The Bartender's Tale by Ivan Doig

Author:Ivan Doig
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Penguin Group US
Published: 2012-07-09T16:00:00+00:00

5

AS POP WOULD have put it, anyone with a brain in his cranium grasps what a lumberjack does. And it’s no great mental feat to figure out a steeplejack, even if you’ve never seen one climbing the peak of a church. But a mudjack? If Fort Peck was the damnedest dirt dam in all of Creation, as he said, why weren’t its builders called dirtjacks? Perched restlessly in back of the two very different heads in the front seat that midweek morning while Del drove the Gab Lab at no more than the speed limit even on long, empty stretches of the highway—surely the only vehicle in Montana behaving so—I asked just that.

“Use your thinking part, kiddo.” Still growly about the trip, Pop took the question as if he had been waiting for something to do besides watch grain fields go by too slowly. We’d had to pile ourselves and everything else into the van even earlier than for a fishing trip, and dawn found us heading east on the plains with the mountains of the Two Medicine country already slipping from sight behind us. The day came bright and washed after the latest deluge, but besides constant wheat and occasional farmhouses crouched behind scrubby trees planted as windbreaks—Igdrasil would have stood out like a redwood in this landscape—there was nothing much to look at. Boring as the geography was, I attached plenty of meaning to it. Somewhere not distant in the gray prairie to the north was the start of Canada, scene of those trips of his that had driven me wild. Were they really over, with the back-room accumulation to be dealt with somehow? I would have to worry about that some other time. Right now the lesson of the day was as basic as dirt, according to his tone of voice.

“Say you wanted to take one of those buttes”—he was squinting into the distance toward the only landmarks anywhere around, the Sweetgrass Hills, rising like three Treasure Islands on the horizon—“and use it to dam up the Missouri River. What’s the slickest way to move that much fill?”

“Uhm, lots and lots of trucks?”

Wrong, his expression told me, not even close. “You’d be trucking for a hundred years. Naw, what you want to do is add water,” he said, as though mixing the simplest drink. “Dredge up the soil, turn it into mud, a kind of slurry anyhow, and then pipe the stuff to wherever you want it. Dump enough of it and guess what, you’ve got a dam.”

Okay, that explained mudjacks enough for me. But he wasn’t through. Shifting around as though the passenger seat and for that matter the Volkswagen van was too small for him, he lit a cigarette, already his third of the day, and blew smoke as if letting off steam. “I bet you didn’t know Fort Peck had the biggest dredges ever built.” This tidbit of information was provided as if for my benefit, but doubtless for that of the straining listener in the driver’s seat as well.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.