Schuts Part I
The summer after first year I got a job at a brickyard. Schuts was five minutes from my home and it offered a challenging setting in which to learn how to drive heavy equipment. The gravel yard, with rows and rows of bricks, each stacked four pallets high, gave a good level surface, perfect for getting to know each machine, what it could lift, what its clearances were and how to approach each type of load. I honed my skills on the hard packed gravel fetching brick orders, loading and unloading trucks or rearranging the stacks.
There was also the far back of the yard where the gravel stopped, where the brambles and soft wet soil took over. One day after a hard rainfall we got an order for four pallets of reclaimed brick. This brick was stored at the very back of the yard in behind the last rows that could be reached from the aisle. I could have pulled out the thirty pallets of brick that sat between me the requested tan reclaimed at that back. I decided instead, to go around, and pluck the order from the ten-foot ditch boundary at the rear of the stacks.
Behind the stacks the ground was soft, muddy and swollen with the fresh rain. The bricks were located in the middle of the yard. I would have to approach them from one of the back corners. My first choice, for the job was the 4x4 JCB 426i but it was being used to load dump trucks with gravel. Instead I fell back on old faithful, a John Deere 482 tractor style forklift. This old brute spewed black-blue exhaust when you started it and it rattled and creaked as it moved. She was limited to two-wheel drive, but was the strongest unit of the three. The 482 was equipped with two brake pedals flanked with two gas pedals. These could be linked or separated. Separated, the pedals controlled the left and right wheels individually. To reduce its turning radius you could brake on the left wheel while still giving power to the right, pivoting the tractor on the left wheel. I kicked open the large clip that linked the two brake pedals, enabling me to be able brake each wheel individually it case it slipped, and I could use the tighter radius to maneuver between the stacks of brick and the ditch beside me.
I clawed my way through the undergrowth, spinning the huge tractor tires in the mud and cutting deep gouges into the earth. The cage on the cab protected me as I pushed through branches and thorns. The tire treads threw up chunks of earth and I coaxed the machine along the swampy right-of-way, stomping with my steel-toed work boots from pedal to pedal, forcing it forward. Once the load was on and stacked two pallets high the front of the forklift sunk into the earth pushing mounds of mud up on each side of the wheels, with the extra weigh it was easier to drive the machine through the slick mud.
Forks low and wooden pallet scraping the weeds I backed the machine out along the two tracks I had just cut and at a turtles pace, drove the load to the front of the yard. When I returned to get the rest of the order the earth had crept back together in my wake, sealing the path I had forged. I repeated act and the machine exhaled black clouds of smoke into humid summer air. Every stomp of my food yielded a grunt from the heavy steel and two more pallets of brick were brought to the front. It was covered in mud with branches lodged in the cage when I parked the 482. It heaved and signed when I killed the engine, ticking as I walked away.
Schuts Part II
Tonka Trucks, when I was four I got my first one, then they were still made of metal, painted bright yellow and black. I had a truck with a rotating backhoe mounted it. You could sit on the back of the truck and operate the backhoe. My older brother had a front-end loader. You couldn’t sit on it but you could bulldoze, could lift up loads sand and rocks in its articulating front bucket. It had a joint in the middle for steering and large tractor tires. Together we performed massive earthworks in our back yard sandbox.
The far north west of the yard well out of public view, the gravel slopes down into a natural low-lying gully. This was the trash heap and at the end of the summer, after a busy building season it was time to clean up the yard. It as late Thursday afternoon, the job was nearly done. It was my last week before I would quit and go back to university. The other Students had left for the day and the boss was on vacation and the lead hand Jeff was drinking beer, resting on one of the three lawn chairs in the shade of the loading-bay. He instructed me to take the loader and go tidy up the sprawling trash pile, my last charge of the summer. I put the bucket on the JCB 426HT and road down the north road to the pile
Before this day I had only really driven the machine as a forklift and never got to use it as a loader. I rounded the corner of the yard, around the last row of bricks, and lowered the bucket two inches above the gravel. With my right hand on the controller I set the cutting edge of the bucket parallel to the ground and drove forward. I hit the gas just before I reached the edge of the pile and dug the bucket into the side of the rubble heap. Simultaneously I lifted and tilted the bucket, driving the edge of the slumping pile higher into the air. The front tires of the loader reached the slope it climbed up the side of the pile. The loader tilted back until all I could see ahead of me was sky. Then dumping the bucket at top of the pile I would back down. I would swing the front of the loader right, then left to straighten out, moving around its perimeter always placing myself perpendicular to the trash heap’s edge. When the wheels slipped I knew I had the reached the extent of what I could push forward the JCB grunting. Then I would lift the bucket, the front tires would compress and the unit would lurch forward, sometimes the back wheels would come up clear off the ground as I lifted.
At about the third pass I realized I had a stupid four year olds smile plastered on my face, I was behind the wheel of a twelve-ton earth-moving machine. Really I was just playing in a sand box with someone else’s Tonka truck.
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