What Can I Say? I Am My Father's Son

     Like most boys, I grew up idolizing my father. Strike that, I grew up idolizing what my father did for a living. I would revel in awe when he told me stories of the places he had been to, the things he had built, and the experiences he had. The people in his stories became legendary characters to me.
     Most kids would be impressed by another's father who was a doctor, a lawyer, a policeman, etc. Those professions are pretty impressive, but to me, nothing could top what my Daddy did for a living. In the wintertime, he would spend month building ice roads over the frozen Arctic Ocean. In the summer time, he would construct gravel pads on the barren tundra. In my mind, my father was a great Arcitc adventurer like Richard Byrd, Ernest Shackleton, Robert Peary, and Roald Amundsen. He was always out on the edge of the world performing some sort of spectacular feat.
     As young idol-worshipers do, I imitated my hero. My mother's garden became my frontier. My army of Tonka toys set about bringing progress to the wilds of the turnip patch. Rows were widened and smoothed into roads. Mounds became impromptu drill sites.
     When the snows came, my fleet was out making sure the trail to the dog kennel was open. I was determined that mother nature would not impede my dog McD from traversing the backyard. I spent many long hours braving the cold and dark to fight back the drifting snow with a one-foot dozer blade.
     As my childhood turned into my adolescence, the Tonkas gave way to footballs, hockey skates, and books. I stopped dreaming of being a pioneer on the last great frontier and longed for the "professional" life.
      The one genetic trait my father hoped I would never realize brought my "professional" pursuits to a halt in my original senior year of college. A drunken mess, I found myself bouncing around from one worthless job to another. When things finally started to straighten out, I found myself driving big trucks and working with construction machinery.
      When I started truck driving, my imagination came back to me. When I was hauling beer, I was always imagining it was something else, something more important. I started moving rental equipment around the Phoenix area, and soon imagined that I was hauling my Dad's gigantic machinery around the Arctic Slope.
      In the Fall of 2008, my world came to a halt alongside the U.S. economy. With no houses to build, builders quit renting equipment from my company. With the loss of business came the loss of employees, and I was one of them.
     My Dad made some phone calls. Two months later I was living my childhood dream, for real. I may not be doing the same things Dad did, but I'm definitely in the same ballgame. Just like me, I doubt my son's friends have fathers who have driven 300,000 pound trucks across frozen oceans, watched the Northern Lights illuminate the largest drilling rigs on the planet, or seen 4000 caribou in a single hour.