Bucking the Sun, page 48
• • •
Some 180 of them were at work on the east upstream section of the dam when it gave way, and the eight or ten minutes of the slide turned them into hydraulic arithmetic.
The riprap crew nearest the east bank comprised the main number, about 125. They were waiting to start laying the next tier of rock, as soon as the crane got back into action and resumed hoisting big quarry boulders from the railcars down onto the face of the dam for them. Meanwhile they were killing time by greasing their equipment and trading insults with the bullgang, below them where the crane had sunk into unusually wet gravel. Close to the crest of the dam as they were, the riprap crew had mostly level running when someone shouted LOOK OUT, THERE SHE GOES! and the slide started. They fled, clambered, vaulted, whatever it took, in wild retreat to the east bank of the river valley, the face of the dam crumbling at their heels.
• • •
Five persons were in the colonel’s car. Colonel Parmenter and Major Santee and Captain Brascoe, all in the backseat, saw the calamity past flinching heads in front of them. For Max Sangster, coming out to see if he could lend Owen a hand with the core pool puzzle and sitting across from the colonel’s driver, the slide was framed in the windshield, horror focused in the panel of glass. Half a decade of engineering, millions of cubic yards of Fort Peck Dam, were melting like brown sugar in front of Sangster’s eyes. He and the three officers were thrown forward as the driver hit the brakes, then the car was racing in reverse, the colonel’s wordless driver turned tautly half around as he steered over his shoulder and gunned the accelerator, one crevice after another opening and folding away from where the car had just been.
• • •
Scattered across the sunlit slope of caving earth, four dozen men from the bullgang rode the slide. A typical set of them, a pair of workers watched by Owen from his helpless distance, managed to leap across two cracks that opened in front of them, but the third took them and then closed over them. For a panicked moment both thought they would suffocate, but water gushed up below and pushed them out where they could breathe. The water tumbled them down the ooze into the lake, where they had to fight not to be sucked down by a whirlpool. There were islands of muck now, a Missouri archipelago in the lake, and they managed to pull each other onto one of these mud mounds and cling there until a motorboat crew came for them. Other escapes, out across the tide of devastation by twos and threes and other handfuls, were just as miraculous.
Those who died did so one by one.
A deckhand on the workboat at the foot of the riprap saw the vast wall of avalanche coming, grabbed the railing, but was swept overboard and buried in the mudslide.
A young riprap worker who had been down on one knee tying a shoelace when the damslope gave way also was buried, and suffocated; hours of effort to revive him in an iron lung failed.
A bullgang laborer who seized a passing section of dredgeline strutwork was carried safely down the trajectory of the slide but jarred loose when it careened into the lake, and drowned.
Four simply vanished.
• • •
Neil was carving clay away from the buffalo skull when he felt the ground shake. He thought a bulldozer must have run into the dredgeline, and he jerked his head out of the trap of the pipe to have a look. Then he felt the general motion, the slippage, everything tipping. Around him the dredgeline crew was running, trying to run; he saw Birdie disappear in a quicksandlike whorl of gravel. The dredgeline was starting to snake down the slope, atop the avalanche of all the fill material from the crest of the dam on down. Jesus, this is worse than— To get out of the gravel tearing at his feet, Neil straddled up onto the dredgeline pipe, desperately hugging down around it to grab the trap’s turnbuckles to hang on to. Bareback on the Chinese dragon of pipe, he rode down the avalanche toward the waiting water.
• • •
Owen backpedaled, skittered sideways, outright ran when he had to, but always with his head turned toward the slide, staying clear of the crater in the side of the core pool as it washed out, all the while trying to register where Neil would end up.
• • •
Rosellen was making short work of next week’s Corps duty roster, paying only half attention to it whipping through the typewriter, glancing up and around her for the latest on the rumor that had been bouncing through the Ad Building. Some sort of problem at the dam. She noticed Major Santee’s secretary, Betty Jane, coming her way and she timed the last of her piece of typing, as she liked to do, so that she could rip it out of the typewriter and hand it across with a grin the instant BJ arrived for it.
Betty Jane didn’t take the roster. With an odd look on her face she asked Rosellen:
“What shift is your Neil on?”
• • •
Wanting to throw up but telling himself he didn’t have time, Owen edged back out along what was left of the rim between the core pool and where the face of the dam had been, desperate to turn around and start scanning down into the soupy mess of the slide but forcing himself to watch the remainder of the dam. Here where the slippage had occurred the dam now was narrowed by half, as if a monstrous bite had been taken out of its upstream side. As best Owen could judge, the downstream crest hadn’t budged, yet. Hadn’t better, either, the sonofa— If a similar slice of it fell away, the whole dam would go, Missourians would be fishing the bodies of half of Fort Peck out at St. Louis. The Johnstown flood, hell. The Owentown version, if it happened, would make Johnstown look like a swimming accident. Owen Duff knew there was no reason why the downstream side of the dam would go out, too; slippage wasn’t a form of epidemic. Yet why, why had any of his scrupulous earthfill slipped?
Dancing from nerves, jittering himself out along the earthfill cliff with his back turned to the gulp of slide, Owen decided if the rest of the dam was going to go, it would go; looking at it would never stop it. He whirled around to what he had to face at the slide area.
An immense raw gulch lay below him, half a mile across, where the fill had flowed out into the lake, millions of yards of carefully dredged material reverting into goo and gravel, and the dredgeline was strewn on it like sections of blown-down stovepipe.
The trap, Owen remembered. Neil had been cleaning the trap. Find that steel pelican-pouch in the dredgeline, what was left of it, and Neil ought to be with it.
• • •
Charlene set her jaw and kept on combing out old lady Abbott, one of the Cactus Flat porcupineheads, as people poured past the front window of the beauty shop. Must be a fire somewhere down the street, she figured, and she was in no mood to see another one of those. People were really on the trot, though, every time she glanced up from Mrs. Abbott’s stiff obdurate hair. If she hadn’t known better, she’d have thought one of those pounding past in the crowd was Hugh.
• • •
From the east shore Darius stared at the delta of destruction below. Some sections of the stone-tiered face of the dam had stayed intact as they skidded out into the lake, solid islands like chunks of a jigsaw puzzle pawed apart. A queer spur of the railroad track still was in place atop the lip of the biggest island, wavery streak of rails beginning in mid-air, ending in midair. Between the archipelago of riprap islands and the damaged crest of the dam was what looked like a cesspool lake, gravel and mud and the backed-up Missouri mixed into a murky brown basin.
Already the pandemonium of the escape was precipitating into hundreds of separate aftermaths, some of the damworkers standing petrified, overcome with thoughts of their close call, a legion of others racing back toward the slide area to search for survivors. Darius thought of Neil with a pang. Willing cog in the machine of work, Neil had let it cost him his life. And Owen; Darius looked but could not spot him in the school of dam bosses, from the colonel on down, frantic on the far side of the slide.
Owen. Darius jerked his bitter gaze away from the gesticulating bosses and stared again at the riprap islands, strewn but solid, in the lake, suddenly knowing what he was seeing. The face of the dam, shalehater Owen’s crafty dam, had not merely avalanched, had it, not plummeted apart in a simple collapse of slope. It had slipped on its underearth, as a ship would slide down the greased launchway into the Clyde.
• • •
“Jackie, no, you can’t play soldiers in the flour bin. Meg, would you—”
“Jack, my man, let’s go for a promenade.” Meg captured the boy out of the trailer house kitchen that Kate was trying to set to rights and whisked him past Bruce edging through the doorway with an armload of bedding. “Perhaps it already has come to your attention, Jack,” the parents heard her deep instructive tone begin before she and the boy were even past the front fender of the truck, “that the municipality of Park Grove is more grove than park.”
Bruce furrowed his forehead. “He’s going to grow up talking like a lawyer’s parrot.”
But Kate was busy at sliding the trailer’s kitchen window open sideways, which was going to take some getting used to. She was intent beyond that at watching the huge Gallatin, broadside to them in a dredged pit less than a hundred yards away, the mountain of the dam behind it. The giant dredge, a cross between a verandahed hotel and a steamshovel and painted sailor-white, was nothing like the cable ferry her grandfather and father had operated, yet she felt she had been here before. She had been like Jackie, at the rampage age, when Grandpère died and they moved in with Grandmère to take over the ferry business, and that same first day her mother had caught her dabbling in the water alongside the hull of the ferry and given her an astounding bare-butt spanking. You are to stay away from that river, Lucille Millay made her small daughter know between whaps with the flat side of a yardstick, you are to stay away from that boat. Jackie was going to need the same, the first instant he wandered toward the river. Today would not be too soon, Kate believed.
Bruce’s next armload of moving stuff in, she felt his flanks brush teasingly along her fanny as he edged past. “Close quarters,” he alibied.
“Everything is, with you,” she said.
“Owen and Charlene made out all right in here,” he said hopefully, remembering in fact how the bachelor version of himself had almost burnt up, from the inside out, watching Owen go home noons and nights to this cute trailer and cuter Charlene.
The scene out the window still had Kate abstracted. “So, what’s going on? Are Mum Mum and I the only ones who aren’t on idle time today?”
Bruce had been curious about that himself, the dredge shut down all this while. He came over to peer out beside her, expecting more than not to see Owen storm up the gangplank and kick things into gear again.
Instead they both saw the eruption of action spreading out from the field telephone in the lever house, commotion that spilled down the decks into men running and shouting, “DAM! . . . GONE OUT! . . . ”
Kate spun, toward the door, the truck, the scream to be let out for Jackie and Meg, but Bruce caught her arm.
“I don’t think so, Katy,” he said with monumental calm. “Or we’d be seeing about a hundred-foot wall of water heading our way, wouldn’t we.”
• • •
The deep gulch of the slide had eaten westward in the dam, along the core pool. Owen knew that the core pool must have emptied into the lake like a broken flume when the slide got underway, adding a lubricant into the shifting mass of fill. Oh God oh why . . . He plunged down the cavity of the core pool, the wet gravel making heavy going, and wallowed his way until he could struggle up onto the far part of the dam crest. The railroad tracks resumed out of midair there; beyond it the rest of the dam face, the three and a half miles of it westward, stood unchanged, another world entirely from the blowout of mud, gravel, water and stone. Grimy and bedraggled with it, Owen read the slippage like a textbook, sick inside himself at the lesson of half a mile of engineered earth strewn out into the lake.
Men along with it. Where’s . . . Owen leaped from boulder to boulder down the riprap until he was at lake level, the muck-flat of the slide to his left, the islands of the broken-away sections of the dam face in front of him. He took a testing step out onto the slurry; there was enough gravel in it that he could flounder toward the broken line of dredgeline pipe, pilings sprouting up from it like small bones. Portions of the slide were large enough to have dry humps of ground, which he could gain footing on and plunge across to the next. He came up over one of these to be confronted with what looked like a crazy cannon, a Big Bertha elevated to fire into the lake. It stopped him cold for a moment, until he saw that it was a thirty-foot length of discharge pipe hurled atop the tipped-over cab of the crane.
The calculations Owen could not help doing as he plunged across the slideflat were coming out worse than awful. Five or six million cubic yards, he was sure it couldn’t be any less, gone in this slippage. Sections of the dredgeline had been carried at least a thousand feet by the slide, every snaking surge of the big pipe amid enough damfill to bury the whole population of Montana, let alone a single missing Duff. Neil, damn you, where— Neil could be anywhere out here, under any depth of muck. Yet most of the dredgeline, crippled as it was, had ridden out the slide, been ushered down into the lake still oddly intact.
Owen was at the first still-standing section of dredgeline now. He filled his lungs to shout Neil’s name, looked out at the long stretch of kinked and zigzagging pipe in front of him, and held the lungful of breath. Beyond on the east shore he could see the intake-gate towers, four in a row, unscathed, people everywhere up there, and men coming down into the slide area with prodpoles. They were too distant to be of any help in his search. He was in motion now, following the pipe sections out across the muck as it still gurgled and seethed, the slide carrying on an awful conversation with itself. Owen clambered alongside the dredgeline until it occurred to him, furious with himself, to climb atop it. The footing wasn’t the greatest, and every dozen feet or so he had to step over a support pole lying half over the huge pipe, but he made better time than wading down there in the mud. He watched below his feet for the collar of the trap.
When he came to it, his hopes sank. The pipeline had buckled and kinked down into a crevice of the slide, hardly any of the metal showing above the muck. He reached down to a piece of glop wedged between the pipe and a support timber. A jacket.
Now Owen let out a roar of “NEIL!” and balanced himself atop the dredgeline, trying to figure out where best to plunge down and start digging. Then, halfway along the length of pipe from the drain trap, he saw a bump in the mud, almost under the big roundness of the pipe. The bump slightly turned toward him, and eyes opened in it.
Owen in six careful steps went to a place on the pipeline just beyond the mud-globbed head, spraddled down and then slid off into the mud. The blob mired under the pipe had shoulders now.
“Neil?! Neil, don’t go dying on me!”
“Get your . . . goddamn . . . dam off me then.”
The mud-caked figure gave a ragged combination of gasp and giggle, head wobbling back to give Owen a full white-eyed stare, making sure he was really there. Neil was drawing in tortured breaths as deep and ragged as if he had run for miles, but at least it constituted breathing.
Frantically Owen dug barehanded at the heavy mush of earth encasing him. “Stay still,” he ordered.
“Did it . . . all go?”
“Shut up. Just breathe, okay?” Owen pawed away. “No, the dam didn’t all go. Just this one—slippage.” He saw the relief register in Neil’s eyes, but a tight squint of concern quickly came back.
“Birdie. He . . . somewhere . . . ”
Still clawing muck away from Neil, Owen shot a look around. “There isn’t any sign of Birdie,” he said in a guilty strangled tone.
How long he dug by hand, fingernails tearing, skin tender and hurting, Owen had no idea. Neil occasionally groaned or gasped, but otherwise lay perfectly still as Owen had ordered him to. This worried Owen.
“You doing okay?” he asked Neil, as if demanding so.
“Hurts . . . on the side.”
Owen drew a hard breath. He hated what he was going to have to do, but he needed to know whether this was an internal injury or—
“Here?” He laid the palm of his hand on Neil’s ribcage.
“OWWW!” Neil’s eyes had opened twice as wide. “Hell, yes . . . there!” He gulped painful air into himself, and used it to say: “Ownie, you’d massacre a man . . . while you’re saving his life.”
Owen pursed his lips, either against a madman smile or a sob of gratitude, he wasn’t sure which. “Broken ribs,” he told Neil. “They’ll hurt some more, but I can get you out of here now.”
• • •
All that endless afternoon, at last into common dusk, Fort Peck tried to pick itself up off the floor of the big slide. Searches went on until there was deemed no chance anyone could have lasted beneath the flood of muck, the mosquito buzz of planes with newspaper photographers already overhead as rescue parties slogged and poked and slowly retreated from the slideflat. Queasy communities downstream from the dam, Park Grove only the first of the number along the Missouri’s descent toward St. Louis, had to swallow hard and decide where to sleep that night, somewhere on high ground or in the valley cut by the river’s eternal longing to wander.
• • •
Birdie Hinch felt all beat to hell.
Gravel had gone over him and roaring water from the core pool had surged him free and then there was a pell-mell mudswim, half dogpaddling and half being oozed along, out into the mush at the head of the slide. His shirt had filled with so much mud it weighted him into the mess like a lead sinker on a fishing line, but he managed to tear it off and bob better. Birdie had been constantly amazed at the kaleidoscope of clear thoughts coming to him as the muck avalanche tossed him along: Wouldn’t this have to happen just when we found that nicest buffalo skull . . . I’m gonna die, out of this. Ain’t yet, though . . . They just can’t pay a man enough to put up with this . . . And at last, gingerbread man of mud gasping on one of the isles of the slide, I’ll be a sonofagun, look at those guys running out onto this.
