TRIAL IN THE TRENCH

In the early 1980’s, Jim, my good friend and fellow educator, and I successfully acquired a contractor’s license which we viewed as a viable means to supplement our dismal teacher’s remuneration.  Now being officially capable, we entertained an offer to do something we had never before done.  An electrician, an acquaintance of ours, and a man so given to frugality that we became an attractive option to assist him, won a large bid to install the street lights for the newly developed International Center near the Salt Lake City International Airport.  We had worked with him previously on a project at the University of Utah.  He had been contracted to run several main underground power lines across campus.  These power lines had to be encased in red concrete and we did all the forming and pouring of the concrete.  The current (sorry, I couldn’t resist) job under consideration presented us with a new experience.  He subcontracted us to pour concrete pillars to which the tall steel streetlight poles could be attached.  Trenches had to be dug to run power to each pole and a large auger dug deep holes three feet in diameter for concrete to support each light pole.  Compared to the incredibly hard physical labor to which we were accustomed, this was gravy work, easy money as it were.  All went well for the first few weeks on the project but then, on a beautiful autumn Saturday morning, an interesting individual intruded upon the idyllic solitude we had grown accustomed to enjoying on those crisp, clear fall days.  When digging each hole, the auger pulled the soil outward into a conical shaped pile of loose dirt.  The curb and gutter had already been poured and the asphalt paving preparation was nearly complete.  On this particular Saturday morning, the paving company was preparing to pave the asphalt.  The dirt from the auger excavations had spilled over onto the curb and gutter and into the road.  A young man from the paving company approached us and told us that we needed to clean the spilled dirt from the roadway and gutter.  We cooperatively and cheerly assured him that we would.  That initial conversation never included a time constraint, so we assumed we could do that at any point before we left for the day.  We were wrong.  Our good intentions proved completely incapable of placating the pernicious expectations of the paving employee who returned much sooner than we had anticipated.  After a couple of hours he returned.  His mood was surly, way beyond any reasonable measure.  He immediately tore into us with language so foul that I cannot even begin to broach repeating what we heard spewing from his vile mouth.  Briefly, his indictment of us was summarized by the fact we had not cleaned up our work area as he had previously instructed.  In a tone of mature response, a trait I’m sure you have witnessed me exemplify on numerous occasions, I simply assured him that we had missed the part where a timeframe for completion had been mentioned.  This observation seemed to act as an accelerant to his already flammable nature.  He lambasted us with another long string of profanities punctuated with an intelligent pronouncement aimed directly at me.  It must have been a concession to my position as spokesman I suppose, “Get that dirt cleaned up or I’ll kick your ass.”  In what I perceived as a normal response to such a challenge, I simply turned away from him, bowed graciously at the waist and presented my posterior as a complimentary and cooperative gesture of compliance.  Apparently, he was not as well versed in the nuances of body language as was I because it seemed to enrage him.  He charged as if I had been a large scarlet scarf brandished by some magnificent matador.  He tackled me and we tumbled into the trench that had been so innocently dug for the laying of power lines.  I had never previously considered that the trench could be my final resting place.  In the chaos of the vicious and unwarranted attack, Jim rushed instantly to my defense.  Due to his instant response, the paving employee, supposing to have me trapped in the bottom of the trench, discovered to his horror that his preferred position of superiority had been reversed and he was now in the bottom of the trench with me and Jim on top of him.  Jim had him in a headlock and I managed to twist one of his arms around and behind his back.  He was in a precarious position.  To this day I can see his crazed expression as his neck was twisted in grotesque fashion and his cheek was pushed up against the side of the gravelly trench in awkward fashion.  Desperation had replaced his arrogant superiority.  After acquiring his verbal resignation, we decided to release him, mistakenly thinking his misfortunate encounter with the bottom of the trench would give him pause.  How wrong we were.  As soon as he escaped his dilemma and air rushed back into his compressed lungs, he immediately resumed his fighting stance and became the belligerent and seemingly insane person he was before his bout with the trench.  He emphatically restated his intent to do harm to my posterior.  At that point we realized that we were probably beyond compromise.  Because we had voluntarily relinquished our previously superior position in the trench and realizing we could not verbally communicate with such a person, we decided to seek help from someone else in the paving crew.  We located his boss and informed him of our encounter with his employee of the month.  He reluctantly took possession of him once again.  Before we were out of earshot we heard him say with a trace of resignation, “Let me go over this one more time.”  Okay, that last conversation only occurred in my imagination.