Were you ever out in the Great Alone, when the moon was awful clear, and the icy mountains hemmed you in with a silence you most could hear; with only the howl of a timber wolf, and you camped there in the cold, a half-dead thing in a stark, dead world, clean mad for the muck called gold; while high overhead, green, yellow and red, the North Lights swept in bars? Then you've a hunch what the music meant... hunger and night and the stars. Robert Service
No one knows
exactly how long ago human beings got to the Americas, but most scientists
believe the first men to arrive walked from Siberia across a land bridge into
what is now Alaska about 20,000 years ago during the last Ice Age. As the planet warmed during subsequent millennia,
melting glaciers and ice caused a general rise in oceans of the world, creating
the body of water known as the Bering Strait between Russia and Alaska,
stopping any further Asian migration.
By the time the Europeans arrived in the mid-seventeenth-century,
three groups of native peoples were living there – Eskimos, Aleuts, and
Indians.
From Alaska’s north coast to Greenland, Eskimos hunted
whales, seals, and polar bears, and inland, caribou. Their cousins, the Aleuts, lived on the
Aleutian Islands and the Alaska Peninsula and were skillful sea hunters using
hide-covered kayaks.
The Indian tribes called Tlingit and Haida lived along
the southern coastal regions where fish and game were plentiful while the
Athabaskans lived further inland in the rugged mountainous areas. The state’s name comes from the indigenous
people of the Aleutian Islands who called the great mainland A-la-a-ska when
describing it to early Russian explorers.
In 1880, Joseph Juneau and Richard Harris discovered
gold deposits along the Gastineau Channel on Alaska’s southeastern coast, which
eventually led to the founding of the future state’s capital city of
Juneau. Then in July 1897 lucky
prospectors found rich placer gold deposits in the Klondike district of
Canada’s Yukon region, just across the border from Alaska, leading to the
second most famous gold rush, after California’s, in North American history –
the Klondike Gold Rush of 1898, which fired the imagination of the world and
brought to the remote region 30,000 prospectors.
More placer gold strikes followed, first in Nome, then
Dawson, and then several in the state’s interior along the Yukon River. The
last major discovery was in Fairbanks in 1902 and as a result the city became
the largest human settlement in Alaska – yet the entire state still had fewer
than 60,000 inhabitants including natives.
#
Soon after Skookum Jim, Tagish Charlie, and George
Carmack panned a shotgun shell’s worth of gold dust out of Bonanza Creek, word
spread and other local prospectors started finding gold along the rest of the
Klondike River Valley deep in the heart of the remote Yukon. When the steamship Portland finally sailed
into the port of Seattle months later, it had over two tons of gold in her hold
and gold fever spread like wildfire.
Even the mayor of Seattle resigned his post and joined
100,000 stampeders in the Rush of ’98, sailing northward to Alaska’s
southeast inside passage and docking at a lawless port called Skagway. They next had to trek thirty-five miles up
and over the rugged Coast Mountains through the Chilkoot Pass trail before
finally reaching the source of the Yukon River near Whitehorse, Yukon
Territory.
The Chilkoot trail was steep and hazardous, rising a
thousand feet in the last half-mile where 1,500 “golden steps” were carved out
of ice and rock to the top of the Pass.
Too steep even for mules and packhorses, stampeders had to cache
their supplies, moving small quantities of goods up the mountain
piecemeal.
The trek was littered along the entire way by discarded
supplies from would-be prospectors who simply gave up and turned back. Hauling a hundred pounds per man in equipment
and rations was the last leg of the journey, a 575-mile homemade raft trip
downstream, once winter ice began breaking up, to reach the Dawson City gold
fields. Many a primitive vessel broke up
along the numerous sets of rapids during the three-week down river journey.
Accounts of gold finds were grossly exaggerated
attracting new prospectors by the boatload; the physical work necessary to
retrieve whatever gold existed there, however, was not exaggerated. To reach the gold some ten-feet or more below
ground level, prospectors had to dig through the rock-hard permafrost, a layer
of permanently frozen soil, making it necessary to thaw the ground before it
could be dug.
The next step was then sluicing the dirt and soaking
the crushed ore in a bath of potassium cyanide to leach out the pure gold. Even in summer when the majority of the work
was done, laboring in freezing water, men were subject to illnesses like
pneumonia and rampant typhoid fever.
With temperatures of 60° Fahrenheit below zero, during cold winter
months men burrowed like animals to stay warm and cabin fever led some to
insanity and suicide.
#
Conditions along the alternative White Pass trail were
even worse, and later it would be known as “dead horse trail” because of the
thousands of pack animals that died on the slippery narrow surface and fell to
their deaths. Northwest Mounted Police
required each man to have one year’s supply of goods, besides what he could
haul individually, before being allowed to cross the border into Canada, about
one ton per person.
Outfitters in Seattle and San Francisco made fortunes
selling useless supplies and rations left over from the Civil War. Only 30,000 stampeders actually made
it to the gold fields since most knew little or nothing about where they were
going, despite pamphlets proclaiming great wealth just up ahead, and had no
idea how cold and arduous the trip and subsequent mining operations would
be.
As miners drawn north by the Klondike strike began
fanning out across all parts of the Alaskan Territory, it was inevitable that
another major strike would be found.
Three Scandinavian prospectors struck pay dirt at Cape Nome in late 1898
where placer gold was found mixed in the sand along the beaches of the Bering
Sea. Rampant claim jumping spread as men
simply plucked buckets of sand from the beaches underfoot upon landing ashore,
fighting for a place to mine.
Lawlessness spread and the only law was the right-hook punch and quick
draw of men with Colt six-shooters and Smith & Wesson revolvers, but the
new city of Nome boomed.
These and many other discoveries of gold during
subsequent years brought national and international attention to Alaska, and as
its population and economy grew, it wanted more self-government, finding its
ability to govern itself thwarted by special interest groups in Washington –
and one in particular referred to as the “Alaska Syndicate” monopoly established
in 1906 by J.P. Morgan and Daniel Guggenheim, two of the most powerful men in
the country. One of the wealthiest
families in America, the Guggenheims owned the Kennecott-Bonanza Copper Mine in
the Wrangell Mountains of north-central Alaska that still functioned up until
1938.
The Great Depression hit Alaska extremely hard as
prices paid for fish and copper, the territory’s two chief commodities,
declined considerably and the economy ground to a halt – massive oil reserves
had by then still not been discovered in Prudhoe Bay. Between 1929 and 1932, the state’s labor
force decreased by 50-percent and wages dropped even more.
Help came from Franklin D. Roosevelt’s New Deal
programs such as the National Reforestation Act of 1933 and various Public Works
Administration construction efforts. Alaskans
did their part during World War II, protecting the soft underbelly of the
Aleutian Islands from surprise attacks by Japanese – including President
Theodore Roosevelt’s son Kermit who was stationed and died there, and by 1950
the immense northern territory grew to a population of 138,000 people.
The Alaskan Statehood Committee formed in 1949
intensified efforts toward making Alaska the forty-ninth state, but it took
President Eisenhower’s 1954 State of the Union address to focus more attention
on Alaska and Hawaii.
Finally, in January 1959, President Eisenhower signed
the official declaration which made Alaska the forty-ninth state, the first one
in 47 years – giving the American flag seven rows of seven stars each. Its flag is solid blue with seven gold stars
of the Big Dipper, with an eighth representing the North Star. Seven months later, Hawaii was made the
fiftieth state. Alaska is more than
twice the size of Texas.
#
In October 1973, Middle Eastern OPEC nations, led by
Saudi Arabia’s King Faisal, stopped oil exports to the U.S. and other Western
nations to punish them for supplying Israel during the Yom Kippur War with
weapons and aid. The embargo caused
gasoline prices in the United States to quadruple from 25-cents a gallon to
over one dollar in a matter of weeks, forcing long lines at gas pumps and panic
buying by consumers.
The situation worsened when oil companies panicked and
horded abundant oil reserves to maximize corporate profits in the face of huge
demand; 20-percent of the country’s gas stations were completely without fuel
during a one-week stretch when the crisis peaked. The sale of gas-guzzling cars plummeted, as
did home construction in cooler regions of the country where fuel oil was
needed to heat the new houses. Congress
reacted by passing a new highway speed limit of 55 miles per hour, down from 70
mph, and not only did fuel consumption fall, but so too did highway
fatalities.
Daylight savings time was put into effect indefinitely
in order to reduce electric usage where oil-powered generators were used. The IRS offered tax credits for using
alternative forms of energy like solar and wind power, and President Nixon
ordered the Department of Defense to create an emergency stockpile of oil for
military defense purposes to control widespread civil disorder should it erupt
– Nixon also created a new cabinet level office called the U.S. Department of
Energy.
The presence of crude oil on Alaska’s North Slope was
suspected for more than a century, although it wasn’t until 1968 that the
Atlantic Richfield and Humble Oil Companies confirmed the presence of a vast
oil field at Prudhoe Bay measuring 15 by 40 miles; it became the largest oil
field discovered in North America.
The crude oil was located at depths of 5,000 to 20,000
feet in porous rock formations and technology existed at the time to get it out
either by straight drilling or curve drilling – all that was needed was a way
to transport it. By 1969 plans were
already under way to build a pipeline across the entire state to carry the oil
south to the port of Valdez, but it was the 1973 oil crisis that finally
prompted rapid Congressional and Presidential approval of legislation
authorizing the building of the Trans-Alaska Pipeline in November 1973 despite
protests by environmentalists.
In addition to construction of the pipeline, a
420-mile road had to be built from Prudhoe Bay south as far as Livengood to
transport men, materials, and equipment; and a new bridge had to be built to
traverse the rock-laden shores and raw foamy waters of the Yukon River. As the road was being built in 1974,
concurrently work started on pumping stations, the pipeline work pad, and the
Valdez Terminal.
#
The first pipe was laid in the Tonsina River north of
Valdez in March 1975 and by the end of 1976 another 428 miles of pipeline had
been laid including one stretch that had to traverse the 2,700-foot high
Thompson Pass. In all 28,000 “pipeliners”
worked the massive construction project ranging from five to ten-percent
women. Everyone working the pipeline and
road project lived in 29 scattered construction camps pioneer style with cot
and three squares a day.
By May 1977, all 800 miles of the pipeline had been
installed and tested; by August the first tanker named Arco Juneau
sailed out of Valdez with the first boatload of North Slope crude oil. Since then, nearly 25 billion barrels of oil
have reached Valdez, flowing down from Prudhoe Bay in a 48-inch diameter
pipeline at six miles an hour, crossing three mountain ranges, forests, rivers,
and plains in the process; the oil takes five and a half days to make the
entire journey south.
The Prudhoe Bay to Valdez Trans-Alaska Pipeline was
run like a wartime project because we were at war – Arab nations of OPEC had us
by the cojones and squeezed, so the
U.S. public and private sectors had no choice but to respond since OPEC’s
actions threatened, invariably, our economy and consequently our national
security. Time was of the essence and
money was no object – Nixon told his cabinet to take whatever legislative
measures necessary to preserve and protect America, our citizens, and our way
of life. FDR had dealt with a similar
existential threat during the Great Depression.
Even though weather conditions, terrain, environmental
concerns, and the immensity of the project provided incredible challenges and
difficulties, Yankee ingenuity overcame permafrost, earthquakes, summertime’s
ferocious mosquito attacks, frigid temperatures, blizzard whiteouts, physically
strenuous working conditions, endless winter nights, and the relentless flow of
the Yukon River to achieve success in a remarkably short time period of just
over three years.
#
The Trans-Alaska Pipeline was one of the most
difficult and remarkable engineering feats of modern times and cost $8 billion,
America’s largest privately funded
construction project in history up to 1977.
Thirty-one poor souls were lost during pipeline construction, but their
adventurous spirit lives on and always will.
The most basic construction problem had to do with the
cold weather throughout the entire project’s lifespan – the problem wasn’t so
much with the men working the lines, they could always put on more clothes –
the problem was with the equipment that just wouldn’t mechanically function
under extremely frigid conditions that could reach minus 100° F with wind chill
factored in.
A road was built to ferry men and equipment from
Livengood stretching all the way north to Deadhorse near Prudhoe Bay, paralleling
the pipeline, and was a rough extension of the James B. Dalton State Highway 11
which actually started in Fairbanks.
This was some of the most remote wilderness in the United States.
But men and women who worked on this stretch of the
two-lane, raw dirt, crushed rock, and gravel road simply called it the “Haul
Road” – and it was the lifeline supply route for construction, operation, and
maintenance of the northern portion of the Trans-Alaska Pipeline System as well
as the oil fields of the North Slope. Blowouts
on tires were commonplace for passenger-type vehicles after only twenty miles
or so because of the sharp rocks used for surface material. Asphalt and concrete surfacing could not be
used due to frost-heaving and frost-jacking.
Tundra trolleys were used for hauling steel pipes,
which varied in length of 40 feet and 60 feet with a half-inch thick
shell. Over 100,000 sections were used,
shipped in from Italy and Japan, with the pipe weighing about 250 pounds per
linear foot. Without the Haul Road,
there would have been no pipeline.
People came from everywhere to work on the pipeline or
the Haul Road – from every state in the Union and many foreign countries;
besides the chance for adventure, it was about the excellent wages, free room
and board, and the chance to work as many hours and days of the week as you
wanted in 12-hour shifts weather permitting.
There wasn’t much playtime and whatever there was of it, there wasn’t
much to do.
From September through May, construction equipment was
left running 24/7 because of frigid conditions; after all, there was plenty of
fuel since a small on-site refinery was set up to make diesel fuel for fuel
tanker replenishment trucks which roamed up and down the line. If you needed to throw trash in the dumpster at
day’s end, you always bumped the dumpster with the fender of the truck first to
shoo away immense brown grizzlies.
#
Duke Mitchum was a newly minted civil engineer from
Texas A&M University with a minor in geology when he was hired by the huge
Houston-based conglomerate Houston Industries Corporation, commonly referred to
by its acronym and Dow Jones listing as HICO.
His new company had its fingers in many pies because the 1970s was the
era of the big corporate conglomerate: a central control and command business
model with tentacles branching out to many disparate types of activities.
HICO was into everything, from agribusiness to banking
to real estate to specialty equipment to road construction, all organized in
separate operating divisions so that spinning off divisions that were
under-performing dogs could be done without impacting the good of the whole –
thereby avoid screwing up bonus plans and stock option plans of the fat cats
back in Houston. On the Fortune 500
listing HICO came in as the sixteenth largest company in America.
Duke was an academic and athletic standout in college
where as tight end he made first team All American, although his six-foot-four
frame supported forty more pounds back then than his current 220. He had been recruited by HICO right out of
A&M and his credentials were further enhanced by having a father who was
almost as famous a heart surgeon as his mentor, the legendary Dr. Michael E.
DeBakey.
Duke senior was a respected member of the Houston
community as well and his wife Becky, an energetic socialite that seemed to be
everywhere, was a key partner of the power couple’s very successful
lifestyle. As the only child, Duke
junior was raised with all the trappings and advantages one would expect of
Texas bluebloods, and he had fond memories of Methodist Church services on
Sundays as a child and lunch afterwards at the Masonic Temple Hall.
After two years of management training, including a
six month stint as special assistant to HICO’s Chairman & CEO, Gerard
Rainos, Duke was given a very high profile job working on the Trans-Alaska
Pipeline as a way to start grooming him for advancement by higher-ups at the
corporate office, and now the big guys in Houston were monitoring the success
of their rising young star.
After showing his stuff working on construction of the
Haul Road, he’d be given a series of other projects in succession, each one
with a little more responsibility, and with each success in that assignment,
another promotion would follow. In
twenty years, if things went according to plan, this young mover and shaker was
destined be a major rainmaker in American industry.
He was not the top man in his new role as deputy
foreman of a road crew, but the job was still very high profile given his young
age and inexperience. The only problem
was that the man he reported to, Big George Savidge, didn’t give a rat’s ass
who this young upstart was and let his opinion be known in no uncertain words
to his boss, the superintendent of the road building project.
“It’s not what you know, it’s who you blow,” was how
George summed up corporate management in general. Savidge had been around, quoting his own
often-used phrase, “since Moby Dick was a minnow and Fluff was a kitten” and
damned if he was going to take any shit from some hotshot college boy with
friends in Houston.
#
His boss, Ernie Parrent, was used to Savidge’s
combative nature since the business they were both in wasn’t exactly full of
girly men. Parrent admired George’s
work, but pretty much told him that if he screwed this kid over his next job
would be in the Republic of Chad.
Sobered somewhat by the thought of working in a hot and desolate Arab
country he had no choice but to cut the kid some slack which he did rather
grudgingly.
“Maker breaker one-niner, this is Tall Texan unit two,
come in Boss Man unit one,” was the scratchy sound Savidge heard coming from
his two-way radio unit mounted under the dashboard of his El Camino. It was the era of the citizen band radio
craze and everyone tried to talk like truck drivers of eighteen wheelers who
broke the monotony of long hauls with colorful chatter, first with other
truckers and then with whoever wished to join in, by using CB radios.
A whole culture grew up around the craze, with movies
and songs and a lexicon of new phrases entering the English language like
“Smokey Bear” for highway policemen; “take the front door, rocking chair, or
back door” denoting your position in a “convoy;” “looks like we got us a Kojak
with a Kodak” (Telly Savalas played detective Kojak on a popular television
show of the age and Kodak meant radar); “that’s a big ten-four good buddy,”
meaning you understood the transmitted message by answering the caller this
way; and everybody involved in the chatter had to have a “handle” or cool
call-name like Rubber Ducky, Wooden Nickel, or Suicide Jockey.
“Unit two, you’re a moron! We’re not using CBs up here, these are
two-way radios and you don’t need to use those idiotic ‘handles,’ just speak
normally. And when you’re finished, for
Christ’s sake, say the word ‘over’ so I know you’re done talking.” Savidge had to use every ounce of
self-control not to pepper his ass chewing of Duke with his favorite
noun/verb/adjective expletive “fuck.”
All of his crew had two-way radios either in their vehicles
or somewhere close-by and all tuned to the same channel, including the
superintendent, and they cracked up.
Parrent had also taken to fining Savidge for using expletives during his
radio discourses because radio transmissions were monitored by the FCC and
profanity over the airways was not allowed under federal law.
#
Verbal admonishments had not worked but fining the
crew boss, first a fin and later a sawbuck per cuss word, seemed to be working,
at least for now. Still in all, just
like everyone else listening into the kid’s reaming out by the crusty one, even
the superintendent had to laugh out loud at Savidge’s ranting.
“Roger that, unit one,” was Duke’s calm response, “I’m
on my way back to camp and I’ll see you there.
Over.” Despite the irascible
nature of his supervisor, if truth be told beneath his tough exterior Savidge
actually had an admiration for the young Mr. Mitchum, and not because of his
high level connections back at the corporate office. Duke was a hard worker, not the least bit
arrogant, and had a great sense of humor.
When he had first gotten to Alaska and arrived at
camp, a few boys in the canteen at supper his first evening there were making
off-color comments about Aggies’ preference for farm animals instead of women, and
their fondness for macho-male bonding.
Big George didn’t intervene; he just sat there at the adjoining table
within earshot of the conversation and waited to see just how this rather large
young Texan intended on handling the situation.
Sitting across
from Duke was Little George Young, who was now kidding him mercilessly about
growing up rich. When there was a quiet
moment Duke spoke up with a few quips of his own and said, “Well, my life
wasn’t so easy growing up ya know, I was so ugly my mom used to feed me with a
slingshot. I ate Pez three times a day. I could tell both my parents
hated me because my bath toys were a toaster and a hair dryer. But the worst part was when I was kidnapped
and they sent my dad a piece of my finger.
He told the kidnappers he needed more proof!”
The place broke up and not only did Duke immediately
establish himself as just one of the boys, unknown to him, he had just endeared
himself to the tough old foreman as well.
Big George hailed from Indiana and went to the school
of hard knocks most of his life, dropping out of high school to enlist in the
U.S. Navy just prior to the end of World War II. His trained specialty was underwater
demolition and as part of special teams during the Korean War, he saw action at
Inchon, Iwon, Chinnampo, and Wason clearing out mines and other ordnance. By the time President Kennedy commissioned
the first Navy SEAL teams in 1962 using sailors from Chief Petty Officer
Savidge’s old unit, the ex-frogman was already working for a construction
company later acquired by the corporate monster HICO.
#
Although pushing fifty, no one screwed with Big George
– the bruiser Hoosier was six feet tall and almost that wide and thick, solid
muscle, bald as a cue ball, and always chomping on half a Garcia Vega. The one thing that awed him was higher formal
education, the idea that someone could complete four years of college and have
a diploma – to him, that meant you were a gentleman and even though he had only
gotten his GED high school equivalency diploma while in the Navy, he had always
held dear the idea of a college education.
The thing that really pissed him off were so-called
educated people who should know better but refused to listen to others with
differing points of view, or they had no common sense. Adults who didn’t know better because no one
ever spent time to teach them about stuff, he could handle; they were just
ignorant, like kids, and it wasn’t their fault.
But narrow-minded, hardheaded assholes who knew everything, these
arrogant individuals were just plain contemptible and he couldn’t abide being
in their company for more than a few moments.
So this kid, this fair-haired boy who had wandered
into his camp, he was okay but that didn’t mean he wouldn’t get his ass chewed
out on occasion. “I mean shit, my life
as a Navy grunt had been a relentless hell and I made it,” he said to
himself. Duke would have to earn his
stripes just like everyone else.
And earn his stripes he did. Upon arriving in Fairbanks, Duke started out
just like the rest of the grunts who wanted to work on the pipeline and that
meant getting into the Union of Operating Engineers so he could run the
equipment – even though he was salaried management. All the pipeline jobs were union controlled
and to start with, you had to apply for training and be put on the “B”
list.
Every morning at 9:00 a.m. and afternoon at 2:00 p.m.,
bosses would call out jobs first for people on the “A” list and whatever was
left over, went to “B” listers. In both
cases, your “bid” for a particular job was linked to a particular number and
the lowest numbers had the best shot that day for the job they wanted.
Working for a construction company supporting the
bigger pipeline companies was how to get off the “B” list and be put on the “A”
list – and that meant learning how to operate loader backhoes, skidsteers,
bulldozers, scrappers, manlifts, hydraulic excavators, and towcats for hauling
the tundra trolleys. The workhorses on
site were the famed Ford 555 “Triple Nickel” loader backhoe and the Caterpillar
D6 bulldozer, and once these two were mastered the rest were easy – hell, Duke
even got certified on the biggest dozer of the day, the mammoth Cat D9. His equipment operating instructor was a pipeline’s
legend Donaldo Mall.
#
When not running equipment, he learned to run a drill
rig to bore holes for the vertical support members support-pipe installed above
ground, moving south to north from camp to camp. He may have been management with a fixed
annual salary, but hourly wage earners actually earned more than he did,
especially factoring in overtime.
Running the small equipment paid $10.50 an hour and
running the bigger Tonka Toys that went vroom vroom meant you earned $13.50 an
hour, big money back in 1974 particularly if you consider all your living
expenses were pretty much paid for and a big new Cadillac cost only
$7,500. Working 80 to 84 hours a week
and earning time and a half for anything over 40 hours – do the math – meant
you were making mid-executive management level salary comparable to corporation
hotshots down in the “lower 48.”
The pipeline construction ran around the clock in
three shifts and people took very little time off – the idea was to make money
because everyone knew the gravy train would end after a couple of years. One of Duke’s most cherished memories was
celebrating the 1976 Bicentennial on the Yukon River working nightshift, when
everyone stopped to whoop, holler, honk horns, and generally raise hell at
midnight since with all the sunlight, it was still too bright for
fireworks.
Even with the noise, off in the distance on a ridge
surrounded by incredible scenery you could plainly see a pack of gray wolves
just staring at the strange scene below them, then they nonchalantly turned and
walked away. You lived the National
Geographic, and observing the stunning moving pictures of real-time
wildlife was one of Duke’s greatest enjoyments while working in Alaska.
When not eating at the canteen, working, and sleeping,
you could drink beer, watch television, or play pool at the recreational center. The game played was sometimes eight ball, but
mostly three-ball, a uniquely Pacific Northwest version of pool that allowed
for up to four players.
And it was a great gambling game. The objective was simple as pie – you went in
rotating order and whoever sank the three balls, racked just like a regular
game of pool, using the fewest shots won.
The kicker was that one tie, all tie, meaning the game
could go on and on, each tie requiring that every player had to add another
dollar to the opening ante of a dollar, or whatever stake was agreed to. Pots of $20 to $30 were commonplace and
things could get hot and heavy after a few rounds. It was during one such game that Duke gave a
small lesson on Civil War history to Big George and the other guys of his road
crew, after the Texan had mentioned innocently enough the previous day to
Little George that his great-great-grandfather had been a Confederate officer
and once actually met the beloved General Robert E. Lee.
“Okay Mitchum, you’re up and you need a two to tie,”
Savidge bellowed, just as Duke prepared to send the white ball crashing into
the other three at the opposite end of the table. The foreman was licking his chops because he
had just sunk two on the break and nailed the remaining ball in the side pocket
so he figured his score of two shots would win this pot.
Big George figured the pot had to be over a hundred
bucks by now and doubted that these other stumble bums could tie, let alone win
– sinking three on the break was well nigh impossible so that didn’t worry
him.
#
Pedro “Ding-Dong” Campana, the resident Latino of the
road crew shot pool like a girl, and Archie “Shaft” Jefferson, the black
brother talked a good game but was erratic.
Mitchum was a so-so player, but he was athletic and competitive
therefore unpredictable. He figured the
Texan needed distracting so he decided to rile things up a little.
“You going to shoot or what college boy? Show some good damn backbone and bust up
those balls.” Savidge was on his third
vodka, an old aqua vitae possibly invented by the Chinese and copied by
the Russians.
Duke shot back, very wittily he thought, “I’d like to
show a little confidence but I don’t know what it looks like. Seems I’m always getting my ass chewed out
for something.”
The oohs an
aahs and finger pointing by everyone, and the mocking laughs thrown at the
direction of the crew boss meant he was back on the defensive during the little
repartee with the big Texan.
“See this right here hoss,” and with that Big George
rubbed his right index finger back and forth over the top of his right thumb,
“it’s the world’s smallest violin playing my heart bleeds purple piss for
you. Go tell it to your parish
priest.” The tide had turned and Duke
knew he could never top that one, so he hunched over and focused on his shot as
the place roared with laughter.
“Hey Mitchum,” Savidge now said as Duke prepared to
break, “tell us about your turncoat relative who fought against Old Glory
during the Civil War.” Duke knew he was
being set up, but by now, Big George had gotten the rest of the guys cheering
him on to tell the story and as the clamor got louder and louder, he finally
capitulated. A few cases worth of empty
Olympia beer cans littered the room and George was now well into his fourth
vodka, his favorite firewater that he drank out of water tumblers over ice, so
things had gotten boisterous and cheerful.
“Okay, okay guys,” Duke said as he backed away from
the table. Things quieted down so now he
had an attentive audience which included, besides the other three players
around the table with him, some of the rest of the crew: Jimbo Phelps, Little George, Jody
Carp, Chuck “Canuck” Blanton, Clark “Chilibean” Billings, Greg Ziegler, Teddy
“Bear” O’Connor, Wally “Beaver” Hoffman, the two Steves – Beech and Smith,
Bobbo “Porker” Hansen, Howie Edwards, Billy “Butt Juice” Gelman, and Stu
“Girlyman” Anderson.
Little did the other boys know it then, but neither
Wally nor Teddy would leave Alaska alive – both died premature deaths by
construction-related accidents and never lived to see completion of the project
they gave their young lives for.
#
“It was early May in the year of our Lord 1864 and the
tide had turned against the South by then,” Duke told his strangely silent
friends and colleagues. “Now it was just
a waiting game, a game of attrition as the Rebel armies lost men they couldn’t
replace and the North’s industrial and economic power came down on the South
like a sledgehammer. Grant was
commanding general of the entire Union Army and relentless against Lee, while
also inflicting massive casualties on his own blue bellies from his aggressive
attack strategy.
My ancestor’s name was Travis Mitchum and he was a
captain in the Texas Brigade; he met Lee at what later became known as the
Battle of the Wilderness. It involved
bloody hand-to-hand combat in thick vegetation and undergrowth so dense you
could only see a few feet ahead. It
turned into savage fighting, with men bludgeoning each other with rifle butts,
slashing with sword and bayonet, and when ammunition ran out, gouging eyes,
scratching, and beating one another with bare hands – Americans butchering each
other like jungle animals.”
“Officers had to navigate in broad daylight with compass, yet units still
got lost and had to fight on their own. By
nightfall of the first day, Grant and Lee were at a stalemate but on the early
morning of the second day, still dark, Union forces led by General James
Wadsworth attacked the Confederate center driving them a mile back into the
woods until they burst through a clearing, which happened to be where Lee had
set up his field headquarters.
As a worried Lee watched, General Longstreet ordered his corps commander
to plug the hole with the Texas Brigade under General John Gregg. Lee mounted his horse Traveler thinking he
might have to flee, but when he saw the bravery of the ragged barefoot soldiers
rushing into battle, those men from the great state of Texas – a state he knew
all too well from his campaigns of the Mexican War – he stood up in his
stirrups, raised the hat from his gray head into the air and yelled, ‘Texans
always move them.’”
“A huge swell of cheering rose up as the hopelessly
outnumbered Rebels counterattacked the advancing Yankee flood of men, and with
tears welling in his eyes General Gregg exclaimed, ‘Attention you Texas
Brigade, the eyes of General Lee are upon you.’
Captain Travis Mitchum later wrote in the diary he kept during the war,
‘Never before in my lifetime did I ever see such a scene as was enacted when
Lee pronounced his words.
A yell rent the air that must have been heard from
miles around and we would have charged hell itself for that old man.’ Of the 673 Texans who stopped the Federals
that moment in history, only 223 survived the brief skirmish by the time
Longstreet finally arrived with reinforcements.
And General Bobby Lee himself reached down from his famous horse
Traveler to shake a wounded Captain Mitchum’s hand and said, ‘You and your
gallant men have made Texas proud this day.’”
The room was eerily quiet when Duke placed the cue
ball on the pool table and took his shot sinking all three balls on the break
and stealing the pot from Savidge, but no one years later who reminisced about
their magic time as a pipeliner cared much about Duke’s nearly impossible shot
or the pandemonium that broke loose afterwards, hell it was only a game – what
they fondly remembered however was what a privilege it had been to work with
and get to know personally that amazing young man from Texas, and thus the
legend of Duke Mitchum was born!
#
Duke’s passion from a young age had been building
things – first with Tinkertoys and Lincoln Logs, then with lumber and nails to
construct tree houses, and finally learning how to survey to clear land and
widen dirt roads on the family ranch outside Houston. He loved to go the library and research how
the ancient cultures built their roads – the Romans and the Incas. Sure, the Chinese and Egyptians made great
strides in discovering the principles of pure mathematics and science; and the
Greeks were known for the creativity of their people in the area of arts and
culture, but it was the Romans who were the engineers and builders he admired
most.
For large building construction, Romans used huge
blocks of a stone called volcanic tufa, a relatively porous and lightweight
stone, but as strong as much denser rock.
Rather than use ramps of sand or earth to slide stones into place during
the construction process like those used by ancient Egyptians, Roman engineers
invented a system of ropes, pulleys, and crane-like machines for lifting.
Rather than use lime mortar, which dried out and
cracked when used with porous stone, Romans used techniques to precisely cut
and fit the stones together and then held them together with clamps of poured
molten metal alloys shaped like a bowtie, copied from the Greeks who in turn
had copied this practice from the Egyptians.
Many of these stones and clamps were later robbed by
architects of the Renaissance who looted ancient structures as a source of
materials and supplies to erect the great cathedrals of Europe. It was also during the Middle Ages that
metallurgists learned to make stone binding clamps from iron, since much higher
temperatures of 3,000° F were needed to separate it from ore in metal form pure
enough to be used for making clamps from molds.
#
Duke and his classmates at the university wore their
slide rules in leather sheaths they attached to their belts, and slung them on
their right leg; the same side where the soldiers of the Roman Legion wore
their short, wide killing swords.
Attending private schools his whole life had prepped
him well for college, but rather than accept an offer to attend the prestigious
Rice University in Houston, he chose the bigger A&M instead since that
meant getting out of the city and learning how to live on his own – even if the
campus was only eighty miles away from home.
He set new standards of academic excellence at the engineering college
and had a passion for surveying and geodesy.
Back then, studying conventional leveling meant using
a telescope that rotated up and down to carry elevations from a known point to
determine the elevations of unknown points, and these instruments were much
more temperamental to get set up because of the manual adjustment screws. Modern surveyor’s digital tools like the
total station, commonly seen in road construction set up on a tripod, is used
to make sure the road and structures are in the right place and are accurate to
within a few millimeters.
The automatic level is somewhat similar to the total
station and measures levels very accurately over long distances. Today’s automatic levels are a snap and can
be set up in moments thanks to delicately suspended digital sensors, yet the
principles of surveying haven’t changed in centuries.
One of Duke’s fondest memories while in college was
the field trip his senior engineering class in geology took to Stone Mountain
Georgia, to study rock formations, mineralogy, surface exfoliation, and lichens
of this 300-million-year-old granite rock.
The culmination of the trip, and indeed the final exam of the course,
dealt with measuring the immense rock of some eight miles long, two miles wide,
and 700 foot high at the summit and answering a series of questions related to
surveying, geodesy, and geology.
He still remembered the answer to some of the
questions. The volume of the mountain
came to 7.5 billion cubic feet, and with granite weighing 168 pounds per cubic
foot that meant Stone Mountain weighed 640 million tons. And the question as to whose figures were
carved on the mountain’s face was something he proudly related to thanks to his
Southern heritage – Robert E. Lee, Stonewall Jackson, and Jefferson Davis.
(This is a work of fiction. Although some real-world names,
organizations, historical settings, and situations are used to enhance the
authenticity of the story, any similarities to actual persons, organizations,
or situations are coincidental and all portrayals are purely the product of the
author’s imagination. This is the second
edition abridged version 2019. First
edition Copyright © 2006. All
rights reserved)
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