates when they were strong-willed, idealistic kids growing up along the Atlantic coast of Cape Breton. They'd sneak off to beach bonfires and watch the day turn into starry night as they'd inspire each other with all the things they'd do to better their world when they were older. Ashley agreed most with one of her best friends, TY, who felt that some jobs would be a means to an end. As long as the finish line was in sight, Ty argued, there'd be no shame in exploring moral grey areas. After all, someone has to do it. On the other end of the aisle, her friend Quentin felt that people with Ty's outlook needed a hard shot across the mouth to know how dangerous that mentality could be.Ashley's watched that finish line stretch so far into the distance that she's not even sure it's there anymore. She knows the same is happening to people like Ty who plug the wounds left open by the lonesome nature of the gig with sex, drugs, and alcohol. What was once an addiction interwoven with warm feelings of camaraderie, the thrill of near-danger, and life-changing compensation, Kilometer 72 has decayed into a hive of mistrust, greed, and back-stabbing.Some of Ashley's crew, like DEE, envy the young mother's installation as the team's foreman and will stop at nothing to make her appear incompetent, even if it means colluding with the enemy. Others, like RYAN, have zero internal conflict with what the job entails and will unintentionally mark their coworkers for injury or death by reporting to Rita as a way to move up the totem pole. As the Steelex pipeline creeps its way toward the border and the Green Movement protestors take the shape of domestic terrorists, it's not clear who will be left alive after the dust settles.One certainty, however, is that by the story's end, PIPE NATION will have woven a muddied tapestry of abandoned morality, hard-earned redemption, and the struggle to build toward a future worth living in, however that may be defined.

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Sep 21, 2023 at 09:53 PM