Chapter 6

When we were close to finishing up Arnold had his brother-in-law Mason come up from South Carolina to help me clean up the punch list. The only thing that Mason and I had in common was he also loved fried chicken. So we ate 2 or 3 times daily at Kentucky Fried Chicken© outlets. We finished up and Mason stayed there to help Arnold's Operators move out the equipment and the office trailer. Arnold asked me to go to Fort Meade (an Army Base) as they were having problems with the Electrical Engineer that had designed the high voltage replacement part of the Contract. So I moved there. It took about 2 weeks for the NSA (National Security Agency) to clear my background to get a gate and building pass. When I could finally get in I found out that our Crew had to have NSA Security Guards with us everywhere we went. The different colors on the ID Cards got you into different floors and rooms. If 1 worker needed a rest room we all had to lock up and go with them and the guard. This got to be very time consuming and ate up a lot of our time.

The thing that I found most astounding there was their café / coffee break room area. It was large and had pool tables, ping pong tables and lots of pinball and electronic games. But what I found to be very unique was their cold drink dispenser. You could insert 1 quarter and choose your brand of bottled or canned beer. Those NSA Employees were not only paid well but were treated very well on the job. But at the end of the day some had to be helped to their cars or to the bus stop.

Later on one of the UG (underground) Lineman wanted us to hire his son. We had his son fill out the NSA security clearance papers and told him it would take up to 2 weeks to get the clearance which was the same with his dad and everyone else. We all had apartments close together. Towards the end of the 2nd week his son told me he was very worried about getting a clearance. I said "What's wrong? Were you a bad boy back in North Dakota?" He said "No, but I put down an earlier year as my birthdate so it would show me as being 18 years old, not 17. I also wrote a fake Social Security Number as I don't have one yet." The next day I went to the NSA Clearance Desk to see if I could stop his clearance paperwork. But they handed me his ID Card and said he was good to start working. Yeah, I was feeling secure with our top Gov't secrets being kept in that building.

I finally met with the Project Engineer on the Contract. He bragged that he had created the high voltage UG cable replacements and that his design would be implemented on Army Bases around the world. He also bragged about the huge Merit bonus check he had received and that he would get more bonus checks over the years. I was really curious about what could be so great and futuristic about replacing perfectly good copper UG cables like the ones that have lasted forever in a lot of old towns.

He said that all of the original cables that were in place were 3-Conductor PILC (paper insulated lead covered) cables filled with insulating oil. These cables and the splices were vulnerable to nuclear shock waves and would fall down and blow apart in the UG vaults. His design was to replace these cables with 3-Conductor aluminum cables that were mounted on the vault racks with rubber shock absorbers and tied up with high strength plastic ties. He said that he had gotten a Manufacturer to build these absorbers and cable ties and they were part of the material being furnished for the Project. I asked him how he ever proved that this installation would withstand a nuclear attack. He said he had designed it on paper and had proved in theory. I told him when it came time for a 'real world" test that I would call him from a very long distant phone to find out how it worked. He didn't think that was funny, but he spoke "Engineer" and I spoke "Tramp Lineman" so it took quite a while for us to (almost) understand each other and be able to communicate.

The only thing I liked about that area was I could ride a bus to Washington, DC on the weekends I had off. There's over 1,000 museums there and the Smithsonian Institute would change their main displays monthly. I also got to attend a bluegrass (kind of a hippie) festival and saw John Prine under a small tent just picking and singing! I wondered if he had ever seen the ugly sights I saw when flying over the open pit coal mining areas with all of the songs he had written and recorded about coal miners. It was a very pleasant afternoon in the park. I still enjoy his music today.

Towards the end of the Contract the UG Lineman and his son from ND came to me and said they had to go back home. The crowded roads, smog so thick you had to constantly clean your glasses and all of the trees everywhere were driving them crazy! They needed space and be able to see far, far away. Plus the seafood tasted weird to them and everyone around them talked funny! So I got their last checks and they headed west for home. I knew how they felt as I was also feeling out of place on the East Coast. We never did run into each other again, but I never worked in ND either.

We finally got this Project completed and I was ready for some back home Kansas time. But Arnold had different ideas for me. He asked if I would go run another Project for him. This one was on the coast of Maine almost to the Canadian border of New Brunswick. The Navy had the Cutler Naval Radio Station there. This had steel antenna poles spread out over a large area with open wire antennas strung in between them. This transmitted radio waves at a VLF (very low frequency) that would bend around the earth's curvature unlike higher frequencies that took off straight out into the atmosphere and would not bend. Submarines would put out a floating antenna and pull it behind them to send and receive radio codes transmitted in Morse Code. This took a lot of power and their old generators were getting pretty sluggish.

When we flew into there we had lunch at a small restaurant in Cutler. It was nice sitting by the window watching the small creek flow out to the ocean. I got to taste a lot of new seafood while there. My 1st time to eat lobster. The next day when we went there I noticed the water was flowing backwards. Machias Bay got some very high and low tides and this would push the fresh water back upstream during high tides. You could see the difference where the salt water and fresh water met and didn't mix together.

Our Project was to take out one old engine/generator and replace it with 2 new engine/generators that were left over from the UG missile sites that were built across the USA and then after the cold war threat was over all of those plus their switchgear was not in use any more. 2 other old gensets would keep running mostly in parallel until we finished up. The power plant had 2 floors. The 1st (basement) floor was where most of the pipes and cables ran. The engine/generator concrete foundations were 12' pillars and started below the basement somewhere and went up to the 2nd floor. The 2nd floor had the large control room and that's where the engine/generators were level with. There were steel floor plates around them so the workers could get to the bottoms of the engines. This looked like a good and interesting job to me so I took Arnold's offer to be the Project Manager.

At times I would talk with the Plant's electricians and mechanics. I watched the mechanics work on the old engines and I was able to visualize Jake Holman working on the old engine of the U.S.S. Sand Pebble in the novel The Sand Pebbles written by Richard McKenna, one of my favorite novels.

We contacted several of the Maine Union Halls and asked if they could furnish workers if we signed an Agreement with them. They said that realistically as far as were up the coast in Washington County (where the sun rises on America) they couldn't. They had very few Members that lived up there in the "Downeast" Maine area and most Members usually lived and worked in Bangor or towns or states south of there. But since we were paying their Union wage scales they would put our contact information on their board. They said we could just hire locals for most of the work involved. They were very happy to hear that a Union Member (me) that was in good standing would be the Project Manager.