Just when I thought I had found a rhythm with my manhood, out came a hot, um, warm bowl of pecan smoked bacon soup dressed in frill and fluff.
For much of the day the male ego was at the podium. The hardhat pressed into my forehead, the safety vest clung to my chest and my steel-toed shoes generated a John Roebling swagger. I was out on the Veterans’ Glass City Skyway Bridge in Toledo, smelling the elevated fresh air with the engineers of the project and gripping cables and ladders like a contractor.
This certainly wasn’t my first jobsite visit, but it provided perhaps the most distinct taste of what it was like to be out on a road or bridge that was quickly growing into something all its own. They had me climbing down into the bowels of the Veterans’ Glass City Skyway Bridge, climbing and jumping ladders and being carried to the top of a 400-ft pylon. It’s what every editor needs to experience. All the other construction visits were cosmetic in comparison. This was the true morning face of the industry.
But it wasn’t until some of that newfound testosterone went from a boil to something far less than a simmer (perhaps I shouldn’t have sipped that soup) that I realized the extreme dedication of the contractor and engineer.
Wade Bonzon, field engineer for FIGG on the Veterans’ Glass City Skyway Bridge, sat right across from me during dinner that evening. Wade came to Toledo as a single guy at the start of the project. Never did he think he would find the girl of his dreams in a city that still revels in the sexiness of the late Jamie Farr, but it happened. He fell in love and now has a baby daughter. But with the end of the Skyway Bridge comes the end of his stay in Toledo. It is on to the next bridge job, somewhere east, perhaps Connecticut. Manuel Carballo, design site engineer for FIGG on the Skyway Bridge, and Bill Johnson, main span engineer for FIGG, also dined with us and ate off the same plate of passion. Bill had just arrived in Toledo and still didn’t have a couch to lie on, but his work was needed, and he responded like a true Army Reservist.
When asked about the difficulties of picking up and moving the family to another part of the country, Wade’s tone did not flicker in disappointment. Bridge engineering is what he lives for, and the more challenging the better. I got the impression that if the call of duty took him to Mars, he would zip the family up in space suits and have them on the next space shuttle flight to orbit.
As for job-related war stories, I could keep up that night in the trendy Toledo restaurant—for a fixed amount of time anyway. My days as a sports writer were spent watching loose basketballs and touchdown spikes seven days and nights a week. Despite the thrills and success, I turned it over to another young, aspiring journalist. These engineers never look up at the clock in fear of the final buzzer. It’s a never-ending marathon of job satisfaction.
Contractors and DOT workers exert the same kind of conquering energy. You never realize the hazards of construction until you are out there, eight steps high on a ladder, trying to step across onto another one with nothing but a concrete bed below you. I was out with the creators, chewing the fat with the best of them.
