Mason City

Mason City was a hastily erected town run by MWAK, the consortium of companies building the dam. In the book, it is not merely a name beside the construction site: its company mess hall and the nearby workers’ settlement of Shack Town frame the daily routine of Joe Rantz’s summer at Grand Coulee, while the dam work drew other young men there as well.

A town built for the dam

The town’s purpose was practical and immediate: to serve the people building the dam. Its large, white clapboard mess hall brought workers together at long tables, shoulder to shoulder, and supplied meals on a scale matching the project’s labor force. Each morning, the thirty kitchen workers prepared three hundred dozen eggs, twenty-five hundred pancakes, five hundred pounds of bacon and sausage, and 180 gallons of coffee. Lunch included three hundred two-foot loaves of bread, 150 gallons of milk, and twelve hundred cups of ice cream. Dinner brought fifteen hundred pounds of red meat—or twelve hundred pounds of chicken on Sundays—and 330 pies.

Joe Rantz’s daily life

Joe ate at the mess hall three or four times a day, returning to a way of eating he remembered from boyhood at the Gold and Ruby mine: leaning into generous servings among other men seated in rows. The food was unexceptional, but plentiful; he finished his own plate and any scraps within reach. The meal hall’s abundance was one part of a routine shaped by hard physical work and the needs of a large construction camp.

At night, Joe hiked uphill to Shack Town, where he rented a cheap room in a long, rickety building for single men. The settlement above the work site was rough and dusty, with shacks made from rough-cut lumber or tar paper, little electricity, and no indoor plumbing in Joe’s room. The communal shower houses offered an especially unpleasant hazard: black widow spiders in the rafters dropped toward the men when steam rose. Joe took a broom with him to sweep them away before turning on the water. Shack Town was distinct from the company mess hall, but together they locate the contrast between the project’s provision of mass meals and the precarious conditions of workers’ lodging.

A meeting place in the story

Two weeks after beginning work at Grand Coulee, Joe discovered that two college men from the Washington shell house had also come there for the summer. One was Johnny White, a poor former member of Tom Bolles’s freshman boat. Their arrival shows how the dam project drew young men beyond its regular construction workforce and brought people from Joe’s rowing life into the setting of his summer labor. Mason City thus anchors a period in which the routines of a company town and the demanding work of the dam intersect with the relationships that would matter to the crew’s story.