Yes, if you have been reading other stories about what my brothers and I did growing up I can understand how you might have jumped to that conclusion, but really, we were only observers.
But one summer, we had ringside seats while the street was ripped up.
The city fathers had apparently inadvertently failed to embezzle all of the tax money that year, and so had to find a “civic improvement project” to enrich one of the various second cousins and zero balance the tax rolls at the same time.
They decided to repave the streets around the Catholic Church and Convent in an effort to curry the religious vote for the next election. And that meant that Fourth Street, right past the front of our house, was slated to be torn up and repaved.
It was better than TV as far as we were concerned.
We just pulled up a few chairs and sat on the front porch with our feet up on the 2 x 4 rail and fists full of cookies and became totally absorbed in what was going on.
It was like a wizard had stopped in front of our house and conjured up wondrous creatures that roared, reared, and rumbled. Smoking and clanking, ground shaking and dust. Absolutely a joy for young teenage boys.
And those work crews did it up proud they did.
First driving back and forth, and then running around spray painting colored marks on the asphalt and making measurements, and gathering in small clutches to look over a driveway or a crack in the asphalt, or what not. And then along came guys with big circular saw wheels on roll-around machines. They cut lines around all of the metal man-hole covers and valve access covers on the street. And painted those covers with fluorescent paint to make them easy to see.
Nowadays when an asphalt road is repaved, they come along with a big grinder and simply grind off the top 2 inches of the asphalt and recover the remaining 4 inches with two new inches of dark black asphalt.
Back then they weren’t anywhere near as subtle.
Along came a huge tracked Caterpillar tractor with 5 massive metal ripping teeth sticking down behind it. The noise was delightful, the windows behind us rattled, the ground bounced as that thing rumbled off of the truck and onto the street.
Then right before our eyes, the 5 ripping teeth were sunk into and punched right down through the road. As the Caterpillar ground forward, the asphalt was torn up in huge scales leaving ragged bare earth behind. Another Caterpillar was used to scoop up the large sheets of torn asphalt and tip them into dump trucks that spewed smoke, but seemed to make no noise, at least none that could be heard over the two tractors.
Being keen observers, we got to wondering why all the measuring and marking and florescent paint work had been done. Cause that guy on the big caterpillar with teeth, just sunk in and tore straight forward, no matter what was or wasn’t marked.
Right when we were in a heated discussion about it, the guy on the Caterpillar illustrated why it had been done, and why he should have been paying attention. Directly in front of the house those giant teeth tore into the natural gas pipe that ran from the street up to our house.
Literally tore it up. Pulled it right out of the ground, snapped it off, with gas jetting out about 3 feet above the dirt.
Near panic ensued as flag waving guys ran in several directions and tractors and trucks were all shut off and cigarettes and cigars were tossed as far away as possible.
The foreman called Pacific Gas and Electric Company who owned the pipe.
Fifteen minutes later the PG&E truck rolled up and a neatly uniformed guy got out at the corner and walked down to the venting pipe. He yelled at the job foreman a bit. Then walked over to one of Mom’s Flowering Plum trees and reaching up broke off a small branch about the same diameter as that pipe.
He pulled a pocket knife out of his pocket and whittled the end of the branch down, then shoved the tapered end into the open end of the jetting gas pipe and wrapped some tape around it to hold it in place. That PG&E guy must have forgotten to use part of his vocabulary, because he went back to yelling at the job foreman again.
I think Jeff was taking notes on some of the more creative expressions.
Then as the PG&E guy started to finally lose steam he sarcastically told the foreman to see if he could keep from wrecking anything else and a gas crew would be out at the end of the day to repair the pipe.
The PG&E guy piled back in this truck and drove off. Work had been interrupted for most of 45 minutes.
I have noticed in my life that joy seems to shine in all directions. Up, down and sideways. Think of pictures of beautiful beams of light slanting from behind a cloud, or the graceful arch of colors that is a rainbow. A gleeful look on a child’s face. It’s infectious.
Not so displeasure. That there stuff must be a lot heavier than joy, because it just always flows downhill. And while known to cause puss and sores, it is an entirely different type of infection.
And so, before the PG&E truck had faded from sight, the foreman was “reviewing” the situation with the Caterpillar driver complete with hand punctuation marks. Looked to me like the Caterpillar driver beat a retreat to his machine before the Foreman was quite done.
You could tell because the foreman had some left over punctuation marks to use behind the operator’s back.
As work resumed we watched the operator carefully lifting and lowering the teeth based on all those paint marks and so all the various manholes in the street along our block survived his machine’s onslaught, and ultimately the manhole covers sat elevated above the dirt in the sunshine with short pipe stubs running straight downward into the packed dirt of the street.
In fact, my brothers and I were out in the street looking those over as the crew had moved onto the next block down when we were treated to two critical life lessons.
The first being that like any other animal, the human animal is a creature of habit and is basically lazy (read personal energy efficient) and unless you kept that in mind, you will never understand how to deal with people. That became apparent when we watched the Caterpillar driver just sort of naturally lift and lower the teeth less and less often as he worked along the street until he tore up a second natural gas pipeline down the next block.
The second lesson is that it is often times better to find a way to keep moving and confess to your crimes later, than it is to stop all progress to confess immediately.
This torn up pipe didn’t prompt any phone calls, nor language lessons, and definitely no 45 minute delay. The foreman walked over to the closest tree, tore off a branch, whittled it to fit, pounded it in place, and the crew just kept humping towards Miller time. After-all, the gas line repair truck was already scheduled.
Yep, just keep at it and worry about confessing later. We took that lesson to heart. There are things that happened later that summer that Mom and Dad still don’t know about some 40 plus years after the fact.
© Copyright 2016 Marty Vandermolen
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