The Dam Tender
by Jeffrey Greene
part 1
Dupree drove to the mine that night as a blind dog might find its way home, by smell and habit. He hardly felt the wheel in his hands and had a kind of crashing silence in his head. The humid air was thick with the pounded-fossil smell of a dry mill, a smell that had a color: off-white, like the residue the smog would leave on his car by morning.
He felt estranged from the last few hours, like a bystander who’d wandered in to gawk at the street accident that the life of Julius Anselm Dupree had quite suddenly become, and he was deep into phosphate country before he even noticed that the eight-track tape had been stuck and dragging on the same song the whole way. He stabbed the ‘off‘ button so hard he almost jammed his finger.
Just road sounds now, the moist, mineral-smelling air through the open windows carrying miles of darkness with it, so much better than silence and safer than music, which might force him to feel something. He kept turning on the car’s interior light and examining first one hand, then the other, looking for stains that weren’t there no matter how many times he checked.
It was the midnight shift, 10:30 to 6:30, with six more days of night before a three-day weekend, followed by the day shift. The day shift was the most hopeful of the three, when he felt closest to being in step with the rest of the world. The evening shift was his favorite, with its transition from day into night, matching the rhythm of his own habits, the only shift when he felt safe smoking dope, which always helped pass the time. Still wired after getting home after eleven, he’d stay up until two, then sleep far into the morning.
But the graveyard shift was when everything went to hell, each month’s rough patch: lost sleep, lost direction, lost time with... He shook off the thought. Was he in his right mind, coming here tonight, of all nights? Once he was on the dam, there was no leaving it until morning, and when he thought of the eight hours that lay ahead of him, he seriously considered turning the car around and blowing off the job.
But where else could he go now, except to the dam? He had made himself homeless. Solitude was peace, or whatever husk of it still remained, and he needed time to think. Or, more likely, just stand there, waiting for the wave to reach him.
Mulberry was a deserted crossroads at this time of night, not that it ever really bustled. He turned right off of SR37 onto Highway 60, heading for the left-hand turn-off, followed by five more miles south through depopulated mine country once known as the town of Nichols, Florida until, much too soon, he reached his destination.
The Wexon International Chemicals washer rose a hundred and twenty-seven feet above the dirt parking lot. He gathered up his grocery bag containing his lunch, his rain suit, mosquito hat and spray can of DEET, and a towel that he used as a cushion. He put on his hard hat, picked up his six-volt flashlight, locked his car and crossed the lot as if a hundred eyes were watching him, to the company truck where Shepherd, the Waste Control Officer, waited, engine idling, to take him out to the dam.
The washer, its intricate structure like a giant steel erector set, with several levels connected by catwalks, was going full blast, the din created by its descending series of vibrating screens and shakers, all designed to sift the black phosphate pebbles out from the slurry of water, sand and clay pumped with it through twenty-inch steel pipe by five-hundred horsepower turbines from the pit and the dragline more than a mile south and straight to the top of the washer.
The separated slurry was pumped to the settling area; the water and sand, to the dam. Aside from the operator’s office midway up, the washer seemed inimical to human life, with its unrelenting noise and vibration, splashing mud and water everywhere, making the stairs treacherous, yet brilliantly lit so that laborers and maintenance crews could work day and night keeping the whole sprawling, enormously profitable operation up and running.
He managed a mumbled greeting as he climbed in, and Shepherd, a godly, taciturn man of middle age with a plain face and a comfortingly solid presence, nodded a quick hello and drove down the dirt road to the highway.
“Might get us a storm tonight,” Shepherd said, chewing his words along with his tobacco into a nearly unintelligible mush as, after a mile or so, they turned off the two-lane road and climbed up a steep sand hill to the dike road. Like Dupree, he hated his first name, which happened to be Estell, and answered only to “Mr. Shepherd” or just “Shepherd.” It had created a superficial bond between them.
Just to say something, anything: “A storm?”
“Big one off the Gulf, headin’ our way,” Shepherd replied, spitting tobacco juice out the window, then wiping his chin. “Maybe it’ll stall out over Tampa,” Dupree said, his voice sounding to own his ear like someone doing a bad impersonation of him. He sat tensely, his bag on his lap, gripping his flashlight.
There was no moon, but the hard country darkness was leached by the glow of other mines on the horizon and the klieg-lighted dragline, visible from here across a desolate expanse of water-filled pits and small, weed-covered islands of overburden, which were just piles of earth, forty cubic yards in each bucket-load, dumped by the dragline months and years before to get to the layer of phosphate rock underneath.
Dupree’s hands, arms and shoulders were trembling with exhaustion, and his lower back was stiff from the work of the last few hours. Though it was at least eighty degrees outside, he felt cold.
It had stormed nearly every day this summer, and the dike road was all but impassable. Shepherd wrestled with the wheel of the pickup as it spun and skidded through the slimy clay. Getting stuck was a distinct possibility, even with four-wheel drive, necessitating a long wait for a bulldozer to come and tow them out.
Paralleling the road on the right side was the rusted sixteen-inch pipe from the washer carrying water and fine sand called the tailings. Shepherd ran the truck’s searchlight along the pipe as he drove, looking for leaks, but everything was tight. Dupree always hated mine shutdowns for repairs because the dam tender would sometimes be called in to work on the washer, and the last thing he wanted to deal with tonight was other people.
The dam tender’s hut sat on a rise of sand about thirty yards behind the pipe’s massive discharge. Built in the machine shop, it was made of heavy-gauge steel painted battleship gray and roughly seven feet high, five feet wide and six feet long. It had a three-foot overhang but no door or windows, a wooden seat spanning the width of the hut, a steel grate for a floor, and it was welded to two steel sleds, with a sturdy eyelet welded to the back of the hut so it could be hooked to a cable and dragged by a bulldozer up the line as the sand filled in the pit and new joints of pipe were added. It was a hotbox in the summer and a freezer in winter, with a dangerous kerosene stove sitting outside on the sand. When the weather turned cold, the stove could be pulled up as close to the doorway as one dared, giving little heat and a lot of smoke.
Major McCoy, the evening-shift dam tender, was waiting by the road, his flashlight boring a moth-navigated tunnel through the darkness. A shrapnel-scarred veteran of Anzio (‘Major’ was his name, not his rank), and a failed family man, who in happier days had owned the African-American Insurance Agency in Fort Blount, McCoy had steadily boozed and whored away all his good luck, eventually, like Dupree, washing up on the dam. He was sixty-four and looked ten years younger, and always seemed a little bewildered and pissed off to find himself wearing a hard hat instead of a suit and tie. His rubber boots and rain-suit cuffs were smeared with the clinging gray mud of the dike road.
“You got a good run here, young man,” he said, nodding sternly at Dupree as they passed each other. “Easy night.”
“Music to my ears, Major,” Dupree replied, his standard reply, yet he cringed at the falseness of it.
And then the truck was gone, and he was alone with the constant roar of water. The mosquitoes had found him, and the first thing he did was don the rain suit, tucking the rain-pant cuffs down into his boots and the jacket into the pants, then tie the pants’ suspenders around his waist like a belt and spray DEET on his hands and around the top of the boots. He ditched the hard hat and put on his improvised mosquito hat, which was a wide-brim canvas trail hat with mosquito netting stapled around the brim, then sprayed more DEET around the edges of the netting.
Thus armed, at least for an hour or two, against what would be an all-night assault, he took his light and walked out to the discharge, casting the beam around the pit where the water inevitably formed a whirlpool that steadily ate away the sand holding up the pipe, resulting in a collapsed, broken pipe and a mine shutdown.
It was the dam tender’s job to see that it didn’t happen, and the solution was simple and jury-rigged. A spatter board was a long, wide piece of scrap wood siding tied underneath the pipe by two lengths of polyethylene rope, its end jutting into the heavy flow, which would disperse a portion of the stream into a fan-like pattern that distributed the sand behind the pipe and neutralized the whirlpool effect. The sand would evenly fill in the pit behind the pipe and allow the bulldozer and float crew to get in and add new joints of pipe, during which time the dam tender would switch the flow to a back-up pipe, called the Old Debris Line, which was even more isolated and had no hut in which to shelter from sun and storm.
The quick look had confirmed McCoy’s assessment: an easy night. The pit was a good twenty feet deep and wouldn’t fill up with sand for several days. He’d look again a few times to make sure, but — aside from the radio voices of other midnight-shifters from all the far-flung stations of the Nichols and Fort Meade mines, country boys yakking business back and forth throughout the night — freight car loader, washer operator, dragline, pit gunner, WCO, foreman, float crew — the next eight hours were his to fill as he might.
From Dupree’s sand hill looking out over the flat Florida countryside, he could see clouds building up on the western horizon toward Tampa more than thirty miles away. Flicks of lightning were still too distant for the sound of their thunder to reach him. It was possible that the storm would get this far inland, but he doubted it would;.the lightning strikes were too frequent. The front of the hut was facing south; chances were good he’d stay fairly dry.
Bad as the conditions of the dike road were, he felt the need to move, so he took the walkie-talkie and the flashlight and slogged through the sticky clay, adding weight to his boots with every step, following alongside the pipe. Then, picking a spot, he sat down on the pipe, facing west. He could feel the water and sand moving under his hands. Leaning down, he put his ear next to the cool, rusted metal, listening to the seethe of tailings forced through the almost two miles of pipe by a series of pumping stations after leaving the washer.
As nothing else could have at this moment, the sound soothed him, and he stretched out full length on his stomach and wrapped his arms and legs around the pipe to hold himself in place. Closing his eyes, he listened, imagining his body melting through the steel, becoming part of the stream, all the rage and dread and unbearable moments dissolving along with his body, no longer tending dam but tendering himself into pure flow.
He heard something muffled yet distinct just under his ear, like a small fist knocking on the inside of the pipe. But sound really carried along the steel. Someone up the line could be banging on the pipe with a hammer, or it might have been a slightly larger pebble or two that had gotten through the sifting process and struck against the metal right under his ear.
He sat up, brushing the granules of rust off his rain suit. Out here in the long dark, he’d heard many sounds, not all of them imaginary, yet he knew that nothing could hurt him besides mosquitoes and tripping over his own feet and falling into the pit. There were big alligators in some of the flooded pits nearby, but he’d never seen one on the dike road, which was too high and steep a climb for a gator. It was all these hours alone that untethered the imagination, and the constant roar of the discharge was like an aural canvas on which one might might paint a world of half-heard, half-dreamed noises.
“It’s back there,” he said aloud, making a gesture as if tossing salt over his shoulder. One second ago was an eon, for all he could do about it. He was safe in the Present; the Past was quicksand.
Becoming irritably conscious of the thin, insistent whine of mosquito wings hovering around his netted face, a sound he could never get used to, he struggled through the sucking mud back to the hut, feeling the need for a cigarette. Using the end of one of the sleds to dislodge the mud from his boots, he seated himself inside the hut and rolled a cigarette from a can of Prince Edward tobacco, a habit he’d picked up from Ulysse, the dam tender relieving him in the morning. Smoking helped keep the mosquitoes away, even though he had to raise the netting to inhale.
The thunderous fall of water from the pipe was more muted inside the hut but, at the best of times, the absence of windows made him nervous. Blind on three sides to all that darkness behind him, he was always half-expecting the sudden appearance of someone in the doorway. An absurd fear, since no one came out here besides company personnel, and only when absolutely necessary. He probably wouldn’t see anyone until Charlie Stillman, Shepherd’s relief, brought Ulysse to relieve him in the morning. All five thousand acres of the Wexon mine were fenced and posted, and he was a mile off the highway.
But why remind himself how alone he was? Wasn’t that what he wanted, what he’d always wanted? There’d been no peace with other people, his family, and certainly not with... He shook off the thought. Hard words, hurt feelings, disappointments, dead ends, demeaning jobs: all that had happened somewhere else, and truthfully, everywhere else but here. Here was where he belonged, doing a job that almost no one wanted.
To choose a low-paying job like dam-tending was considered odd for a younger man. One either started on the dam or ended up here, like Ulysse, who was mellowing out his last couple of years before retirement after a lifetime of day labor. Dupree was White and Ulysse was Black, but they were alike in one essential respect: after years of fighting losing battles, they both craved peace and had found a measure of it on the dam.
Most of the day laborers dreaded being alone for an hour, much less a whole shift. But he’d never bid on another, better-paying position, not in the two years he’d been here. He’d learned something on the dam, besides his own capacity for solitude: one is never truly alone anywhere.
The entire scroll of one’s memory and all the people in it is always unfurling, moment by moment, and he knew now, better than at any time in his life, what the Past was: a land of phantoms, separated from the Present by the flimsiest fabric, and any thought, any memory, could rip a hole into its realm and let them in. But living wholly in the present moment was impossible; he’d tried. He was trying now.
“22 to 108.”
It was Frank Thomason, his foreman, doing his once-nightly check-in. He picked up the walkie-talkie and pressed the talk button.
“108, go ahead.”
“How we doin’ out there, Dupree?”
“No problems, Frank. Several days before it fills in.”
“What I like to hear. 22 out.”
Barring a shutdown for repairs, he wouldn’t be bothered for the rest of the night. On an easy shift like this one, when things were running smoothly and, if the footing was better, he would usually take a long walk on the dike road, enjoying the night air. But tonight he was stuck with the hut and a few yards around it.
Copyright © 2023 by Jeffrey Greene
