Guest Posts on County 10 are provided by contributors and the opinions, thoughts, and comments within are their own and may not necessarily reflect those of County 10.
Throwing a rope to catch a calf or tossing a line to pull in a trap full of crab, is there much of a difference in the synaptic firing of muscles to do these two things? How about just tossing an extension cord across a roof to a fellow worker? Same muscles, same motion, but one pays a lot better than the others when it’s done right.
One of the biggest academic mistakes I ever made was in a kinesiology class. Our final project was to take a physical movement and sequentially map the muscles used to accomplish it. Why not map a curve ball, I thought? Or rather, didn’t think.
I quit at 180 muscles, just grouping a few of them together. The professor knew what I’d done and was graciously accommodating in the grading. Suffice it to say, there are a lot, hundreds in fact, of muscles used in throwing a baseball.
The exercise from long ago had me thinking about the connections between athletics and the workplace. Never mind the obvious things like a grappling hook compared to an extension cord.
If I’m ever in the situation where I’m sliding off a roof or perhaps approaching some precipice, I don’t want a rope and grappling hook at my disposal; instead, give me a cleanly looped extension cord and a smooth garage floor style surface to throw it on, it will catch everything in sight and plug tightly into every unforeseen crevice.
You don’t need to be a PRCA cowboy to throw an extension cord, but dexterity and range sure help.
As a young man, I worked one summer with an older guy (probably younger than me today) named Wilson who grunted a lot, never spoke a full sentence, and was angry all the time (it’s getting easier to relate to that). Tough? He put the “T” in tough. He’d cut boards with a single measurement using a worm drive saw and then drop the running saw onto the concrete. He just didn’t care.
One day at lunch, he took out his lighter (yep, he was a chain smoker; Lucky Strikes, no filter) and sniffed the open flame with each nostril. He was burning his nose hairs the old-fashioned way, with an open flame. We didn’t mess around with Wilson much.
Athletic in the way of toughness. I’m sure he had been or would have been a tough wrestler, boxer, or football player. He did mention one day he’d fought the Japanese in the South Pacific, most likely a Marine.
Sometimes, athletic prowess isn’t agility or toughness but raw, brute strength.
Whenever someone starts talking about strength, I think of the Blankenship boys, the late patriarch, Keith, and his equally powerful son, Trent.
One afternoon, Trent and I were screwing around in an old car they kept on the place that roared with no muffler and made a little extra noise since the doors were missing. As we buzzed around the Blankenship farm, we noticed his dad, Keith, standing behind a two-ton, single-axle farm truck.
We pulled up and saw it had several hundred pounds of potatoes in it. It also had a flat left rear tire. He had a spare tire on the ground next to the flat. We asked him if he had a jack, and he said, ‘No, but if you boys move quick, we won’t need one.’
Trent and I started to spin off the eight lug nuts. With just one left in place, Keith said, ‘Trent, take off that last nut, Randy, grab the spare.”
He moved to the rear of the truck and lifted the tire off the ground. Trent pulled the tire loose, I slid the other one in place, and we put two lug nuts on the rim. Keith let the truck down as we tightened the lug nuts.
“Thanks boys,” he said and then drove off.
I looked at Trent with wide eyes and said, “I wouldn’t screw with your dad.”
Impressed? You bet.
Later that fall, we were triple-dating in our friend Pat Wilson’s car, and it slid off into a ditch as we dropped one of the girls off on a rainy August night. Trent got out first, and as Pat and I got out to help him lift the front end of the car, we heard a groan. Trent picked up the front end, shoved the car backward, and we were out of the ditch.
Like father, like son. No wonder I had to cut block him, leg whip him, or punch him in the throat at football practice just to keep from getting killed.
Sometimes, agility is a useful tool on the jobsite. My best buddy for life, Tad McMillan, has that kind of agility.
One crisp morning, we were setting trusses on a house. We had three inner trusses nailed in place with just a couple of 16-penny nails on each end and a 1×4 ridge board to hold them upright. We were moving the gable end into place. It wasn’t nailed anywhere; I was holding it in place with my right arm while I balanced on the wall and the first regular truss, staying in place with my left arm holding me. As I turned to tell Tad to nail the end in place, I watched a pair of muddy irrigation boots step over my right hand. Tad was walking up the narrow edge of the rafter to nail it in place to the ridge board.
He nailed it, then turned to me.
“I’ll take Cody fishing a few times a year after you’re gone,” I told him. “You’re nuts; there was nothing holding that truss in place except my right arm.”
He took it a little hard, thinking of his young son Cody. The man was fearless when it came to heights. Athletic too, even the Russian judge would have given him a 10.
Football, baseball, and basketball often break down to simply throwing and catching. So does the jobsite.
Sometimes you need a hammer thrown to you, or a screwdriver, nail gun, level, or tin snips; the list of tools is endless. No one wants to walk down the ladder or crawl over to hand you a tool. It’s simple toss and catch. Don’t be the guy who messes up a throw or drops a tool that hits you in the hands; you’ll never hear the end of it.
Cutting a straight line or driving a straight line with a tractor using only a distant tree as a marker when you’re plowing or cutting. These skills are disappearing in the age of GPS, but they’re still viable.
Perhaps the greatest combination of coordination, balance, and power comes in setting a railroad tie as a corner post.
You hold the four-foot level in your left hand, moving it from one face of the tie to the adjacent face while adjusting the tie with your right hand. When the bubble is between the lines, you stand on your left foot, holding everything tightly in place, and begin dragging dirt into the hole with your right foot. After a few inches have dropped, you wiggle the post, drag a little more dirt in, and then check for level. If it’s close, you grab the idiot stick (a nine-pound tamping bar) and begin compressing the soil around the tie. After a few well-placed whacks, you check the level a final time and tamp the remaining dirt in place.
Athletics on the job site, they’re everywhere.