The shoveling conspiracy

The Theodore Roosevelt obelisk was featured in local newspaper story recently, and it brought back a fading memory. Those who traveled the scenic U.S. Highway 2 in the days before 1989 can never forget the original location … smack dab in the middle of the road at Maria Pass, all 60 feet of it. That’s where it was when I had a personal adventure there.

The latest photos show its new position just south of the highway and reveals the obelisk as being clean and shiny. Wasn’t always that way. The monument to honor Roosevelt for establishing the Forest Service was erected in 1931 out of what I believe is granite. There was a big dedication with speeches, but then it just stood there for 18 years with the Continental winds and weather discoloring the surface and little attention to the shrubs and petunias around the bottom, especially during World War II years.

Then! One early morning in maybe June of 1949, I and good friend Barney Coster were summoned to the Coram Ranger Station office and told we had been chosen to “clean up the monument.” Not long out of the Army, I was just tickled pink to get away from all the hell-raising social activity around the then booming Hungry Horse Dam area. A veteran employee, “Big Jim,” drove us to our bunk house at the now non-existent Java Ranger Station, which was located just inside Glacier National Park, where the highway exits the Park above Goat Lick.

Neither Barney or I had ever operated sandblasting equipment, let alone built a scaffold and then dragged a roaring nozzle to the top, but somehow we did it. Can’t remember how long that took, but we had “Big Jim” often coming around to check on our job and give advice. When the sandblasting was over, we were looking forward to some good times back in civilization; however, “Big Jim” showed up with a dump truck and told us we were going to redo the area around the base.

He had a spot in the woods west of the Pass hidden from the roadway where heaps of soil had been dozed up. On the first trip for dirt, Jim told Barney to get on one side of the truck, me on the other with him at the back, and we’d all shovel in the load.

Here I might explain that “Big Jim” took pride in a longtime reputation for out working others. Although getting well up in laboring years, this pride drove him to extreme exertion, and Barney and I figured he was also upset about not being assigned to do that physically challenging sandblasting job. He had taken out his resentment on us a few times.

As we shoveled dirt into the box, Jim tried to keep his pile at the back higher that those made by Barney and me on each side. It was a challenge, and he was making no exception for the fact Barney and I were strong, much younger men. After dumping that first load into the base area, Barney got me aside and whispered, “Next load, I’m going to throw every other shovel full over onto your pile. You’ll outdo Jim, then next load, you do that to my pile.”

It was a mean trick, but we still got the truck loaded in about the same time. On the last load in late afternoon, Barney and I just shoveled onto our own piles, but Jim was so pooped he came in third. He barely spoke to us during supper at Java, and went straight to bed.

When that job was over and Jim was driving us back to Coram, we worked the conversation around revealing our shoveling conspiracy against him. He got a relieved expression, and we could tell he felt better knowing he had not been beaten in a fair and square shoveling game.

Others have obviously cleaned the Roosevelt Monument in the years since 1949, but I doubt they went through what Barney and I did a long time ago. The workers probably had a big boom truck and missed out on that exciting scaffold adventure.

Maybe some of you will think about this the next time you drive over Maria Pass … in your comfy air-conditioned cars.

G. George Ostrom is a national award-winning Hungry Horse News columnist. He lives in Kalispell.