Off Main Street

by Michael Perry

  A standpipe is defined as a tank that rests on the ground but has a height greater than its diameter; in other words, if a reservoir is a tuna can, a standpipe is a pop can. The extra height is used to create pressure for water distribution. The oldest steel standpipe in continuous use is located in Dedham, Massachussetts. Built in 1881, the Dedham tank tops the Steel Plate Fabricators Association’s “Century Club,” a list of twenty-two steel water storage tanks that have been in continuous service for over one hundred years.

  Elevated tanks—true water towers—are subclassified by style and capacity. In addition to the double ellipsoidal version that stands in my town, two other common variations include spherical single pedestal tanks (the ones that resemble giant mushrooms) and fluted column tanks, featuring a broad, fluted central support column beneath a tank shaped like an aspirin tablet.

  There are deviations from the standards. Gaffney, South Carolina, promotes the peach trade with the “Peachoid,” a million-gallon peach-shaped tower replete with twelve-foot stem, sixty-foot leaf, sculptured cleft, and even a peachy little nipple. Built by the Chicago Bridge and Iron Company and painted by artist Peter Freudenberg, the Peachoid has its own Web site and has even been touched by scandal (owing to the remarkable resemblance of another town’s copycat tower). A water tower in Plant City, Florida, is shaped like a giant strawberry. Another in Germantown, Maryland, is a spherical simulacrum of the earth viewed from space. Water towers have been constructed in the shape of apples, milk bottles, ketchup bottles, baby food jars, Dixie Cups, Mickey Mouse, a cake with candles. A giant coffee percolator in Stanton, Iowa, honors hometown girl Virginia Christine, the Mrs. Olson of Folgers coffee fame. More than one country club has erected a water tower painted to look like a golf ball perched on a tee.

  But of course, no matter the shape, the color, or the message, a water tower’s first purpose is to store water. Or, more specifically, to store energy: Pump stations along the line re-pressurize larger water systems, but in smaller systems, gravity alone forces water through the pipes. And so, in my town, the nearer your tap to the tower, the less time it takes to top off your teapot.

  A tower also equalizes supply and demand. During peak water use—generally between 6:00 p.m. and 10:00 p.m.—demand may outstrip pumping capacities. The difference can be made up from storage. Then, when demand drops below average—generally from 10:00 p.m. to 7:00 a.m.—reserves are replenished. The ability to draw from reserves also allows your town to save money by running pumps during off-peak electricity demand periods, when power is cheaper. And storage reserves are essential in the event of a fire, when fire-fighting efforts can rapidly exceed normal peak demands.

  Have you ever closed a tap abruptly and heard the water pipes clunk? That’s “water hammer.” Water hammer occurs when pumps switch on and off, or valves open or close. Surprisingly powerful pressure surges result and can seriously damage pipes and equipment. Water towers help offset water hammer damage, channeling the surges up the riser, where it is absorbed in the tank.

  There is, in America, a cultural corps d’elite of sorts, a fraternity salted throughout the generations, the members of which, likely near the age of their emancipation, took a trip to the top of the town water tower. Most carried paint and left behind the classic “Class of…” inscription. Others, in the process of declaring undying love, foresight clouded by infatuation and euphoric chutzpah, left behind incriminating initials. A recent initiate (or team of initiates) in Archer City, Texas, eschewed tradition to address current events. After city officials spent thirteen thousand dollars to repaint the water tower, they invested an additional one thousand dollars to install flat steel bars on the tower legs to thwart upwardly mobile graffiti artists. “Now,” said a city representative, “if any kids climb up there, we’re going to give them a spanking.”

  Shortly thereafter, the tank’s defenses proved pregnable. The latest graffito? You must give us a spanking.

  Arnie Napiwocki may have the answer to Archer City’s problems. He is the owner of Lane Tank Company of Mosinee, Wisconsin. Much of his time is spent repainting water towers. It’s an esoteric profession. “People who do elevated tank work are rare,” he says. “Insurance is so expensive…. Workman’s comp is way, way up there.” In 1889, when construction workers were erecting a 147-foot tower in Ypsilanti, they invested in their own form of insurance by incorporating three crosses, still visible today, into the design.

  Napiwocki’s professional knowledge is laced with arcana: “Ambient air quality laws stipulate no one may put more than 5.7 pounds of dust into the air without a permit. The official definition of dust is any airborne material. That means if I drop a six-pound rock off your water tank, I’m in violation.” It also means that prior to sandblasting paint containing hazardous compounds, he must wrap the entire tank in a tent—Christo has nothing on Napiwocki. He knows a tank must be emptied before he paints it. “Otherwise they sweat constantly.”

  He knows better than to emblazon a tank with “1996 State Football Champs” without a word of caution. “What about next year, when the girls volleyball team wins? And then the golf team? It can get expensive, and usually you’re dealing with taxpayer money. Sometimes they’re better off to just put up a sign.”

  And Napiwocki knows a thing or two about water tower graffiti. “It runs in cycles,” he says. “Once it starts, it continues until the town cracks down.” One of Napiwocki’s regular customers, a small town in northern Wisconsin, recently suffered a rash of graffiti postings and hired Napiwocki to put obstructive gear at the base of the tower. “These kids rode by while we were putting the stuff up and said, ‘We’re going up there anyway.’ I told them, ‘Listen, this is costing your town a lot of money. Next time you go up there, just hang a banner.’

  “A month later, the town called. They wanted me to come take a banner down.”

  Once a day, Rob, the village maintenance man in New Auburn, opens the door to a tiny brick hut at the base of the water tower. The interior is clean as a kitchen. Standing beside an electric pump motor the size of a pig, he takes the pulse of the system, checks dials and gauges and makes notes in a log. In the winter, he will be especially careful to check the condition of the circulating pump. If it fails unnoticed, a giant “ice doughnut” will form at the top of the tank. Come spring, it will shift and rip the steel as if it were tinfoil.

  Twice a year, Rob climbs the tower to replace the flag. On his most recent ascent, the village board gave me permission to climb with him. What I saw surprised me. There was the old feed mill, there was the fire hall, there were our eleven streets: But this wasn’t the town I thought I’d see. It appeared smaller—as if it could be gathered up in an armful—and yet at once more spacious. It seemed no distance at all from the tower to the implement store at the northern outskirts, and yet, cramped yards that can be crossed in twenty steps looked roomy and wide. There were sounds: the grating trundle of a child rolling down a driveway on a Big Wheel, a rumbling load of channel iron being trailered down Main Street, two women in backyard conversation, the yap of a dog, a table saw.

  I circled the catwalk twice. Rob had already finished hanging the flag, and it was time to descend. Looking to the blue hills in the distance, I misstepped and leaned instinctively into the dense bulk of the tank. It felt cool, deeply solid. I thought of all this water, fifty thousand gallons, forty-seven or so gallons of which—based on my water bills to date—I would draw before the day was over. Water is life, and, as far as this town is concerned, this is the source. This tank, with its unseen pulse, its cycles of filling and emptying, is our communal heart, and threaded through the ground beneath us, to all edges of the place we live, are the vessels, the arteries from which we tap our own little daily portion.

  Today, when I pass the tower and look to the catwalk, I think of what I saw from that place above the ground but beneath the sky, and understand: You are here.

  1997

  P.S. When compiling collections of this sort, one is
chagrined to learn how frequently one repeats oneself. For instance, it seems I have a fascination for water hammer. I have mentioned it in at least three different pieces of writing. Once here, once in Population: 485, and elsewhere in these pages when referring to my personal plumbing.

  As of this writing, there is talk of replacing the New Auburn water tower. I understand, but I will miss it.

  II Gearjammers

  Convoy

  If you accept the hypothesis posited via airbrush on the cab of a giant purple Freightliner idling behind a Nebraska truck stop, the American economy lives and dies on eighteen wheels: Without Trucks, America Stops. Evidence supporting the hypothesis? Virtually everything you purchased last year—whether you sat on it, wore it, listened to it, or ate it—was delivered by one of America’s 3.1 million truckers. Trains, pipelines and ships move more bulk commodities, but in 1996, 60 percent of all domestic freight—6.5 billion tons—traveled by truck. Consequently, as the economy booms, so booms trucking. As of 1998, roughly 423,000 trucking companies were desperately competing for drivers at a rate projected to add between 40,000 and 80,000 new truckers to the road every year until 2005. A January 1997 Time magazine article ranked truck driving fifth on a list of the fifteen hottest fields.

  But who wants to be a trucker? The associations are rarely flattering. The leering sleazeball in Thelma & Louise. The cold-eyed gear-jamming kidnapper in Breakdown. A goofy Sylvester Stallone, arm wrestling and dieseling a path to his son’s heart in Over the Top. The Subaru Forester ad in the back of Harper’s, with its beastly semi veering across the double yellow on a narrow mountain road (the family survives thanks only to the Forester’s zippy, evasive all-wheel-drive system). The theme is repeated in any number of television commercials and reinforced on the news: Trucks run the road like rhinos on a jail-break, usually with a spectacularly distorted passenger vehicle on their snout. And it doesn’t help when some eighteen-wheeler looms over your trunk, filling your mirror with a palette of dried bug guts pasted across a steel bumper the size of a chromed morgue slab. Suddenly you are Dennis Weaver in Spielberg’s Duel, strung on a thin wire between terror and defiance. You hold your own, because by God this is your road, too, but what a confidence builder it must be to sit eight feet above the concrete, backed by eighty thousand pounds of Big Mo. You look in the mirror again. I wonder, you think, what it’s like up there.

  And so you hitch a ride with a trucker.

  The trouble with hitching a ride with a trucker is the lawyers. A truck wreck involving an unauthorized passenger is a litigation lollapalooza, and so most trucking companies have a no-riders policy. I knew this when I showed up with a backpack and a notebook at the Trucker’s Jamboree in Waupun, Wisconsin, looking to hitch a ride on the Share America Convoy to Reno, Nevada. By the time I got to Dave Sweetman, I was batting oh-fer and expected to be turned down again. If you can’t risk the liability, I said, I’ll understand. He looked me over, then stuck a thumb over his shoulder. “See that?” I sighted along his thumb to the lettering on the side of his big green Kenworth. Owned and Operated by David L. Sweetman, 3 Million Safe Miles. He looked me square in the eye. “I reckon I can make it three million, two thousand.” And so, we put our tin in the wind.

  It’s interesting what you feel up there in the prow of that big ship. Powerful, certainly, what with those 475 horses chooglin’ along at your feet, the turbo holding its high, thin note, sucking down air, turning it into miles and blowing them out the twin stacks while the rest of the world sits still and falls behind. But you also feel a little tentative, a little out of control at the front end of all that length and momentum, like a flood victim sweeping downstream astride a duplex. And from up here, the cars—all of them, even the overblown SUVs—look flighty and irresponsible. They take on the nature of pests, and when they dart too close, or linger too long in the vast blind spots, you want to chastise them, tell them to get clear for their own sake. They are like little piglets who fail to realize that while Mommy may wish them no ill, they must give her room to operate or risk being crushed.

  As an owner-operator, Dave Sweetman owns his truck and leases his services to a car hauling company. Owner-operators are essentially self-employed. They enjoy more independence than company drivers, but they also have to keep a closer eye on the bottom line. Few are as established as Sweetman, and his truck, with all its accoutrements (including a stand-up shower), is not typical. Most truckers run with one eye on the road and one on the end of the month.

  Sweetman’s business card reads Transporter Of New Rolls-Royce, Bentley, Ferrari, Lotus, Antique and Classic Cars, Trucks, Boats, Airplanes, Movie, TV and Celebrity Cars Door To Door. He’s hauled the Batmobile and the Fred Flinstone car. He’s delivered cars to Puff Daddy, Lenny Kravitz, model Tyson Beckford, and spent quality time tooling around with Jay Leno. The priciest car he ever hauled was a 1907 Rolls-Royce Silver Ghost, otherwise known as “the World’s Most Valuable Automobile.” When Sweetman eased it into his trailer, it was insured for $40 million. It takes a confident man to handle that kind of cargo, and Sweetman is a bit of a showboat. At Waupun, his tricked-out truck won a rack of trophies for which he feigned apathy. He says things like “absol-tute-ly.” He speed-dials his dispatcher on a voice-activated cell phone by barking “Butthead!” When he misspeaks, he lets loose a sharp tooth-whistle, as if he’s summoning his runaway tongue, and cracks, “Brain-fade!” He’s not cocky, but he operates with a contained swagger. Then again, he has navigated seventy-nine feet worth of Kenworth over enough miles to circle the earth 140 times—through twenty-five years of every imaginable form of ugly weather and ugly traffic, with nary a fender bender—all the while toting cargo valuable enough to finance a series of Whitewater investigations in perpetuity. There’s a reason they’ve trusted him with the Silver Ghost six times in six years.

  It’s tough to recast the stereotypical trucker when he’s all over the road. You don’t remember all those trucks that run a polite line; you remember the one that squeezes you on a curve, the one that roars up and breathes down your neck, the one with the window sticker that reads “Diesel Fumes Make Me Horny.” An hour at a truck stop will only reinforce the worst caricatures. Recurring themes: bellies, cigarettes, and scruffy disgruntlement, often clad in overdue laundry. These are impressions not easily overcome. You have to stand right up and acknowledge them, for starters, which means we must put Dave Sweetman on cruise for a minute and talk about Share America Convoy organizer Gary King. He knows what you think of truckers, and he knows why. “All our warts, wrinkles and bumps are out in the open,” he says. “Whatever we do is pretty much observed.” King is a former state trooper and Greyhound bus driver. Left all that to drive a truck for twenty-six years. Too many years behind the wheel, too many Camel cigarettes, and too much truck stop food have saddled him with short breath and swollen feet. He’s a big man. “I’m two hundred sixty pounds, used to be three hundred. I can be as mean and nasty as anybody.” But he smiles when he says that, because he has seen what mean and nasty have done to trucking. “The trucking industry was always known for having a brotherhood, and that’s fallen by the wayside,” he says. “There comes a time when you have to say enough is enough.” What he really wants is for us all to get along, to buddy up and share the road. And so a few years ago, he started Trucker Buddy International, a pen-pal program linking drivers with grade school students. The truckers send letters and photos and souvenirs from the road, and drop by with their trucks now and then, and the kids learn about geography, and math, and commerce, and time, and distance. The kids would probably go bonkers if Shaquille O’Neal stopped by to play role model, but underperforming superstars are tough to book. Instead they get to meet a trucker who speaks with enthusiasm about a fundamental profession with no cheering section, and, as Dave Sweetman will tell me later, find out where potatoes come from. “Drivers have very few opportunities to give something back to society,” says King, “even though they do it every day just by doing their job. T
his industry is the industry all others rely on.” He hopes the convoy will help recruit drivers for the Trucker Buddy program, but he also hopes it will do a little something to rehab the image of the American trucker.

  Trucking was born at the end of the nineteenth century, when gasoline engines began to replace horses. In 1912, a Packard truck delivered three tons of freight from New York City to San Francisco—in forty-six days. Trucking was held back by a dearth of decent roadways until the Great Depression: President Franklin Delano Roosevelt responded to the economic crisis with work-relief programs, the largest of which was road building. The modern age of trucking arrived in 1956, courtesy of President Dwight Eisenhower’s Federal Aid Highway Act, the result of which was a nation crisscrossed with superhighways. The entire nation was thrown open to commerce on eighteen wheels, and the trucking industry soon became a powerful economic force in its own right: By 1996 it employed 9.5 million people and generated more than $360 billion in annual gross revenue.

  Ninety-four percent of today’s truckers are men; average age, about forty. An increase in female drivers has been limited largely because long stretches on the road render child care arrangements nearly impossible; many of the new women truckers are empty nesters who join their husbands to drive as a team. But this is no carefree road trip to retirement. From the day you obtain your commercial driver’s license, you will remain in constant contact with the authorities. Dave Sweetman carries a three-ring binder filled with an array of permits and fuel-tax forms. Gas tax reciprocity varies from state to state; if you cross a state without buying fuel, you must still pay tax on the fuel you used to cross the state. Get caught overweight, overheight, overwidth, or with the wrong light out and you’ll find yourself fined and grounded. Every trucker is required by the federal government to log his activity in fifteen-minute increments; computerization, satellite tracking and in-cab monitoring (right down to engine revolutions) is spreading, and while many truckers welcome the simplification, nearly all of them bristle at the idea of some far-off spy in a cubicle tracking every gear they grind.