The Dirt Tribe

This is a culture of dirt, dust, grease, sweat, complicated unforgiving machines, hangovers, and that terrifying cough through clouds of cigarette smoke that may or may not signal lung cancer. And it is tribal and militant. I am not a tribal member, just a sixteen-year-old summer temp as dumb and useless as a boutique of dead spring flowers out here in this world of trenches, pvc pipe, and hydraulic fluid. My father is a member, a sub-chief in fact. He’s one of those elites who knows how to make the backhoes, track hoes, excavators, and bulldozers plow, rip, and maim the raw earth into something organized and useful.

I see in his eyes every morning when we wake before the sun is up to get a jump on the blistering summer heat, embarrassment, shame, and maybe even disgust in my inability to distinguish myself on the job. Even after working there a month and having obtained a fairly good understanding of what my job entails I’m still slow, clumsy, and by my dad’s standards lazy; the worst of all sins amongst the dirt tribe members.

I do try. This isn’t just teen angst swinging blindly to disappoint and provoke. I want his approval and I want to do well at my job at least for the summer. I can’t complain. $7.25 an hour under the table, $3 above the minimum wage in 1986, is a lot of money for a teenager desperate to fix up his ratty old Trans Am.

The truth, however, is a horrific allergy to dust that threatens to drown me in phlegm every morning coupled with the disappointment and depression brought on by a school-year-end break-up have submerged me in a lethargy with more immobilizing suction then even the boggy peat dirt we dig into day after day. The pattern is a common one for me that I am just barely aware of. Every time I start dating a girl she always breaks up with me after 3–4 months. This spins me into a two or three-month-long negative introspective interrogation of all the things that are wrong with me. This is contrasted by the surface self-righteous hatred and, often times, violence towards the new boyfriend my ex-girlfriends almost immediately start dating as soon as they are finished with me.

This pattern has gotten me suspended twice from junior high and once from high school. It has also resulted in a black eye, a broken thumb, bruised ribs, and a lot of bloody knuckles. But it has never resulted in my winning back the heart or even the friendship of any of my former girlfriends. If I could have stepped outside myself for a bit at the time and looked objectively at things I would have seen that 3–6-month relationships were pretty standard for junior and high school romances, but at the time I couldn’t.

In the trench, my dad is yelling down at me, “Watch for gravel in the mud.” My primary job is to make sure he doesn’t accidentally rip through a sewage line, water line, or worse, the recently laid gas line. I can still remember stories from my childhood of the terror every heavy equipment operator has of tearing out international phone lines because of the cost to repair it (one thousand dollars a minute, I think it was at the time) and the fear of hitting buried power lines because of the instant death they brought to anyone standing in or near the trench at the time.

“Are you fucking watching what I’m doing?” I hear, screamed down at me.

I look up to see my dad’s glowering green eyes boring into me. Then I look down at the bottom of the trench. A clean sliver of pea gravel has appeared in the mud. This was the most technical aspect of my job. I had to be the backhoe operator’s eyes as he gently scraped away enough of the mud so I could expose the gas line with my shovel. The gravel was just an indicator of where the gas line was. It could be another four feet underground or it could be a few inches. I had to watch very closely as the heavy metal toothed bucket of the backhoe stripped back the mud and gravel looking for anything orange, the color of the plastic gas line. I stood close to the bucket with my arm in the air to signal him to stop if I saw any orange. After each pass of the bucket, I would gingerly scrap some of the mud and gravel off myself to see if the gas line was close or not.

We did this four times and I kept my eyes glued to the dirt each time. But on the fifth pass, just for a second, I turned my attention away toward a big clump of dirt and rock that shook loose from the edge of the trench and cascaded into the ditch. When I turned back I saw the deer hunter orange plastic pipe slowly pulling out of the mud caught in the teeth of the bucket. I signaled to stop frantically with my hand nearly jumping up and down to get my dad’s attention. He came out of the cab of the backhoe and into the trench with panther-like speed.

“Fuck, fuck! Fuck Steve. What the fuck were you doing?” he said low and intensely.

I attempted a lame explanation about the rocks falling in, part of my job was to keep the trench clean, but I knew it was a bitchy little whiny attempt to try and get out of trouble.

“Put your fucking shovel under the pipe and hold it up while I back the bucket off.

He left the trench without looking at me and I put my shovel under the pipe like he had told me to do. There was some heavy clanking and creaking as he slowly worked the bucket down and backward out of the trench. I stood in the trench with my shovel statue-like under the pipe, stupidly not knowing whether I could set it down or not. He came back into the trench and roughly took the shovel from me without saying a word this time. He gently scraped some of the mud off the side of the pipe looking for breaks. A small two-inch white scratch appeared in the second spot he cleared.

“Shit,” he said bending down to wipe more of the mud away with his hand. “Listen, this one’s small. I’m going to put some mud back over it and we’ll just hope the PG&E inspector misses it when he comes out to sign off the trench. Don’t tell anyone and keep your eyes open from now on,” he said calmly.

I didn’t cry in front of him, but my suppressed sobs were drowned out the rest of the day by the noise of the backhoe. I finished out the summer in the dirt and dust, but I knew at the end I would be an outcast of this tribe, never having the will or temperament to dominate the dirt like my father.