On the third day, Frank had rented a crane. The crane operator had taken one look at the swamp, shaken his head, and refused to get within a 100 ft of the edge. That ground won’t hold me, he’d said. You want two machines stuck instead of one? Now Frank stood with his engineers looking at a piece of equipment worth more than most houses slowly disappearing into the earth.
What about a helicopter? One of the engineers suggested. A sky crane could lift it. A sky crane costs $15,000 an hour, Frank said. And the nearest one is in Minnesota. By the time it gets here, that excavator will be underground. We could drain the swamp with what? That swamp is fed by an underground spring. We’d need a month in a million dollars.
Insurance? Frank laughed bitterly. Insurance doesn’t cover operator error. And according to the fine print, driving into a swamp counts as operator error. The engineers fell silent. They were running out of options, and they knew it. That’s when the John Deere tractor pulled up to the edge of the construction site.
Let me tell you about Walter Brennan because you need to understand the man before you can understand what he did. Walter was 73 years old and had farmed the same 400 acres in Clayton County for 50 years. His land bordered the construction site or what would become Highway 52 when Donley Construction finished the job. Walter had watched the construction crews arrive 6 months ago.
watched them survey and grade and pour concrete. Watch them bring in equipment that cost more than his entire farm was worth. He hadn’t complained when the noise scared his cattle. He hadn’t complained when the construction traffic tore up the county road. He hadn’t even complained when the project manager told him he’d need to relocate his fence line because the original survey had been wrong.
Walter Brennan wasn’t a complainer. He was a watcher. and he’d been watching this stuck excavator for three days, waiting to see if the construction company would figure it out. They hadn’t, so Walter drove his John Deere to the edge of the site, climbed down, and walked over to where Frank Donnelly stood with his engineers.
