The big truck simply backed up a foot or two and pinned the guy's foot to the rail. It was the first accident in our work crew, and the first safety failure in the Marshalltown railroad yard for quite a while. And it couldn't have happened to a more deserving guy.
I was between cognitive activities, and back on the football team. At least that's what it felt like. It was fall, anyway, a good time for football, but I was really just working on the railroad. I had been teaching TM in Cedar Falls for a year with my new bride from Marshalltown, and was planning to enter graduate school in January, and we ended up at her parents' house in the interim.
Teaching TM had been a lot of fun, but financially a bit sketchy. But a new university had been founded in Fairfield that combined Maharishi's theories and the practice of T.M. with traditional academic disciplines. I saw an opportunity to have a real career, combining academia and my interest in T.M. So, off to graduate school to get the other side of the credentials together.
In the mean time, we were in Marshalltown, broke, and I looked around for work. Rather, my father in law did. It was simple, too, since he just called one of his friends over in the railway office and set me up. Within two days I was at work at 6 a.m., armed with a shovel and steel-toed shoes.
The first three days were a lot like football, too. Because if you work from six a.m. to 3 p.m. digging, tamping, scraping, carrying, shoving, lifting, and hammering spikes, you get a major workout. So work was work and home was a world of pain and fatigue. I eventually got in shape, but the work got no easier.
Since I was probably the only college graduate there, and certainly the only one going to graduate school, I felt I had something to prove. I didn't want anyone to think that I wasn't going to do my share. So, I pitched in whenever it was time. And it was time most of the time.
When a crew of guys work together in physical labor, they rarely all work at the same moment. And it's not just because everybody likes to watch. It's because some of the jobs are only suited for two guys, or one guy, or three guys. , And when that work is done, the other guys pitch in while the last group rests for a few moments.
There's a kind of trust that gets built up among a work crew, that everyone does his or her share, takes their portion of the load. Sometimes you do it rather than make the other guy do it. You don't want him to get tired anymore than you want yourself to. You actually start to care about each other, though it's completely an unspoken thing.
And sometimes you see some of the older guys working really hard, but you get so that you wish that they didn't have to. So, you go for it first, if you've got the energy at that moment.
But the guy who got his foot smashed was oblivious to all of these forces that compelled me to work so hard. He was my first and only experience of the world war two term, "slacker." And you can really feel what it means to have a slacker in your work team. It's as if four guys are pulling on the rope, and one more is just holding up his section, with the rope slack in his hands.
It manifests in little ways, too. In the tendency, when those two or one man jobs come up, for the slacker to get there a little bit after everyone else, so there is nothing to do. Until it's obvious that he is needed, then he joins in. And if the job opens up equidistant between the slacker and some other guy, even an older guy, the slacker just kind of stares at it a while longer than the other guy, who then just buckles down to work. Watching this kind of thing exasperated me completely, but I never said anything.
When the accident happened, we were building a crossing on a road in downtown Marshalltown. Marshalltown is a working man's town, no question. It has the feeling of a place where you work 9 to five, probably in manufacturing, find a wife, get a mortgage and kids, and work again nine to five, nine to five, nine to five, forever. Unless you get laid off. Sure, there's an art center, and a community college. But the community college was antiquated, at least when I was there, and even the art center didn't offset the working man's town feeling.
Building a crossing is a special event in the life of a railroad track crew. Not as special as a derailment, but special. Derailments are great because they call you up at three a.m. and you have to go out and stand around for a while, and maybe eventually drive a few spikes and then go home tired but much richer with double overtime. Of course Uncle Sam eats most of the increase on payday.
But a crossing is special because it's a lot deeper digging job than what you usually do, because crossings have a lot of layering built into them, and because of creosote crossing ties. Creosote ties in general are messy. They are regular railroad ties that have been deeply soaked in creosote in order to increase their longevity, and they are mostly pitch black, and oily.
But creosote crossing ties can be a much bigger animal. Sometimes crossing ties must go under more than one set of tracks, so they can be very long, and very, very heavy. Sometimes we would have to force three metal poles under these ties so that six guys could pick up the poles and carry one tie, coffin-like. Then you knew you were up against something.
The basic function of the track crew member is to fix "lowjoints." You have to say it as one word, even though it's made of two. If you get your head down so you can look down a railroad track from the boot-top level, you will note that there are depressions in the track at the junctions of the individual rails. The powerful hammering of the iron horse on these joints forces the ties underneath the joints deeper into the ground than the rest of the rail. Eventually the contrast is too much and lowjoints can cause derailments.
So the track crew has to go along the side of the track, find the low joints, jack up the track a few inches, and stuff dirt and rocks under the tie in order to get the joints up higher. Sometimes you put all fresh ties in, after digging out the old beaten-down and rotten ones. That's always fun. And sometimes your work is laid out for you when you get there in the morning, with six or seven ties neatly dropped by the side of the track. Then you know that you are in for another day of digging, hauling, shoving, scraping, and sweating.
But it's okay because you're all it in together. And maybe today one of the real good spike maul users will give you some more tips on how to drive spikes. I was just getting fairly good at it when I left.
But the other guy had to leave with an injured foot. And it happened not just because he was standing around, leaning on his shovel, looking philosophical, not just because he wasn't watching what was going on, but because he disobeyed a safety rule. Never stand with your foot on the rail. It's risky, what with all of the stuff that can happen around a rail.
But when he went, he wasn't missed. I have to admit that my over-eagerness to be accepted and to be considered an equal probably made me work too hard, and also made the "slacker" hard for me to understand. Maybe he had his own agenda. But I was quietly proud some time later, long after I had left that job, when my father in law told me that his friend in the railway office had said that I was a "good worker."
Damn straight. But it wasn't quite as nice as football. The football team had cheerleaders.
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