Ranger Collins crouched down in the heat in front of the low bronze plaque on the overlook wall, wiped the dust off it with the heel of his hand, and began to read. He read the names of the high scalers first, the men who hung from ropes down the canyon walls with jackhammers in the year 1931. He read slowly. Then he came to the youngest, the last on the list. “Harold Halvorsen,” he said. “High scaler. Age nineteen.” He turned his head and looked up at me. I am Gus Halvorsen, eighty two years old, and I was standing in the sun with my hat in my hand.
My father was a farm boy from North Dakota who walked into Las Vegas in 1931 with one pair of boots and a letter from a cousin. He was too young to be hired on the high crew, so he lied about his age. For five years he swung over the canyon on a rope, and he never once let go. He came out of it with a bad back, a pocket watch and a copper pin, which the Six Companies gave to every man who finished. He gave the pin to me in 1962, on the day I opened my hardware store, and told me never to wear it except on the days I was proud.
The old volunteer from the information booth, who had walked out into the sun beside the railing, took off his straw hat. His name was Arlen, and he was eighty. “Gus,” he said to the tour group, “your father taught my father how to tie a scaler knot. This man has carried that pin through two wars and a flood, and he has never once asked for a thing.” The family with the baby stood still. The couple from Ohio lowered their cameras. Out over the water, a hawk rode the thermal and said nothing.
A low bronze plaque on an overlook wall gave one retired hardware man the afternoon to bring a young ranger back to the men who built the dam.
I gave my terms when the ranger stood up, wiping his eyes with the back of his wrist. “Son, I will not report you, and I will not ask you to apologize to anyone but your tour group. I will ask you for one thing. Tomorrow, before your first tour, you will walk down to the bottom of the dam where the water comes through, and you will stand there for ten minutes and think about a nineteen year old kid on a rope. Then you will tell his story. You have all the facts of the dam. Now tell them the men.”
Collins nodded, but his face was working. He turned to the tourists, and his voice was thick. “Folks, I have given this tour nine hundred times. I have never once mentioned a single name.” He looked at me. “Mr. Halvorsen, I grew up in Henderson. My great grandfather helped pour the concrete. I told the family about it at Christmas as though it were a trivia fact.” He took off his sunglasses, and his eyes were red. “I am so ashamed. I called you a man who might fall.”
Then the poor boy lost his nerve. He did not want the pin to be real, because if it was real, then he had to be what he was. Collins lunged, snatched the copper pin off the pocket of my shirt, and ran for the visitor center door, perhaps hoping to find it in a catalogue of fakes. He got three paces. The old volunteer Arlen stepped out in front of him with his arms spread like a goalkeeper, and the family with the baby stroller, the father and the mother, rolled it sideways across the walkway and stopped.
The stroller blocked the door completely. The baby, who was about a year old, looked up at the ranger in his hat and gave him a gap toothed grin. The couple from Ohio had formed a line behind the stroller with their arms folded. Collins stood with the pin in his fist, panting, in a hundred and six degree heat, and then he opened his hand and looked at it. The copper was green at the edges, worn smooth by sixty years of my thumb. He walked back to me and pinned it on my shirt himself, carefully, with shaking hands.
The consequences were quiet. The next morning, Ranger Collins stood at the bottom of the dam for ten minutes, in the roar, and then he added a new stop to his tour, a stop at the low plaque on the overlook wall. He reads three names now, every tour. The park service asked me to give a talk on Saturdays, which I do, in a folding chair, with a thermos of lemonade. The hardware store, which I sold in 2012, is an ice cream parlor, and I eat there every Thursday.
In the name of my wife Ingrid, who passed in 2019, I started the Ingrid Halvorsen Fund. It pays for scholarships for the grandchildren of dam workers and for wheelchair access at the historic sites of southern Nevada, in Clark, Nye and Lincoln counties. In the first year we sent nineteen young people to trade school and built nine ramps. One was a young mother from Boulder City whose great grandfather had poured the concrete, and who is now training to be an electrician at the very powerhouse.
On a Wednesday in October, with the temperature finally down to ninety, I stood at the railing with Ranger Collins and a tour group of schoolchildren, and he pointed at the low plaque. “Kids,” he said, “this is Harold Halvorsen. He was nineteen. He lied about his age to get on the rope.” A small girl in a pink hat reached for my hand. “Is that your daddy?” she asked. I looked down at the green water, and the hawk riding the wind. “Yes, honey,” I said. “That is my daddy.”
