Los Angeles, 2006
In the dark of dawn on the top floor
of a hotel room in a suburb of L.A. I can’t remember, I watch the bedside alarm
clock until it is about to ring, then shut it off. Like a farmer’s my body knows
to wake up before it is light. In the other bed, my four-year-old daughter
stirs. She will be the first child dropped off at daycare, as well as the new
kid, and she will be the last one picked up, too. I don’t wake her until I have
to, after I have showered and dressed in my levis and long-sleeved shirt and
tied my blond hair in a ponytail. Then I shake her gently and she stretches and
goes to the window, looking at the freeway spinning below us. “Where are we?”
She doesn’t know because she slept as I carried her in around midnight when I
drove in.
I started being a single parent at
nineteen, and I started being a structural iron-worker and welder at
twenty-two, in Phoenix, Arizona. I never thought I would be either one, but
since that is the way it turned out, I made the best of it. Growing up I never
wanted anything but to be a writer or a social worker, but college wasn’t an
immediate option for me and I had to make some money. I never thought much
about construction before, I mean, how buildings are made, and when I was hired
by an ironwork company out of Washington state as a driver and laborer in 2004,
I had no idea what I was in for.
My first morning on the job I watched
my co-workers, all male, as they put on full body harnesses weighted down with
tools and climbed into heavy machinery and up onto the skeleton structure. They
were walking about on long beams five inches wide and twenty feet across, high
in the air like a circus act. What was I doing here? I reminded myself that I
was already making more money than I ever had made before, and that I had a
little girl to support. I also reminded myself that this wasn’t much more
dangerous than all the cliff jumping at Salt River and rock climbing in Devil’s
Canyon that I was used to. “I can do this,” I told myself. “Piece of cake.”
At first I ran errands and put the gas
in the trucks and welders and eventually I began to learn how to use the aerial
lifts and I had to put on a harness myself and get on the iron. I will never
forget the day I first got on the iron, shaking like a leaf as my boot left the
scissor life and I found myself sitting on the beam. Shaking, I tried not to
look down or around as I shoved my bolts through the holes at the connection
point and tightened them with my wrench. Then I had to make my way fifteen feet
across the beam to the next connection. Taking a huge breath I made sure the
beamer connected by a four foot nylon length attached to my body harness was
tightly clamped to the beam, and I stood. I counted under my breath as I made
it across, stepping as gracefully as I could. I was being watched. “Walk
faster,” some one called from below. “Stay ahead of the wobble.” I quickened my
pace and sure enough, the beam moved less, and soon I sank into a sitting
position on the other side, grinning to myself. I was a circus act!
After the first job the company began
to fly me all over the West Coast for jobs, and I learned how to weld. At first
it was difficult for me to keep a steady bead rolling, but after awhile my eyes
got used to steadily pulling the bright ball of orange color around under my
dark welding hood. I learned to operate the forklift, too, often being the
operator who handled most gracefully, but also capable of showing that I am a
female driver, being reprimanded for speeding. The hours were usually long, as
commercial construction work can be, and often we did not stay at one hotel and
job-site for more than a month.
My daughter and I treated it like a
permanent vacation. In every new cities we would see all the sights and buy
souvenirs: Disneyland, Vegas, Yellowstone, the Redwoods, Six Flags, Hollywood,
the beach. I played with the money I made as well as bought whatever we needed.
But life wasn’t all fun and games. Working outside in the natural elements is
tough, and we seemed to follow the inconvenient weather around. In Vegas in the
summer, drenched in sweat before the sun was up, in Portland in Autumn when the
rain never stopped and you had to wear medical gloves under the welding ones so
you wouldn’t get shocked. Then there was the physical strength the job
required. I was sore all the time from trying to carry my own weight as the
guys, swing my beater just as hard, lift up my end of a heavy piece of
material. I also once lit my pants on fire with a sheet metal chop-saw and I
once slashed a terrific scar in my thigh with a grinder. Countless small
welding scars dot my forearms where I couldn’t brush the molten metal off
before it burned through my sleeves, and once I even had a huge girder drop on
top of the lift I stood in but I was not hurt. But I never fell, and I never
quit. Now and then I even had to deal with a jerk who didn’t think the job-site
was a woman’s place, and let me know he felt that way in one way or another. I
had to earn my place among them, and carrying my own weight with my newly
acquired skills and also being friendly but taking no harassment was essential.
Flagstaff, Arizona, 2008
The skeleton of the new Flagstaff
Medical Center looked beautiful covered in a blanket of snow, but I was not
looking forward to shoveling it off. I put my new car in park and crossed the
ice to the concrete slab where the guys were gathered around the boom truck
warming their hands around coffee cups. They greeted me as the foreman spread
the blue-prints across his truck bed. “Cassandra you take this west half of the
building and make sure all the ledger is welded,” he said. I had been working
for this fabrication shop and iron erection company since moving to Flagstaff,
so my daughter could start kindergarten. Traveling wasn’t an option if I wanted
her to do well in school, I reasoned. So I had taken a pay cut, set my vacation
lifestyle aside, and rented a beautiful house with my brother.
I warmed my hands on the exhaust of my
welder, adjusted its heat, and pulled my harness over my back. At least I
wouldn’t have to carry that much weight today, no heavy tools or bolts, just my
chipping hammer and welding rods and the steel plate I used for scraping snow.
I could still barely buckle my harness over the thick Carhart coat with several
layers underneath. I let my scissor lift warm up while I wrote down my
measurements on a piece of cardboard with frozen fingers. I squinted at the
drawings. Some things I still had some trouble with. A shadow appeared beside
me, and a guy on my crew I hadn’t met before said hello. He complimented
yesterday’s welds and helped me find my measurements on the blueprints. “What
made you want to do ironwork,” he wanted to know. Ah, the million dollar
question. I told him the story of how I had been hired as a driver after
meeting some ironworkers at the hotel where they were staying (and I was
working) in Arizona. But then I added something different. “It’s not a lifelong
career,” I said.
Phoenix, Arizona, 2010
“So what exactly can you do?” I stared
back at the big, hulking foreman, his sleeves rolled up to reveal tattoos of
spud-wrenches, women, and skulls. I was insulted. Just because my hard hat was
pink and I was as pretty as the girl tattooed on his arm didn’t mean I had
showed up at the job-site unskilled. “What needs to get done, boss?” Testing
me, he sent me to the roof, seven floors up, with no aerial lift, to bolt up. I
took the ladder to the beam on the first floor, and took the next ladder to the
beam on the second, and so forth. At last I stood overlooking all of downtown
Phoenix, and way down at the foreman’s tiny hard-hat as he stretched his neck
to look up at me.
I shoved the bolts through the holes
at the connection point, having trouble with one so I had to stick the bull-pin
in the one next to it and beat it through. In the hot summer sun I bolted up
all morning, and when lunch came I made my way down, throwing off my tools, my
harness cutting a sweaty X into the back of my T-shirt. The foreman caught up
with me as I neared my truck. “Hey, welcome to the crew,” he said,
grinning. I had passed initiation, but I
wasn’t surprised like he was. I knew by now that I was comfortable with what I
did.
I had started going to college online
to become a social worker in 2009, and moved to Phoenix for job opportunities
and warm weather. By 2012 I planned to quit ironwork and have a desk job, and
have time to follow my other dreams like writing and joining the Peace Corps.
But for now I had to put up with the latest iron work company. I had developed
quite an issue with dating ironworkers, having fallen in love with two of these
wild, arrogant men already. Unfortunately the lifestyle that comes with the job
usually includes drinking, womanizing, and partying, and neither one of them
proved that stereotype to be wrong! So here I was, 27, still single, and with
no opportunities to meet men outside of work between parenting and online
college! I knew I would be alright though, as I kept providing for my daughter
and looking toward the future.
Globe, Arizona, 2012
My hard-hat hangs on the wall of my library and
every now and then I put it on my head, and nostalgia for the incredible career
than fell in my lap overwhelms me. I wish my grandpa would have lived to see me
do construction, as he had done. But I live knowing that my daughter, now in
fourth grade, will never question a woman picking her own place in this man’s
world. In 2011 I graduated with a degree in Human Services Management and next
year I will also have my bachelor’s in Sociology. For two years I moved to my
hometown and worked for several more ironwork companies in the Phoenix area,
commuting more than a hundred miles a day. The economic problems of the decade
took their toll and I was also laid off several times, struggling to make ends
meet, having little work experience besides construction under my belt, and
being spoiled to the decent wages I was used to.
The last company fired a foreman over a sexual
harassment issue I owed it to myself to report, because after eight years on
the field as the only woman, there comes a time when a woman just takes no more
crap. I was waking before sunlight to drive for an hour and a half, work for
ten hours, drive back, and do schoolwork late into the night, and the precious
time I got with my daughter was very little. But looking back, I know why I did
it, and I know how. I had to make ends meet for my daughter, and to prove it to
myself that I could run with the bulls. And I summoned the strength and bravery
that was in my heart all along. I am after all, evolution’s greatest success
story: Woman!
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