The Boys in the Boat (Young Readers Adaptation) by Daniel James Brown

Author:Daniel James Brown
Format: epub

The town of Grand Coulee, with B Street off to the right.

17

Difficult and Dangerous Work

Joe’s old car labored and coughed and wheezed, crawling up the long, steep ascent to Blewett Pass, high in the Cascade Mountains. That morning, in June of 1935, he had thrown his banjo and his clothes in the backseat, said good-bye to Joyce for the summer, and driven out of Seattle, heading east, looking for work. Jobs were still scarce, but there was hope for Joe. The previous summer, President Franklin D. Roosevelt had traveled out to Washington, to a town near the Columbia River and a fifty-mile-long dry canyon called the Grand Coulee. Twenty thousand people gathered to hear him speak, among them George Pocock and his family. When President Roosevelt appeared on the platform before them, the crowd roared its welcome, and when he spoke of plans to build a massive new dam in that rough, empty country, they cheered again. The Grand Coulee Dam, he said, would bring water to arid farmland, generate electrical power, and create thousands of jobs.

Now, less than a year after Roosevelt’s speech, Joe drove down from the mountains, through gently rolling jade-green wheat fields, into the rugged Washington scablands, then on to the ramshackle boomtown of Grand Coulee, perched just above the Columbia River. Thirty minutes after he stepped out of his car, he had a job. To build the foundation of the dam, hundreds of workers first had to knock away layers of loose rock from the canyon walls to get to the older granite bedrock. Then the granite itself had to be shaped. The men who performed this work had to strap themselves into harnesses, dangle from the cliff face hundreds of feet above the river, and pound away at the rock with jackhammers. The work was difficult and dangerous, but it paid better than the other jobs at the dam. Joe signed himself up, for seventy-five cents an hour.

That evening, before his first day of work, he sat on the hood of his car, in front of the office. Down in the coulee, steam shovels and electric shovels clawed at piles of loose rock. Bulldozers pushed earth and rocks from one place to another. Tractors crawled back and forth, gouging out terraces. On the cliffs, men suspended from ropes crawled and swung from one spot to another like so many black spiders. Studying them, Joe saw that they were drilling holes in the rock faces with jackhammers. As he watched, a long, shrill whistle blew, and the jackhammer men scrambled quickly to the tops of their lines. At the base of the cliffs, hundreds of men who’d been loosening the fallen rock with picks and crowbars suddenly scurried away. The deep, hollow, concussive sound of an explosion boomed and blossomed across the canyon. A shower of rocks and boulders tumbled down onto the piles below.

Joe was not at all sure what he was getting into here. But he was flat broke again and more than a little discouraged.

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