Years ago, fifty years ago and more when we were wee boys, the annual arrival of the steamroller on the country road leading up to Ballinacarrick and unnamed townlands beyond, was a major event.

Rutted cart tracks and dusty potholes were first attended to by the steamroller's acolytes, men who pushed wheelbarrows full of crushed stones in front of the roller, filling in the ruts and the holes as they went. Then came the steamroller, gigantic to our young eyes, a veritable leviathan, driven back and forth, back and forth, until the road surface was made smooth. If it was a macadamized stretch of roadway, hot tar was spread on top, and the rolling process repeated.

To us the driver of the steamroller was a god, second only to the driver of a train, which seemed to be the first choice of vocation for lots of youngsters growing up in those times. There was, however, a restraint on his godhood, and that restraint was the ganger. Every road crew had one, the man in charge, the man with the whistle. He it was who determined when work would start and when work would stop, when to spread the stones, spray the tar, and how many times the steamroller should be driven backwards and forwards.

'Tis said the Pyramids were built by slaves to the cracking of whips. Maybe so. All I can vouschafe is that roads in Ireland were always repaired to the blowing of whistles. The ganger, not the driver of the steamroller, was the master.

The work lasted two or three days until the crew moved on to another road or another barony, and for those two or three days no workers had a more faithful audience. By the end of it all we knew their first names, who enjoyed having youngsters around, who didn't, and thus whom to avoid as we hopped around the roller and the wheelbarrows. To this day the smell of boiling tar brings back the memories. Watching men at work has been a lifelong fascination ever since.

In London, in Paris, New York and Ottawa, the sound of a jackhammer, the warning blare of a siren, the sudden silence preceding a blast, and the whomp of an explosion, have always drawn their audience. Most work sites even provide observation decks or windows from which the passing public can watch the backhoes, the dumpsters, the cranes, the trucks, as they excavate the earth and rock and enlarge a hole that will later become an underground parking garage for the hundreds, sometimes thousands, of workers in the new office towers high overhead.

Through the years the machines have grown in size and power. The steamroller on the Ballinacarrick road would now appear a pymy in comparison to present-day models. And the men in their helmeted hard hats are anonymous figures far removed from contact with their watchers.

Until last week.

Early in the morning a series of explosions announced the annual arrival of the Rideau River ice-breaking crew.

A glance through a bedroom window showed eight of them in red coats, red hats, and black rubber boots, working in pairs across the breadth of the river. One bored holes in the ice, another tamped in a stick of dynamite and, chunk by chunk, the two-foot thick ice was blasted into the air, to fall back into the newly revealed river and be carried away, reducing the threat of flooding to thousands of homes along the river's banks.

Two metal-hulled river boats powered by outboard motors cruised ceaselessly in circles around the front edge of the retreating icepack, creating rippling currents that carried the ice chunks downstream. Sometimes whole squares of ice were broken off and floated away as separate islands. Sometimes an explosion hardly made a crack in the ice, and two or three blasts were needed to break the pack. Sometimes the ice thrown up by an explosion flew out over a wide radius.

The bright morning sunshine, the white snow-covered river, the red coats of the men, the explosions and the showers of glittering ice flung into the air were a cheery notice that winter was ending and spring was on the way. I went off to work happy with that thought.

Little did I know that watching men at work was firmly embeddded in the genes. When I was gone, my two daughters, both off university for the March break, had become entranced with the spectacle.

Later that day, with two lawn chairs, a handful of thick black crayons, some pieces of bristol board, and dressed in warm winter parkas, off they went across the St. Patrick Street Bridge to the footpath in the park on the far side of the river. There, as each explosion went off, up went a bristol board with a number on it--from 1 to 10. You can bet it didn't take long for the men on the river to spot the two lassies, self-appointed judges of a new sport that livened up an otherwise hard day's work. After each explosion, like figure skaters waiting to see the scores awarded by judges for technical merit and artisitic impression, they would look across to see what rating it got. For a golden hour or two there was magic on the Rideau.

The younger workers outdid each other in an effort to achieve higher and higher scores. Twice they got perfect 10s, and once a standing ovation. The girls even got to know a few of their first names.

Passers-by were intrigued. They wanted to know the marking criteria. "Volume", "Height", and "Scatterability"!

I am glad my daughters will have that memory of watching men at work. I have mine from another time, another place.

The End

Note: This was written in 1993. Since then, ice-crushing machinery, supported on pontoons, has replaced the eight-man crew of former years, who now take their place with the lamplighters of an earlier age. But they remain vivid in memory's eye. And I, for one, remember not only them but also the lamplighter making his lonely rounds of the street gas lights in the town of Strabane in the county Tyrone, his wand lighting them in the evening, his crook shutting them down at sunrise.