In the scores of Westerns I’ve seen and read, the most memorable scene is not a gunfight or train robbery. It was in “Shane,” where homesteader Joe Starrett and the transient title character struggled to remove a tree stump.
That scene resonated during the past fortnight as I removed an elm stump from our front yard near the sidewalk.
To reach the roots, I had to dig in our rocky soil, which requires a few pokes with a pick or spud bar for every shovelful. As in the days of Shane, passersby took an interest. But unlike Shane, none offered to help, although they were talkative.
I didn’t mind the interruptions. The most important blue-collar job skill that I ever learned was the art of leaning on a shovel, and these conversations enabled me to stay in practice just in case I have to take up honest work again.
If the passerby was a guy my age or older, the conversation always turned to the world’s greatest stump-removal tool: dynamite.
My next-door neighbor, who is retired from Public Service Co., recalled a time he and a work partner, exasperated at their slow progress in relocating a utility pole in Leadville, decided to toss a couple of sticks down the hole. To keep rocks from flying out, they dragged an old steel grate over the hole. The blast sent the grate up; on the way down it landed across two legs of a 22,000-volt line.
“It was the greatest fireworks show I ever saw, giant sparks shooting everywhere,” he said, but Leadville went dark for seven hours, and no one offered the corporate honchos any explanation for how a 200-pound steel grate fell out of the sky.
Nothing that gaudy ever happened during my explosives education, although I came close on my first try. Colorado School of Mines in Golden used to host “Engineer’s Day.” High school students interested in becoming engineers, and I was one in 1967, were invited and so a friend and I went.
We met a Mines student we knew from Greeley West High School. Perhaps to show us that Mines was not all calculus and no play, he asked if we wanted to learn how to use dynamite.
No 16-year-old boy could resist that offer. We went to Foss Drug where he casually bought a few sticks, a dozen primers and a coil of bickford fuse. He told us that this was quite legal; anybody could just walk in and buy dynamite.
We headed west, turning off U.S. 6 to drive up to an old quarry carved from the canyon wall. It was cluttered with junk; we learned to crimp primers and slice rat-tail fuses as we demolished old stoves, refrigerators and washing machines.
One flat piece spun up like a Frisbee and sailed off over Clear Creek Canyon. We ran to the quarry ledge in time to see it land on the highway, right in front of a car. Fearing a police report, we left in haste.
For a year or two afterward, I scoffed at my blowhard friends when they returned from trips to Cheyenne with M-80s and Silver Salutes and other big firecrackers that were legal in Wyoming but illegal in Colorado. Why bother with that wimp stuff, I asked, when you could just go to a hardware store and buy dynamite? I even removed a few stumps, after my dad made me find a legitimate use for my 10-stick cache.
Soon thereafter, the feds tightened the laws, so that it’s nearly impossible for a normal citizen to get dynamite now. Dynamite does, after all, have a history of terrorist use (remember, the striking Colorado miners who used dynamite in their battles were terrorists; and the mine owners, who used the State Militia, were upholding law and order).
But a quarter-stick in that front-yard stump would have saved me hours of hard labor. So here’s what would be fair: In cases where a citizen has a legitimate use for dynamite, but cannot obtain it, the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms will dispatch agents to perform the task.
That way, we wouldn’t miss our dynamite so much, and our respect for federal law enforcement would grow as we saw the agents performing productive work with picks and shovels and pry bars – unless, alas, they were as skilled at leaning on a shovel as I am.
Ed Quillen of Salida (ed@cozine.com) is a former newspaper editor whose column appears Tuesday and Sunday.
