Joe Rantz takes a jackhammer job at Grand Coulee Dam

Joe Rantz takes a jackhammer job at Grand Coulee Dam in the summer, trading the shell house for a place on the cliffs above the Columbia River. The decision is both practical and revealing: the student oarsman needs work, and the athletic body he has trained for rowing makes him a plausible candidate for one of the construction site’s most demanding jobs. At Grand Coulee, strength is not an abstraction measured against a rival crew. It means holding a seventy-five-pound machine against solid rock while suspended above a canyon.

Departure and the road east

Joe leaves home for the summer after saying goodbye to Joyce Simdars. He loads his banjo and clothes into his old Franklin and heads east looking for work. The car labors and wheezes up the steep road to Blewett Pass, where lingering snow remains in the mountain shadows. A canvas water bag hung in front of the radiator helps guard against the Franklin’s tendency to overheat on the climb.

Beyond the pass, the journey carries him through sharply changing terrain. He drops toward Wenatchee’s orchards, crosses the Columbia River on a narrow steel span, and drives across the long, straight roads and wheat fields of the Columbia Plateau. Then he turns north into the Washington scablands, a landscape carved by ancient floods. The route ends at Grand Coulee, among basalt cliffs, sagebrush, sparse grasses, and windblown sand. The passage from familiar rowing water to this dry, immense country sets the scale of the change: Joe is leaving the routines of the university for a place where physical effort will be tested in a different element.

Applying at the dam

The government has recently committed to building a dam at Grand Coulee on a scale expected to make it the largest masonry structure built since the Great Pyramid. Joe drives into the ramshackle boomtown, crosses the river on a steel bridge, and goes to the National Reemployment Service building. The site is not yet a finished monument but a working landscape of bridges, conveyors, cofferdams, machinery, and men preparing the gorge for construction.

Thirty minutes after entering the office, Joe emerges with a job. Most available positions are for common laborers at fifty cents an hour. The application, however, lists higher-paying work for men who hang in harnesses from cliff faces and break rock with jackhammers. That work pays seventy-five cents an hour. Joe checks the box for the jackhammer position and goes in for his physical examination. It requires more than the ability to operate a machine: workers need upper-body strength to resist its kickback, strong legs to hold themselves away from the cliff, agility to move across the rock, and confidence enough to climb over the edge. When the doctor asks about his fitness and Joe explains that he rows crew at the university, the job is his.

The exchange makes rowing consequential in a new way. The university sport is not simply a past achievement that Joe can set aside when he needs wages; its training has helped qualify him for a task in which bodily control and endurance are immediate requirements. The job also offers a higher wage than ordinary labor, but it comes with exposure to falling rock, the cliff face, and the machine’s force.

The work and its demands

For eight hours a day, Joe hangs from a rope in the canyon’s furnace-like heat and drives the jackhammer into the rock. The machine weighs seventy-five pounds and pushes back as he tries to hold it steady. Its rapid, repeated blows join the noise of the machines around him. Gritty dust gets into his eyes, mouth, and nose; chips of sharp stone fly up and sting his face; sweat falls from his back into the void below.

The labor is part of a vast preliminary task. Workers must strip away hundreds of feet of loose rock, which engineers call overburden, to reach the older granite that will support the dam. They then have to shape the granite to fit the future structure. The stone is so hard that the combined jackhammers and pneumatic drills consume roughly two thousand feet of steel from their bits each day. The scale of the work surrounds Joe with a project that is at once collective and relentlessly physical: the dam depends on engineering and machinery, but its foundations are prepared through repeated human effort against the rock.

Joe comes to enjoy the job despite its brutality. He learns to work in close coordination with the men hanging on either side of him. They watch for rocks falling from above, warn those below, and search for better seams in the stone. This attentiveness gives the work a cooperative structure: each man’s safety and progress depend partly on the vigilance of others. Joe is drawn to the easy camaraderie among the workers and to the directness of the life they share on the cliffs.

Fellow rowers and the meaning of the summer

Two weeks after starting work, Joe discovers that two other college men from the Washington shell house have also come to Grand Coulee. He does not know either well at first. By summer’s end, Joe, Johnny White, and Chuck Day have formed an easy, comfortable confederacy. Without needing to announce a truce, they put aside shell-house rivalries and the insults of the previous year, and set aside, for the time being, the competition they know awaits them the following year.

Their temporary alliance matters because it reverses the usual logic of the shell house. There, the men are connected through athletic rankings and rivalry; at Grand Coulee they share the work and conditions of the construction camp. The job makes room for companionship that does not depend on defeating one another. It does not erase the coming contest, but it changes how the three men inhabit their time together before it begins.

The summer’s physical effect also recalls rowing without simply duplicating it. Joe finishes the work exhausted, thirsty, and hungry, yet he feels cleansed, lithe, and limber, as he sometimes does after a hard row on Lake Washington. Under the desert sun his muscles grow bronzed and his hair blonder. The jackhammer’s punishing resistance and the rhythm of a hard day’s labor become another setting in which his strength is tested, but the satisfaction he finds comes as much from the work and its companions as from endurance alone.

That experience sits in pointed contrast to the genteel ideals surrounding much collegiate rowing. Eastern institutions modeled the sport on elite British schools, and the Henley Royal Regatta barred men who had worked for wages as mechanics, artisans, or laborers. The book’s account of that exclusion clarifies the social boundary around amateur rowing: labor could be treated as disqualifying even while strength and discipline were celebrated in the boat. Joe’s summer does not place him at Henley or resolve that contradiction. Instead, it shows a working oarsman moving between worlds—using athletic preparation to earn a laborer’s job, and finding in difficult work a bodily confidence and fellowship that remain connected to rowing.