Page 20 of Working for the Mountain Man

"This road isn't safe," I say.

"Then why are you going? If it’s not safe for me, why is it safe for you?"

I sigh, I know her well enough by now to know that she’s not going to give up on this. If I’m going, she is too. I pick up my hard hat and grab the spare one from the cabinet and hold it out to her, she takes it without smiling.

"You stay where I put you, you don't step past barriers, and if I say we're leaving, we leave. No arguing."

She nods instantly. "Agreed."

"I mean it, Elsie."

"I know," she says. "So do I."

The upper ridge road is worse than I expected. I knew it would be bad, but I didn’t know it would be this kind of bad, the road looks passable, but I know better. I can see it. I’ve worked this business long enough to see the trap.

I drop the speed and put more weight on the brakes, and the truck steadies.

Elsie doesn’t say anything, she’s watching the road out the windscreen with her file checklist in her lap and her jaw set.

"Are you always this calm in bad weather?" she asks.

"Being calm saves lives."

"That didn't answer the question."

"It did."

She looks at me for a second. "You know, a normal person would say something like 'yes, I'm very experienced and we'll be fine.'"

"We'll be fine," I say.

"Now I don't believe you."

The road narrows, the trees close in on both sides, branches have been bent under ice, a few already snapped and are sitting in the ditch. The radio crackles with Darnell confirming he is heading back down. The main crew is off the mountain. Good. I want them off before the front moves in.

"The bridge abutment repair," Elsie says, looking at the file. "There's a reference to a secondary drainage outlet on the east side. Is that the one that was most affected by the runoff?"

"Yes."

"So that's the one that needs the photo. The state team is going to want to see that the outlet is clear and the repair is holding."

"Right."

"And we need a note that accounts for today's debris without making it look like the repair failed."

"The debris is surface runoff from overnight snow melt, it’s nothing to do with the structure."

"I'll write that into the weather condition note. The date, the conditions, the debris source, and the structural status confirmed." She makes a note. "Do you have the site code for the east abutment?"

I tell her and she writes it down, all the while I continue to watch the road.

The site is cold, wet, isolated, and beautiful. The bridge is a single span over the upper ridge creek, a repair job we finished in October when storm runoff had scoured one abutment enoughto compromise the footing. The repair held through winter. I can see it from the approach, the new concrete clean against the older stone, the drainage outlet clear, the shoulder graded properly.

I get out and go straight to work. Elsie’s right behind me, hard hat on, high-vis bright against the grey and white of the mountain, and her boots planted properly on the icy gravel. She photographs the abutment first, date stamp visible, then the drainage outlet, then the surface of the road shoulder on both sides. She asks me to confirm the site code on the marker post, finds it has accumulated ice and can’t be read, photographs it anyway and notes in the file that ice obscured the marker, but site confirmed by foreman on-site, which is exactly the right call.

I check the repair, then test the abutment, and check drainage flow. The outlet is clear, the repair is solid, the debris is sitting on the road shoulder, not in the channel, exactly where I thought it would be.

"East outlet," I say. "Get a wide shot first, then close on the channel."