Chapter 35

After breakfast the next morning, Jr, George, and I found Sky waiting by the door when we left the house. He spit out something to George, in their lingo, and Jr tried to translate.

"Sky say something new across creek."

"Where?"

"Where you Randy look yesterday," Jr said.

"Let's get Randy then," I said, already suspicious of my benefactors.

Randy came on out with his trash bag when we knocked and after he disposed of it, we followed sky to his find. Damn, they were making things easy for us. It made me wonder if we were behind schedule somehow. They hadn't given us a schedule, or not one that I knew of, but they had done a lot of facilitating lately.

"Well that's one job we can cross off the list," Randy said.

"Yep, and I'm not a damned bit sorry to lose it. I never wanted to build a damned old bridge anyway."

"Me neither," Randy said.

"Well what next then," I asked.

"You askin' me? You're the ramrod on this job, pull out the soapstone and lay something out, I'll get right on it," he said, and laughed.

"We still need to train some guys to finish concrete," I said.

"Yep, and if it's concrete pouring and finishing practice you want I do happen to have an idea. We need a decent ramp into the river to launch and recover boats. I figure we can form up a fourteen by twenty slab on level ground, and after it's cured a while we can push that part on into the water about half way. After that section is down in the water we can add to it on the dry end," he said.

"I think you've got something there. It'd be a big help with the boats and it would be big enough to give the guys some practice," and that was that for now.

Randy and the crew started gathering up shovels and other hand tools while I changed implements on the 988B Cat loader. They took off for the river before I had the bucket in place and I followed them as soon as I got done.

There was a good place for the ramp we were going to build almost exactly across from where the road from our new campsite came out. When I got there Randy climbed the Cat's ladder and I opened the cab's door to talk to him.

"I think you should take that bank down a little," he said.

"Looks to me like I should take it down more than a little. I won't go wild or anything but we should make the ramp long enough so we'll still be able to use it if the water rises," I said.

"Yeh, but it won't be like a river with a dam on it. If it rises much it'll spread quite a bit, but then it will probably go down pretty quick too," he said.

"You're probably right, if a hundred feet of ramp ain't enough there we'll just have to fish later, or launch the boats from whatever dry ground we can find. Guess I might as well get started."

"Just don't get stuck in soft ground. We could probably pull this monster out eventually if you do get hung up, but it will take everything else we've got and probably a week or two," he said.

"Don't worry, this ain't my first ride in a rubber tired loader," I said, and laughed at him.

He was right about getting it stuck, sorta, but I had sense enough not to dig myself in if the loader quit moving under its own power. The best way to keep that from happening in the first place was to pay attention to how much bite you were trying to take. I started skimming about four inches at a go and just took my time.

I was done in an hour and a half without even a hint of getting in a bind. We had a nice smooth slope into the water and at about a two on twelve fall. I locked the Cat's door as I got out. We might as well leave it here until this deal was done, but there was no sense tempting any of our curious helpers.

In a way this first section was going to be bassackwards, sorta. It needed to be pretty smooth on the bottom, even more so than the top, because we would need to slide it down into the water when it was cured. I didn't have any worries about actually moving it but I did worry about breaking it in the process.

Even with taking extra trouble to make sure the bottom was smooth, we still managed to get the form built and place the mesh and rebar before night. The girls had even brought our lunch out so we could eat without wasting an hour or two of daylight going to eat and then coming back to work.

We knocked off when we had the form ready to pour and headed back to the trailers. I could tell that our helpers were more than ready for a little ass time too. They were all in great physical shape, but they weren't used to a full day's work on something like this. I knew they'd used muscles today that they weren't all that accustomed to using.

Hell, they'd just have to get used to it like Randy and I were going to have to. We needed to do a hell of a lot of building in the next few months. All in all though, I was just as ready to stop for the day as they were.