24 Hours in America: Part 2

PICKENS, WEST VIRGINIA

By Anna Patrick

Christine Sneberger Long got to school later than she wanted to. For most of her dewy morning drive, she had been stuck between coal trucks, crawling along a narrow and winding Route 46 after leaving her home in Mill Creek, West Virginia.

She was headed to Pickens School, where she is the principal, health teacher and math teacher, and it’s a much longer commute — about an hour each way — than she used to make as a student here.

Tucked in the southwestern edge of Randolph County, the state’s largest in landmass, Pickens School has become somewhat of an oddity even in a rural state like West Virginia. Officials estimate that the bus commute for children living in the three remote communities that Pickens serves would take nearly an hour and a half one way to reach the next closest school. And that’s just too long to ask any child to do, said Long, 53.

When she was growing up, she would get on the bus from her family’s home in the town of Czar. Her father was a coal miner, and she rode the 8 miles through the next town over, Helvetia, a tiny village settled by German-speaking Swiss immigrants after the Civil War, before arriving at a school so small that it easily held the three communities’ children, kindergarten through 12th grade, in one building.

The old Pickens School ran on a coal furnace and well water, and in the winter the students would help shovel coal to keep the furnace running.

That building has been replaced with a tan, more modern facility, and the furnace is gone. The school has just 32 students.

Long’s recent morning began in the library with seven kids — the entire middle school, minus one absent child — staring back at her, all trying to talk over each other to get her attention.

“What are we doing in Friday’s class?” one student asked.

“Let’s make it through today first,” Long said.

They flipped open their health books and dove into a section on dating and relationships. Some students volunteered to read; others needed to be called on.

After they finished, the chatter rose, a way to pass the time before the next bell. “We went hunting the night before,” one girl said to Long.

Long looked at one of the boys, the one who had given her the hardest time about reading earlier, and said quietly, “Did you get Gumpy taken care of?”

“Yeah, he died yesterday at like 3:30, and then my mom and sister buried him after I left,” the boy said. “And Max, he’s been howling all night long.”

“Oh, misses him,” Long said.

After the bell, she walked back to her office and began proofreading the student handbook. It was due in the county office by noon. She started dictating edits to the school’s substitute secretary, Iris Davis.

“Her name has an ‘A’ in it,” Long said. “This here probably needs a space.”

The janitor, Ruth Anne, appeared in the doorway.

One of the air-conditioning units did not seem to be working. “It’s making a loud noise, and it feels really hot,” she said.

Soon Long was treading through the wet grass behind the school in her thick black heels, stopping at every AC to check its temperature.

She flipped a breaker on the unit near the cafeteria. Nothing. She asked the cook to keep an eye on it and let her know if it started up again.

Just a couple of hours earlier she had said, “It’s a rough trip over, but it’s worth it once you get here.” It was a reference to her commute and the rugged roads, but, with air conditioners conking out and students to be comforted, it could apply to any number of things.

BLADEN COUNTY, NORTH CAROLINA

By Michael Parker

“Lately the talk is all about the storm,” said Pat Soesbee, 65, a member of the Lumbee Indian tribe, who, with her cousin Betty Rose Dolce, runs the Elwell Ferry on the Lower Cape Fear River in southeastern North Carolina.

It was the Sunday before Hurricane Florence made landfall, and although the storm did not hit until Thursday, it was then a Category 4 headed straight for nearby Wilmington. (Ferry service was suspended before the storm and would remain so for at least four weeks.)

The Elwell ferry was started by two local men, the Russ brothers, in 1904. The ferry used poles then, instead of a cable, and the limit was two horses and a carriage. Now it’s one of only three two-car ferries in operation in North Carolina, and the only one operated solely by women, according to Andrew Barksdale, a spokesman for the North Carolina Department of Transportation.

Dolce was asked why the state doesn’t just build a bridge. “Well, it’s history,” she said. “The man that founded this ferry lost his life just to get these people across the river.” She was referring to Walter Russ, who died in an explosion aboard the ferry in 1942.

The ferry is free and has no schedule. Passengers just show up and blow their horn to signal the operator if the ferry is at the far dock. No schedule for passengers can mean no break for the women on the busiest days, although neither complains about the work.

“Used to, it was five men doing what it takes two women to do,” Soesbee said. “Men just get bored easy.” On cue, a male passenger rolled down his window as she tied off the ferry and raised the crossing arm. He said to me: “Seems like this would get real boring.”

“See what I’m saying?” said Soesbee, who overheard the comment. “I never get bored. I like to read. I love to read about the Amish.”

Soesbee said that if her passengers are ever surprised to find a woman running the ferry, they don’t register it. “I had 50 motorcyclists come through here yesterday and seemed like they kind of liked it,” she said.

The river that day was sluggish and chocolate colored, the cypress trees lining it stately and still. It was Sunday, generally less busy, but there were passengers. A preacher who lives on one side of the river was headed to his church on the other side. “He comes through every Sunday, of course,” Soesbee said. “Tries to keep me straight.”

Although the river is 120 yards at the crossing and the ride takes only three to four minutes, its operators have come to know the regulars well. Aside from the preacher, there’s the woman who brings her children across to their grandparents to baby-sit several times a week, saving her more than 30 miles of driving and a considerable amount of gas. And there’s Carolyn Cromartie, aka "the Gatorade Lady,” who makes sure Soesbee and Dolce are well hydrated.

Dolce, also 65, was hired first to run the ferry when the state contracted the work out to a local hauling company. “I was mowing highway medians for him at the time, and the owner asked if I wanted to try running the ferry,” she said. “For the first six months, I worked seven days a week until Pat came on.”

Now they each work seven-day shifts, roughly from dawn to dusk. Dolce said she never gets bored, either. “I like being by myself,” she said. “I fish when I have the time. You just have to love it out here. It’s beautiful.”

Before she came to work on the ferry, she said, she always worked hard jobs. “I came up with four brothers,” she said. “They said to me when it got time for me to go to work, do you want to make man’s money or women’s money? First job I got was as an electrician’s helper. I worked at a cannery, sprayed yachts. I helped my husband drive an 18-wheeler, until he was murdered in a robbery at a truck stop in 2005. In 2010 I lost my 39-year-old daughter to an automobile accident.”

“I guess because I endured a lot in my life, this is easy,” she said. “I never get up in the morning and say, ‘Oh, God, I’ve got to go run that ferry.’ But I’m tired on a night when I do 80 vehicles. Walking those hills will get to you.”

Soesbee said she has a hard time with the heat, even though she allowed that summer is the best time: “We get all the beach traffic. Some of them coming way out of their way just to ride the ferry. And I love being out in nature.” She said she has seen fox, raccoon, wild turkey. “One day I saw a cottonmouth eating a fish. That was interesting.”

Dolce has had experience with wildlife as well. “I had an alligator follow me around for most of the day once,” she said. “Finally he left. I guess he got bored.”

For both women, it’s the passengers that keep the job interesting. “You get these kids, they’re so excited,” Dolce said. “Never rode on a ferry before. ‘Can I get out?’ Yes, I tell ‘em, just stay right close. I love to watch them.”

Then there are the drivers who head down Elwell Ferry Road without realizing that there’s no bridge. “You see them stop up by the crossing arm, looking confused,” Soesbee said. “If I can catch them, I’ll run up and try to get them to ride across.”

“They don’t even know where they are,” Dolce said. “I just ask them, ‘Well, where is it you’re wanting to go?'”

BOULDER CITY, NEVADA

By Abby Aguirre

On a late September morning, Jason Takeshita, 43, a hydroelectric mechanic, was traversing the top of Hoover Dam under a scorching sun.

Starting from the Nevada side of the Colorado River, not far from a bronze monument honoring 96 men who died building the dam — “They died to make the desert bloom,” a plaque reads — Takeshita walked west to east.

To his left, Lake Mead lapped against the dam’s four intake towers. The lake is one of the largest man-made reservoirs in the world, a body of water so heavy and unexpected that it sent earthquakes across the desert floor to Las Vegas when it was created. To his right, tourists peered over a ledge at the face of the dam: 726 feet of hallucinatory white concrete wedged between the walls of Black Canyon.

Trailing Takeshita, it was not hard to tell him apart from the visitors. Tall and sturdy, he wore a blue workman’s jumpsuit, a blue hard hat and, pinned to his chest, a button with the word “METRIC” crossed out by a red diagonal line.

He is one of 32 hydroelectric mechanics at the dam, and, generally speaking, he and his colleagues do not care for the metric system. Partly it’s that Hoover Dam was not designed using metric units. “The whole plan,” he said, referring to the dam’s design, “is made off the imperial system.” But he also maintains that imperial measurements, with their successive halving, are more precise for his purposes.

“Imagine aligning a 70-foot shaft, plus or minus 3 to 5 thousandths, and you’re dealing with plumb and orbit as it rotates,” Takeshita said. (This reporter tried to imagine but could not.) “Half of a half is a quarter, half of a quarter is an eighth, half of an eighth is a sixteenth, 32, 64, 128 ... ” His voice trailed off.

Takeshita stopped at a small tower with two brass doors: an art deco elevator he took 530 feet down, into the dam’s main structure. Then he walked through a tunnel that runs horizontally, over terrazzo floors that mix Navajo and Pueblo motifs with centrifugal themes, a nod to the dam’s turbines.

At the end of the tunnel, in a space the length of two football fields, nine gigantic generators hummed loudly. This was the Arizona wing of the dam’s power plant, and there are eight more generators in the plant’s Nevada wing across the river.

The largest hydroelectric power plant in the world when it was built in the 1930s, Hoover Dam remains a linchpin of the Southwest. So much so that, shortly after Takeshita arrives at work, at about 5:45 a.m., he can hear the entire region wake up.

“I know, just by the alarms of the units going off, when everybody’s getting up,” he said. “Everybody’s turning on their coffeepots. It’s starting to warm up, and the ACs are kicking on.” As temperatures climb across the Southwest, more of the generators flip on. “By noon or 1 o’clock, every unit is online, producing power.”

It’s Takeshita’s job to keep the 17 generators intact — to keep them sending power to Los Angeles and a dozen other Sun Belt cities, and thus to keep the desert blooming. The work requires mastery of five trades: machining; maintenance mechanics; welding and pipe fitting; rigging; and crane operating. Depending on the day, he may also have to do some rappelling or scuba diving.

Takeshita picked up three of the trades in a training program for former servicemen. (From 1994 to 2003, he was deployed as an infantryman to Haiti, Rwanda, Bosnia, Uzbekistan and Kazakhstan.) He bounced around the private sector for a while, working for the Las Vegas Paving Corp. and other companies.

The 2008 financial downturn essentially halted construction in Las Vegas. During the worst year, from 2009 to 2010, he did not work at all. Instead, he took care of his daughter while his wife, a surgical technologist, provided for the family. “I was Mr. Mom,” Takeshita said. When the economy picked up again, he was offered two jobs at once, one of them at Hoover Dam. “Funny how the floodgates opened.”

He has spent eight years here, most of them doing the following: “Heavy lifting, kneeling, crawling, climbing, exertive force-type work.” In a way, it is not unlike the Army. “Instead of shooting, it’s lugging big wrenches and heavy equipment around,” he said. “Instead of running and maneuvering, it’s tugging and pulling.”

On this particular day Takeshita was getting ready for maintenance season, October to May, when fewer air-conditioners are running in the Southwest. He took an elevator to a floor below the river line, where an air compressor was giving off a deafening buzz.

The compressor supplies critical air to the generators, and Takeshita needed to prepare it to be turned off. Using a small wrench, he removed a drain plug and drained oil out of it. Then he removed an oil filter and drained it. Next he removed a valve and pounded a new part onto it using a rubber mallet.

After 45 minutes or so, Takeshita was dripping with sweat. He climbed a short set of stairs to an office area where he keeps a desk. He gulped down a cup of water. Above his desk, a paper sign is taped to a shelf. “There are two kinds of people in the world,” it reads. “Those who use the metric system. And those who put a man on the moon.”

PHILIPSBURG, MONTANA

By John Branch

Lacie DeMers got home from a three-day rodeo at nearly midnight, driving one of four big rigs carrying the bucking horses and bulls back to the ranch.

There were 89 broncs brought to the Montana Junior Rodeo Association Finals, a herd of miniature horses and ponies to fit the sizes of the kids trying to hold onto them for eight seconds. In the dark, DeMers, 37, and a few helpers offloaded them into the corrals and made sure they were fed and watered.

In the morning, before first light and before her young boys were up, she did a pile of paperwork and posted some of the rodeo results online, because she knew parents would be looking. She got the boys, ages 9 and 5, off to school, in town 13 miles away.

To appreciate the priorities of DeMers, a stock contractor and president of the Junior Roughstock Association, note the name of her boys: Rodee Owen (say it out loud) and Bronc Ryder.

Alone, she had time to get her real work done. She spread hay, recently cut by her husband from the 200 acres behind the house, across one end of the biggest pen. The horses sauntered over and bowed their heads to it. She grabbed a big bag of grain from the nearby tack room, which the mice had started to occupy in time for the coming winter, and poured some into large plastic pails. She brought that to a pair of mothers and their young colts, separated from the others.

A rainstorm the night before had doused the end of the rodeo, which forced DeMers to hustle gear into a horse trailer. Now it was warm and sunny, and she got busy untangling flank straps and hanging them on the rails of the trailer to dry the sheepskin and leather.

She unpacked a box of equipment her boys used to ride small broncs and bulls, including custom-built saddles (for small riders on small animals), gloves, helmets and protective vests.

A cloud of dust drifted down the dirt road, trailing a pickup truck. Inside was DeMers’ husband, Joe. He had slipped away from his job overseeing the stock at the Ranch at Rock Creek, a luxury dude ranch, to give his wife some help.

“I found Rodee’s spur,” she said to Joe, 60, a former professional cowboy and a longtime stock contractor. It had gone missing in the chaos of the night before.

The DeMers name is well known in rodeo. Their focus now — her focus, especially — is on youth rodeos. The Junior Roughstock Association (motto: “Filling the chutes of the future”) sanctions about 200 youth rodeos each year.

Lacie and Joe operate 406 Rodeo, named for Montana’s area code. Among their stock are 140 bucking horses of all sizes and 40 head of bulls. There are a couple dozen saddle horses, some used in rodeos for pickup men, the job of pulling competitors safely off an angry horse.

They supply stock to junior rodeos just about every weekend, and on Tuesdays to a private full-size rodeo over at Rock Creek.

Rodeo is hardly seen as a growth sport. Part of the problem, the DeMerses said, is that a shrinking pool of competitors is losing to bigger and badder broncs, and bulls being bred by stock contractors.

“The stock’s winning,” DeMers said. “We’re trying to build that back up by bringing size-appropriate stock to age-appropriate kids.”

As the children get older, the bucking horses get bigger. The 6-8-year-olds ride miniature horses; 9-11-year-olds board Shetland pony crosses; those 12-14 and 15-17 ride quarter pony crosses, no taller than about 5 feet (measured at the withers, between the shoulder blades) and up to 1,350 pounds.

“That’s still a big horse, but it’s not 16 hands,” DeMers said.

It is a relatively untamed, unbroken herd. Many are rescue horses.

“So many kids want ponies for Easter or Christmas,” she said, strolling through the pen looking for any signs of illness or injury among the animals. “But guess what? Ponies are not nice. Most of these horses would be at slaughter. That’s our thing: Save rotten ponies.”

All the animals have names, as unpredictable as an unbroken horse — Coconut Shavings, Frank Sinatra, Drop Dead Fred, Hooked on Phonics, Cindy Lou Who.

The only one that looks like its moniker is Trump, with a wispy and unruly blondish-orange mane. Nightmare “is black and tough and hard to handle for kids,” DeMers said, pointing to a stout, waist-high pony that doesn’t like to be touched.

DeMers does some of her work on a four-wheeler, some on horseback, especially up in the rugged range where the only true all-terrain vehicle has four legs. On this day, there was an extra chore — drive the hundreds of cattle grazing in the surrounding pastures higher into the nearby hills.

A late-summer snow a week earlier in the mountains of the Anaconda-Pintler Wilderness had nudged the cattle down into the warmer valley, an elevation of 5,800 feet. Now it was sunny and 70 degrees, and the DeMerses wanted them feeding in higher pastures until the deeper freezes of winter brought them down for good.

First, though, the horses needed to be turned, to roam the 400 acres of wildland for the next few days. DeMers opened a succession of gates, the farthest one first.

The horses, some big, some small, all running with manes blowing in a wind of their own creation, burst into the open space under a big sky. Soon they were dots on the faraway landscape, some still and resting, others galloping in tight, meandering herds.

“I’ve never quite understood what makes them do that,” DeMers said with a smile.

She turned back to the work in front of her. Before she knew it, it would be time to pick up her rodeoing, bronc-riding boys at school.