06/22/2019
"Construction Labourer"
David Penley ©
from the collection "Take Your Best Shot"
We were partying with our visiting friends from Gaffnee Construction. They were living in town for a year like gypsies to build Trenton’s new sewage treatment plant. Glen Breen was the wizened tough job superintendent. He had been dating my Aunt Alice who was widowed three years ago. His right hand man is Lornie, a big affable bear of a man with a pot tummy. Warren was the strapping handsome chief electrician, a dashing young rogue who had a way with attractive women. Al was the preppy but sage young site engineer who interpreted the blue prints and kept the project on code. He ran with the gang and, though quieter by nature than the others, had the chops to hold his own with the older men. My father, brother and cousin Donny had all taken jobs with Glen as laborers. My wife Karyn was hired as the office administrative assistant working with Glen and Al in the small white ATCO hut at the site entrance. Glen had freely tasked her with a variety of weighty responsibilities including everything from hiring casual laborers to purchasing building materiel for the job. It seemed the construction project had become a bit of a family affair for us.
We were sitting around the campfire that Friday night at Big Boulder Park where dad and I operated a campsite, sold propane, truck caps and camper trailers, and hosted country jamborees. Dad had become an entrepreneur. I was hunkered near Glen at the side of the campfire, engaged in a discussion comparing life in the air force with that of the contracting business.
“Well,” enquired Glen, “what exactly is your job at the base Dave?”
“Well, you see Glen, I repair airfield radar sets.”
“Sounds pretty easy, eh?”
“It’s not a bad job. It has its moments.”
“Not too physical, is it?”
“Naw, mostly figuring out system faults from schematics and making repairs to circuit boards, although some of the work is heavy when we set up our radar system on remote airfields; you know, driving trucks, using cranes, hauling heavy cables and moving packing crates in the snow, that sort of thing.”
“Sounds like you air force guys have real easy jobs,” Glen taunts.
“Well, I wouldn’t exactly say that Glen,” I rebutted feeling quite affronted.
“Well shucks, you wouldn’t last two days working at my job site.”
Thinking of my workdays in the arctic in thirty below weather, sometimes in blizzards, bolting together radar sets with my bare hands, sprinkled with a few nasty flying experiences, I feel a wave of defensive anger at Glen’s ignorant comment. I thought of all the hairy approaches onto gravel strips I’d had to endure going into the arctic in bouncing C130s. I knew I had at least a little toughness in me to have coped with these things. I decided to take Glen on.
“Glen, I’ll bet you I can survive anything you could throw at me on your job site.”
“Oh yeah, what do you have in mind?”
“I’ve got two weeks annual leave coming to me and if you’ll take me on as a laborer, I’ll come and work at your site for those two weeks.”
“Okay, bet you ten bucks you can't hack it... when can you start?”
“Give me three days to set it up.”
“Done.” We shook hands and had another beer. Lornie belly-laughed so hard at our bet, that when he leaned backwards in the kitchen chair he’d borrowed from my mom for the campfire he snapped the back off the chair. He ended up on his backside on the grass. We all laughed too.
Three days later I showed up at the job site. It was a Monday morning. I was wearing jeans, white t-shirt and a brand new pair of steel-toed boots. Lornie had directed me to join a small team of guys tearing down cement forms and shifting timbers, props and plywood. My cousin Donny was on the team. He grinned when he saw me. “Boys, are we going to have fun,” his eyes seemed to say.
Donny and I worked like demons carting heavy twelve-inch thick timbers from place to place. I sweated like a pig but relished using my muscles to their maximum endurance; and felt pleased with the strength and lift my one hundred and fifty pound frame could generate. When the catering truck came and honked for morning break I gratefully lit a smoke, snapped back three cans of iced tea, and still felt the thirst for more. We got back to work. Donny was such a clown, he kept us both laughing as we worked. Still this did not slow us down and Donny and I, both hard workers, competed with one another as to how much we could lift and how fast. Whenever I looked over at Donny, he had a wicked grin pasted on his face all day.
I got through the first day, with my body sore all over but still a little energy to spare. I was awful glad the day was over.
Tuesday Donny and I were lifting and erecting steel scaffold sections up to six levels. My medically documented fear of heights caused me only momentary pause as I resolved to ignore it in a need to preserve my pride with Glen and get on with the job. I was very focused and soon felt quite comfortable hauling material fifty feet off the muddy ground along wobbly two by ten inch planks. It was to be an eventful day. About mid morning a whistle blew and work stopped. I looked around in confusion, uncertain what this meant.
“The whistle means someone’s been hurt,” a nearby laborer commented.
An ambulance pulled up in the mud below and I saw a stretcher team haul an injured man off the site. A foreman came over and told us the guy fell off a scaffold and landed onto a protruding piece of rebar, impaling his body like a stout sword. “I think he’ll be okay,” he said, “but it looked pretty bad.” The rest of us were shooed back to work right away.
I never did hear the outcome of this man’s injuries.
Later that day I heard a commotion over by an open topped concrete settling tank. Someone yells at me, “Dave, it’s your dad, he’s in trouble, get over here!” I ran a hundred feet along the concrete top deck of the plant till I came to the edge of the open settling tank. I looked across the still black water and saw my dad in his old work clothes looking back at me with strangely distant eyes. His arms were stretched out to either side and his body was tilted over the water. One hand was anchored on a piece of metal rebar sticking out of the concrete deck. His other hand was holding the tether cord of an electric submersible pump. I suddenly realized that my father was being electrocuted in front of my eyes. Dad had been working as the pump man, responsible for shifting electric submersible pumps from place to place on the site to regulate the water levels in the various compartments. He had been attempting to haul out a pump to move it and apparently the pump’s safety ground was not working. My father was taking the electric charge through his body from the pump’s handle, across his chest into the rebar. His damp work boots were providing an effective ground onto the damp concrete deck. His entire body was taking a high current A/C charge across his body and down through his feet. He seemed to be trying to let go of the pump but both hands were clenched firmly by electroconvulsive seizure effect of the lethal charge. He no longer had control of his hands.
My mind raced with extreme focus. I had seen men get shocked in around heavy radar sets, and has assisted in their rescues. There were two or three men near my dad here but they were frozen into inaction, realizing that if they touched my dad to help him they might well also be electrocuted. I was on the opposite side of the settling tank and had no insulated rescue gaff to use. But I had an idea!
My dad’s only chance was to twist his body with enough force to get the pump swinging in motion on the end of the power cord. I believed if he could get the pump to swing hard enough that way the momentum might give the device enough g-force weight to break it free from dad’s frozen grip. “Dad,” I yelled, “twist your body back and forth as quickly as you can; it might shake the pump loose from your grip.”
His eyes were like glass balls staring at me in electric fear. Immediately however I saw him gyrating his body in a frenzied twisting motion. The pump seemed stuck firm in his hands. I felt desperate fear. “Keep it up dad,” I yelled. I prayed too. Suddenly the pump broke from my father’s grip. He fell backward against the deck. The pump splashed into the water of the tank in a hiss of steam.
Men jumped to my father’s side. I sprinted around the side of the tank and in twenty seconds was by his side. He was still lying down, propped up by one of the guys. He looked white and shaken to the core.
“I’m okay now David,” his weak voice spoke. He attempted a brave smile. I took a deep breath. Two of the guys took my dad to the hospital for a check over.
“Okay guys,” Lornie hollered, “show’s over, back to work.”
I sucked back my fear and went back to my crew. More work to do.
“Jeepers,” I reflected, “for years I’ve been telling dad to be more careful with electricity around construction sites, now it had finally finally bit him hard, thankfully he was still alive - God love him.”
Next day I heard a commotion on the other side of the plant. I wandered over to see what was going on. My brother was there. He was very angry and seemed to be gathering his things to leave.
“What’s the matter Eddy?” I asked him.
“I’m fired. I’m going home.”
“What happened?”
“I refused to work on top of that scaffold without a harness. Lornie told me we can’t use a harness on that job and that if I can’t do the job I might as well pack up my gear and leave.”
I checked the location he was referring to. It was in a shed perhaps fifteen feet high. If I had to use a harness to do what they wanted Eddy to do I knew I’d never be able to get the work done. In this case I had to side with Lornie. “You sure you need a harness up there Eddy? It’s only about fifteen feet high.”
“Yeah, I need a harness, it’s not safe.”
“Eddy, Lornie’s right, a harness won’t work for you in that tight spot.”
“I don’t care, I have a right to wear a harness.”
“Okay brother, your choice, see ya later.” My brother was off the site in ten minutes. I went back to work. Friends or no friends, Lornie was a tough boss.
Even on the weekend I had work to do on the site. I was helping dad with weekend pump watch duties and had to go to the site four times over each weekend to check on all the pumps. For two hours of this work each weekend I got paid a hundred dollars. It was good enough for me.
Tuesday of the second week Donny and I were tasked to strip scaffold and cement forms from a huge concrete settling vault. Lornie told us he expected the job to be completed in a day and a half. Looking at what was involved, I figured it would more than likely take two days. The freshly poured concrete tank was like a dank dark tomb, thirty feet square and thirty deep. It was wet and slick on all surfaces, with a two-foot thick concrete ceiling. The atmosphere was heavy, damp and smelling acridly of wet cement. There were no lights and only a single hatch on top of the plant’s upper deck about five feet square, through which beams sunlight down into the dank dark vault, leaving only the lower corners still in relative darkness. We were armed with giant pry bars, hammers and crescent wrenches. We must remove many long 6 x10 inch timbers, 2 x 10 inch planks, wooden struts, plywood form sheathing, and tubular steel scaffold sections. It was heavy, dirty, dangerous and complicated work, moving a lot of heavy and mucky material down in that vault while perched precariously on the wobbly scaffolds. We faced the job feeling a little intimidated at the task ahead. Still, we were young and still full of pep and vinegar.
Donny sprang into motion. “Well let’s get ‘er done Penley,” Donny yelled. He faced me with his dirty jeans, sweaty white t-shirt, and lively grey eyes gleaming with excitement. Donny just loved this. He was such a physical guy, a bear for work, and he always had a way of getting me jazzed up. Any event, even the hardest and dirtiest jobs should be fun in Donny’s mind, and his glee was infectious. He was standing on the top tier of scaffold under the ceiling and grabbed a timber behind him. The timber came loose with a creak and Donny heaved it over his shoulder through the hatch. I could hear it slam onto the concrete deck above. Getting into the spirit I grabbed another timber and began yanking it free. Donny was motivated by my acceptance of his challenge. He began to work faster. I worked faster. He worked faster. He was making it a competition…a game. Well, so be it. Away we went.
For the next six hours we worked like demons, hauling planks, throwing out metal scaffolds, sliding slimy chunks of plywood up through the roof hatch. We worked faster and faster, into a fever pitch. We took only the minimum of break times to snarf down iced tea and sandwiches and then got right back at it. By three o’clock we were filthy and ragged. My jeans were torn and my new green patch boots soggy, scuffed and muddy. I could barely feel how sore my muscles must be due to running on so much adrenalin.
An hour before quitting time we had worked our way down to the last tier of scaffold at the bottom of the pit. As we went lower it took more and more energy to drag the material upwards through the vault to heave it through the upper hatch. Where we got the jam from to work at this pace I had no idea. I only knew that we were two whirling dervishes in mortal combat with each other and the material. The work we had still left to do in the vault would normally take till mid morning the next work day to finish, but somehow Donny and I both tuned in to the unspoken challenge that we’d not go home today until the vault was cleaned out. It seemed to have become a matter of pride. ‘Just what we were trying to prove; I had no idea. I only knew that I felt the challenge as strongly as Donny did. I felt alive, euphoric, and full of adrenalin.
Five o’clock rolled around just as we tossed the last timber out the hatch. Donny stood panting on his scaffold plank. His eyes were on fire. We did a High Five and then he lunged at me playfully. After a work day like that and the son of a gun still wants to rassle. I couldn’t believe my cousin.
Thursday I was working up on the roof behind a low parapet wall facing the dirt parking lot. I heard screaming and yelling coming from below. I looked over the edge down toward the boss’s small ATCO trailer. I heard Karyn’s voice yelling from inside the hut and then I heard Glen screaming just as loud. The two of them were going at it hammer and tong. I saw the engineer and head foreman leave the shack, shaking their heads. Glen and Karyn were still inside having a screaming match about something. After five minutes of it I heard the door slam as Karyn stormed out of the shack. She got into our red ’68 Mustang and fired up the engine. I heard the Thrush mufflers resonate in anger as the muscle car burned rubber and fishtailed off site and down the road.
“What the deuce !?’
Lornie came up top a bit later. I gave him a questioning look.
“Just Glen and Karyn having a fight,” he says. “Karyn quit.”
“What was the fight about?”
“Who knows, it had been coming a long time, they were too much alike, both stubborn, and only room for one boss in there.”
One by one my family members were getting weeded out. First dad got hurt (though he returned the next day), then Eddy got fired, now Karyn taking off. A few days later my cousin Heather took Karyn’s place. It is my last week on the job anyhow.
Three Friday nights after the bet had originally been made, all the same characters were back at the campfire at Big Boulder Park. Dad, Mom, Eddy, Karyn, myself, Glen, Lornie, Aunt Alice, Heather, Al Gibb and Warren. There were no hard feelings between any of us. Work is work, but sitting around a campfire was the time to be friends. We’d been playing some guitar and were taking a break, all staring into the glowing red embers in our own thoughts about the mysteries of life. Glen broke the silence. “Hey Dave” he grinned, “You won the bet fair and square. I gotta say, I was wrong about you air force guys. You’re not really spoiled after all.” He leaned toward me across the campfire. He handed me a ten-dollar bill folded lengthways and held between two fingers. I took the money.
I sank back with satisfaction into my lawn chair. It felt good that I had apparently defended the reputations of air force personnel everywhere. But what also came to mind was the day my dad almost electrocuted himself on that settling tank. Although I didn’t physically rescue him, it would seem that my presence, my knowledge of electricity, and my instructions to twist his body had helped him save himself. And I had known of that trick only because of my air force radar training. Why had I been there that day due to a random campfire bet in the first place? What were the odds? And what would have transpired had I not been there? I would never know, but it scared me. What was the total sum of cosmic implications of my off-cuff wager with Glen three weeks prior? I could not answer that one either. I only knew once again there are Universal Forces that guide us and sometimes intervene to our benefit through apparently random decisions made at other times.
All I could find to say was, “Thanks Glen…Thanks a Lot.”"
