Howdy, folks. Glen Blamstead here. I told the crew to break for lunch last Tuesday. They broke something else entirely. Not sure what to make of that. Insurance says I have to make something of it, so here we are.
The job was a straightforward pole barn out east of Mora, off one of those tar roads that turns into gravel about the time you start trusting your GPS. Nice folks. Wanted a thirty-by-forty with a lean-to, the kind of building where you can park the tractor, hang the fishing rods, and still have a corner left over for the grandkids to build a fort. My kind of project.
We had the posts set. We had the trusses staged. The sun was out, the wind was down, and the coffee thermos had been refilled at the gas station in Ogilvie without incident. When a Minnesota August morning goes that smoothly, you should be suspicious. I was not suspicious. That's on me.
About eleven-thirty I hollered at the crew that we'd break for lunch at noon. Mind you, I said break for lunch. I was specific. I said the word lunch. I even pointed at my sandwich as visual aid. Somewhere between me saying it and noon actually arriving, my meaning got run through a translator app that only speaks in property damage.
Here's what happened, according to the reconstruction I've pieced together from three eyewitness accounts, none of which agree. Kid we've got working with us this summer — good kid, works hard, would apologize to a screwdriver — decided to move the auger off the pile of trusses where somebody had, against all better judgment, parked it. He picked it up. He carried it about four feet. Then, and this is the part everybody agrees on, the auger discovered gravity in a personal way.
It landed on the tailgate of my truck.
Now, I love that truck. I bought that truck when my youngest was still using training wheels. That truck has been to Bemidji and back more times than I can count. It's got a dent in the passenger door from the time I misjudged a fence post in a February whiteout and a scratch on the box from the ill-fated Christmas tree incident, which is a story for a different Thursday. But the tailgate was pristine. The tailgate was the last untouched piece of that truck. The tailgate was my pride.
The tailgate is no longer pristine.
The kid stood there for a full ten seconds, I would estimate, holding the auger and staring at what he had done. My crew foreman — who has seen a lot of things in a lot of years and has developed a face that is impossible to read on purpose — turned very slowly and looked at me. He didn't say anything. He just looked. That look contained multitudes. That look was doing the work that words don't do.
I said, and I quote myself here because I want to be accurate for the record, "Well."
That's it. That's all I said. "Well." Then I ate my sandwich.
The kid apologized about seven times before I got him to stop. I told him what I tell every one of them when something like this happens, because something like this happens to everybody eventually, and it's better if they hear it early. I told him: it's a tailgate. Tailgates dent. That's what they're for. If tailgates weren't supposed to dent, they'd have called them the front hood, and I've got one of those too and it's dented also. The auger, however — the auger I care about. And the auger was fine. So we ate our lunch.
The customer came out about halfway through the sandwiches, looked at my truck, looked at the auger, looked at the crew, looked back at me, and said, "Do I want to know?"
"No," I said.
"Fair enough," he said. Then he went back in the house. Good customer. Reads the room.
We finished setting the trusses that afternoon. Wooden trusses, by the way — Sherman doesn't do metal trusses, never have, never will, and if anybody tries to sell you a pole barn with steel trusses on treated posts you should ask them to draw it on a napkin and then keep the napkin as a souvenir. Anyway. Wooden trusses. Went up beautifully. The building looked square, the roof pitched right, and the customer came back out around three to hand us cold water because he is that kind of customer and this is that kind of state.
The tailgate is going to a body shop over in Milaca next week. The kid is going to help pay for it out of his check because he insisted, and I let him, because that's how a kid learns to be a man who owns his mistakes. But mostly I told him not to worry about it. It's a tailgate.
If there's a lesson in all of this — and I'm not saying there is, but I'm not saying there isn't — it's that when a Minnesota August morning is going too well, you should probably eat lunch early. Also, don't park the auger on the trusses. Also, don't teach your grandkids the word your foreman was silently thinking during those ten seconds.
If you're thinking about a pole barn — thirty-by-forty, lean-to, a corner for the grandkids to build a fort — holler at us. We build them square, we build them with wooden trusses, and we build them with a crew that only occasionally practices gravity on my truck. Stop by Sherman in Mora sometime. Tailgate's around back. You can't miss it.
