Balanced Rock and Other True Stories

By Dale Brabb

In Balanced Rock and Other True Stories, join Dale Brabb for stories of the author's life experiences from childhood to the present time: job stories, family stories, and others that will have you turning the pages.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Dale Brabb
• Release date: Jan 25, 2023
• ISBN: 9798886792140

Dale Brabb

Dale Brabb has been writing poetry for fifty years. He studied poetry with John Haislip at the University of Oregon and has a Bachelor of Arts in English from that institution. He has previously published a collection of poetry titled A Gold Mine.

Book preview

Balanced Rock

Every year we left Oregon to go back home to Idaho, since that was where most of our relatives lived. A continual highlight was going out for potlucks to farms. Relatives on both sides of my family had farms which were perfect for family gatherings. I got introduced to many things, barns at night and sleeping in the hay, jack-rabbit hunts in the evening and rolling rocks in the canyon after dinner.

Just to clear things up, rolling rocks in the canyon was not a drunken enterprise. No this was the act of sober, God-fearing church-goers who just got a kick out of rolling rocks down the canyon walls and watching what avalanches they could produce. They used pry-bars to dislodge the boulders, anything they could find too, but one huge boulder was off limits, Balanced Rock.

Balanced Rock has hovered over the canyon outside of Castleford Idaho for a very long time without falling down, who knows how many thousands of years. It lies in a fairly active volcanic area so I doubt it’s older than that.

When Basque sheep-herders began using that valley to herd sheep through they didn’t like the looks of Balanced Rock, thinking how many sheep it would crush if it came rolling down. So they went pro-active and tried to dislodge it by cutting through the base, luckily they were unsuccessful. Locals noticed and repaired the damage so it is still standing today.

Balanced Rock to me is kind of a holy place, I’ve been up there many times in my youth, each time related to family. I’ve rolled rocks down the canyon right close to it, watched them bound up and cause more rocks to learn about gravity, thankfully no sheep were harmed.

The last time I saw Balanced Rock was when I took my mom up there. I spent a week with her after dad died and I thought it might be a good outing for her. A chance for us to connect with where dad grew up and to get out of the house he died in. Apparently the State of Idaho thinks it’s worth keeping, even going so far as to build a place to view it.

I am using the metaphor of the Balanced Rock for my new book of stories, all of them from my life. There have been times that could have toppled me, but they didn’t, so, still upright, I’ll write about them.

Job Stuff

Part One

It was during July when we flew in to Wrangell, the rainy season (this is a joke, Wrangell gets around 160" of rain a year, which suggests to me it’s always the rainy season). I was accompanied by a kid from the office who wanted to make up in enthusiasm what he lacked in experience. Oh well, you got to start someplace, I guess.

We met my old buddy Dan Bigelow out at the landing the next morning. Today was the load-in, the boys had stacked and labeled every lift and all we had to do was set the chokers by the numbers. Dan was in charge. He wouldn’t be going up on the job, which was just as well when his hand got smashed because our office friend signalled the helicopter too early.

The rest of the lift went as planned and my tent and luggage went up the hill to wait for me. There were different drops up on top of the mountain, some went to our camp which was a hundred feet or so below the summit, mostly food and camping supplies, a lot of wood went up to the summit. Up on top they dropped the treated lumber we’d need to replace the staircase wiped out last year in an ice-storm. The rest of the drops were to build the step-and-run trail down from our campsite, the start of a trail that would go all the way from the trailhead to the top. It would take years to finish, but this was the start.

It was good I didn’t have to carry anything up to the jobsite. Greenberg met me in Wrangell and we went out to the trail-head. It wasn’t what I’d call a trail, more like follow a sloppy mess other people made before I got there. Because it crossed a lot of muskeg, peat bogs in the making, we’d actually have to build more of a bridge than a boardwalk. I slipped and slid my way up the trail.

Wrangell had just got cruise ships and they needed to give those folks memorable moments (beyond the nine-hole golf course with astro-turf greens). Wrangell also boasts some very nice petroglyphs of ancient origin down on the beach, very visible during low tide. And then there was Wrangell Mountain, surely a tourist magnet although there was no trail to get up there. So they made a deal with the Forest Service to make a trail people could climb up to the fabled peak of Wrangell Mountain. It wasn’t that grand up on top, no peak to speak of, in fact kind of flat. But it was way up there and had a terrific view in all directions. Years before they’d built a three-sided shelter on top, and a staircase up a particularly steep part of the trail (the one that got wiped out in the ice storm). My task was to help build the new staircase.

Part Two

God, what a horrible trail we had to follow up to the jobsite. I kept waiting for quick-sand. It was a great idea, let’s build a trail up on top of the mountain first, where people could walk around without mud-boots and then make it nearly impossible to get there. The bottom section of the trail, connecting to what we were supposed to build had not even been proposed for bid yet.

Still, Greenberg and I finally approached the camp after several hours and I got a glimpse of where I would be living for the next month. The selection of the camp locale was okay, being right next to where we’d have to begin the stair-case to replace the old one. But we had no shelter, beyond a tent open to the elements beyond screens. That was our kitchen and after-hours lounge.

But I had more important things to deal with, to find a place to pitch my tent for one thing, and to find a shovel. There was no shitter on the site so I was on my own. No water either, and no firewood. There were dead hemlocks on the landing but they were too wet to burn and we hadn’t enough diesel to burn them. In short, it was a pitiful place to camp, I’ve never seen a worse.

And then the job started.

Part Three

We weren’t on top of the mountain, maybe a hundred and fifty feet short of the top. Up there was a shelter for day hikers, as well as the lumber the helicopters had dropped for the job to build the staircase. It was a good stack of wood. I hiked up to have a look at it. Six by eights for the sills, three by twelves for the treads, four by tens for the rails. Now all we needed to do was to get it down the hill so we could build the staircase. Which was less of a problem because it was all down hill. Just grab a stick of lumber and throw it down the slope.

Tossing wood downhill by might and main does seem to be a primeval way to do things, but it works. So many jobs I had done down south (the lower 48) involved machinery, pallets, etc. but up in Alaska none of that was possible and so you had to do things the old fashioned way, by hand. And so we threw the wood down-hill, trying to keep it from the channel where the new staircase would go. We started with the 6X8’s, twelve feet long which we would cut up into sills, then we went down to install them.

It rained the whole time, but we didn’t care, since it made everything slippery, that should have been a warning.

And then we began carving out the staircase. The rain kept falling and soon we were like salmon fighting upstream. We were faced with slabs of limestone interspersed with blue-berry roots like ropes holding the stones down. We had to use sledge-hammers to break them apart. It was hell. And the constant cold rain was no help. Yet we prevailed. We built sills and introduced runners and then we screwed down steps. We shortened our work, bringing the top of the mountain closer, in spite of the rain.

Yet on the few times the rain let up, we were treated to a great view to the West. We were on top of a mountain, it should be so. I remember several wonderful sunsets when I felt myself to be on top of the world.

And then I had to go to bed and arrange my wet work-clothes on the lines I had strung in my tent to at least partially dry things, hoping at best for damp.

On one of those evenings I made one of the best meals I’ve ever cooked on a job. Canned smoked sockeye salmon fettucini alfredo. I’d made friends my one night in Wrangell and been given a couple of jars of smoked sockeye as a result, which I’d been able to wrangle up the mountain via a helicopter. God it was good eating, and afterward we sat drinking cold beer and shivering.

Part Four

A big portion of the staircase was the very beginning of it, two fifty-foot laminated beams leaping up the cliff-side just to get started. All they needed was a landing at the top and some foundation at the bottom.

The landing on the top was easy enough, just another sill, really, but the foundation at the bottom required concrete to make it work. Which meant I had to build forms. Forms are a pain in the ass, in order to build them you have to do reverse-work, you have to build a null-form.

In this case I had to build an empty box the concrete would go into, first, and then a form creating a cradle for the beam to fit into. It was complex. I worked on the design all morning just trying to figure it out, finally I had it clear in my mind and then we broke for lunch.

It was a sweet afternoon, no rain to speak of, the boss and I ate sandwiches and then he broke out his pipe. I shouldn’t have done it, but I got high. After lunch I went back out on the jobsite and realized I’d forgotten all the stuff concerning concrete forms I should have remembered and so had to start again from scratch. Thankfully it didn’t matter, as I figured it all out again. A thing worth doing well once is a thing worth doing well again and again, as they say.

The only problem then was that we didn’t have enough concrete to make it work. The boss was learning how estimation is an inexact science, and he hadn’t ordered enough concrete to be lifted up on top of the mountain using helicopters. And nearly enough wouldn’t do the job.

Our Forest Service inspector was a local guy from Wrangell, and also the high school wrestling coach. He knew we were on a shoe-string budget and couldn’t afford another helicopter drop of concrete. All we needed to fill the foundation forms was about five more bags of redi-mix, so he organized his wrestling team to take part in a day-hike up the mountain for fitness purposes, of course. So those kids hiked up that sloppy horrible hill to collapse in our camp, glad to finally get rid of the fifty pounds of concrete mix tied around their middle. I wonder if they ever go up there now they are adults. The trail is in place all the way to the top, so it would be much easier for them to get to where the final ascent to the top of Wrangell Mountain begins. The staircase they’d helped to build, anchored by a couple of fifty-foot long laminated beams set in the concrete they’d packed up there so many years ago.

Part Five

One thing about working up in Alaska, many times the scene is awesome. Un-named (as yet) mountains rearing up snow-capped. Fiords. Animals you don’t see anywhere else, like ptarmigans.

I’d heard of ptarmigans before, they’re fairly common up around the Arctic Circle and also in Alaska. Although they have proven to be quite edible, apparently they have resisted domestication, so they’re still wild birds. Their plumage changes with the season, in winter they’re white, the rest of the year camoflage.

One afternoon it was sunny and I sat on a log there in our campsite after work, waiting for someone else to cook dinner (we took turns and it wasn’t mine), eating an apple. And lo and behold there was a white chicken (in reality it was a ptarmigan) working the hillside down below. It was by itself, a rooster, I guessed. Now I come from a long line of hunters and gatherers so my first instinct was to think how I could harvest it for dinner. But I didn’t have any weapons but this apple core, which I tossed at him. The bird examined it but didn’t recognize it as food, nor was it concerned with my presence, and just kept working the hillside.

I don’t find magic happens very often at the jobsites I’ve been on, but this was one. There in the middle of this unpleasantness was a chicken. Looking back I’m glad it wasn’t a bear which would have been more likely, a bear who would eat an apple-core and then look around for the dispenser.

Part Six

Finally the phone call on the SatPhone arrived that I’d been waiting for. I was needed someplace else down south, to build a fire lookout tower in California. Thank you Jesus! I wouldn’t be able to see this job to completion, the bottom section involving the lam beams had yet to be built. But I had completed the staircase to the top at least, I could walk away with my head held high.

I left my tent and etc. there at the camp, packed in my waterproof bags. When they broke camp they would send it down to be shipped back to Oregon. I didn’t need them, for this next job I wouldn’t have to camp.

And so I packed my dry-bag for a hike down the mountain tomorrow. We had a goodbye dinner that night, probably burritos since we were low on food after a month, it didn’t matter. For the first time in my job history I left beer behind for the boys to share. I’m usually pretty good at predicting how much beer I’ll consume, but this time I over-estimated, instead of three or four beers after work I could only drink one before shivering off to bed.

I wouldn’t get the chance to see the finished project but I didn’t need to, that’s happened before in my work history, cabins I worked on but never saw finished. Boardwalks, bridges, the list goes on. It doesn’t matter to me when I hear that a giant cathedral spruce crushed a cabin I helped build, because that means someone else will get a good job replacing it.

So there I was, in the morning after breakfast, my pack on my back and heading down the hill. At first it was easy, my buddies had built a fine step and run trail to follow. But then it ran out and I was faced with mud dotted with pools of muskeg. You can’t trust muskeg, it could be deep or shallow, mud, though, showed where the trail was closer to the surface, but still no bargain. There were places I could just lie down in the mud and slide, thanks to my rain-gear and rubber boots (my dry-bag was slippery too). I was lucky to have the benefit gravity provides. But it still took me a couple of hours to slip and slide down to where our truck was parked at the trail-head.

I have never been more glad to get to town. The truck hadn’t been run for a