Building Bridges

For a couple of years in the mid 90s, I kicked around aimlessly as a temp worker, doing construction jobs that ranged from driving trucks, running forklifts, working assembly lines, on down to digging ditches. Wherever the temporary winds of temporary work blew me. That kind of work is thankless and unglamorous, and the people working it are, by and large, temporary employees for a reason. It’s the last stop before that van down by the river, and the last refuge of the recalcitrant, the sullen, and the gold-brickers, broken up occasionally by decent folks in a pickle just trying to make-do. I was somewhere in between, for sure. Always breaking up with my girlfriend, selling my stuff to buy smokes and make rent, just high as a kite 24/7. Although I wasn’t overly burdened with ambition or regret, I certainly wished I was somewhere else, no matter where I was.

I’ve seen that life from both sides now, having been both a temp and someone who has to hire and direct temps. As a lot, they haven’t improved much from when I was schlepping it in their shoes. In fact, they actually seem to have gotten worse, hard as that is to believe. Smart phones have introduced a whole new level of indolence as they check their Face-snap-agrams and get into mid-shift screaming matches with their baby-mamas. Or maybe I just have a raging case of “kids these days…” At any rate, most of them have to go back on the recycle pile as not ready for Prime Time.

Some of them I let go at the end of shift, if they don’t quit on their own. Which they often do, sometimes just walking away at lunch without a word, never to return. Still others will desert at lunch and then have the temerity to show up the following morning, expecting their job to still be there. Once I’ve winnowed them down to the not-too-awful ones, I have to find a way to motivate to do the thankless and unglamorous tasks we hired them to do, whether for a few hours, or a few weeks. I’d say I fail at least as often as I succeed, sometimes because I’m just not in the mood for their shit, but just as often because they not in the mood for my shit, or anything outside the ongoing cat-rodeo of their own lives. The times that I succeed, it’s usually because of something I learned from a guy named Sal back in the day.

Sal was a job foreman for Rainbow Valley Construction, a transplant from Buffalo, NY, in his early 30s with a wry face and a boxer’s nose, hustling in a new town and trying to make that bread. Rainbow Valley was developing a tract of land out in what used to be the leading edge of the western frontier, off of Roosevelt Avenue, just past the Beltline. It was basically going to be a clone neighborhood of low-income houses, but at that point it was mostly just 14.4 barren acres of graded earthwork, with individual lots staked off with day-glo twine property markers stretched between stakes at every corner. There were three model homes fully built and staged with furnishings, of which the rest of the neighborhood would be copies. There were random stretches of standalone curbs and sidewalks, bulk utilities stubbed up, and a few foundations waiting. Mostly, it felt like a ghost-town that no one had bothered to finish building.

Me and my buddy Sluggo were assigned to Sal to dig little beds that ABS connector pipes would lay in to connect curb-side gutter drains to houses that hadn’t even been built yet. Thankless and unglamorous ditches being dug by a couple of recalcitrant, sullen, gold-brickers like us, and it was poor Sal’s job to get us to do it. I figured that his boss Robbie, the project superintendent, must have been the heir to the Massengill fortune, because he was such a giant douche. And of the drive-by variety, which I’ve learned is the worst kind. He’d cruise around the proto-neighborhood in his pro-fit Mariners cap, designer sunglasses, and giant, gleaming “I’m compensating for something” pickup, calling his underlings over to the truck to issue orders so he didn’t have to get out, or just yell things at the crews working as he creeped slowly by. He seemed to take a special enjoyment in haranguing me and Sluggo as we were digging. Screaming at us to go faster, WTF is taking so long?! I’ve had a hundred bosses like Robbie, both before and since, and I can tell you that only the names change. And sometimes not even that, because there are a million Robbies in the world and some of them are statistically bound to be your supervisor at some point. But Sal was something else.

After about a week of that grueling work, Robbie called us over and told us to hop up on the tailgate because he had a special assignment for us. Turns out that Sluggo and I sucked the least out of the unending cavalcade of losers they cycled through the revolving door. Hard to believe, since we took 10 smoke breaks a day, to say nothing of getting high on the way to work and at every lunch break. Then again, we showed up for work on time every day—for a whole week!—which makes you a superstar when the bar is set a millimeter off the ground. So Robbie decided we were the cream of a crappy crop, and ferried us over to a remote corner of the neighborhood in the back of his truck like so much cargo. There the bulldozers and backhoes were still busy clearing lots and grading land on the far side of a drainage gully that bisected the entire tract from one end to the other. Robbie got out a can of neon-orange spray-paint and marked out a square on the bare dirt, roughly four feet on a side, and told us to dig a hole three feet straight down inside that box. He tossed us a couple of shovels and then informed us that if we didn’t finish by 2:00p, we were fired.

In the world of temp work—especially ditch-digging—you’re both inured to threats of losing your shitty job and yet oddly dependent on the regularity of shitty work continuing. On the one hand, if they fire you, you’re just on to the next menial thing no one wants to do. On the other hand, going from supermarkets, to hot-sheet motels, to warehouse loading docks, to construction sites in every corner of the county is an impossible life to plan for. How much gas will you need to make it to Friday? Less if one of the jobs lasts a couple of days. Or, if the blue-collar gods of piece-meal poverty were smiling on you, all week. Way more if you have to go to ten different places to cobble together that week’s paycheck on Friday. That’s a tricky calculus when you’re paying for gas out of the change you find in couch cushions and laundromat washing machines.

So when some asshole wants you to stay for a while—but he’s going to be an asshole about it the whole time—there’s a delicate balance to be maintained between your freedom to tell him to fuck himself, and your desire to keep coming to the same place for a few more days so you don’t have to put fifty miles a day on your hooptie that has the drivers side door being held shut with a rope. You know, theoretically speaking. So you have to weigh it out, because sometimes a bag of dicks like Robbie is slightly less awful than unpacking galoshes and granny-panties at the Emporium department store receiving warehouse, or whatever other brand of misery the next place might have in store for you. It’s a hard life to plan for, and a hard life to care about living at the same time.

When Sal came by and saw that we’d been moved off his ditch-digging project and onto the all-important hole-digging project instead, he seemed mildly amused. He was an alright guy, and seemed to think we weren’t too awful, although it was patently obvious that Sluggo and I were mildly wasted from sun-up to sundown. Still, he’d have a smoke with us sometimes when Robbie was out of sight, and BS about what a bunch of pussies Oregonians were. A favorite subject of every New Yorker I’ve ever met. So when he came across us lollygagging and generally doing haphazard job, he grabbed a shovel out of the back of his rig and joined us, which was a first.

He whistled to one of the guys on a backhoe across the gully and signaled for him to toss something across the wide, shallow ditch. The guy fired a ball of day-glo twine over the gulf, a thread unspooling from the skein as it sailed toward us while he held the other end. The twine was so bright it looked like a burning fuse. Backhoe Dude wrapped his end around a stake just back from the edge of the slope and then went back to his thing. Sal took the ball of twine and pulled it tight around a stake on our side, just beyond the square Robbie had painted, about a foot off the ground spanning the draw in a perfectly straight line. Then he started digging just under the taut line, making the edge of our hole directly beneath the string, a clean straight margin. After a minute, we jumped in with him.

It turned out that the hole we were digging was going to be the site of a concrete footing that was supposed to be poured into it that afternoon, hence our deadline. A footing is an extra thick concrete pad designed to support great weights or anchor loads to keep them from moving. These particular footings, one on our side and one on the backhoe side, were going to support a foot-bridge that people could walk or bike across to get over the main storm-water drainage culvert for the neighborhood that was about ten feet across. Our side of the gully was wedged in between trees and sensitive utility stubs that made it too tight for heavy equipment to maneuver, so the hole had to be dug by hand. But unlike Robbie, Sal made sure that our footing would be perfectly in line with the backhoe side by stringing the line across, rather than trying to eyeball it. Meanwhile, Robbie just cruised around on douche-patrol, and the highly-paid, got-his-shit-together backhoe operator on the other side of the gulf dug his hole with a few practices flicks of the wrist. Just over there astride his CAT, all permanent as hell.

As Sal worked with us to establish a crisp edge all the way around the perimeter, he learned us a couple of things about how the world, or at least this nascent neighborhood, worked. All the ditches we’d been digging—which were really just connectors that bridged various underground pipes too small for the backhoe to work on—were ultimately intended to keep water moving. That was the name of the game, especially in rainy Oregon. And that was the job of every shovel, Bobcat, bulldozer, and backhoe in sight.

Every drop of water that would ordinarily have been absorbed by the ground under the footprint where the new house would be, would now have to be diverted somewhere else. Namely, the street. But obviously, it can’t just sit there in the street, because the asphalt won’t absorb the water either. It needs to keep moving, which means the streets need to be just slanted enough to direct the water to drains. Those drains need to be slanted enough to direct the water somewhere else, in this case, the central drainage culvert running the length of the entire neighborhood, which they were optimistically referring to as the “Creek.” From thence to Eugene’s central drain path Amazon Creek, then to the Willamette River, to the Columbia River, to the sea, to the world, and back again.

But between the world and back again, people needed to be able to get across the Creek that bisected the entire neighborhood, hence the bridge and, as a precursor, our hole. Armed with the idea of our contribution to the world and back again, Sluggo and I actually got the lead out for once. Thanks to Sal connecting the dots for us, we were motivated to find another gear beyond the sullen recalcitrance and gold-bricking that kept us in perpetual hand-to-mouth mode, and we finished up the not-inconsequential hole almost an hour early.

There’s a million Robbies in the world. People that make you feel like a replaceable cog, an
interchangeable component in the world, a part that can be easily exchanged. But there are damn few Sals. People that can help you see the global perspective, the part each of us plays, the significance of our actions, no matter how small. Any time I’ve ever succeeded with a temp, it was when I was able to connect those same dots for them. Because I’ve never forgotten the difference between Robbie and Sal: One told me I was just a ditch digger, but the other showed me that I was actually a bridge-builder. 

If someone will show you, and you have eyes to see, that makes all the difference in the world and back again.