“I don’t know about that,” he said. “It seems to me you’re the smart one, knowing how to make people get along and do what they should. And the fellows give you credit for it, even if the captain doesn’t.”

Chapter 29

Even before the open house, we’d already started working outside.

The fellows who’d be operating the camp’s heavy equipment had begun learning how to do that. There’d been quite a competition for those slots, and I’d drawn names for the five allocated to my barracks.

I never heard how Compton decided on A Barracks’ five operator jobs, but I doubted it was anything so simple.

Pops had a crew learning how to be surveyors as they staked in the boundaries of the reservoir and of a big chunk of prairie that was to be restored around it.

Another LEM was taking fellows down to the river, a few miles past where it ran by town, to cut willow starts. They’d be planted as soon as the ground would allow—a willow branch will root all by itself.

Apple was on the willow-cutting crew, and I asked him how it was going.

“Not bad work,” he said, “except Compton seems to think he’s in charge instead of the LEM who really is. You sure you don’t want to invite him to be part of your shovel brigade?”

“Sure as certain,” I answered. “Much as I would love to see him flinging mud.”

By early April, the rest of us were working in mud all day long.

One of the first things we had to do was temporarily divert the creek, which was swelling with snowmelt from the mountains, far away as they were. The creek ran right through where our reservoir was going.

We made the diversion by digging a long channel around the land’s shallow basin, starting up above it and rejoining the creek down below. Once we got that done, we stacked sandbags to wall off the natural streambed.

The army had loaned us a second bulldozer to go with the one we already had, and soon both were going nonstop. One towed a scraper across the bottom of the basin, removing layers of soil into the scraper body to be carried near where the dam and one bank were being built up. The second dozer, equipped with a plow blade, pushed the soil—mud mostly—closer.

But then it was muscle work. Dozens of us were kept as busy as agitated ants, shoveling the mud into wheelbarrows and running it up on top of the berms for other fellows to spread out.

And besides that, we had the spillway to build, and that meant preparing a base, laying in supports, and building forms before we could even begin pouring concrete. We wanted to have everything ready when the cement that was being ordered in from someplace arrived.