It was only a few months after Storm King — early spring, when the thaw makes you feel like the world is loosening its grip. Siah had another installation scheduled, this time in Roanoke, and I was still the golden assistant: fast, skilled, unafraid of hard work. But I was completely new to hauling art cross-country. I didn’t understand yet that installation work had its own kind of gravity — and its own catastrophes waiting underground.

I picked up a Ryder truck, loaded the artwork, and started the long drive south. I remember humming Terry Allen’s “Truckload of Art” as I drove, the tune pulling up the memory of a long, ridiculous night shooting pool with him — both of us so drunk we couldn’t sink the eight ball to save our lives.

Somewhere on the way down, I stopped at a gas station to fill up. I was just tightening the cap when I heard it: a deep, rolling thunder that felt like it was coming from the ground itself. Then they appeared — a hundred Hell’s Angels motorcycles swarming into the station like a single organism made of chrome and noise.

I panicked.

I climbed into the truck and tried to get out of there before they boxed me in, but the only exit was around the back of the building. I cut the turn too sharply — way too sharply — and the station awning cut an ugly gash along the full length of the truck.

But I wasn’t sticking around to negotiate with a gas-station manager while Hell’s Angels circled the pumps. The truck was still drivable, so I kept going.

When I got to Roanoke, I told Siah. He listened quietly, and then we got back to work. Neither of us knew that the real disaster was still ahead.

The installation site was on a college campus — wide green spaces, old brick buildings, students wandering between classes. My job was to operate the auger, drilling a series of clean, deep holes for the fence posts that were part of the sculptural layout.

I’d drilled hundreds of holes in my life. This felt routine.

Until it wasn’t.

About two feet down, the auger hit something solid, something that bit back so hard it almost tore the machine out of my hands. When the campus crew arrived, the truth surfaced fast.

I hadn’t hit a rock.
I had severed the main telephone trunk line for the entire campus — hundreds of twisted copper pairs in a single cable. It took them thirty-six hours to splice it all back together by hand.

But the real shock came when they dug deeper. Beneath the phone line — only six inches lower — ran the main power feed. Six hundred and forty volts. One more pull of the auger, one more inch, and I wouldn’t have survived the mistake.

And the truth is, there were dig-safe laws in Virginia in 1981. Someone should have called. Maybe the commissioning institution, maybe Siah, maybe me. We were all so focused on the artwork, the schedule, the physical work of building — none of us stopped to do the most basic, essential thing.

We were lucky.
Luck is not a plan.
And after that day, I understood that deeply.

Siah never chastised me. He never brought it up again. But he never asked me to work for him again.

Roanoke taught me that building art wasn’t just carpentry carried into the world — it was risk, responsibility, and the thin line between intention and catastrophe. It was the moment I understood how much danger sits quietly beneath the surface, waiting for the unknowable to come along with an auger.