YOU'LL NEVER GET RICH DIGGING A DITCH?
Mr F already told his sob story about buying a lot on a hill: steep driveway, lots of concrete, lots of digging, lots of rock, etc. etc. etc. Yawn. However, reality struck when excavation started on October 21st. Mr and Mrs F left town for the day and when they returned late that afternoon their pine-and-chaparral-frocked lot had been scalped. All that remained, vegetation-wise, was a wall of pine and manzanita that circled all but the front entrance to the lot. “My trees!” Mrs F exclaimed. “My beautiful trees! Couldn’t he have left a few trees?”
“He” was a reference to our excavator, who I will refer to a “Mr. E” as a preemptive strike against potential litigation. A life-time Payson resident, Mr. E has been manning big machines since he was a kid. During the infamous blizzard of 1967-68, when northern Arizona received 900 feet of snow in seven days (according to the locals), the young Mr. E was driving a snowplow 24/7 up and down the Beeline Highway to keep the road clear. He was thirteen years old. Instead of calling Child Protective Services, he got time-and-a-half and a life-time coffee addiction.
“My trees!” Mrs F wailed in case half of Rim Country hadn’t heard her the first time.
Mr. F summoned up thirty-five years of work experience and a doctorate degree to offer this little gem: “House plus long driveway equals Big Footprint.” Maybe he thought he was being clever.
Mr F then pointed out that the horseshoe of pines and Manzanita created a natural barrier around their property that would block out intruding eyes which meant skinny dipping in the hot tub was back on the his list.
“We don’t have a hot tub,” Mrs F reminded Mr F and his face melted. Mrs F routinely rains on Mr F’s parades which is probably why they’ve never had to file for bankruptcy.
Mr. E reminded me of my perpetually disgruntled high school football coach. On the upside, Mr E was a perfectionist: every grade had to be perfectly level, every trench perfectly dug and perfectly filled, every boulder perfectly stacked. A colleague said Mr E was probably born with a level in his butt. I think he meant that as a compliment. Mr E wasn’t the cheapest excavator in town by a long shot, but he was by far the best, and he was the first to tell you so. Other excavators bid the job for as low as $17,000 but their proposals all included the notorious “rock clause.” If they hit rock, the original bid would be null and void and from that point on they could nickel and dime you to death. The lot sits on a small mountain of pink granite, so even Mr F didn’t need soothsayers to read the handwriting on the wall. Mr E thought he could save Mr and Mrs F a few bucks if he did the job at an hourly rate plus 10%. They knew they were rolling the dice, but in the end they shook on it, then closed their eyes and held their breath.
So Mr E set to work, shaving the lot bald for starters. He employed an arsenal of big machines whose alphanumeric names sounded like weapons of mass destruction. When Mr and Mrs F got their first bill, they thought they were bankrolling some terrorist initiative: KX161 Trachoe @ $85/hr; 315 Trachoe @ $150/hr; 710 Backhoe @ $90/hr.; 410 Backhoe @ $60/hr.
I have to admit it was pretty impressive watching Mr E at work. He’d sit in his open air cab gleefully manipulating the multiple gears and levers like a teenager with a dozen joysticks. On the one hand, he was a circus ringmaster commanding his giant metal beasts to scoop, sculpt, and smooth vast volumes of the earth. On the other hand, he worked the dirt with such fine-toothed precision he was like an artist with a 20 ton brush. Meanwhile, the dump truck (driven by Mr E’s 80 year old father) was lumbering non-stop up and down the driveway bellowing like a mastodon in transitional labor.
And that was just phase one. As it turned out, Mr E did hit rock and extracted a small mountain of it from the basement: Cha-ching! Cha-ching! Cha-ching! The silver lining under this extra (and costly) labor was. . . free boulders to line both sides of the driveway. However, the boulders had to be moved from Rock Pile A to Driveway B. Ray Bradbury once described the lethal arms of a tyrannosaurus rex as “delicate watchmaker’s claws.” While there was nothing delicate about the appendages on any of Mr E’s machines, one machine did have giant lobster-like pincers that Mr E used to lift, transport, and (most impressively) meticulously place and stack each boulder along the driveway.
And that was just the excavation. Mr and Mrs left town for another one of their notorious “fact-finding missions” (i.e., another little frolic in the woods while I get left behind to do the heavy lifting) only to return that afternoon to find their beautiful (albeit bald) lot carved into a maze of deep trenches. It looked like an archeological dig. Or a graveyard.
Mr. F looked at the six foot holes and chuckled nervously. “I thought maybe you were going to bury a body or two in there,” he said. He was trying to be funny.
“Nope,” Mr E said. “For the footings.”
“The footings, of course,” Mr F said and then he would have looked up “footings” on his iphone if he’d had one.
A few weeks after that, Mr and Mrs F took another French leave and returned in the afternoon to find their driveway carved into a network of six-foot-deep intersecting trenches running from side-to-side and top-to-bottom. It looked like a scene from All Quiet on the Western Front. For once, Mr F was absolutely speechless. Mrs F was ecstatic for a week.
The trenches had to be back-filled, of course, after the plumber and the electrician did their preliminary work. Pipes for sewer, water, and propane had to be run into the basement. Wires for electricity, phone, and cable had to be run the length of the driveway up to the temporary power box. The lion’s share of the excavation and earthwork took four weeks, but it wasn’t completely finished until December 13 (and Mr and Mrs F thought I was pokey with their silly Christmas letter.) Final price tag. . . more than Mr and Mrs F had budgeted, but when he looked at the finished product--every grade perfectly cut, every section perfectly level, every boulder perfectly placed--even Mr F the cheapskate had to admit Mr E was worth every penny.