When I was very young, my family lived beside a steel fabricating plant. They made bulldozer blades and dragline buckets. The yard was constantly filled with huge earthmovers of every description.

I went to sleep every night watching the light of the arcwelders flickering on the walls of my bedroom. As a solitary five-year-old, the graveyard shift kept me company.

I can still hear the echos of sledgehammers ringing on steel. They coming through the trees that separated us.

As a small child I wandered the back yard of our house hearing the snorting of diesel engines. Bulldozers and cranes moved about the yard of the plant that hid behind the Douglas Firs. There were gaps in the trees that I could glimpse them through, and I knew every one. They went there for new blades and buckets. I would watch the lowbed tractors bringing them in, and I'd watch them leave. I kept track of them all.

When I was old enough to go out alone on my bike I'd ride over there, I would sneak under the chain link fence and wander about in the huge yard. I would crawl up the big steel tracks and into the cabs. I could survey the world from the lofty perch of the operators seats. I'd pull the levers and try to imagine what they did. I'd make diesel noises for hours imagining the piles of dirt I'd make, and the holes I'd dig. I loved those machines, they were like big friends.

Today, thirty-five years later I still love those machines.

Today I find them still, hiding in the Fir trees they hid behind all through my childhood.

Long ago left behind by owners gone broke, parked in the bush to disappear.

Sometimes I find them like treasures of memory.

They wait in the weeds around me
forgotten juggernauts
mountains of steel
rust and grandeur
faded
chipped and peeling like the old men who drove them
yesterday

They smell of musty grease
rotting rubber
and 90 weight

Cables slack
lever handles
still smooth from a hundred thousand hours of calussed hands reaching, pulling, pushing
just so, just right
thirty tons or so swinging into place
again and again

I found his gloves still sitting stuffed behind a toolbox in the corner
where he left them
forty years ago

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© Smiling Rhino 2001