The Ravine Construction Project

Filed by JW. PHASE 3, POST 1—THE TURN.

Behind the chicken coop there was a small ravine and a stand of young trees, and that’s where I ran the largest infrastructure project of my career.

Tonka trucks did the heavy work. The crown jewel of the fleet was a metal Sears semi—real steel, the kind they don’t make anymore, the kind that could take a hill loaded. We built a full road system back there. Sticks laid for train tracks. Cuts and grades carved into the ravine walls. Holes everywhere, each one part of a plan only the site foreman fully understood. I’d come in from that ravine at dusk like a man leaving a job site, because that’s what it was.

Some time later—this was a little before everything changed—we were living at a place with a shed, and all my toys were stored out there. The whole fleet. The road crew. The Sears semi.

And then they were gone. All of them. Stolen, was the story.

— ENDING, VERSION A (implied; reader does the math) —

Here’s what the kid knew: the toys were there, and then they weren’t. Here’s what the adult knows: that property saw maybe single-digit traffic on a good day, and my mother asked a lot more questions about that theft than you’d ask about a stranger’s crime. I’ve run the numbers on that road many times since. I have no hard proof of anything. The case remains open.

I’m still pissed about the semi. Fifty years, and that one’s still warm.

— ENDING, VERSION B (stripped; loss only, no implication) —

Nobody was ever caught. Nothing ever turned up. A kid’s entire fleet, gone from an unlocked shed on a road nobody drove, and the case has been cold for fifty years.

I’m still pissed about the semi. That one’s still warm.

Lesson logged: (both versions): this is why I register everything now. Every artifact, checksummed, inventoried, locked. Once you’ve lost the whole fleet from an unlocked shed, you spend the rest of your life making sure nothing you build can vanish without the record screaming about it.

End of the JW era. The crow was coming.—JW