Like DJ, Tap had just recently joined the union. The hardworking guy had meaty hands like vise grips, and they always seemed to be in motion. A thirty-year-old with receding brown hair, Tap had a wife and one-year-old daughter at home back in New Hampshire. He had dropped out of college after one semester and logged some fun years as a ski instructor in Colorado, then some less fun years helping his father build houses. In commercial diving, he told DJ, he’d finally found his calling.
What Tap lacked in training—he had never gone to commercial dive school—he made up for in drive. Not long after he’d earned his scuba certification in high school, he had become fascinated by a 1710 shipwreck off Maine’s Boon Island. Not only did he dive to search for wreckage near the coast, but he arranged with the Boston Public Library to view the captain’s log, donning white gloves over those rugged hands of his and tenderly turning each page. It was clear to DJ that once Tap got interested in something, he went all in.
As Tap began working more shifts in Bellows Falls, he and DJ grew closer. Although Tap was a family man hustling to earn enough money to make a down payment on a house, he found DJ’s footloose style a welcome reminder of his own freewheeling bachelor days. And DJ found in Tap a straightforward guy who liked to have fun but who also had a clear sense of direction in life.
In short order, DJ had formed two close friendships on the Vermont job. In the beginning, all three guys got along well. Before long, though, tension developed between Kozlowski and Tap. Some of it had to do with personality differences, but more of it was about how to deal with management.
Tap soon tired of all Kozlowski’s stories, in which the veteran always seemed to cast himself in the lead. More than that, he saw Kozlowski as a chronic complainer, someone who made lots of demands of the bosses and kept chiseling away until he got what he wanted. When Kozlowski tried to rile up the diver rank-and-file and insist that their Kiewit managers give them more holiday time off, Tap wanted no part of it. He could only shake his head and wonder, What will it take to keep this guy happy? Tap had no problem admitting how grateful he was to be working for Kiewit, which, despite being based in off-the-radar Omaha, Nebraska, was one of the biggest contractors in the country.
Kozlowski, meanwhile, saw himself as wise to the ways of the world. He liked how receptive DJ was to his advice, but he sensed growing resistance from Tap. And he came to see Tap as a naive guy too concerned with trying to please management. Kozlowski had lasted in the field a lot longer than most divers, but he knew that hadn’t been by accident. Over the years, he’d seen friends injured and even killed, often because of money. Sometimes an employer had been trying to save a buck and insisted on shortcuts that put lives at risk. Other times it was the diver who was reckless. “Most guys don’t make it ten years,” he told DJ. “They get hurt seeing dollar signs, taking chances, trying to be a hero to impress the bosses.”
Kozlowski told DJ about a big job in Boston that had consumed most of his time over the last two years. It was related to another Kiewit project, the construction of the miles-long Deer Island sewer tunnel. But Kozlowski was working for a different contractor on a jack-up barge parked in Massachusetts Bay, above the tunnel’s eventual end point. In the fall of 1991, a storm raced up the East Coast so fast that the contractor missed its window for bringing the three-thousand-ton barge safely back to shore. The swells were lapping at the barge, even though it had been jacked up ninety feet above the water. Still, Kozlowski said, the rig’s supervisor actually instructed him to make a dive to inspect a drill shaft. “Are you freakin’ crazy?” Kozlowski shot back. He refused to go.
The supervisor backed down, and soon that guy’s bosses ordered the entire crew to evacuate the barge. Even though Kozlowski had survived chopper rides under gunfire in Vietnam, he said his helicopter ride from the rig back to land that day was the scariest of his life. During the storm11, the only way the contractor knew whether the evacuated jack-up barge was still standing was by repeatedly calling the fax machine aboard the rig and hearing it beep. After that weather event on October 30, 1991, passed, it was given a new name: The Perfect Storm.
Kozlowski used the story to support his contention that divers had to look out for themselves and each other, even if that made them unpopular with the higher-ups. If they didn’t put their own safety first, who would? Kozlowski told DJ that the contractor on that job had actually not been a reckless one. And some hazards are simply the nature of the business. Still, he said, on virtually every job, no matter how well run it was or how much the employer talked about safety, a diver was going to be asked by someone—at some level of authority—to take an unnecessary risk. Having the good sense and strong stomach to stand up and say no, Kozlowski said, was a muscle that every diver needed to develop.
DJ tried to avoid choosing sides between Kozlowski and Tap, though he put more stock in what a seasoned ex-Navy SEAL like Kozlowski had to say. Still, he had no way of knowing then that Kozlowski would one day give him the most important advice of his life—advice that DJ, for some reason, would decline to take.
The Vermont winters were too brutal to get much work done in the river, so the fish ladder project was put on hold till the spring thaw. DJ spent the break back in Waltham. One day he drove to a construction site at a hospital in Boston. He stopped a guy in a hard hat and asked, “Can you get Timmy O’Leary for me?”
“Who’s looking for him?” the guy replied, guardedly.
“Tell him it’s DJ from Local Fifty-six.”
DJ had deliberately worn a shirt and hat from his union. This visit might have made him uncomfortable, but he wanted to make it clear to everyone that he was a thriving twenty-four-year-old man. He had every right to be there.
For a long time, DJ had been wrestling with the idea of trying to track down his biological father, a mysterious figure he’d grown up resenting but had never met. The only time his mom ever invoked his name was when DJ showed his fastidious side—for instance, delicately spraying Armor All on his steering wheel. His mom would quip, almost without thinking, “That’s just like Timmy O’Leary.”
Finally, DJ had decided to act on his curiosity. He knew his mother had no contact with his father, but with his aunt’s help, he tracked down the man’s brother. The brother cautioned DJ, “Your father’s his own man. He’s very private.” But he did cough up the fact that his brother was working on the hospital project. “You’ll know he’s there if you see his truck,” the brother said. “And you’ll know it’s his truck because it will be immaculate.” In a muddy parking lot, his would be the truck without any mud on it and with a towel draped protectively over the dashboard.
DJ knew his father had chosen not to be in his life, and for years he had kept that piece of resentment like lint in his pocket. Now, as he was forced to wait for the mystery man, he wondered if he should have just left it there. Tired of standing by, DJ entered the job site and found the first guy he had talked to now walking toward him with another guy at his side. The second man spoke first, and defensively. “You looking for me?” he asked.
“You Tim O’Leary?” DJ replied.
He nodded. He was shorter than DJ and had the compact build and crew cut of a drill sergeant.
“I think you’d appreciate it,” DJ said, “if we can speak by ourselves.”
O’Leary waved him off. “Whatever you’ve got to say, you can say it right here.”
“My name is Donald James Gillis,” DJ replied, enunciating as clearly as if he were identifying himself on the stand in a courtroom. “I think you’d prefer if we talk privately.”
11 (Chapter 1, note 4)
During the storm: Dave Beck (Kaiser manager for the diffuser riser installation project), interview by author, April 2011.