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Hitting the highway with my Grandpa Jack
is like getting a guided tour of a carpenter's house. It's hard
to drive anywhere in Alberta without passing something Grandpa
Jack built. Here a bridge, there an information booth, beneath
the road a culvert.
"What was the toughest job you ever
had?" I asked him once, as we drove through the mountains on the
way to Calgary.
"The bridge in Hondo," he said.
Forty-four years of construction, but he needs no time to think
it over. Hondo is the story that every grandchild hears from
time to time. Actually he says Honda, or Hondoo. He and Grandma
have four or five different ways to pronounce this tiny town
north of Edmonton. It’s as if one word isn't enough.
"That was a tough job," said Grandpa
Jack. "I'd like to see it again someday."
So one weekend in August, Grandpa Jack
and I woke up at 5:30 a.m. at the family cabin near Red Deer. We
got into his car with a lot of coffee and struck out for Hondo,
over 300 km north.
I had my own motives for this trip.
About a dozen years ago at the cabin, the whole family pitched
in to dig a drainage ditch. Nobody worked harder that week than
Grandpa Jack. Nobody could. He was in his 70s. He a leads
without ordering, challenges without competing. But the way he
thinks is still a mystery to me.
About 10 years ago I went to what
everyone expected to be Grandpa Jack’s deathbed. I hoped there
might be a profound secret I could learn. But I was still
digging, doing most of the talking myself, when his son Howard
came in. Howard looks for oil and restores Hudson cars. They
talked for a long time about backing up some truck through the
mud in 1959.
So when Grandpa Jack said he'd like to
see Hondo again, I saw again the chance I'd missed in the
hospital. I wasn't interested in seeing the bridge. But I was
interested in seeing Grandpa Jack see the bridge.
Driving north, we talked about the
farmers making a living in the run-down trailers that dot the
farms north of Edmonton. We passed a tree-planting truck, and
talked about the man at the wheel, planting windbreaks all over
the province.
Between talking about farms and trucks,
I pestered him to talk about things I thought were more
important. For example, I asked where he got his sense of right
and wrong from.
“Church,” he said. In fact, he said
that's where everyone's morality comes from, at least those of
us who have it. I've never seen him in a church, but that's what
he said.
But Grandpa Jack always hedges when he
talks about abstract things like this. "I don't know anything,"
he says. I've built rafts and dug ditches with him, I once
restored a 1972 Pontiac Firebird with him, but I never heard him
say any such thing about drill bits or steel rods.
Early in the afternoon we crested a hill
and saw the Athabasca River, and Grandpa Jack's bridge
stretching across it. He knew it instantly, but from the
driver's seat, there was nothing to set it apart from the dozens
of bridges we’d already crossed that day. Not to me, anyway.
Grandpa Jack would point out the steel spans and the absence of
arches. It's obvious if you're looking.
We parked the car and walked out over
the river, and I got the story of the bridge again, feeling it
hum and groan under our feet as the trucks thundered past.
The bridge was actually his brother's
job. Grandpa Jack and his crew were just pitching in to help
pour concrete. They were also working full time at Grandpa
Jack’s company in Calgary, about five hundred kilometers away.
They would finish work, drive to Hondo, work all weekend, and
then drive back to Calgary to keep working. The crew slept while
Grandpa Jack did most of the driving.
The first problem was the ferry the
government provided to shuttle equipment across the river.
Grandpa Jack arrived with a dragline, a 12-ton digging machine
with its bucket suspended from a cable, and found a ferry so
small that if he put the dragline on it, it would sink. So he
built a barge.
The finished barge, though, was too
heavy for any nearby boat to tow. Grandpa Jack returned with his
own speedboat and a towing propeller. But the propeller was
designed for an engine that turned the opposite direction. The
only way to tow anything with that engine and that propeller was
to run the engine in reverse.
To support this, he had a small launch
as a rescue boat. Grandpa took it out for a test run and the
engine fell off into the river. In need of a rescue boat
himself, kilometers later he scrambled onto the bank and had to
walk back to the camp through mosquito-infested marshes.
"Hop into the river if you like,"
Grandpa Jack told me. "Find yourself a new engine, only used
once."
Winter came, and they began pouring
concrete by driving equipment out onto the frozen river. If they
didn't solve the problems and finish before the river thawed,
they'd go broke. So they solved them, finished, and got out of
there. Walking across the bridge 37 years later, Grandpa Jack
told me he'd never crossed it before.
At the end of the bridge, we met a
construction crew installing a new drainage ditch to preserve
the banks.
"This is my grandpa, Jack Nodwell," I
told them. "He built this bridge." It still seems a little
magical to me, that anyone could actually build a bridge. But
the construction guys didn't seem impressed. Every bridge is
built by somebody, maybe somebody whose life hangs from the
spans of the bridge in question. For them, and maybe for Grandpa
Jack, bridges and trucks are the things most worth talking
about.
On the ride home, I was still wondering
about the secret of being Grandpa Jack. I still am. Maybe it's
too simple to be a secret. I think it will come to me if I just
work harder.
In memory of Jack
Nodwell
1917 - 2003
Father, grandfather,
husband, friend.
Our guide and
inspiration forever. |
