The Hole

At a Glance

Metadata	Details
Publication Date	2023-08-01
Journal	Italian Americana
Authors	Robert Stewart

Abstract

The first time I took a turn on a jackhammer, on a sewer repair crew, the foreman told me to strap steel toe guards onto my boots. My boots already had toes hardened with some sort of composite, but the foreman did not want to chance it. The other men at the worksite, on Daggett Avenue in south St. Louis, looked away, as I remember. Those men normally ran the jackhammer and did not bother with toe guards, which had to be dug out of a rarely disturbed compartment in the crew trailer. My response to the foreman’s order was to resist—I’ll be fine, I heard myself say. Rather be a fool than look like one.What men on a sewer repair crew bother with has become expansive in my mind during the COVID-19 pandemic, as well. Some people bother with face masks and some do not, with varying degrees of intensity. I understood the virtue of those toe guards, especially for a rookie; I valued the foreman’s virtue, as he was looking out for me. I was not without sense, but I was ready to sacrifice virtue’s propriety for reasons fuzzy at the time.“I have never seen a man who loved virtue,” wrote Confucius, “as much as he loved beauty.” Toe guards were awkward, true, but something more happened to my thinking that day, confronted with those clown-shoe, silverish orbs that covered half my boots. I come from a labor culture, blue collar, working class, not academic or entrepreneurial; I was born to it. Being singled out on the crew in this way, as I measured it, estranged me from my people. Being safe didn’t seem worth it.My father had worked with the tools in the pipe trades for many years, as did his father. They broke concrete with sledges until the union told the skilled tradesmen, as they were, to leave that job to laborers, as I was to become. My father would make demands on me about how to work, not for his own self-interest but, to paraphrase Anthony de Mello in his book Awareness, to keep my illusions from clashing with reality.During a job early on, when our crew was making a creek crossing for cast-iron water main, my father offered me a warning. “Watch those backhoe operators when they swing their buckets,” he said to me one day. “You hear me?” I did. I also caught myself blissfully working in the hole, crumbing dirt with a shovel, while a backhoe straddled the ditch above me.As a kid in the late 1950s, I watched my uncle Tony Agrusa, a Sicilian immigrant, carried into his house on a stretcher after a ditch collapsed in on him when he was preparing to lay clay pipe not far from Daggett, in The Hill neighborhood. They didn’t take time that day—maybe any day—to shore the hole, and Tony, by the way, barely spoke English. A generation later, the men I worked with in construction “got after it,” as we’d say, fast as ever; and most were not lamed by any offer of caution when it came to opening a ditch. They were not men prone to love virtue.“His virtue made him mad,” wrote Byron of Don Quixote. Mad, yes, but compared to whom? Quixote’s job was to rescue, to serve, to defend the helpless, to get after it. He would not relinquish his ideals, or compromise them, or take no for an answer, or wait upon calmer heads, or faint back before entering a labyrinth, even were a tiger inside. Such doggedness might seem weak-minded to some in the professional classes, but it distinguished workers from slackers where I come from, not risking—that would miss the point—but ignoring fracture for the work to be done.To break through the possibilities of pavement—where the pick, jackhammer, shovel, or backhoe introduce a laborer to the many sublayers of gravel, clay, and ash—physically expands a person’s pupils, as the shade of the hole deepens. Each hole has its form, sometimes expansive—wherein to drop an office building—or wide as a set of shoulders, squared in clay, perhaps shored with timbers and straight down, or blasted into the rocky hills of southern Missouri, or mortared, as in earlier generations, when manholes were laid on site by bricklayers. It is the going down, more than the depth, one confronts, stepping onto the upper rungs of a ladder or straddling a pipe at the bottom of a ditch, bent over to snug a running rope for a lead pour. Sometimes you just need to fall to your knees.“A knight-errant,” wrote Cervantes, “must never complain of a wound, even though his entrails are dropping out of it.” The hole, the work at hand, demands more thought than we sometimes notice.Ditches over five feet deep first required shoring by law in 1969, with an amendment to the 1962 Contract and Work Hours Standards Act, too late for my uncle Tony. Even so, laws and regulations help but don’t always penetrate the job. My foreman that day on the street crew, in south St. Louis, simply put his left hand on the jackhammer’s handle to stop me from proceeding to dig without safety equipment; he used his right hand to signal another man to take over. That foreman was not prone to offer explanations or inclined to delineate on my behalf the dichotomy of beauty versus virtue, there in the street. His gesture, however, was all it took for me, then and there, to strap on the right equipment and get to work.In the struggle between my own real and ideal actions, I was fortunate to have had such a foreman, not only to avoid injury but to show me a way of work not seen on other crews. So it was, on another day with another foreman, it took about 30 seconds for a fellow crewman in a manhole to clump over into a motionless heap, once he reached the bottom. We’d been called to a spot on North Broadway in St. Louis, an area of small manufacturing plants, to inspect a sewer line. Our foreman that day was possibly in his mid-60s, small in stature, and not one to impose protocol on his crew or entertain those who wanted to stop and strap on safety equipment. I happened to be on his crew temporarily because our regular foreman was on vacation.The truck barely had stopped when that particular crewman jumped out, pulled the manhole cover, shone a light, and started down the rebar steps of the manhole. He was the type of worker one finds on many jobs who always rushed to be first in the hole, wherever we were, which created competition among the rest of us to jump in ahead of him, if possible, to hurry up and avoid being labeled a slacker. You don’t want to be the guy always standing on the surface, looking in.We often dug new manholes by hand in those days, six-foot square and straight down, spading and crumbing, shaving the sides so they were straight and clean, and shoring the walls as we descended, typically 20 feet deep or more. When you go down into the earth like that, or use a jackhammer to break through the archeology of a street—past asphalt, concrete, even cobblestone—a man working a shovel will uncover wrinkled shards of colored glass, elixir bottles, a brass star from a long-gone building, a beaded necklace. An older gentleman on one crew I worked with always insisted that he be allowed to break into clogged sewers, once us younger guys exposed the lines. I saw him more than once crack open the blocked pipe with a ball-pean hammer and sort through the muck inside to recover a gold wedding band or diamond ring that had slipped off someone’s finger in the dish suds.To step steadily downward, one spade cut after another, reminds a person that the ground has absorbed the sweat of generations. It would be stifling down there, true—as it could be in existing manholes—and room for only one person. That would be the person moving the job. In the deeper digs, he would throw dirt with a shovel over his head onto a secondary platform, then someone would relay the dirt to the surface; otherwise, we’d send a bucket down to be loaded and hoisted up, where other men would throw the dirt onto a truck bed. It would not do in construction to be slow to go into the hole, or to hold up the job by unpacking safety gear. You won’t find a ranch hand wearing a riding helmet. No one needs to explain such things. There was, on this crew, no time for awkward and cumbersome matters, such as strapping on masks or hooking up air tubes, blowers, safety lines. Just go.During the worst of the COVID-19 pandemic, I accompanied my wife to a meeting in rural Kansas of about 15 members of an equestrian group, where one of the horsemen announced, not jokingly, “If I have to wear a mask, I’m leaving.” We were at a state park, under an open-air pavilion, with people on benches shoulder to shoulder, though I sat on a table away from the cluster of bodies. A good breeze pushed through. No one wore a face mask or asked others to wear one. We had arrived at a moment of Zen, appropriate to acknowledging the presiding fear, not of illness or death, or loss of freedom, but fear of appearing inelegant.“God may forgive sins,” wrote Ralph Waldo Emerson, “but awkwardness has no forgiveness in heaven or earth.”When my coworker collapsed in that manhole, I realized there was a problem only when the foreman that day started yelling Jesus, Jesus. It sometimes happens in parts of a city that poisonous gasses settle in the sewer or the bottom of a manhole, I learned later, no doubt from chemicals released illegally by one of the plants in the area. A new friend of mine, Jonathan, seemed, for some reason, to practically jump down that manhole, intending to pull the first guy out. He was a soft-spoken kid, otherwise sensible, whom I assumed had been told to go down there and rescue the first man, though I heard little over the muffled roar of panic. Jonathan collapsed on top of the other fellow.Gas masks, air blower, and a harness had hung in the crew truck untouched. The foreman, I remember, just hopped in place, trapped by his jittery failure to act. Other men ran to phone for help, and within minutes, I witnessed what remains for me the overriding image of professionalism at its steady, functional core. A fire department crew arrived and set up a blower to force air down the manhole; a fireman with light on his helmet, gas mask, and harness went down and pulled out the two men—Jonathan first then the other, both, by this time, dead.I never in my work life have seen a foreman display such incompetence, not, at least, so it led to tragedy. My father, by then, had become a business agent for St. Louis’ Plumbers and Pipefitters Local No. 35 and had heard what happened, even though ours was a municipal crew and not with a private contractor. When I described the foreman’s behavior to him, he seemed unsurprised. “Some of those older foremen never changed,” my father said. “You have to watch for how they operate.” He asked if I understood. Probably, I did not.“As I raved and grew more fierce and wild / at every word,” wrote poet George Herbert, “I thought I heard one calling, ‘Childe’.”I easily could have gone into that hole myself, if ordered, ignoring my own good sense and the lessons I had been given. Work, as it turns out, is about mindfulness, which never looks like someone hopping up and down, sputtering the words “Jesus, Jesus.” Awareness is my responsibility, and that responsibility is hard to escape. Legal or official proscriptions entertain us, but the only way to get on with things, advises de Mello, is to see through it: Don’t denounce it; understand it, is his advice. My regular foreman enforced his judgment about toe guards that day on Hampton Avenue, when I was introduced to a jackhammer, simply by putting his hand on the jackhammer’s handle, a gesture so loud I almost did not hear it.

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DOI: https://doi.org/10.5406/2327753x.41.2.20