Crawl Space Spelunking with Spiders

Disclaimer: This is a long post, but its been several months and I feel like writing!

Its time to break tradition.  I’m pretty sure I won’t get fired for this…

Until today, I’ve made it a policy to never blog about what happens at my day job.  For those of you that don’t know, in addition to be a pastor and a freelance geek-for-hire, for the last several years I’ve been a phone tech, geek-for-hire at an independent local phone company.  I’ve run into several very interesting characters and I’ve had some great stories to tell my wife and kids.  I haven’t written about any of these adventure for two reasons: (1) I don’t want to accidentally offend a customer and make my company look bad, and (2) people out here in extremely rural America carry guns and grudges.  I’ve haven’t posted any of those stories until today.

You may not know this, but I was a victim of profiling when I was hired for this phone tech job.  No, I wasn’t racially profiled, I’m convinced I was genetically profiled.  They didn’t really say this during my interview, but they really needed a crawl-space specialist.  Someone not prone to claustrophobia, arachnophobia, rat-poop-ophobia, and most-importantly someone short.  When I hear someone in the office say, “take Brad Doherty with you,” there’s a crawl-space out there with my name on it.

Crawl spaces come in all shapes and sizes and can be filled with all sorts of lovely treasures.  Manufactured homes have plenty of room to move around, but the steal beams will draw blood from a nearly bald scalp if a hat is not worn.  If you’re really lucky, a herd of cats will discover that the dirt in a crawl space makes for a great litter box.  Depending on the drainage situation outside of the house and the time of year, the mud get a little, well, muddy.  (Hint: if you ever build a home, please create a four-foot crawl space.  Your phone guy will send you flowers.) 

Then there are the arachnids… I’ll get to that in a little bit.

Today’s crawlspace was nicely situated under a 60-year old, two-story ranch homestead.  Two of my friends (who I’m pretty sure won’t hunt me down for sharing this story) had a bad phone wire somewhere under their house in the crawl space.  When I arrived on site, I knew this crawl space had some real potential. The entry point was on the opposite end of the house from where the bad wires were (Murphy has several laws that make this nearly always true).  The crawl-space started out at a comfortable bent-elbow crawling height.  There were the usual spider webs and nests around the entry, but that was no big deal. My flashlight revealed that the clearance got cozier further in.  I had no idea.

About 30 feet in, the clearance went from bent-elbow height to military crawl height.  Again, no big deal.  The ground was dry, no animal messes to drudge through, easy-cheesy.  Then I came to what I call, the tiny hole.

One load-bearing wall in the house was supported in the crawl-space by a small wall of fairly large rocks.  At various points in time, rocks had been removed from this wall to make way for plumbing pipes and allow access under the other half of the house.  The bad wires I needed to replace were partly in the comfy military crawl zone I was currently in and partly under the “other” half.  The only way into the other half was through the tiny hole.

With my head tilted 90 degrees to the side, one arm forward and one arm back at my side, I began to ooch (I’m certain that’s a word) through the tiny hole. With my head and shoulders through the hole, I remembered the exhale-scoot spelunking technique as I felt the tiny hole put some pressure on my back and chest. I gave out a long breath, causing my chest to compress and giving me just enough more room to ooch the rest of the way through.

That was pretty cool… the smallest hole I’d breached yet.  But that was just warm up.  Only three feet ahead, I had to get under the “think skinny” pipe.  The think-skinny pipe had less vertical clearance than the tiny hole, but it had a little give to it, so I was able to get head under, then gently push it up as I worked my way under.

The spooky part was the jungle that laid beyond the think-skinny pipe.

I needed to retrieve the new wires from a wall 20 feet past the think-skinny pipe.  Grass from the outside lawn had sent hundreds of runners under that wall and into the last 20 feet I had to crawl through.  The home owner followed me  into the military crawl zone and he could see through the holes in the rock wall into the jungle I was about to crawl through. He shouted “Brad, this looks like something straight out of Indiana Jones!”  He was right.  Instead of a machete, I used my flashlight to hack my way through.  The dry roots broke easily, but I was more concerned about the spider egg nests and webs (and the critters that make those webs) that grew more numerous the closer I got to my destination wall.

As I crawled under each floor joist, I slowly peeked up to see if anything was about to fall down on me.  I had my cap on backwards and my coat pulled as high up on my neck as it would go.  No creepy-crawlies down the neck, thank you very much.

When I got close enough to the wall to reach out and grab my wires, I decided to slowly look around.  Within three feet of me, I saw 3 black widow spiders and a brown one that had recluse potential.  I tried not to think about how many I couldn’t see.  I was relieved when I looked straight up and didn’t see anything moving.  Needless to say, I didn’t waste any time pulling my new wires away from there.

I ooched around 180 degrees, scooted back down the path I cleared through the jungle, made it under the think-skinny pipe, and exhaled my way though the tiny hole into the military crawl zone.  Victory!…. almost. 

After I got the new wires up through the floor, I had to go all the way back through the jungle to staple the new wire up to the joists to keep them up out of the dirt… yep, that meant two more trips through the tiny hole.  I was getting good at this.  But I wasn’t done yet…

With the job finished, and slowly packed my gear towards the back towards the entry point.  I was about 10 feet from the exit, when I heard a beep from my phone.  Not just any beep, but the beep that means the phone just lost it’s bluetooth connection to my earpiece.  I forgot to take it off before I started the project and somewhere in all of the ooching and crawling and exhaling,  it fell out of my ear into the dirt of the crawl space.  You can guess where I found it… at the far end of the jungle!  Yes, that’s right, two more trips through the tiny hole. 

So what did I learn from today?

God made today’s task for me and me for today’s task.  In Ephesians, Paul tells us that God has good works for us to do, and that he had those tasks  planned planned out from before the creation of the world.  He also made us for those tasks.

Specifically, God created me to physically and psychologically be the guy for today’s task.  I am the only guy on our staff that could have fit through tiny hole.  I’m not claustrophobic at all. Most importantly,  Spiderman has always been and will always be my favorite superhero.

Tasty Grit In My Teeth

Nothing says yummy like licking dust off your teeth.

Today didn’t start off gritty.  My cousin (one of my favorite people on the planet) and I gathered a pasture of cows into a set of corrals to be checked for tuberculosis (yep, cows can get it too – luckily for us our cows were healthy).  He and I have similar values, but we are very different – which is very cool.  We’re never trying to outdo eachother because we’re into the same stuff.  Just lots of low-key good times.  We rode horses to gather the cows in the morning before the wind picked up and it was a beautiful day in a pretty pasture.

Then we got to the corrals.

Somehow it happens to be extra windy on the days I help my family work cows.  There are several places we work cows.  Some of those places have a little bit of wind protection – by that I mean trees, or hills, or well, something to slow down the wind.  The places we worked today somehow missed the day God was handing out extra trees and hills for wind protection.  These two corrals are out on the plains where trees are scared to live.  Several moments made me wonder what the dust bowl must have been like.  I think my lungs are a pound heavier from the dust I inhaled. There were times when I was walking behind a large bunch of cows and I couldn’t see them in front of me. 

We didn’t have to be out the wind too much.  The particular job that had to be done in the dust-bowl-throwback corrals was pretty easy.  The job got done.

How much of life is like that?  A lot I think.  Parts of a day start nice, then it’s time to work.  Sometimes work pleasant, but sometimes it is eye-squinting, grit-licking, grime-pushing work. God gives us work to help us get past ourselves.  There was no time today to focus on “my” issues – there was just the job that needed to be done.

Have you thanked God for your work lately?