Bob Aikens looks intently at the man lying two stories above him. The man has his legs wrapped around a narrow steel beam, part of a nearly finished building frame, and is struggling with another beam that is hanging from a hoist. He is trying to ram a bull pin–a heavy, tapered steel tool–through a hole in the loose beam and into a hole in the beam he is lying on. Then, with the two holes aligned, he can slip a bolt through and fasten them together. The hanging beam weighs about 400 pounds. It is not easy to move. “Hurry up!” Aikens shouts at him. “We’ve got steel to set!” The man says nothing. Aikens seems slightly embarrassed and says quietly, “Actually, they’re doing real well for beginners.” Later he adds, “I holler at them, but that’s the way it will be on the outside.”
He logged for nearly two years, and then decided it was too dangerous. “I had a couple of trees drop on the skidder that I was driving,” he says. “Bounced me around a bit, but that was about it. That happened to me a couple times, and I said, nah, nothing for me. Plus I almost dropped a tree on my brother.”
Summers has done well in this winter’s class, and he likes the work. He is powerfully built and moves easily around the first floor of the program’s two-story steel frame. (The students of each class build it and tear it down repeatedly as they learn different ways to maneuver beams.) He once tried to move himself across the structure by swinging from one hand to the other from a cross beam, but was stopped when the wrench that hangs from his belt caught on a cable. One of the other trainees finally unhooked him. “I shouldn’t have done that,” he says. “I knew I wasn’t that high, so I just crossed. Next thing I know, they said ‘Watch it! Watch it!’ I was hanging there for quite a while. Then I tried to reach down, and oh, man, I can’t do it. I was just laughin’ and everything.”
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He gives his usual laugh. “Tie off. Get my rope out and tie off.”
The students repeat stories of men who walk like cats and one day happen to touch a hot electrical wire. Or men who slip on an oil spot and then tumble 50 feet. A myth still circulates in the media that Indians make the best high-steel walkers, but the truth is they fall as often as anyone.
