At my high school commencement ceremony, one of our class co-valedictorians, Richard Burgess, delivered a speech that touched on the tricky subject of time. Nearly half a century later, still not comprehending the fundamental nature of time at all, I can now recognize a few of its many impacts. Listening to Richard’s talk I had no idea how I was about to begin several summers of regular time travel and how it would change my life. You see, I thought I was only making some money for college by working as a construction crew laborer.
The school district of my home town hired part time workers in the summer, mostly students, to help take care of facilities maintenance like lawn mowing, painting, window repairs and small-scale construction projects. I thought I would be mowing grass, but somehow ended up on the construction crew putting in driveways, sidewalks, digging ditches and laying water and electrical lines. I ended up learning quite a bit about how many things I once took for granted came to be only after a good deal of hard work.
Changes, Fast and Slow
Some of the changes this summer job induced came about quickly; learning a new language; “mud” (concrete), visqueen (plastic sheeting), forms (not paper), plumb, etc. Laboring in the hot sun ultimately left its physical marks like great suntans and hard calluses along with skin cancer, although that unfortunate change took decades to finally emerge.
It was a great time of my life when nearly every day brought new experiences and learning. One of the things I realize now is how much of the education process extends far beyond the confines of the classroom. Decades of teaching experience have revealed that, with the possible exception of Ivan Illich (Deschooling Society), even most educators never grasp the full scope of the education process. I think Mr. Illich would have been delighted to find that the particular bit of critical educational experience I describe had nothing to do with a classroom.
The Time Travelers
Something else happened to me on that job that I absolutely did not, and arguably could not, comprehend for many years. It turns out that my co-workers and I were regular time travelers. Embedded in my brain, some of these implanted memories remained silent for decades, to bubble up when prompted by events or conversations. Such is the nature of the human brain and its amazing capacity to leap across time with seeming ease.
What happened is so routine that we consequently often fail to appreciate this miraculous human capacity. The crew was composed of older, long-term school district employees and a few summer laborers like me. And those old guys had some stories to share.
Their recollections would spring forth at unpredictable moments, but the short intervals of daily down time during and after lunch or our mid-afternoon breaks were often relaxed and unguarded moments when we would talk. Often only snippets flashed out from these guys, but sometimes they offered detailed accountings of traumatic events prompted by context I no longer can recall, that were journeys back into times and places far away. Too young almost 50 years ago to understand what was happening, I took in the information, said little and although I sometimes re-told a couple of the stories over the years, wrote nothing about all this until now. Some of what they conveyed, perhaps unintentionally, were dark secrets that I will never reveal, but I now put forward a few things I still remember when these guys looked back in their minds to recount the events of their lives, some long passed and some still fresh and being processed.
Al
Al was our backhoe operator. A man so skilled with the controls that the bucket moved as if it were an extension of his hand. He had worked a variety of construction jobs over the years and when I was on the crew with him he was probably around 50 years old. I think his most memorable moment operating the backhoe had to be the day he severed a large underground natural gas line that fed a newly constructed high school. Hearing the noise and seeing dirt flying, Al knew instantly what had happened and that he had to kill the engine to prevent a deadly explosion and fire. Luck had not totally abandoned him that day because the diesel engine, which Al said normally rolled over several times whenever he switched it off, “stopped dead” the instant he turned the key. If it had not happened that way and that rushing gas geyser had ignited only a few feet away, Al, and God only knows how many others, would have been incinerated on the spot. Al scrambled away to inform the crew chief, describing for us how that man’s eyes grew wide with terror as he realized what was happening. Although I think Al told us the chief was criticized for issuing a Mayday call on his radio, he got the help needed onsite in a hurry and averted a possible disaster.
A World War II veteran, another memorable story Al told had to do with being in combat during the final months of the campaign in Germany. Like a lot of the crew in that day, Al had been a smoker for quite a while and one story he revealed was about having a cigarette on the front lines. “They told us to get down in a hole if wanted to smoke at night.” Forgetting this potentially life-saving advice, Al told us how he stood in the dark sideways to the enemy position with a lit cigarette dangling in his mouth. A sniper’s bullet whizzed past and “knocked that cigarette out of his mouth.” Had he been facing the enemy directly as the sniper who noticed the glow of his cigarette must have assumed, Al probably would have died right then and there.
I recall this particular story partly because Al repeated it several times over the four summers I worked with him, and I remember another worker, Terry, asked me once if I believed it. All I could do was point out how I had heard that same story several times and it never varied, not even a little. Consistency was characteristic of all the stories I heard Al tell.
One of the things that did not make the journey through time is the conversational context that led to the recounting of war experiences stories like Al’s. Fifty years later I can still hear in my mind some of the words he said, but cannot tell you why that particular story would come up, although it did several times over the years I worked with him.
Somewhere in a conversation with Al and Jack (a Navy veteran) that transpired as we installed a new Cyclone fence section at a school yard, I got the clear impression both of them had served brief jail terms, perhaps while in the military, although neither man ever offered the specific details. At other times, Al had told a couple of stories that conceivably could have led to trouble with the authorities and one stood out in particular. He talked about going through a repossession experience. When the persons came to seize his property, he was waiting in a barn or shed with a rifle. He had one of them in the sights, but said, “it’s a hard thing to pull the trigger,” and, as angry as he was, could not bring himself to shoot him. He added that when they threw open the door and saw him standing inside with a weapon they were shocked and ran off. It probably did not take long for them to call law enforcement officers.
Howard
Al and his older brother, Howard, a construction crew chief when I worked with him, had lived through the Great Depression and those experiences had left deep scars. We would get paid every two weeks by check and one payday on the way to a job site, Howard pulled the truck into a gas station near his home in a part of town known as Gilman Terrace. He came back with a big wad of cash and I asked if he had plans to buy something. “No, I trade here and the owner cashes my checks for me.” Somehow it became apparent that this was his regular payday routine because Howard did not have a bank account. When I pointed out how that was costing him money my comment was met with dead silence.
Al informed me later that both he and Howard never put any money in banks because they didn’t trust them after the catastrophic childhood experience of seeing their family lose everything during the Great Depression of the 1930’s. I recall one of them mentioning “the banker never lost his home.” Understanding this traumatic history, I realized those repo men who came to Al’s home years later were in some serious danger.
It dawned on me that some of the stories Howard told over the years could have come when he, like a lot of young men of that era, survived the Depression by picking up any work they could find. I recall on some hot summer days he recounted bringing in the wheat harvest during a blazing heat spell, warning us to consume cold drinks slowly to avoid getting sick. He’d seen that happen when harvest crews were offered a choice of hot tea or cold water to quench their thirst. “Those of us who drank that hot tea kept right on a-going,” he said, while the guys who downed the cold water got pretty sick.
When the United States entered World War II, Howard joined the Army. I can’t say if Army life improved his circumstances because Howard never mentioned anything like that in all the days I knew him. However, he did have some harrowing experiences which may have outweighed any good memories.
Howard served in several North African desert campaigns and one battle that did not go well. He told me how an officer gathered the men and gave them two options. “Those of you who want to surrender, get rid of your weapons” and muster over there. “We don’t know if the Germans can even take prisoners, so you could end up dead. Those of you who want to keep fighting” gather up here. Howard, at that time with enough combat experience to have no illusions about what might happen to him, said he thought about it, “pushed his rifle straight down into the sand” and went to surrender.
His gamble paid off, the Germans did take prisoners and Howard ended up in a POW camp in Germany. He mentioned his experience was not much like the movies or a popular TV comedy show. “There were rules” and punishments for any transgressions. The thing that surprised me was he mentioned how much weight he lost during his time as a POW. “They fed us every day,” he said, “it just wasn’t enough.”
Howard’s return to civilian life seems to have been difficult as he mentioned after he got out of the Army how “he did not think he drew a sober breath for over a year.” He saw a quite a bit of combat and was awarded the Bronze Star 3 times, events I only found out about by reading his obituary. Beyond his account of being taken prisoner, he never spoke to me about any of the battles he was in or how he turned things around after returning form the war. Thinking back, I cannot remember him ever talking about drinking or going to a bar like quite a few of our coworkers would from time to time. Howard passed away in 1989, but he lived long enough to get his picture in the local paper when he was awarded a medal recognizing the over 2 years of time he was held as a POW.
Cliff, a.k.a. “Preacher”
Cliff was one of the youngest guys on the permanent crew, a Vietnam veteran who was known as “Preacher” due to his habit of carrying a Bible and readiness to talk about his faith. I finally had to ask his real name because the older guys never referred to him by anything other than this intentionally derogatory nickname. Because the bulk of the crew were people who had been working together for years, getting into the social circle could be hard. A person like Cliff, younger and with a tendency to witness for the Word, probably had more trouble being accepted.
I do not recall now if I asked Cliff exactly how and when he came to see the light, but along that line do remember him telling me how “he had been looking for something.” I also discovered that he was a Marine and served in Vietnam. He did not say he turned to Jesus because of that experience, but in the short time I worked with him he described one hair-raising event.
His company was on patrol when someone leaped up out of cover, sprayed a burst of AK-47 fire at them and ran. They killed their attacker quickly after a chase and brief firefight. “Of course, then we all had to go running up to look at him,” Cliff said, realizing too late their unlucky foe was the decoy when they found themselves trapped between hills and a river as mortar rounds starting coming in from the high ground. With no way out “we fixed bayonets and ran up the hill directly at the enemy” who must have been surprised and retreated. I never thought to ask if any fellow Marines were killed or injured in the assault. When stories like this were told, they often came out fast and grabbed your full attention.
I suspect Cliff probably had more war stories, but I only worked with him a few days before he moved on to another job. I imagine he felt pretty lonely during his time with the crew. After he left, I do not recall anyone ever speaking about him.
“Brownie”
I never knew Brownie’s real name because he was a painter and not a part of our group. One day while working an inside job which meant it was raining too hard for the crew to do their usual outdoors tasks, he came over and just started talking to me. Apparently, a tendency to be talkative was the norm for Brownie. As he told his story I realized I had already heard pieces of it being commented on by the other guys. The version I had heard being passed around second-hand was accurate.
Brownie had been contacted recently about a relative, possibly an uncle or a great uncle, that he may never have known. The amazing part of this was the reason Brownie was contacted had to do with his relative’s estate. Based on hear-say and what Brownie told me directly, the man was senile and had not too much longer to live. And it seemed his final official act was to be a last will that named Brownie as the beneficiary of a purportedly life-changing amount of money. Brownie told me he had traveled to California to visit the man – I am unsure now if he ever told me his name – and the shock over his medical condition and physical situation in a nursing home facility. The final, undignified days of this poor soul and his fellow facility inmates left a deep impression on Brownie. He never spoke to me about the money or his plans for it, only the terrible things he saw on his visit. It was apparent from the comments going around the shop that he had been retelling that sad story over and over again, possibly to come to terms with it. I never encountered him again and perhaps Brownie did receive an inheritance that gave him the freedom to quit his painter job and do whatever he wanted to do.
“Whitey”
Whitey was a veteran of the Korean War and of all the guys he seemed to have had the most demons still chasing him in the days I worked with him. He once mentioned his first day in Korea, taking cover in an excrement-filled shell hole, but apart from that and a story about the great time he had while on leave in Japan, never brought up any more of his military experience when I was around. Based on other things he said and did, I suspect that he may have been suppressing some unpleasant memories with alcohol. Most of his stories involved humorous descriptions of past events on the school district job, and despite his frequent complaints, remarked several times how both “I and Al have found a home.” Whatever his issues and famous volatility, he was a kind and considerate crew chief.
Bill and Don and the Legendary Freezer Rats
Bill and Don exemplified quite a number of school district employees who had lost their previous employment through change or disability. Many of these guys were former meat packing plant employees so broken down physically after years of back-breaking labor they could no longer work the kill floors. Others, like Bill and Don, were skilled journeymen who were laid off when employers shifted operations to new labor-saving technologies. I am sure for almost all of them the school district paid them much less than their previous jobs. However, the school jobs came with benefits which was an important consideration for people who found themselves without work at the awkward age of being too young to retire while still needing a job.
Bill and Don described the sort of work they did as newspaper printers before I encountered them on a school district construction job which I put in an earlier blog post https://syntheticgeneticshakespeares.wordpress.com/2017/09/06/scanners-live-in-vain-vs-frankenstein/(opens in a new tab). In addition to that, I think Bill was the first to tell me a story I simply did not believe could be true at the time, possibly because I did not think it was a first-hand experience. I later heard the same story from other guys who definitely worked in packing plants and were in a position to have actually seen these things they called freezer rats. Gigantic (for rats), these long-haired beasts lived secretly in the meat freezers deep in the dark recesses of the old Swift packing plant and other meat processing facilities near the Floyd River. These were huge buildings, often open to the outdoors directly, providing a lure and ample opportunity for rodent infestations. These bold rats moved right in and adapted to the cold. My skepticism was misplaced because it seems the long-haired freezer rats these guys talked about are real. I am also pretty sure the story he told me about an exhibitionist who drove a convertible around the newspaper building on hot summer days when the workers – mostly women – would hang out near the windows at break time was true as well.
Jack Spins a Tale About Chickens
One story I remember was a completely bonkers tall tale, put out I suspect just to see who might buy it.
A Moon rock then touring the country came to our town. Yes, a Moon rock really did tour the United States of America. The public was invited to a local college for a presentation by a NASA scientist and get a close look at a genuine Moon rock collected by one of the Apollo astronauts. All paid for with their tax dollars. Safely within a square plastic container and watched over by an armed guard, I remember the rock as being between the size of a golf ball and a baseball and dark colored. And you were allowed to get right next to it, which all of us in the surprisingly small audience did.
I mentioned the event to Jack and Al, who were not in attendance and recounted part of the talk given by the NASA speaker. He spent some time lamenting the state of our nation where young people were more focused on working dead-end jobs that enabled them to scrape together enough money to buy a ‘73 Chevy Monte Carlo or some such vehicle and not dedicating enough effort on higher education.
In one of the few times I recall the lead-in to a story, I mentioned the lecture included a brief story about the outcome of an experiment in which chickens put in motion on a centrifuge or some other device induced a fat-mobilizing enzyme he suggested could have a future medical spin-off for obesity control. Jack really took off on this one, getting animated as he proceeded to tell Al and me some scientists had put chickens on spinning platforms which caused them to vanish mysteriously and “they don’t know where the f’ing things go!” A moonlighting musician and a character, although we did not argue with him, neither Al nor I considered Jack a reliable source of scientific information.
A funny outlier, most of the stories from those days I recall today were not tall tales, but recollections of lived events, things like fishing, vacations, freezer rats and sometimes experiences dredged up from much deeper in the past. However, Jack’s claims remind us that conspiracy theories are nothing new. Jack had one true claim to fame since he was the only guy, at that time at least, to have set his equipment, a dump truck, on fire. He said he could not figure out why everyone was pointing and waving at him as he drove down the street and, happy guy that he was, he was just waving back. Finally someone yelled, “look behind you!” Glancing in the mirror he saw his truck was blazing. Part of the load cover tarp he had rolled up after a run had slipped onto the vehicle exhaust and ignited. Ever resourceful, he pulled into the driveway of a fire station he happened to be passing and they extinguished the fire. The tarp was next to the fuel tank, so it was bad, but could have been a lot worse.
The Human Brain Time Machine
Evolution has somehow honed the human brain to re-construct itself in response to stimuli. Part of this legacy is it turns our brains into living time machines. However, not only can these encoded memories take us back through impressive expanses of time and space, we can pass those experiences along to others. When I worked with the crew and heard their stories, I thought we were only killing time, not realizing how I was being taken on journeys or how fortunate I was to be invited to ride along. Because he was one heck of smart guy, maybe Richard Burgess knew all this when he spoke about time to my graduating class so long ago. Hopefully, someone will ask him about this at our 50th class reunion. Being much slower, it took me a lifetime to get any sense of the full message.
The Power of Listening
I think it is fair to say that many, if not most, of the people working on the crew were accustomed to being ignored and treated disrespectfully. I believe that led to the one piece of advice I got consistently from almost every one of them at one time or another; essentially make sure you finish your education. Many of them for one reason or another had not completed high school and were painfully aware how that specific early happenstance had held them back in life. One guy named Paul pointed out that “what you know is the only thing they can’t take away from you.” I enjoyed those summers working with them and recalling the many things they taught me. Looking back at events small and large I realize now that I was not just another college kid part-timer to them, but somehow over time had been accepted as a full member of their group. Most important, that meant they trusted me with some of their darkest secrets.
I will never understand why a group of guys my Dad’s age and older decided I was OK. The only thing I can think might have played a part in this was the fact that we listened to each other. That was easy for me since, having zero life experience, all I could do was listen to the guys who had collectively lived through the Great Depression, survived wars, traveled the world, had a few adventures and cheated death. Their way of according respect to one another was the simple act of listening – quietly – to each other’s stories. In this part of the world, the tiny piece of it they controlled anyway, they paid attention to each other. The world little appreciated that these almost invisible men were heroes, survivors, fathers and builders. If you waited around a while and listened, they might reveal a bit of what they had done and seen.
Years after I had finished my formal education, I picked up two books in a uniquely organized used book store https://syntheticgeneticshakespeares.wordpress.com/2017/12/29/preserving-odd-connections/(opens in a new tab) in Cedar Falls, Iowa; How to Win Friends and Influence People by Dale Carnegie and The Awesome Power of the Listening Ear by John Drakeford. Only after reading these books and the passing of many more years did I realize the astonishing power of listening skills and how much people respond to simply knowing they are being heard by others. I am not sure anyone, including the guys in the crew, could explain why they allowed me into their group, but I have to believe that just being seen as someone who listened to them was a big part of it. However it came about, I am grateful for the miracles of memory they shared with me through space and time.
Most of my time traveler friends are gone now, but in a sense some of their memories are still alive. God bless them all.
###
Synthetic Genetic Shakespeares 