by Mike Rowe
Through his telescope, the invalid watched the passenger approach the vehicle, turn to those who had assembled, and begin to speak. He couldn’t hear the words, but he knew what was being said. The passenger was thanking the taxpayers for their patience. Thanking them for their faith in the mission. Thanking them for the honor of being the first to go where no man had gone before.
When the passenger finished, the crowd applauded with great enthusiasm. Fireworks exploded. The band began to play. Then, after fourteen years of painstaking preparation, heartbreaking setbacks, and too many obstacles to recall, the passenger climbed into the vehicle, waved to the crowd, and rode off into the history books.
Grimacing in agony with every breath, the invalid watched it all through the lens of his telescope—and wept. Perhaps if his wife had been with him on that historic day, she could have eased his pain. Ever since his escape from that terrible fire, sixty feet below the surface, she’d been trying to treat the mysterious symptoms that continued to plague him. They had begun with the strange tingling in his feet and hands, followed by intense pain in his knees and elbows and inexplicable bruising on his chest and ribs. Then the headaches had begun. Headaches that made him wish he’d stayed below with the men who had perished in that pressurized pit of despair. But his wife had never left his side. Even when the swelling had left him mute. Even when the numbness had left him paralyzed. Even when his skin had begun to molt and slough off in pieces.
Today we call it the bends. Back then, they called it caisson disease. Either way, it was one hell of a toll.
The invalid never recovered, but he did remain on the job, supervising the progress from his bedroom window, always behind his telescope, always racked with pain. His wife became his nurse, his ears, his hands, and his mouth, relaying his instructions to the men who labored below. In her spare time she studied physics, hydrodynamics, and structural engineering. When her husband’s condition deteriorated even further, she began to take the meetings that he could no longer attend. Meetings with crooked politicians, ruthless financiers, and a clutch of unscrupulous vendors. Meetings where women were not at all welcome. She attended them anyway. She lobbied hard to prove the experts wrong. And in the end she did.
Through his telescope, the invalid watched the celebration unfold beneath him and continued to ponder the price of progress. Slowly, painfully, he shifted his gaze away from the triumphant passenger and back to the scene of the accident. Not the accident that had left him crippled and ruined but the one that had left him in charge. He found the exact spot on the pier, half a mile away. A slip, a fall, a broken foot, an amputation, an infection, and, just like that, his father—the chief engineer who’d conceived this audacious journey in the first place—was gone.
Of course, it hadn’t felt “just like that” at the time. It had taken weeks for the old man to die. First he’d endured mysterious contractions that bent his spine backward, leaving his body arched and twisted. Then he’d contended with spasms that caused his arms to jerk wildly—before they, too, had gone rigid. He’d never forget the way his father’s face had slowly retracted from his skull. How the muscles in his head had tightened and seized, pulling the features ever backward. When his father finally died, his eyes were wide and bulging, his teeth bared in a terrible grin.
Today we call it tetanus. Back then, they called it lockjaw.
Either way, it was one hell of a toll.
The invalid lowered his telescope. He brushed away a tear as the passenger slowly rolled off toward the history books. His work was finally done. The trip of a lifetime was now underway. A $15 million excursion that’s been repeated so many times since, the original cost has long been forgotten. In fact, in our own century, you can take the same trip for free.
The toll, you see, has already been paid. Paid by the twenty-seven men who were crushed, burned alive, torn in half, and hopelessly mangled in a series of workplace accidents too horrific to describe. Paid by hundreds of other men who lost fingers and toes and other body parts, working on a job site that OSHA would have shut down on day one. Paid by the countless immigrants who labored for two dollars a day in the bottomless pits called “caissons”—pressurized wooden coffins, far below the surface, where forgotten men had dug the foundations by hand and built mighty barbicans one stone at a time. Day after day, week after week, year after year, until limestone towers emerged from the watery depths and scraped the Manhattan sky.
Those were men who’d paid the original toll. Men like John Roebling, the chief engineer and the first man to die during construction. Men like John’s son, Washington Roebling, the man who’d inherited his father’s title and paid his own heavy price in the caissons—the same man who now watched through a telescope as his wife completed the work that he and his father had started.
Make no mistake, it had been a team effort. A family affair. But Washington’s wife was the one who put the ball through the hoop. The self-taught contractor who’d never stopped learning. The unelected official who went toe-to-toe with countless corrupt politicians. The uncredited engineer who won the respect of an army of men—forty years before women were given the right to vote.
Her name was Emily and she, too, understood the price of progress. That was why Emily Roebling was selected to become the first passenger to cross the East River in a horse-drawn carriage on a road experts said could not be built. A road suspended in space, 135 feet above choppy waters. One that had cost over $15 million to create and would not have been there without her extraordinary efforts.
Back then, they called it the eighth wonder of the world. Today we call it the Brooklyn Bridge. Either way, getting it built took… one hell of a toll.
* * *
The Mighty Mac is a suspension bridge that connects Michigan’s Upper and Lower Peninsulas. It’s five miles long and 552 feet tall. In May 2007, I painted it. Not all of it; painting the Mackinac Bridge takes a team of maintenance workers seven years to complete. As soon as they’re done, they go back to the beginning and start again. Kind of like what I did when I finished the last Travis McGee mystery.
It was windy that day, and as we worked from a scaffold hundreds of feet in midair, covering everything we could reach with a thick layer of “foliage green,” I couldn’t help but look down and recall the sad fate of Leslie Ann Pluhar. Leslie was crossing the span in September 1989 when a gust of wind blew her Yugo off the deck and sent her plunging into the icy water far below.
Hell of a thing. One minute you’re driving across the bridge in your trusty Yugo, cursing the ever-increasing toll. The next, you’re free-falling toward oblivion.
Eight years later, the Dirty Jobs crew was trying to avoid a similar fate. Along with the hair-raising business of filming hundreds of feet above the water, we shot inside the towers themselves; specifically, inside the small steel compartments that made up the honeycomb-inspired interior. These tiny industrial cubicles needed to be painted with a zinc-based solution that would keep them from rusting. It’s hard to choose between the vertigo of working five hundred feet above the water and the claustrophobia of cramming yourself into a coffin-sized steel space with a paintbrush and a respirator. Happily, I didn’t have to choose: I got to do both!
Back on the deck, just when I thought we were done, I jokingly suggested to the foreman that we get some footage of me replacing light bulbs on the outer suspension cable. This would have required me to climb over the railing and walk across a steel girder about fifteen feet long, several hundred feet above the water—at around the same place where Leslie Ann’s Yugo had gone over the edge. Once across the girder, I would have to step out onto the suspension cable and walk up to the top of the tower, replacing bulbs as I went.
It was a ridiculous suggestion. That was the point: in the history of Dirty Jobs, no one had ever allowed me to attempt something so inherently risky. I expected the foreman to laugh along with me. Instead, he said, “Sure! What better way to show your viewers what my guys do every day than let you experienc
e it for yourself?”
Gulp.
Fans of the show will remember that scene. It was one of the most ambitious we ever filmed. We had a helicopter, and it captured every step I took on my long ascent to the top. The footage illustrates the dangers of the work, along with the beauty of the Mighty Mac and the dedication of the men who maintain it day after day. But no one saw the moment, five hundred feet up, when I realized that my safety line wasn’t attached.
Suffice it to say, the fault was all mine—a simple lack of concentration.
Here’s how it works: As you move up the suspension cable, you have two safety lines that slide up with you, each looped over two smaller cables that function as handrails. Problem is, every ten feet or so, you run into a perpendicular cable between the handrails and the suspension cable. It prevents the safety line from sliding along. You have to unhook each line, one at a time, reattach yourself on the other side, and keep climbing.
After changing dozens of bulbs I’d become increasingly comfortable with this procedure and increasingly confident—overly so. I stopped thinking about what I was doing and began to focus on how I was doing, trying to coordinate with the helicopter pilot to get especially good camera angles. As I leaned over to unscrew another bulb, I looked down between my legs at a freighter passing under the bridge. At that height, it looked to be about four inches long, like one of the battleships in the game of the same name. In that moment, I realized I hadn’t reattached my safety lines—a realization that nearly caused me to vomit.
Strange, right? Physically, nothing changed when I realized I wasn’t secure. I was no less stable than I had been a second earlier. I was at no greater risk of slipping. But the stakes of slipping had changed dramatically and, as a result, my sphincter slammed shut and remained that way for the rest of the week. As for the rest of the day, you’d better believe I remained properly tied off and fully focused on the what of what I was doing. Screw the how. At five hundred feet in the air, how doesn’t matter.
That’s the thing about safety nets: their presence impacts everything. Not just when you fall, but when you don’t. And this brings me back to the moment I lost my life’s savings at the age of thirty-seven. Nothing, really, had changed. Nothing physical, anyway. I still had the skills that allowed me to book as much work as I wanted—no more and no less. I was still healthy, debt free, unencumbered, and able to earn a good living. It’s not as if I was Leslie Ann Pluhar, plunging toward oblivion, praying that something or someone would catch me on the way down. But when the feds dragged the trusted financial adviser who’d pretended to be my friend off to prison and explained to me that my safety net was gone, my sphincter slammed shut and stayed that way until I got back on my feet.
But getting back on my feet required me to do something that Travis McGee would have never done: accept a full-time job. I’m referring, of course, to the aforementioned Evening Magazine, the inexplicably popular series in San Francisco that afforded me my aforementioned bronze bust, along with a chance to reconstruct my aforementioned safety net, whose sudden disappearance I’ve just linked to my unplanned walk up the aforementioned Mackinac Bridge—which, I now hope you’ll agree, was worth mentioning.
BREAKING THE SILENCE
When Donald Crouch first encountered Jim in his English class in rural Michigan, the aging teacher saw a sullen fourteen-year-old boy. A boy who’d gone deep into a cocoon of self-imposed silence.
Donald might have assumed that Jim was bored or uninterested or even backward. Certainly, he appeared to be all of those things. But there was something in the young boy that lit up whenever the subject turned to poetry. It was subtle, but Donald could see a shift in the boy’s posture—a quiet but unmistakable enthusiasm that accompanied any discussion of Chaucer, Shakespeare, or Tennyson.
One day Donald kept Jim after school and tried to get through to the stony-faced boy. Before long, he understood the problem: Jim stuttered. Not a little—a lot. Donald listened patiently as Jim stammered and sputtered and told him about the humiliation he’d lived with for all of his life. Donald understood that Jim had embraced the written word because the spoken word had eluded him.
The next day, Donald told the pupils in his English class to write a poem. The topic didn’t matter, as long as it concerned something the pupils were passionate about. That’s where fate stepped in, as fate often does—this time in the form of a ruby red grapefruit.
During the Great Depression, rickets and scurvy had become a public health issue in Michigan. The government sent tons of fruit up from Florida to help combat the problem. That very week, a welfare worker had delivered a crateful of grapefruit to Jim’s home—and Jim had nearly swallowed his tongue with delight. It was the most incredible, delectable, mouthwatering food he’d ever tasted. That night, Jim wrote his “Ode to a Grapefruit”—a flowery homage to epicurean bliss brought to life by the full, juicy luxury of eating citrus in the dead of a Michigan winter.
Jim turned his poem in the next day, and Donald was stunned by how good it was. Then he did something most teachers would never consider doing today: he put Jim on the spot. Donald had noticed earlier that Jim’s stutter vanished whenever he quoted his favorite poets out loud. And so, as he returned the students’ assignments with grades and comments attached, Donald addressed the class.
“I’ve read your poems, and for the most part, I’m pleased,” he said. “Some are quite good. Several are excellent. One is… extraordinary. Jim, would you kindly come to the front of the class and read us what you’ve written?”
Jim froze in his seat. The blood rushed to his face. He felt the other students staring at him. Why would his teacher ask him to do such a thing? Jim had trusted Mr. Crouch. Now he felt betrayed. Doubly betrayed because of what Donald said next: “Jim, I think your poem is too good to be true. Frankly, I don’t think you wrote it.”
Practically speaking, Jim may have been mute, but his hearing was excellent. He couldn’t believe his ears. Mr. Crouch was accusing him of plagiarism?
“If the words really are yours, Jim, then prove it. Stand and recite them. Right now. Or admit that you stole them.”
Jim sprung to his feet and recited “Ode to a Grapefruit” just as he had written it. There was anger in his voice, but what a voice it turned out to be: big and booming and clear as a bell. That was the day Donald Crouch unlocked one of the most powerful and familiar voices in the world. The voice of a boy who stuttered whenever he read aloud, but not when he recited from memory.
As Robert Frost put it, “way leads on to way,” and Jim’s way was suddenly clear. He became a master of memorization. Reciting poetry led to the debate club. Debate club led to the theater. In time, Jim’s newfound vocal prowess took him all the way to Broadway, where he was cast as the lead in Shakespeare’s Othello—a big part but one that he memorized in no time at all.
A Tony Award followed. Then an Emmy. Then an honorary Oscar. The world, it seemed, was too small to contain a voice as big as Jim’s—and so Jim took on the galaxy. A galaxy far, far away…
That’s how the villainous voice of Darth Vader was created—coaxed from the body of a tremendous performer who might have remained a more silent observer, if not for an extraordinary teacher who understood the power of the spoken word, and the unexpected arrival of a ruby red grapefruit that tasted too good to be true. The unmistakable voice of… James Earl Jones.
* * *
Like James Earl Jones, I was a painfully shy kid with a deep voice and a weird stammer. My mother still likes to tell stories of how, as a boy, I’d dive under the dining room table when the doorbell rang. Sometimes, according to her, I would vomit at the mere prospect of meeting new people. Happily, the Boy Scouts were on hand to help me out of my shell, along with a teacher no less remarkable than Donald Crouch: my favorite teacher, Fred King.
I was a tall, skinny freshman when we first met, with an encroaching hairline and a larynx the size of a fist. He was “Mr. King,” the new music teacher who inherited a
choir filled with students like me—students who’d never sung before and thought they were getting a “free period.”
From the start, we got much more than we’d bargained for.
Remember George C. Scott’s opening speech in Patton? Well, Patton was a wimp compared to Fred King. He walked into our classroom that very first day and greeted us with two words that bled into each other: “Shutup!”
His voice was stunningly loud. The classroom was instantly quiet. In the silence, he passed out a piece of sheet music far beyond anyone’s ability to sight-read. It was a six-part a cappella arrangement in Latin.
There was no way for us to get our bearings—we didn’t know how to sight-read—and what’s more, there was no time. Mr. King had already blown a pitch pipe, raised his hands, and started to conduct.
I don’t know what he was expecting, but the silence that followed seemed to confuse him.
Mr. King looked around curiously. He looked at his hands, as if they were causing the problem. Then he frowned, gave us the pitch one more time, and started conducting again.
Silence.
“This is the Overlea High School Concert Choir, is it not?”
Once again silence.
Mr. King closed his eyes. He took several deep breaths, as though trying to calm himself. Then he came unhinged. Smashing one hand on the piano, he launched into a tirade peppered with expressions most often heard in pool halls and saloons. He foamed. He raved. He cursed like the sailor that he had once been as the veins bulged in his neck and forehead. He tore the sheet music to shreds, threw the pieces into the air, and started to rant about “cruel twists of fate,” “clueless mutes,” and a few other things. Kicking a music stand across the classroom, he bellowed, “If you’re not willing to sing, then just GET THE HELL OUT!”