I Caused A Superfund Site
Love Canal, the Valley of the Drums, and me
I caused a Superfund site.
This was almost 40 years ago, and I was still in high school, so I’m pretty sure it came off the last revision of my CV.
But yeah, I did. With a tractor.
The Superfund was created in 1980 by the EPA to address hundreds of polluted sites in the US, and was responsible for cleaning up the nation's most contaminated lands and responding to environmental emergencies. As of this year, it is working on 85 Superfund sites and has added funding for 25 more.
It started in the ‘70s with sites like Love Canal and Valley of the Drums. It’s what happens when corporations and manufacturing facilities dump hazardous waste in the open or in improperly managed sites. According to science fiction and The Simpsons, it creates genetic monstrosities.
It’s also what happens when I get behind the wheel of a tractor.
Dateline: August, 1986
Farmington, Minnesota
I had just turned 16. I was gainfully employed by the Mount Olivet Lutheran Church Retreat Center.
My job was to clean up the place so the Northeastern Minnesota Synod of the Evangelical Lutheran Church could hold their annual meetings. Alternately, church youth groups full of teenage girls from neighboring high schools would come hang out.
I liked the job.
I mowed the grass and listened to my Simple Minds cassettes1 on my bright yellow Sony Walkman. I vacuumed and emptied tampon boxes in the bathrooms (my wife always asked me why I knew what those boxes were) and mopped floors and generally got coordinated seating plans in place for church groups or corporate meetings.
I’d started working there when I was 14. With my first check I bought a VCR so I could finally watch all the movies I wanted to watch, on our 13 inch color TV downstairs. I also recorded Letterman, horror movies that played after midnight on one of the few channels we had, other nerd stuff. One of those channels, KTMA, would go on to host the earliest Mystery Science Theater 3000 episodes.
The Mount Olivet Lutheran Church Retreat Center had two buildings of note – the main office and retreat facility, and the dormitory, which housed bunkbeds in shared rooms, single rooms where ladies on diet retreats stashed their Snickers bar wrappers, and a pool.
There was a separate power transformer for each building. The power transformer for the dormitory sat behind the building on a raised, flattened bed of rocks, on a hill that trailed down into a gully.
There was a fresh trail down along the hill which we’d carefully lined with clean wood planks and filled with decorative rock.
All of this was freshly landscaped, the pride and joy of Steve Helkenn, the groundskeeper and my boss. It looked good against the paper birch and spruce trees opposite the dorm.
Steve was a big man, with a brushy mustache with trace elements of sandwich, a John Deere cap, and work clothes flecked with sawdust and oil.
Steve wasn’t particularly fond of me. I was bookish, I liked to listen to “progressive rock” (which then meant The Cure and The Smiths, not King Crimson and Gentle Giant) on my headphones, I did not know shit about shit when it came to tools, the outdoors, shovels, lawnmower motors.
But I was a likeable kid, I suppose, and I cleaned up the tampon boxes well enough.
On this particular day, I’d just turned 16. I had my drivers license, although I really hadn’t had much experience actually driving or riding much of anything.
My dad was and is a car nut and tractor nut, and at that point in his life, didn’t exactly want his only son getting into a car accident. I would find out later my dad might have had a bit of juvenile delinquent in him early on, of the Happy Days/Grease variety. He loves Elvis Presley and he loves cars and he especially loves vintage tractors.
That really makes this story all the more idiotic.
Steve needed a load of rock driven up from the workshop on a loader attached to a Ford 4600 tractor. I was, apparently, the only working shithead in sight, because he had never asked me to do something of this scale before.
“I don’t know how to drive that thing,” I argued. I really didn't.
“You have a driver’s license, don’t you?” Steve said. “Get on it and get up there. Put the rocks around the transformer. And watch that edging we just put in, I don’t need another project.”
Steve was short tempered. At one point Steve, in heat induced irritation, told me “Those jeans are so goddamn tight I can tell what religion you are.”
I didn’t want to lose my job. And outright protesting was not something one did in Farmington, Minnesota.
So I hitched myself up on the tractor. He showed me how to turn it on, and with a lurch, I was off.
At first, it was going smoothly. I just had to get this thing, and the enormous loader filled with rocks humping away in front of it, up the hike from the workshop, turn right into the parking lot, swing another right toward the dormitory, arcing out over the new edging, down the hill slightly, and turn to face the power transformer head on. And slowly, carefully approach.
I guess I must have known how to use the loader. I do not remember specific instructions about that.
I do know that loader could carry up to 3,000 pounds, so it was over a ton of rocks I was carrying.
This 16 year old sheltered kid had passed his drivers test but not actually driven anywhere but the mile and a half to work on a dirt road. And our 1979 Subaru definitely did not have a loader on it.
I swung out in a large arc, now perpendicular to the hill and to the new wood edging on the trail and trundled toward the transformer.
I hit the brake. I did not hit the clutch first.
The immediate crash was more of a muffled thump, as the loader and tractor was still driving into the power transformer, pushing it toward the dormitory building.
Remember, this power transformer carried all the juice to power the facility and the pool and public spaces; 3 stories.
I was frantically trying to turn the tractor off. I did not realize I could stop the forward motion by pressing the clutch then the brake. I was new. I was panicking.
The brand new wood edging was flying out behind the tractor in chunks as the big rear tires spun against the weight of the power transformer. Meanwhile, the power transformer was shifting, pressed against the loader full of rocks.
Something broke.
As it broke, the lights went out across the dormitory. It was daylight so it was subtle, and there was just a puff of smoke. And a dull sense of the lights pulsing off.
The transformer ripped off its bearing and went over the side of its raised rock bed.
The tractor finally turned off, and I hopped off. It rolled back and settled against the destroyed edging.
I realized now that some serious damage had been done.
I was 16 and I was very dumb, so I tried to push the transformer back on to its bed, as if I could pretend the accident hadn’t just happened.
It, obviously, did not move.
Oil or gas or something similarly noxious was flowing in a stream straight up out of a severed pipe.
It’s amazing I wasn’t dead. A power transformer is about 300-3000 kVA with 13,200 volts coming out of the utility grid. That wouldn’t exactly vaporize me (I mean, I don’t know — maybe it would) but I wouldn’t be setting up any more chairs in a half-circle formation.
I knew that what I had done was bad. Very, very bad.
I ran down to the workshop. Steve and his dad Louie were on their backs under a different tractor. Steve had some sort of incalculably large gear on his chest.
I said, “Steve, I had an accident.”
Steve took barely a pause to register. He threw the gear on Louie’s chest. Louie audibly grunted from the weight.
I took off after Steve who was already puffing his way up the driveway. He rounded the corner of the dormitory and stopped.
He saw:
his meticulous edging in shredded matchstick shards behind
the tractor which was setting at a canted angle against the destroyed wood partway down the hill from the
transformer which was completely off its base, irregularly abutting the hillside, held on by
cables of unknown power or function but which were lightly sparking and
the pipe of oil and gas that was surging upward in a geyser while
the power had gone out completely in the three stories of dormitory rooms.
Steve took off his John Deere hat. If he wasn’t already pretty much a living Tex Avery cartoon character, he threw the hat on the ground and cussed while stomping on it. Enormously stomping on it. He decimated that hat. And yelled. And cussed more.
The stream of obscenities, most of them starting with “FUCKing Tangborn” was voluble. He kept up the obscenities as he walked away from me, swearing at the universe, Ford Motor Company, his mother, God, the power utility, goddamn kids, fucking Louie, and me again, anyone within earshot.
The swearing, I was later told, did not stop as he trudged up the hill, across the yard to the main facility, entered the Mount Olivet Lutheran Church Retreat Center main lobby, swung left into the offices, picked up the phone, and dialed it.
“Dakota Electric, this is Steve Helkenn at the Mount Olivet Retreat Center. We have a problem.”
“GET YOUR ASS OUT OF HERE” he roared at the sight of me. I ran to my car and drove home.
I nearly fainted when I got home and saw my mom. I thought at that point my life was over.
I would later get a call from Kay, the executive director of the Retreat Center. My mom got the call first, then I was put on the phone. Steve had told them that I said I did not know how to drive the tractor. I would keep my job.
Dakota Electric was sending a crew out. They were going to have to shut down the dormitories for a week while they excavated all the earth under the transformer, down to 25 feet, and the site would be hazardous due to the miscellaneous chemicals that had flowed out of the severed pipe.
PCBs were mentioned. References to Superfund.
In 1986 dollars this was going to cost upwards of $30,000. Cost adjusted, this was probably a quarter of a million dollars, at least, for the transformer, the excavation, the clean-up, the contaminated dirt storage, and ongoing testing.
Steve didn’t want me to see me for a few days, but eventually I went back.
He said I would never touch a tractor again. And he handed me a length of string.
“I need you to go out to the swamp and take this and measure the length.”
“The length of what?”
“The swamp,” he said, smiling.
I walked 800 feet through methane gas, covered in leeches, loon shit, and swamp mud, with a piece of string. That was my penance for causing the hazardous waste dump behind Mount Olivet Lutheran Church Retreat Center.
Afterwards, Steve sprayed the mud and duck shit and leeches off me with a high pressure hose as a church group of teenage girls paraded past. If you’ve seen Tommy Boy, in which Rob Lowe power washed a mud-besotted Chris Farley as Farley sings “Maniac” from Flashdance, yes, that’s pretty much it.
He didn’t even loan me waders.
There’s a floating bridge now over the swamp I measured that leads to a small island. We built the first version of this with the specifications obtained from my journey. I don’t remember exactly how long the swamp was. The island is a peaceful little meditation spot. I’m sure kids neck out there after hours.
Everyone probably has something they’d prefer not show up on their LinkedIn profile. Now you know mine.
When I went off to college Steve bought me a bottle of vodka as a parting gift, even though I was underage.
He handed me the bottle and said “This is for you. Do not come back.”
Thanks for reading, and thanks for sharing if you feel so inclined. As usual, I’m Nick Tangborn, and this newsletter is about finding career and purpose after 50, among other things.
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The original name for Are You Experienced? was Alive and Kicking, but that was taken. My wife still says that name was better.
I’m dying over here 😂
You remain a champ storyteller. Even if this one's missing any mention of 'Lovecraftian diarrhea'.