One summer in the mid-1970s, I wasn’t in school, needed a job, and visited an employment agency in east Alabama. I sort of knew the job-seeker in line before me, and they sent him to a truck stop kitchen a few miles down I-85. I wanted that job, but he got it. They sent me to a construction site about a mile past the truck stop. I drove past that truck stop twice every day I worked on the construction job.
The construction company was building a grain silo on a cattle ranch. They used a round platform with two outer walls. We’d pour wet cement and lay bent steel rods in the gap between the walls. When it hardened, we used some motors to raise the platform above the solid concrete. We were building a tube, a foot or so at a time. We were at ground level when we started, but eventually, the platform was high off the ground. A few men were on the ground, mixing concrete. The majority of the crew was on the platform. We had to climb a ladder to reach the top of the silo, and with time, the ladder was tall and scary.
We had a crane on the platform that we used to lift large buckets of wet cement from the ground. The crane would swivel if needed. I ran the crane for a while. Once I didn’t notice the cement bucket was too far off to the side from where I expected. When I powered up the crane, it swiveled several feet and pulled me off the platform as the chain tightened. Suddenly I was hanging from the crane by one hand, maybe forty feet above the ground. The bucket of wet cement was swinging from the chain below me. I somehow made it back to the platform (it’s a blur). I let someone else operate the crane for a while after that.
As the silo grew taller, a chunk of concrete several feet below the platform fell off the side of the silo. The boss asked me to hang down with a rope and patch the spot with wet cement. I said no way. My coworkers told me I was chicken, and I agreed. None of them wanted to do it either, though another man eventually did it and didn’t die.
It may have been psychological on my part, but as the platform drew closer to the Alabama summer sun, the hotter it seemed. The boss always had cold water for us. I’m not sure I could have survived without it. There was no shade up there.
The livestock company put some cattle in a large barn below the silo every night, and then let them out every morning about the time we began to work. These animals left us a daily present to smell. A man used a large shovel every morning to put the mess in a truck. Maybe they used it for fertilizer. We had a name for the man with the shovel; perhaps I shouldn’t tell it here.
The boss was the contractor, and as the job neared the end, he had a new silo construction job scheduled for across the state and asked a few of us if we’d come work with him for this project. I was flattered, but classes at Auburn University were about to start, and I declined.
On the last day of this job, I drove past the truck stop one more time and realized if I’d arrived at the employment agency a few minutes earlier, I might have worked there instead. I’m sure I’d have different stories now. I guess timing is everything.