Chapter 19

Randy didn't particularly like flying on airlines. In fact, he hated it. He wasn't scared of it, but he hated being treated like one of a herd of cattle, with the airlines grubbing him for every cent they could. As a result, he hadn't flown on an airliner for over three years, not since he'd flown back from the sailing trip in the Bahamas, and that trip had been screwed up royally by the airline he'd been flying on. That made him even more leery of airlines than ever, and if there had been any other way to make the trip to California in the same time frame he would have been glad to use it. But, there wasn't, so he just loaded an absolutely minimal amount of stuff in a carry-on so he wouldn't have to run the risk of the airline losing his luggage. Again.

Getting on a flight had been a pain in the neck. He'd had to leave at a very early hour of the morning to drive nearly three hours to Minneapolis-St. Paul airport and still barely made the plane; fortunately the time change was such that he'd get into San Francisco at a reasonable hour.

He spent most of the flight thinking about the Newton's windmill house, rather than the problem with Rachel – there really wasn't much he could do about the latter other than try to make contact with her and see what he could find out. After thinking it over, he decided to not give her much warning that he was coming, and only call her after he got into San Francisco. Since it was the middle of the day, there was a chance he might be able to see her for a while without Joel around, and he might learn a little more. If they happened to be out of town or something, then he would just be out of luck, but he had the impression that Rachel and Joel didn't leave town very much. With Jared being in school it seemed even less likely that they would be gone in the middle of the week.

After thinking about it for a while, he still wasn't sure what he hoped to accomplish in checking out the situation at Rachel's, other than to just look things over and see what crawled out of the woodwork. If it was nothing, it was nothing, even though his gut told him otherwise. After an hour or so of thought on the four-hour trip Randy found himself going around in circles and not accomplishing anything. The thing to do, he decided, was to accept that he was going to have to take the situation at Rachel's as it came, whatever happened, and to quit trying to worry about things he didn't know about.

He needed to get his mind on something else, and the Newton house was the obvious thing. After all, there were known problems there that hadn't been cracked in the little more than a work day that he and some of the other people around the company had been able to work on it. For example, they hadn't put much time into how they were going to get materials and equipment over to the island in the first place.

Nicole had made the suggestion of a pontoon raft, like were often used as party boats on the big lake. There were various styles, running up to twenty or twenty-five feet or so, with floats about two feet across. On the surface it had some potential, but Randy thought it had problems. He remembered a party back in high school when some friends had loaded onto such a raft, and it had seemed to be pretty low in the water. When several kids gathered in one corner of the thing it came pretty close to running the end of the pontoon under water, so one of them probably couldn't take a heavy load.

The way to solve that was to put more pontoons under it, to increase the floating capacity. How big a load would have to be hauled to the island at one time? At a guess, they'd want a backhoe over there, at least in the early part of the project, and the smallest one the company had was four and a half tons or so. What would it take to float one? Randy recalled someone saying sometime that the first pontoon rafts had been built from 55-gallon drums – that was a concept he could handle. He pulled out a scratch pad and started doing some figuring. A moment with the scratch pad revealed that a 55-gallon drum could float 440 pounds, probably a little less considering the weight of the drum. Call it 400 pounds to be conservative, he thought. That meant that twenty-two drums would float a backhoe, less the weight of the raft, of course. Three rows of eight drums would result in a raft that was six feet wide and twenty-four feet long – not big enough for the backhoe, but it could be built wider than that.

But that would leave the raft just barely afloat. What's more, remembering that incident in high school, the raft would have to be loaded and unloaded over the end, which would mean that all the weight would be concentrated at that end. He could see that much more reserve capacity would be needed. Doubling the number of drums might do it, six rows of eight drums, and that would mean a raft twelve feet wide and twenty-four feet long – plenty wide enough but a backhoe would fill it in terms of length. So, make it longer, he thought – six rows of ten drums would be big enough and ought to have plenty of reserve capacity in case they had to haul something even heavier. There were plenty of empty 55-gallon drums sitting out back of the plywood plant, so that wasn't an issue.

Moving the rig would be easy – just tow it with a rowboat and an outboard. There was a problem in getting the backhoe or whatever onto the raft in the first place, but some sort of ramp could be devised. There were some problems he could see, like building a fairly rigid structure that long, but nothing that couldn't be solved. Maybe it would be easier to haul materials straight to the loading ramp on a flatbed trailer, and just take the trailer and all to the island – that would cut down on extra handling. There were some heavy materials that would be needed, too. For instance, there was going to be a lot of concrete needed, and there was no way a raft could handle a loaded concrete truck – not even the ice of the most frigid winter could be expected to do that. So, the concrete would have to be hauled over in bags and mixed with a small portable mixer, a pain in the neck but there didn't seem to be any other way.

Exploring the concept took Randy the rest of the way across the continent, and by the time he got to San Francisco International what had looked like a major problem now seemed like it could be managed, and with a little fun from being innovative, too.

That left Randy in a better mood when he got off the plane. He went off to pick up his rental car, and soon was in some kind of a Japanese econobox in the parking lot of the rental place. It was warm out there, in the high fifties or the low sixties at a guess – perhaps not warm in absolute terms, but coming from the subfreezing temperatures of Spearfish Lake with snow still on the ground, it was more than warm enough. There were times that winter got awfully long in Spearfish Lake, and March was one of those times, so maybe San Jose had that much going for it.

Not knowing what the traffic would be like or how long it would take him to get to Rachel's house, he guessed that he was close enough to announce his presence. He was a little surprised that his cell phone worked – while his contract said that he had nationwide coverage, he'd learned from bitter experience in the past that the reality was a little less than the advertising. He punched in the number – he called it so rarely that he didn't have it in the phone's memory – and in a couple minutes was talking to his older sister.

"Hi, Rachel," he said as she answered the phone. "It's Randy. How are you doing today?"

"Just fine," she said in a voice that seemed like it was a little less than just fine, but Randy wondered if that was just his suspicions talking. "What can I do for you?"

"I thought I might drop by and see you," he said. "I know this is a little bit of a surprise, but I decided I had to go to a construction equipment show this weekend, and I've got some time to kill."

"You're in town?" she said, sounding a little surprised. "I didn't know you were coming."

"I didn't know myself this time yesterday," Randy replied. "I won't go into the ins and outs of it but we've been arguing over graders, and I decided the only way to settle it is to look at the prospects side by side. Anyway, I thought I'd drop by if you're not too busy."

"You might as well," she told him. "Jared is in school and Joel is at work. Where are you, anyway?"

"At San Francisco International. I've got a rental car. My guess is that it'll take an hour to get down to your place."

"This time of day it'll take all of that, easily. Can you find our place all right?"

"I should be able to, I've got the address."

Soon Randy was heading down the highway toward San Jose. It was the first time he'd ever been in the Bay Area, and there were some interesting sights to see if he could have paid attention, but he was mostly busy trying to manage the heavy traffic and get where he was going. Interesting place, he thought as he drove. It's too bad I'm not going to get to see much of it.

Finding Rachel's house wasn't difficult – he'd downloaded a map and directions from MapQuest, and there were only a couple of ambiguities where the map didn't quite face up to reality. He suspected that the route wasn't exactly the shortest and simplest, but at least it got him there. Due to the traffic and the uncertainties, it took him most of two hours to find his sister's house, and at that he figured he was doing pretty well, although it left him wondering if maybe he'd allowed Rachel a little too much time.

He finally found the house, and cynically wasn't surprised that it wasn't all that Joel had cracked it up to be. It was no mansion, even by Spearfish Lake standards – just a pretty normal suburban house, perhaps a little larger than most, but nothing spectacular. Considering what he knew about real estate prices being extremely high in the area, it wouldn't have surprised him if it had cost two or three times what his own rather spectacular house in Spearfish Lake had cost.