Proof The Bible Is True

I’d been on the pipeline job as a laborer for five months, the lone female in a field of men. My job was to work directly with the engineer as he marked the bends in the pipe. A hundred yards in front of us, the backhoe clanked and rattled as it cut a five-foot ditch across the northwest Colorado high desert.

 

Climbing up on a rocky hill and staring ahead at the long ditch, I decided it looked like a giant snake easing its way through the sagebrush and pinyon pine trees. Snakes were on my mind. As they had been every minute of every day since the start of the job.

 

It had been an unusually dry year and the snakes were plentiful. We’d heard the warning at our Monday morning safety meetings. “Stay alert. Keep your ears open. Don’t put your hands where you can’t see.” Easy for the safety guy to say. My job entailed being down in the ditch, where it was usually dark and difficult to see. Early on, a man had been bitten. He was airlifted to the hospital in Grand Junction, and had survived. Yet I couldn’t get past it.

 

“What type of rattlesnake are we dealing with?” I asked the following Monday. Over the weekend, I’d gone to the library and done my research. The two types most common in northwest Colorado were the midget faded rattlesnake and the Western or prairie rattlesnake. The potency of their venom differed. They had different habits. I wanted to know which species I should become an expert on. My question got a round of belly laughs from my coworkers.

 

The engineer I worked with shook his head. “Here I am in northwest Colorado with the girl and the rattlesnakes,” he said, as if each was a challenge he’d prefer to work without. Big yucks all around.

 

Since I was one of the first woman laborers on a pipeline job in the early nineties, I was conditioned to the jokes. It wasn’t my first rodeo, working with an all-male crew, and I’d been raised around two ornery brothers. Besides, I was a single parent, interested only in doing my job and collecting a paycheck. I just let the unenlightened comments go unanswered.

 

Sometimes, though, I did yearn to have the last word. Prayer helped me hold my tongue, but I struggled with constant worry, my eyes searching every inch before I took a step, my ears ever alert for the horrifying rattle. I imagined snakes everywhere.

 

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