ARMADILLO AMBUSH

When I was near bout 13 or 14, I lived in Wright City next door to a guy who moved houses for a living. Leroy would disconnect the stuff underneath, jack them suckas up, put wheels (called dollies) under them, and down the road they would go to their new location.

Leroy offered me a job (50 cents per hour). Money being scarcer than rented mules in those days, I accepted (no resume required).

My job description was heavy on crawlin':

1. Crawl under the house and saw the connecting pipes (gas/sewer/whatever) in two with a hack saw (don't break the blade or your butt would have to crawl out, get a new blade, get a "chewing" from Leroy for breaking the blade, crawl back to finish the job.)

2. Crawl and drag a large metal cable under the house that was used to pull back a steel I-beam on each side of the house. Then the I-beams were jacked up and the dolly wheels were chained under them to form an axle.

3. Crawl some more under the house to tie cables around the blocks that the house had been sitting on for some number of years. Next a winch truck could pull the blocks out of the ground and out from under the house. Finally the house could be towed away.

Don't know if you have ever crawled around under an old house, especially since most all houses are built on a concrete slab these days? But, yuh can accumulate some pretty unusual experiences if you spend enough time under an old house:

a. Think about the fact that you are lying on your stomach with anywhere from 12 to 24 inches between the ground and the bottom of the house. Also, some houses had large wooden beams (called ceils) that ran the length of the house about 36 inches apart. This created underground tunnels to crawl thru that averaged 24 inches tall by 36 inches wide (all absolutely saturated with enuff cobwebs for a long horror movie).

b. If you do this enough (while lying on your stomach in the dust) you will encounter all manner of spiders, snakes, possums, roaches, creepy crawly, slitherin', hissin' varmits (at EYE-BALL level!) I was under a barn one time and half-way thru encountered an armadillo nose to nose. Before I could decide what to do, Mr. Armadillo shot at me like a bullet and clawed between me and the ground to safety on the other side. (I wonder if he felt the wetness soaking my overalls during his lightning-like passage?)

c. We didn't even own a flashlight (we called it a lantern), much less have one to take under those houses. That patch of daylight you could see on the other side of the house was like the light at the end of a tunnel for you.

Once the house was freed from its earthly bonds and strapped on the I-beam/dollies, it was chained to a winch truck (old army surplus) as the towing vehicle.

One job was to move some old army type barracks that formerly housed tuberculosis patients from the Tyler Hospital to (can't remember). The "barracks" were so long that we had to cut them into three sections to move them. By "cut", I mean use an electric hand held circle saw and run it up a wall, across the roof, down the opposite wall, and across the floor (and watch the sparks as you were whackin' them nails along the way?)

When working getting the barracks ready to move, the ole W.C. naive one discovered pigeons (that were roosting in the attics of the barracks). Don't ask me why I had never seen pigeons before, but I'm blaming my lack of worldliness on my being as country as Henderson Sugar Cane Syrup. Besides, if we had something like a pigeon around Wright City, us poor oil field trash folks would have put 'em on the bar-b-que pit, lit some hickory, and downed 'em with a Falstaff?

Anyway, I couldn't help but catch a few, put them in a "pasteboard" box, and bring them home for pets. I would have done better bringin' home a sack of scorpions as my mom/dad went ballistic due to, "all the disease that pigeons carry"!!!!!!! (thus why they call them "carrier" pigeons I'm thinkin'????)

Now here's where I need help from my loyal TSRH blog reader(s?). Why wuz it okey-dokey for me to crawl over, under, around, and through a former tuberculosis ward, but not OK to have a pet pigeon??????????? (Oh yeah, they was "carriers")

Enough side trip, back to the main meat of this blogisphere:

After all was tied, lashed, given the Good Housekeeping Seal of Approval, and dusted off, the young ranch hand got a special treat (RIDING ON TOP OF THE HOUSE) to the destination of the unceremoniously uprooted residence. This dubious honor included:

1. Hang off the side with saws (and I don't mean motorized ones) to cut limbs that were protruding from the side of narrow roads.

2. Assist/drag/pick up low hanging overhead wires that were strung across the highways over the roofs of the houses. (Now if anyone knows why I didn't get fried to a crispy critter doing that little 50 cent/hour chore (other than God's grace), be sure to let me know. (Reckon Workman Comp Insurance was invented back then?)

This was also my first experience (from the top of the roof) to see law enforcement in action as various constabulary would "check us out" as we backed traffic up for miles.

Over the years with the Highway Patrol, co-workers would gripe about one work related thing or the other. I would always say we had a good job (Guess ya had to know the armadillo story to enjoy my perspective about "good" jobs?)