I am sure we’ve all been there. Trying to stay out of sight from a second-floor window, while surreptitiously watching, enraptured, as the septic guy installs the new drainfield.
That’s a thing everyone does, right?
How could you not get caught up?
Right?
It’s an amazing thing to behold. How did he know exactly how much sand to bring? Or how much gravel? How does he manage to be so precise with the excavating equipment: using machines capable of effortlessly snapping huge tree roots and lifting boulders to gently peel soil within millimeters of the 1000-gallon, plastic tank hidden in the ground – without so much as scuffing it. How did he manage to dig such a big hole, fill it with gravel and pile other stuff on top of it without ripping up the rest of the lawn? Or even nicking any of the surrounding trees? And how did he do all of that so freakin’ fast – without ever being hurried? Everything was totally controlled. Not a single movement was wasted.
It was like an exquisitely choreographed ballet of steel and hydraulic fluid and diesel – all to engineer a place for microbes to decompose the effluvia and other stuff I flush down the drain.
The building of the septic field is not where my fascination with the septic guy started though. I was attuned to that part because of what had happened earlier.
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He rolled up in a huge dumptruck, filled with gravel, and towing a trailer hauling a skid steer, mini excavator, and a couple of attachments.
It was cinematic.
Fog had settled in the low wetland between the house and the highway, so I heard him long before I saw him. It was so quiet at 7:00am, I heard the unfamiliar diesel drone from at least a mile away. It slowed to turn onto my driveway and I put on my shoes and was out the door in time to see the giant Mack grill aparate from the mist.
I showed him the route around the outbuildings and through part of the shelter belt he could use to get his equipment back to the site for the drainfield. We walked the path as he checked he would have enough clearance to get through and decided where he would dump the loads of dirt and gravel he needed for the job. In one spot, a tree limb was in his way.
As he started unloading his equipment from the trailer, I got a saw and set to work on the limb.
It was bigger than it looked from the ground.
I soon found myself growing self-conscious as I labored to get my cheap bow saw through the branch. The spetic guy was ready to get going; waiting and watching me from his excavator as my saw wandered so badly off course I was cutting nearly parallel to the limb by the time I was half way through.
Finally, he put me out of my misery and asked if I wanted him to just break it off. Grateful, I clambered down and out of the way while he rolled over to the tree and then reached up with his metal arm and plucked the branch off, as though he were picking fruit. He set it gently aside and then rolled off through the woods.
A few minutes later, I gathered my jaw from the ground and went inside to stalk… I mean, study him from the window.
I am not sure how else to explain what I had seen except to say that he hadn’t used a machine to pluck the branch. HE had simply reached up and done it as though reaching with his own arm and hand. Yes, he was sitting in the cab, operating the levers that directed hydraulic fluid to one cylinder that raised the boom, another the extended the arm, another that curled the bucket outward, and another that closed the thumb attachment on the bucket over the branch – as well as a motor that swiveled the whole cab and arm – all while moving the whole machine around on two differentially controlled tracks. But all of that was one motion. It was no different from the way a person can reach up to pluck an apple from a tree as a single motion even though dozens of separate muscles are involved.
The machine was not a tool he wielded. It was simply an extension of the septic guy.
It.
Was.
AWESOME!!!
It wasn’t the mere fact that someone could develop that level of skill that blew me away. I was already thinking a lot about how people get good at complex endeavors, so I knew this dude’s skill in the excavator represented thousands of hours of practice. It was the mundane-ness of the branch-plucking that fascinated me.
I probably would not have noticed if I hadn’t spent so many hours trying to master a hydraulic attachment myself. To be very clear, the loader on my little tractor is orders-of-magnitude less complex than the excavator. The boom goes up and down. And the bucket curls forward and backward. Two controls. One joystick. And a pedal that makes the whole tractor go back and forth. I suppose you have to steer too. But my point is that there is very little going on with my front end loader compared to an excavator. And even so, it took sooooo many hours of practice to stop feeling completely incompetent with it.
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When I first got my little sub-compact tractor, I was giddy to go scrape up… whatever I could find. And make a pile. Or lots of piles. I had never gotten to play with real hydraulic equipment before.
Even the little digger attachments I would occasionally see in the sand pit at parks always seemed to be occupied by some other kid, gloriously moving sand from one spot to another. The day I finally got my chance at an unoccupied digger, I was all kinds of disappointed to realize that being anchored to one spot meant all it could do was pick up some sand a fixed distance from the base and drop it somewhere on a circle – the same radius from the base.
Even so, moving stuff around with hydraulics had held an inherent fascination for me since I was a child. And I finally had my own equipment to do it!
And none of those other kids were in my way!!
I had the perfect spot to start. It was a rarely used offshoot of the driveway. There was a bit of gravel sort of roughly strewn about. I could scrape it up and make piles without damaging or interfering with anything important – and when I was done playing I could spread the gravel out more neatly, so it would look nice. I lasted maybe 20 minutes before I was so frustrated I had to call it a day.
You can’t see the front edge of the bucket from the driver’s seat. So you can’t tell when it’s level. And level is important for a front end loader. If the bucket is tilted the slightest bit upward, little, if anything, goes into the bucket. When you push it forward along flat(ish) ground, the bottom of the bucket just basically surfs along the surface. If you push the bucket into a pile like that, some material may leak over the elevated lip, but mostly physics makes the bucket ride upward and smoosh the whole pile away. If the bucket is tilted down, on the other hand, the lip digs into the surface of the ground and physics pulls it downward quickly, so you get a very sudden gouge in the ground if it is soft enough. Also the tractor slams to a stop. I spent my first 20 minutes on my tractor alternately sliding impotently across the surface of the driveway or having the seatbelt deliver a gut punch when the bucket gouged into the soil and the tractor’s momentum stopped before mine did. Worse, once I had a few divots in the driveway, the tractor started acting like a see-saw as I would drive over them: the front wheels would fall into the hole and the tractor would tip forward, pulling the bucket downward. Then the rear wheels would go into the hole as I proceeded driving over it, tilting the front of the tractor up, pulling the bucket several inches upward. Then, as the rear wheels came up out of the whole, the bucket would be plunged back down and, if the bucket was too low and tilted forward, gouge another divot. I soon had an emerging pattern of periodic indentations, spaced the same distance as the front and rear wheels.
At one point, I tried standing up, leaning forward, leaning out to the side… to try catch a glimpse of the front of the bucket. There was simply no way to see if the bucket was level when I was in the seat. So I stopped, got down from the tractor, and walked far enough off to the side to see if the bucket was level. I had to go about 20 feet to get to a spot where I could be sure I wasn’t seeing a parallax distortion. I got back on adjusted until I thought it was level, got back off and checked to see if it was right (it wasn’t), got back on and adjusted, wash, rinse, repeat… When I finally got the bucket level, I drove forward a few feet with the bucket scraping up gravel as I had hoped. It was a glorious second or two and then… the wheels hit a bump and suddenly the bucket wasn’t level anymore. I got off again to assess the levelness situation. It was going to be a looooong process if I had to get off and walk 20 feet to the side every time I hit a bump (especially now I’d created so many new ones).
I got back on and searched for some other feature on the bucket I could use to tell if it were level. The top of the bucket was parallel with the bottom, so if I could find a way to get that top surface level, I would be good. There were even stickers on it to (apparently) help(?) with leveling. But they didn’t line up with anything that was even a little bit helpful. I experimented a few times, thinking that all I needed to do was figure out what it looked like when it was level. So I adjusted the bucket until I thought it was right, got off to check, tweaked it until it was right, stared intently at the bucket, then moved the whole thing and brought it back to a spot that looked right, got off and looked again from the side… wash, rinse, repeat.
Didn’t help.
Somehow, I eventually managed to get enough gravel and dirt into the bucket that I thought I could dump it into one of the divots I had made to repair it. I missed. (Turns out, it’s difficult to judge where stuff will land when it falls out of a bucket – when you can’t see the front of that bucket.) No problem. The pile was in front of the hole, so I raised the bucket, drove forward a bit, tilted the bucket down until it touched the ground just in front of the tiny pile I had just created, and backed up so I could drag the pile into the hole. As I backed up, the front wheels came up out of the divot they had fallen into when I had driven forward and, as they came up out of the hole, the whole tractor tilted backward – raising the bucket up and gently rounding over the tiny pile of dirt, which stayed in place as the bucket arched over it.
My anger rising, I raised the bucket again, drove forward, and pushed the bucket down so hard it picked the front of the tractor several inches off of the ground. This time the damned wheels couldn’t lift the bucket over the pile, because they weren’t even touching the stoopid ground! I would use brute force to just scrape the pile where I wanted it!
But physics…
I had the bucket tilted almost vertical by this point – and the surface it was resting on was ever so slightly sloped to the right, and Newton’s third f-ing law provided just enough of a nudge to push the tractor off course. When I started moving the tractor backward classical mechanics simultaneously deflected the bucket to the right so that it inscribed an elegant arc – around the side of the pile and the hole I wanted to fill.
I was shaking with rage as I turned the key off, pulled it out, and did the most measured, Wile E Coyote walk I could manage back to the house.
The next day, I learned to remove the quick-attach loader from my tractor and it sat in my shop while I used the tractor purely as an expensive lawn mower for the rest of the summer and fall.
It was a particularly snowy Minnesota winter that finally taught me how to operate my front end loader. I headed out, with trepidation, to re-attach the loader after the first major snowfall, expecting a frustrating battle. But I very quickly learned, to my great relief, that my little sub-compact tractor was not heavy or powerful enough to dig the bucket into the solid, frozen ground even the slightest bit. Even the gravel sitting on the surface was locked in place, so there was no danger of messing up the driveway surface by having the bucket set wrong. It did, however, make for a rough ride if the bucket was tipped too far forward, because, every bump and rock sent shudders through the machine as the sharp edge of the steel lip thudded over them them: feedback in the right range to be helpful. Unlike the soft summer ground where the feedback was too subtle for a novice to correct an error before something disastrous happened, I was getting a clear indication it was not right without serious consequences.
It was less obvious when the bucket was tipped too far back. The consequences of this error were still minor though. If the snow was deep, the bucket would ride upward a little bit, slightly lifting the front wheels and compacting snow under the bucket. The tractor would gradually lose traction as it simultaneously created a heavier and heavier wall of compacted snow, and it soon ground to a halt. If the snow wasn’t very deep, the bucket would sort of surf along, spreading a wake of snow out both sides for a few hundred feet – but when I lifted the bucket to dump it, nothing would come out. It made for veeeeeeery slow progress, but still no serious consequences. And it didn’t take long before I started recognizing the sounds and feeling of bucket surfing on snow – and after several clumsy attempts, I started getting a sense for how far to tip the bucket forward when that happened.
By the end of the winter, I was pretty good at keeping the bucket level – and using the loader in general. Between the 1/4-mile driveway and the better part of an acre to clear between buildings – plus heavier than average snowfall through the winter – I got plenty of practice. I must have gotten at least 100 hours of practice just that winter. By the time the septic guy came into my life, I had probably had a few hundred hours of experience with the loader. That was enough to have some confidence about what I could do with it – and perspective to know what I couldn’t. It was the beginnings of competence.
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