In reality, the dust, now a grey fog in the excavator’s headlamps, was a by-product of copper mining in Arizona. Near Morenci, they stripped an open pit nearly round the clock.
John Brigham was approaching middle age with grace and humility. Son of a small town plumber, he had left home at eighteen in search of fortune. Along the way he acquired a wife, two children and a modest living. In return, he spent half the year away from them living in a company doublewide. He had traded the trappings of a suburban life for solitude. Each time he returned, his children’s faces were a little longer, their limbs less chubby, more gaunt.
In the evenings the men on his shift would gather and play cards. He preferred to watch and conserve his earnings. They ribbed him for being tight, but he would just laugh and visualize the wallet photos of his son and daughter.
He had one close friend whom he trusted. Günter was a veteran of the mine; the engineer responsible for placing the de-watering bores and pumps. Like an avalanche control expert, he decided when and where to relieve water pressure in the mine walls.
John first crossed paths with him in the field several years ago. Günter was high above on a batter near the pit’s first berm. A small team of men were assembled around the borehole and appeared to be waiting for something. John had noticed them through the dirt-pocked film glazing his excavator’s windshield. He had just left the access route and was hugging the batter’s base. His scheduled dig was nearby and this was the most direct route. Suddenly his cabin radio crackled, cutting through the chuff of the diesel under load.
“Ah… excuse me. Where do you think you’re going? I’m referring to you, trackhoe with the red orange boom.” The accent was southwest, but tinged with Bavarian.
It took him a second to self-realize. With some arrogance he continued on his path, yanking the hand mic from its slide perch.
“Yea. Roger, this is John speaking. Who’s this?”
“Which is it, Rodger or John? Listen. I don’t have time for formalities. I am about to press a pump into an iffy hole up here and I’m not sure if it’ll take or blow back. If it blows, you can kiss your sweet ass goodbye. I advise an immediate ninety degree right turn away, back to the access route, over.”
The no bullshit tone was convincing enough. A few moments after re-joining the route he heard a tremendous rumble. A glance in the rearview yielded a chaotic scene. A large slab of bedrock had come loose on the batter above and taken the pump along for a ride. John purposefully stalled the excavator. He peered for several long seconds in his rearview, trying to discern figures through a rising dust cloud. The pump, a device weighing nearly a metric ton, had crashed, as predicted, at the batter’s base. Remembering his cabin radio he shouted at the mic. Spittle laced with dust peppered the horizontal slits.
“Is everyone OK up there on the first berm? This is the excavator that was just at your position. Do you copy?”
A few tense moments passed before an answer. “Gocha trackhoe. We are all here and accounted for, less a half a million-dollar pump. Good riddance. Anyway, you owe me a beer after shift. I’ll be at the cantina.”
John was taken with his matter of fact nature, but had a chuckle nonetheless.
He was able to repair earlier than normal that particular night. His dig was cut short on account of the accident. Some men had been diverted to help salvage the pump.
The walk from the equipment depot to his trailer was usually the most savored part of his day. Through the chain link fence of the depot, his first step outside afforded him a vista few ever witnessed. High above the pit rim, the berms splayed out like earthen tree rings, each discerned by caged floodlights spaced every hundred yards. The vertical pit walls between each berm, the batters, were the focal points of the light. The stepped berms combined with the even cascade of light against the grey washed walls gave the appearance of a vast amphitheatre. Instead of music, there was the droning of reversing trucks, both their gearboxes and nasal warning tones. Instead of spoken lines, there was the clanging of dump buckets dropping open, the reverberations just as dramatic.
John would stroll back slowly to his trailer, stopping frequently to peer through the fence. He imagined it a secret government complex where giant machines of war were being assembled. Daydreaming had always been a favorite hobby since youth, but time spent in the excavator saddle had rekindled his passion.
The night of the accident he diverted past the power plant on the way to the cantina. The white castle hummed and spewed high frequency tones. Cast below and before it, the neatly arranged sterile trailers reflected the light and tones. A fiefdom that burned bright all hours, indifferent to the desert sun.
He found Günter alone at the bar.
“The name’s John. John Brigham. I really want to thank you for the head’s up back there. It was too close for my liking.”
“Don’t mention it. Here, pull up a stool. I’m Günter. I’m an engineer, here on loan from a German sister company. Hence the cockamamie accent. Although I’ve been here going on a decade now, so I dink it’s fading. And you, where are you from?”
“I hail from Mobile, Alabama. The fishing life never appealed to me, neither did the rigs. Damn water’s too unpredictable. Well I guess you would know a thing or two about that. Got two kids, been married once.”
Günter nodded in acknowledgement. “Had a wife. She was a real drag. Don’t think I could be out here alone, with a family. Why do you do it John? Or I guess, how do you do it?”
“That’s as good a question as anybody’s ever asked me.”
The two began spending most of their free time together when shifts allowed. Günter was a pleasant diversion from the more rough-mannered men on his crew. As an engineer he approached problems methodically. He never gambled, seldom drank; two things in common that John hadn’t found in anyone else at the mine. One day Günter welded a protective shield around his engine’s air filter. Less dust clogged it and his cruising speed increased a fraction. Negligible over the course of a day, but his workload seemed to ease with time.
He had seen much less of him now that he was on the twilight shift. Every now and then he would hear some engineer traffic over his cockpit CB and strain to make out an accented voice. This particular shift the radio was silent, so he entertained himself in the usual fashion.
Abruptly, he lost hydraulic pressure in all lines. His right hand stick controlling the boom height went dead and the entire rig went crashing down onto the truck bed. The sheer tonnage of the bucket slamming down had caused the truck’s front wheels to rise off the ground at least ten feet. Fearing for the men driving, John threw the excavator in reverse.
As he expected, the maneuver relieved some of the angle and pressure. The truck’s wheels began to lower and he goosed the throttle more. His radio buzzed to life.
“Stop John. You’re on the edge of the berm. STOP!”
The cry was of sheer terror. John’s entire body coursed heat. He clutched his kill switch and pressed. He could already feel his equilibrium tilting. A glance in his side mirror revealed a small portion of his right track resting out over the edge.
He practically ripped the parking brake from the floor as the engine shuddered to a halt. Just like during his daily toil, his mind sped. Except instead of a dull, timeless wandering, it was crisp and jolting. He saw his children’s faces like the wallet pictures he kept.
He later recalled hopping out of the cabin and running. Running away from the dig site up towards the power plant. Careening past the card trailer, past the cantina and up Günter’s mobile home steps.
Completely out of breath he managed a few words.
“I see what you mean now brother… I can’t be out here alone no more… out of respect… I want to say goodbye.”
Günter simply nodded and closed the door. He marched past the depot to his trailer with his eyes locked to the ground. Exposed by the scathing white light from the plant, John Brigham packed his belongings and headed east. The scene unfolded below with the same cadence it always had, less one digger.
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