On back another couple of decades

IN THE CREEK

During the early 1970’s I was working as a construction mechanic and foreman at an earth moving concern. This company moved dirt. We built levees. We remodeled pumping stations. We dug drainage ditches. We cleared land, and we filled in ditches. This meant that we had plenty of big earth moving equipment. This also meant it all had to be repaired constantly and usually where it sat at the job site, in whatever type of weather the season brought. During those years I developed a theory about machinery that has held true to this day. Essentially, “Time and friction have an affect on moving pieces of steel” This means that everything eventually breaks over time. Mostly the timing of when it breaks depends on how hard you work it and how well you oil it.

If it was possible, we brought equipment for repair back to the main garage in Oakville Iowa. This is up the river about 20 miles from Burlington. Cranes would tip over, or be overloaded, or smashed in transit, and I would dutifully cut out the bad section of boom, and weld up new sections. Semi tractors would get piled up in the ditch, and I was the one who would straighten them out. The cranes and dozers at the job site always needed a morning greasing and a noon time fueling. I got to do that. If a crane broke a clutch or a brake for the house to spin on, I would do that type of work in the field. Now we are talking about some pretty big pieces of equipment, and it comes to me that I never really understood how big and heavy this stuff actually was until a bulldozer blew out the clutch brakes for the main drive.

This was a Euclid (Yuke) tractor with a separate V-8 diesel engine for each track. It had three gears forward, and three gears back. The blade had to be moved separately from the main unit during transport. It wouldn’t fit onto a regular highway. Well anyway, the clutches that delivered power from the engines to the tracks had been burned out by a cowboy operator who never got the hang of just putting the thing in gear and pushing dirt. The only way to get to these clutches was up from the bottom, between the tracks. There was a “Splash-plate” between the tracks to keep debris out of the works. The plate was about 5 inches thick, and had a series of large bolts holding it in place that had heads larger than any tool I owned. So, the first order of business was to flame out a wrench. That it, to make one from metal stock with my torch. Crude, but effective. Once the wrench was made, the business of blocking the tractor up, and breaking the bolts loose came to play. I used a small winch on my new tool, and was able to break the bolts loose relatively quickly. I then put some hydraulic jacks under the plate to hold it up, and began walking my wrench around, until all the bolts were loose. There were two locating pins to hold the plate in position, and even after all of the bolts were out this thing would not budge. I was under this thing a dozen ways trying to get it loose. Eventually, I decided to bump the plate with a tracked pick up vehicle we had, called a “Weasel” It broke free all right. And when it did, it was so heavy that it literally punched the hydraulic jacks that were supporting it right on down through the concrete floor. That thing was Heavy! My thoughts raced back to the previous ten minutes when I had actually been crawling underneath that thing. “Whew” Well, now I had a whole new problem. How do you move a piece of steel that heavy out of the way, and plan for returning it to position. I had seen a funny picture of granite blocks being moved by slaves during a High School history lesson, and decided that there was no other way to move it by myself than to do as they had. Put a series of rollers under it. First, I had to drive wedges underneath it to get one end high enough to get a roller under, and after that it was all downhill. I put a winch attached to a building column onto it with a cable, and that baby rolled right out of there like nobodies business. I was feeling very much like the Pharaohs assistant. I still had to get the jacks out of the floor, and pour new cement into the broken place before I could go on, but I felt nothing was too big after that.

The work was hard, and the hours crummy. My boss drank a lot, and that interfered with just about everything. I felt put upon by him, and he made every effort to comment on my long hair, or my dubious friends. One day my friend had padded his crane into a very swampy area of a river bottom, and was digging a ditch with a drag line attachment. He was putting the dirt he removed into a sort of a straight pile, and when I would come out to fuel him up at lunch time I would straighten it up with the newly repaired bulldozer. Now dirt pulled up from a creek bottom is usually pretty wet, and this dirt was no different. I would wait for it to turn to just the right consistency before shaping my new levee with it. My boss came out to check on the job one day, and I was setting on the dozer just finishing up with it as far as I felt I could comfortably move ahead. He was drunk, and started shouting that the job was behind schedule, and it was never going to get done if he let us nincompoops finish the work. He told me to get off. He was going to show us how it was done. Well, he moved ahead about 30 feet and the tractor slid out of control right down into the creek. The creek bottom was rock, and fairly solid, and the intake for the engine was out of the water, so it was still running. Marvin decided to just drive it down the creek to where the bank was not so steep, and to turn, and climb out there. It really was a working plan, except for the large granite rocks that got under the carriage and broke the track. Now Marvin had broken the dozer. It is in icy water just over the top of the broken track, and somehow that was all my fault. He had me pick him up with the weasel, so he wouldn’t get his feet wet, and said fix that thing or you’re fired.

I was eventually able to fix it in place, but the water was cold, the grease was slick, I had to keep going to get fuel to keep it running, and I was not happy. The water was so cold that every so often I would have to get out and get up onto the manifold to get warmed up or just shake to pieces. The broken part was at the bottom of the track, and that meant any fixing had to be done in whatever burst of time that I could hold my breath. I eventually got the broken piece of track to the top, and made the repair. I then drove it up the bank, as in the original plan, and then just kept on driving it on back to town, because that jerk had taken the truck and left me out there in the middle of the night. All of the time I was making this repair, there was a thought that kept revolving through my mind. “There has just got to be a better way to make a living.” I had said it over and over in my mind a hundred times. I had put the emphasis on every single word. It all made sense, and there was no part of it that did not make sense. Soon afterward, I sold all I owned, and went off to the University of Iowa to try something very different from what I knew.
Steve Forrester