It wasn’t going to be a big bridge, just two lanes, about three hundred feet long and twenty feet or so above the Little Sandy River. Most people would drive over it without noticing they were crossing a bridge. Construction had just begun in the spring of 1973 when I started as an inspector’s helper with my father, an engineer with the Kentucky Highway Department. I had dropped out of college in what would have been the last semester of my engineering degree.
The construction site was planned chaos, like a lumberyard picked up by a tornado and dropped on a junkyard. The ground was mud, dirt, or dust, or sometimes all three, depending on recent weather. Gravel spread here and there implied roads. The tool shed was an old semi-truck trailer with the faded name of a grocery store on the side and rude wooden steps going up to its back doors. There were stacks and piles and equipment everywhere: re-bar, lumber, steel pilings, cables, gravel, a crane, air compressors, a small bulldozer, a pile-driver. Bob Johnson, the construction foreman, parked his dented and dirty blue Ford pickup that was also his office near the bridge. Blueprints and paperwork filled the cab, in the passenger seat, the floorboard, and behind the seats. We parked our yellow Highway Department truck near Bob’s, overlooking the work site. Dad had built a rack in our truck to hold our blueprints neatly rolled.
My father was an assistant resident engineer, responsible for inspecting the contractor’s work on a bridge and ensuring that it met specifications. He started work for the Highway Department when he came back from the Navy after World War II and worked his way up to assistant resident.
He was short, 5’7” or so, with a dark tan from years of working outside that ended at his rolled-up shirt sleeves and the neck of his shirt. He wore a suit to church on Sunday, and khaki work clothes the rest of the week. He never wore short-sleeved shirts, only long-sleeved, and always rolled the sleeves to the middle of his biceps. He smoked unfiltered Camels down to the ends, drank his coffee black, tasted whiskey once when he was in the Navy and never drank alcohol again. He combed his black hair straight back and held it in place with Vitalis, its scent mixing with the aroma of Old Spice aftershave and the smell of his Camels.
Dad was quiet and reserved, comfortable with only a few good friends. My parents got together with other couples to play cards occasionally, but their main social activity was going to church. He could be funny and had a large repertoire of stories and sayings, but his jokes often contained criticism or mockery.
Bridge construction starts with the abutments at each end, where the bridge and road meet, or abut. Steel pilings are driven down to a solid foundation, then concrete is poured around the tops of the pilings to form a bench which supports the ends of the bridge beams. The contractor started the south abutment first, so that’s where my bridge-building education began. I learned how to judge when the pilings were deep enough by watching how the cylinder on the pile driver rebounded after each stroke. I verified that the reinforcing steel was the correct size and type. I ran slump tests on the concrete as it was poured to make sure there wasn’t too much water and made the concrete cylinders which would be tested for strength later. I got donuts for the crew when the foreman was feeling generous. I got to do more than an inspector’s helper normally would; Dad was showing me things that most engineers wouldn’t have bothered to and was making sure that I learned as much as possible.
I thought my father and I were as different as any two people related by blood could be. He was always working, he relaxed by working, and expected everyone else to do the same. At home we worked in the garden or the yard, mowing or raking leaves, and on my grandparents’ farm there was another garden, plus tobacco, corn, hay, and cattle. There was always something to work on.
I was not a hard worker; in fact, I was hardly a worker at all except under threat of punishment. I liked books, math, science, model airplanes, model cars, music, and a hundred other things I bounced between, trying to avoid the boredom I was so susceptible to. There were few things more boring to me than tasks like hoeing or planting, the same operation repeated over and over under a hot sun. I would try to disappear when I knew it was time to work.
His contempt for someone who couldn’t do a job was clear, and that someone was often me. I remember, when I was around ten or twelve years old, him telling me to “do up” a long rope. I tried to coil it up on the ground, but the twist in the rope kept messing up the coils. I had never been shown that you prevent this by twisting the rope as you coil it; unlike him, I had never been in the Navy. Dad came over and saw the problems I was having and instead of showing me how to do it, shook his head and said under his breath, “Can’t even do up a rope.” I coiled it up the best I could and decided not to do it again.
We skirmished throughout my teenage years as I asserted my independence through clothes, music, attitude, and of course, hair. I grew my hair longer and sported a scraggly set of sideburns that aggravated him to no end. He told me that they “looked like a chicken shit down the side of my face.” It was the ‘60s and I fancied myself a hippie, or at least as much of a hippie as anyone in a small town in eastern Kentucky could be at that time, and he was a Republican. We argued about Vietnam, Nixon, and whatever else came up.
Things got better between us when I went away to the University of Kentucky on a Highway Department scholarship to study Civil Engineering. The physical distance between us helped our relationship, but I think that the main thing was that I was finally doing something he could support and understand.
I signed up for 21 credit hours in the spring semester of my senior year so I could finish my degree. The classes were hard, but normally I could have handled them. The problem was that I was becoming increasingly unsure that I wanted to be a highway engineer.
My parents had encouraged me to apply for the Highway Department scholarship since it would pay for most of my college expenses. I was good in math and science so everyone assumed that I would be an engineer or something else technical. I assumed that too, mostly because I didn’t know what else I could do. Without any other clear alternative, taking the scholarship was an easy non-decision for me. Four years later the question had come up again, now more real: what do I really want to do? My scholarship obligated me to work for the Highway Department after graduation. My family expected me to do that. I had seen other possibilities while in college but didn’t know if I could change to something completely different, or even if I wanted to. I felt trapped.
By the second week of class I was so depressed that it was hard to get out of bed. The third week I officially withdrew from school and went home.
I brought my depression home with me. Mom wanted me to see a doctor in case there was a physical cause. Dad was mostly silent, like me. I couldn’t tell them how conflicted I was about finishing my degree; instead, I said I’d just signed up for too many classes and had overworked myself.
I hung out, read, walked, drove around. After a couple of months I decided that it made the most sense to finish my degree and go to work, then figure it out from there. I talked to the University and to the Highway Department scholarship people to let them know I was coming back. I was able to begin my summer job for the Highway Department early.
Dad was starting work on a new bridge, and I going to be his helper. He didn’t ask me about it, just said that it was going to happen. Things had been a little rocky between us after the shock of my leaving school but had evened out again. Still, I was a little apprehensive at spending all day every day with him.
We drove to work together in the morning, spent the day together, then drove home together in the evening. Dad would talk about other bridges he had worked on, things on other projects that were similar, different, or funny. Sometimes he’d talk about his family, telling tales about some of the more eccentric ones.
“I’ve told you about your uncle Deward and the IRS, haven’t I?” Dad’s brother Deward was a construction foreman who was well-known for doing things his own way, both on and off the job. “He was travelling all over for work, so he had a lot of receipts. Whenever he got one he’d just throw it into a brown paper grocery bag behind the seat of his truck. When that bag got full, he’d just start another one. Well, the IRS finally figured out that he hadn’t been filing his taxes and called him in. Deward went to the IRS office with all of his brown paper bags and just put them on the guy’s desk. By the time the IRS got all the bags sorted out, they owed him money.”
Dad had always come home from work and told us about what had happened on the job that day. He was often mad at his boss or a contractor for not doing things the way he thought they should be. Other times he talked about pranks or somebody’s screw-up. We knew the names of all the guys he worked with and a lot of the contractor’s men. Sometimes on the weekend we’d take a drive to see the project and he’d point out what he’d been telling us about. Now I felt like he was showing me his world and what he had done for the last twenty-five years.
A new project is always a reunion. Dad knew many of the guys on the job and I recognized several of the names from having heard about them in his stories. Harold Jesse was the crane operator on Dad’s first job and they had worked together many times since then. One slow day he asked if I wanted to run the crane. I immediately reverted to a ten-year-old boy and climbed into the cab. Welder Tuffy Griffith had been a professional boxer and a motorcycle racer when he was young. His huge forearms made him look like Popeye. Dad’s running joke with him was to point at one of Tuffy’s welds and ask if a goose had crapped there. Rumus Colegrove drove a concrete truck and was a banjo player. I played some banjo with him one evening.
After the contractor had driven the pilings for the north abutment the carpenters started building the concrete forms. One of the carpenters looked across the river and remarked that the south abutment looked lower than the north one. As soon as he said that the other carpenters started squinting across the river and trying to level with their hands, arguing whether the two abutments were the same elevation or if the north one really was higher. It’s deceptively hard to estimate small elevation differences at a distance, especially across an empty space, so Dad and the foreman just assumed it was an optical illusion. Finally, though, there was nothing left to do but to set up the surveyor’s level to show everyone that the abutments were the same elevation.
I set up the level and centered the level bubble. Someone held a level rod on the north abutment, and I measured its elevation. While I waited for the rod to be carried over to the south abutment, I thought about how many times I had run the level and hoped that it wasn’t my mistake somehow.
The rod was set in place on the south abutment. I focused, then read the measurement out loud. To our surprise and the carpenter’s delight, the north abutment was exactly a foot higher.
A problem like this can be expensive. The worst case is that concrete must be jackhammered out and replaced, requiring weeks of extra work and cost. If it was the contractor’s mistake, he would have to fix it. If it was the State’s design mistake, the contractor would be paid extra to fix the problem. No concrete had been poured on the north abutment yet, but the south one was almost finished.
Since the mistake was an even foot, it was most likely a surveying or design problem. Elevations are surveyed relative to a benchmark, a permanent monument with a known elevation relative to sea level. It’s dangerously easy to make a one-foot mistake when adding or subtracting elevation measurements, but this seemed unlikely since the measurements had been made multiple times by the contractor and verified by the State, i.e, me and Dad. I didn’t think there was any way it could have been my fault, but that didn’t stop me from worrying.
The foreman called the construction company’s head engineer to come out and look at the problem. The head engineer spread out the blueprints on the hood of his truck and Dad and the foreman joined him in studying them. I stood behind them with a couple of the carpenters looking over their shoulders, anxious to see what the problem was.
The head engineer started by recalculating the elevations given on the blueprints for the north abutment: “The benchmark is at 583.31…”
Without thinking, I said, “No, it’s 584.31.” I had done so many calculations with the benchmark elevation on the south abutment that I had it memorized. The head engineer looked over at me, then turned back to the plans and checked the elevations given for the benchmark on the blueprint pages for the north and south abutments. They were a foot different.
They all looked at each other, hesitant to think it was that simple. After another check of the plans the engineer said “Well, that’s it.” Everybody standing around the truck grinned, relieved that it had been figured out. The carpenter reminded everybody that he had seen it first, while the engineer talked about another job where a similar mistake was made. We kept looking over at the problematic abutment, as if it might have moved while we weren’t watching. It seemed anticlimactic for it to be such a trivial mistake, just some draftsman in some office somewhere who had copied a number wrong.
While I was waiting for supper that evening, I overheard Dad telling Mom how I had spotted the error. I don’t think he ever said anything to me about it, but praise was never his way. I felt redeemed after all my years of uselessness. I had proven I could do something and I had done it in front of his co-workers.
By the end of the summer the steel beams had been set between the abutments and work on the deck had begun. I went back to college, finished those 21 hours of classes, then went to work for the Highway Department.
I thought for a long time that the benchmark incident had changed my relationship with my father by convincing him that I was competent and not just a lazy dreamer. I now believe that it was the bridge, but not necessarily the benchmark problem, that brought us together. Instead, it was spending the summer working together and talking in our yellow Highway Department truck. There was no one moment that changed things, but a gradual evolution as I figured out my own path and as he started to understand what I was becoming.
I now understand that the problem was that, in many ways, we were not all that different. We were both introverted, socially awkward, and had trouble expressing our feelings. I realized over the years that I was doing many of the same things that I resented him for, being judgmental, making cruel jokes, and holding resentments inside until they exploded. Our similarities exaggerated our differences.
We always assume that bridge plans, with their ruled white lines and precise measurements, are correct, but sometimes they’re wrong. If we’re lucky, we find the mistakes in our assumptions before it’s too late. I assumed that I understood my father and how he felt about me, without realizing how little I actually knew about him and about myself.
I worked for the Highway Department for two years, then went to graduate school for a PhD. My jobs were in research and development, developing math and coding instead of driving stakes or testing concrete. Whenever I took a new job or got a promotion Dad would ask for my business card to carry in his wallet and show his friends. He retired in 1982, after 37 years at the Highway Department, and died in 2008.
Many of the roads back home take me across bridges that Dad built; sometimes I make a detour just to cross “our” bridge. I like to think of the bridge as an unnamed memorial to him.
Chris McGlone recently completed an MFA in Creative Nonfiction at George Mason University. He received a BS in Civil Engineering from the University of Kentucky and MS and PhD degrees from Purdue University. His work has been published in Still: The Journal, The Nasiona, Floyd County Moonshine, and the Brevity Nonfiction Blog.
In his pre-retirement life as a photogrammetrist he published a number of technical papers and book chapters, co-authored a textbook, and edited the Manual of Photogrammetry, a standard reference work.
His other interests include gluten-free baking, playing Irish guitar and bluegrass banjo, and his dog, Darla.