“Remember Kid, keep your head on a swivel.

The iron is unforgiving.

You fall, your body will break before the steel.

So listen to Eddie, and take your time.”

Bill slaps The Kid’s hard hat and strides off with the telltale stiffness of a man who’s taken a hard knock or two in his day.

The Kid and I are working on a suspended deck hanging below the Grand Island bridge over the Niagara River, reinforcing this old beauty while the traffic rumbles overhead.

The old timers always give the apprentice ironworkers a hard time, but it’s for their own good.

“You gotta keep the machinery in good working order, you want a 30-year career like me,” yells Bill into the wind, slapping his own behind for effect.

“He’s right,” I tell The Kid. “One in four won’t make it to retirement.”

“You mean they quit?” he asks.

“Or life quits them,” I reply, taking on the wise old man role, though I’m just 29.

I’ve risen to union steward over the nine years I’ve been an ironworker, and this Kid’s safety was now in my hands, just like mine was in Bill’s when I started out.

And just six months before, my girlfriend Stacey and I had bought our first house…

I already knew we’d marry someday, and this house would one day be our future family’s home.

Stacey was just finishing her undergrad, and money was tight.

Without my health, without this job, we’d be out on the street in a couple of months…

So I get back to it.

It’s Friday August 28, 2009 around 11 a.m.

An hour to lunch.

The strenuous physical work and the wind always rustle up a hunger.

And every lunchtime I call Stacey to trade war stories.

She worries about me up here, but she trusts me.

And I love her more than she’ll ever know.

“Number one thing up here is trust,” I tell The Kid as I hand him the magnetic drill.

His hand sags with the weight. Strong as years of ironwork make you, the heft of a mag drill always takes you by surprise.  

“Let’s go,” I say, slapping his hard hat. “This bridge won’t support itself.”

The Kid shields his eyes from the mid-morning sun and scans the length of the bridge.

I’d been installing these support beams day in and day out for 3 months now, and there were hundreds more to go.

We had already erected the hanging scaffold under the bridge, and that was the platform we were working on.

Now if you’re working more than six feet off the ground, you must tie yourself off with a six-foot lanyard.

But we were only working a few feet up, so for this part, we didn’t need to tie off.

This day was like all the others.

I had already climbed up and down the scaffold to the lower decking with that heavy mag drill a hundred times that day.

But as an ironworker, it doesn’t matter how careful you were the hundred times before…

The step you take right now is the only one that matters.

And this next step mattered more than any I had taken before.

A piece of the scaffold had come loose.

My boot slips.

My body flips.

My sense of time zips.

I fall just a few feet to the lower decking.

Crack!

My head strikes the flange of the I-shaped bridge girder.

It hit on the base of my skull just underneath my hard hat.

As I lay on my back, I see The Kid’s blurry face looking down at me.

He’s talking but I can’t hear his words.

As I drift into unconsciousness The Kid’s young face becomes that of old Bill’s, and all I hear are his words of warning…

“Your body will break before the steel.”