In Her Wheelhouse
Admiral Biscuit
Five AM. The sky was dark and the town was fog-bound—it came in from the ocean almost every morning in the late spring, leaves during the day, and returned at dusk.
Her apartment wasn’t high enough to see over it; out her window all she could see were faintly-glowing streetlights below and the occasional ghostly car passing on the street.
Corduroy Road didn’t like being awake so early, but in order to get to her job she had to be. Coffee helped, but not as much as she’d like it to. Coffee wasn’t as good as sunshine.
Back home, fields didn’t get planted by lantern-light; there was no sense in being at work before the sun was shining. Here on Earth, the work schedule didn’t reflect the sun’s schedule. Nothing she could do about it, and she did love her job, just not the early mornings. Not many ponies got to operate heavy machinery—it turned out that earning a forklift license was merely the beginning.
There was never enough time to properly enjoy her coffee. It came in a jar full of magic crystals that could be dissolved into hot water and some mornings she wondered if she might just eat a spoonful directly to save time and get the same result. It would save on mugs to wash.
She rinsed out the mug and grabbed her high-viz vest off its peg. Never mind that she was more brightly-colored than any human—her mane and tail might be a dull battleship grey, but her coat was a vibrant blue.
Her apartment had elevators, but they were for the end of the day. It wasn’t that much effort to walk down stairs, or trot if she was running late. And it was good for her to have some exercise; her job was more mental than physical.
•••
Whoever was waiting by her apartment door first got breakfast for free. That wasn’t a formal rule, but a friendly one. It came with its own caveats of fairness that were never explained, but as with any friendly competition, the rules were understood even if not expressly written down.
Today, Juan was there first, the pickup idling right in front of the apartment door. He reached over and opened the door for her, and she hopped in, settled on the seat, and stuck her tongue out at him.
Sometimes they talked about their former homelands, other times they just rode in silence. Today was a contemplative day; even the truck’s radio was off.
•••
The mood was broken at the McDonald’s drive-through. Juan got his usual Sausage McMuffin with egg, hash brown, and coffee. Corduroy got a Big Breakfast with extra eggs instead of the sausage patty. Some days they weren’t paying attention and gave her a sausage patty anyway, and she’d trade it to Juan for his hash brown. It was a fair trade; both were equally greasy.
Big Breakfasts weren’t hoof-friendly. Some days she wouldn’t eat it until they got to work, other times she’d set it on the armrests between the seats and do her best. So far, it had only gone on the floor once when Juan had to panic stop for an idiot in an Infinity.
There wasn’t a lot of traffic in the morning, and the bridge across Assawoman Bay was nearly devoid of other cars. What few there were would suddenly appear in the fog, first just their headlights and then a ghostly car-shape, then a fading red light in the rearview mirror.
The bridge ran across an unpopulated island, and then on to Ocean City proper. In a few weeks, it would be bustling with tourists, but for now it was still in the off-season, like a field awaiting planting.
And just like a field awaiting planting, there was plenty of work to do.
•••
Her job was seasonal. Not in terms of whether she was employed or not, but rather in terms of what equipment she got to operate and what she got to use it for. In that sense, it was familiar; just as on the farm the season dictated the equipment.
Today her equipment was a John Deere 410L backhoe—in the winter, she’d graduated from skidsteer to backhoe. Next year, she might be able to move up to a wheel loader like Juan drove, although they only had a couple of them.
And she knew that her backhoe had more finesse than a wheel loader anyway. All Juan could do was carry around big scoops of sand or snow, and kind of smooth things out with the backside of his bucket. She could use her smaller buckets to get right up against the wall and along the steps and scoop out the winter sand for Juan to carry off and spread out.
Every morning before she started her backhoe, Corduroy needed to inspect it. She didn’t understand exactly how it all worked, but she knew how to inflate its tires, grease its fittings, and check all its fluids. Knock the sand out of the air filter—there was always sand in the air filter—and make sure that no hydraulic fluid was leaking out of any of the hoses.
There wasn’t an official machine assignment, but everybody knew who got which backhoe. She was the second-newest full-time employee on the crew and had earned the right to move up to a newer backhoe if she’d wanted to, but she thought that seat time and experience were just as important—maybe more so—than newness and features, and doggedly stuck with the machine she’d been trained on.
Satisfied with her inspection, she started the machine, wrinkling her nose as the diesel exhaust sputtered out of the stack. Once its idle smoothed out and the whiteness disappeared, she started running the controls, making sure that everything was working as it should. There was nothing more embarrassing than arriving at the beach and then finding out that the bucket didn’t work.
•••
In the summertime, the days were long and the beach was crowded with tourists. Any work they did was necessarily early in the morning; she’d discovered that tourists didn’t respect construction machines, even if they were big and yellow and had flashing lights on them. Everyone seemed to think more of their temporary inconvenience rather than the ultimate benefit to all.
Before the tourists descended like locusts, the beach was mostly theirs, their own private sandbox to do with as they pleased.
•••
The first light of dawn was barely in the air when they left the garage and headed towards the beach. Juan was the leader and all the other machines followed along.
She wasn’t allowed to operate a car or a truck, but this was the next best thing. A string of earthmoving machines, Juan in the lead, three backhoes, and a pickup truck following along, all of them equipped with strobes and rotating beacons and enough worklights to pass for an alien invasion. Sometimes they’d get separated at a traffic light, and whoever was in the lead would wait for the rest of the group to catch up on the next cycle, or—if road traffic was light—they’d run the light and follow along.
In the summer, they stayed on roads as long as they could, entering the beach as close to their work area as possible. In the off-season, when the beach was theirs, they usually entered the beach at 70th Street if they were working on the north end, or 59th if they were working towards the south. It really depended on what Juan wanted to do, though.
Cars had turn signals which, when used, would tell the driver’s intentions. The Komatsu wheel loader Juan drove didn’t. It had caught her out the first time, but now she knew that slow traffic was supposed to be on the right and fast traffic on the left, unless they were turning. Juan cut across the lanes before the Ocean City Expressway, so he’d be set up for a left turn on 59th.
The traffic lights were sequenced for cars, but they couldn’t drive as fast as cars. They had to wait in the left turn lane for the signal, and then they cut across traffic, her backhoe entering the intersection as the arrow changed to yellow. The one behind her and the pickup truck ran the red, and one block later they ignored the sign prohibiting vehicles from the beach.
Her backhoe felt different when it left the paved roads and ventured onto the beach sands. It wasn’t really made for pavement, although it could grudgingly use it, just like her cultivator back home.
When she was young, she’d only ever imagined terraforming in the context of cutting down trees, pulling stumps, and plowing fields for crops. Time-consuming, especially with pony-pulled equipment.
Humans thought outside that and built big machines to work for them. She hadn’t had the opportunity to set her backhoe against a tree stump or one of those rocks that occasionally showed up during planting, but knew that it wouldn’t be fazed at all by such a challenge. According to its manual, its engine could make 116 horses’ power, and she knew that even a dozen ponies could shift a stump.
All that power under her hooves had taken some getting used to. The machine did not discriminate in what it scooped or bashed into. Clumsy hooves on its controls could gouge the concrete seawall or reduce a flight of stairs to flinders. The idea of controlling such brute force with gentle hoof movements on controls had taken some getting used to, but now she understood. She and the machine were as bonded as any two ponies in harness, even if it couldn’t directly tell her how it was feeling and what it wanted to do.
In truth, Corduroy didn’t need it to tell her; she knew. Keep its fluids full, its tires aired up, its zerks full of grease, and its filter clear of sand, and it was happy to do whatever she wanted it to do.
•••
Maryland numbered the roads, starting from two at the southern tip of Fenwick Island and counting up all the way to a hundred forty six which was right up against the Delaware state line. Juan had told her that there was a One, once, but before humans named hurricanes, one had come along and destroyed First Street and replaced it with the inlet. She’d seen some of the storm-damaged roads on Assateague Island, and wondered if the bottom of the inlet also had huge chunks of asphalt sticking out of the sand, or if they’d been completely annihilated by the hurricane.
They always started from the north and worked their way down. She liked that. There wasn’t any obvious difference between Delaware and Maryland, but when the skies were clear she could see where Fenwick Island ended, and that was a goal to work towards.
Humans didn’t schedule their weather, but they did have important days in their schedule. The beaches needed to be open by Memorial Day, regardless of what the weather was, and that meant they’d shift to beach work from their other duties. It was her second year, and she was a veteran. Nothing compared to Juan; sometimes on their breaks he’d give a history of the storefronts they were working by. The town had been a tourist town for decades.
They worked in the mornings, before the beach-goers arrived in force. Even when it wasn’t tourist season, locals and some die-hard visitors found themselves on the beach, sunning themselves or flying kites or just looking at the vast spread of the Atlantic and the waves crashing onto the beach.
Corduroy understood; she used the beach in the off-season, too. Sometimes it was fun to gallop through the dry sand, or on the firmer wet sand where the waves crashed. To stomp and scrape in the sand and then watch the waves wash it away, to build sand castles or dig holes down to water. To watch the moonlight reflected in the waves, or the sunrise over the ocean, to see the foggy days and the clear days, or the days with clouds like fluffy sheep. To watch how the beach changed in storms that brought waves crashing right up against the seawall, or winds that blasted sand and salt against everything. Gentle snowfalls, moonless nights, seabirds wheeling around in the sky . . . sometimes she imagined the beach as the bridge of a giant ship fighting its way through the ocean, and even though she knew that it was really anchored to the bottom, if it wasn’t for constant work, the ocean would take what was hers.
Sometimes she just stood on the beach and let the Atlantic lap around her, sometimes she just stood on the beach and let the breakers crash around her, feeling the sand shift under her hooves, moving along at the whim of the waves. Her mane and tail whipped in the wind, sand gritted through her fur, and the horseshoe crabs crept up the beach as they had for millions of years, with no care for humans or ponies.
•••
They were down at 37th Street, starting their work as the sun rose. Waverley Castle and Castle in the Sand were familiar landmarks—many of the buildings tried to set themselves apart from the others, offering different amenities or putting fake crenelations and watchtowers on their buildings. Condominiums, apartments, and hotels all vied for space, some of them new and shiny and others old and kind of run-down.
Work assignments weren’t specific. She and the other backhoe operator—a former high-schooler named Chris who’d stayed on after his first summer—knew what they needed to do and to not crash into each other. Juan would pick up sand as needed and move it down the beach.
Where they were working now, the beach was wider, and the access paths were mostly zig-zaggy, with clusters of beach plants growing in the unmaintained areas. Clearing drifted sand and making paths smooth for the hordes of tourists to come was their mission, some of which could be accomplished by just dragging the front scoop backwards along the sand.
Her backhoe had extra legs that folded down to make it more stable when digging deep holes, something she didn’t have to do on the beach. She could; just for fun she’d spent one break digging a hole in the beach and then filling it back in. She had to be careful; the sand wasn’t stable and if she dug too big a hole it might collapse and suck her backhoe in.
Likewise, what seemed like firm sand along the wave’s wash wasn’t firm for a backhoe; it would sink in and couldn’t get itself back out. Last year, one of their part-time summer crew operators had discovered that. He’d gotten plenty of ribbing from the crew, even if it had been fun to do something different for once. Juan had pulled with a ribbon of nylon strap, and she’d been trusted to help by pushing it with her rear scoop.
Paths were delineated by cheap wooden fences that sometimes got blown over and had to be fixed, and occasionally got knocked over by a careless backhoe operator.
Her record when it came to the fences wasn’t spotless; she’d misjudged when backing up and taken out a ten foot section with her rear bucket. She’d also caught a section with the front bucket when she turned too fast, and that one was the more embarrassing incident, since she’d been cocky and showing off.
As punishment for her second offense, she got to work a shift with the fencing crew. It was a fair punishment, and she hadn’t knocked over any fences since then. Putting up sand fences was boring hooves-on work but she did it with as much grace as she could muster—plenty of farm work was boring, too. Back when she was too small to pull a plow but too big to escape chores, she’d stacked rocks on a border fence.
More importantly, Corduroy had learned to pay more attention to where every part of her backhoe was. The fence was cheap and replacing sections of it were expected; had she bumped her backhoe into a car—or Luna forbid, a person—it would have cost a lot more.
•••
They broke for lunch by the Hilton hotel, which featured two swimming pools and sunning decks for the people who didn’t want to actually go onto the beach. She didn’t really understand the draw of a pool when the ocean was right there, but some people didn’t like salt water and always shifting sand.
In the summer when everything was open, she liked to try all the different beach foods for lunch, even though most of it wasn’t healthy. This time of year, not all the restaurants and food shacks had opened yet, which left the off-beach establishments as the only viable choice.
The Hilton had a restaurant inside it, but it was slow and expensive. Instead, the crew drove off the beach and parked around the corner from Shmagels Bagels. She got a cheesy tomato melt, and Juan bought a Giddy Up Horsey just to tweak her nose.
Chris, the former high-schooler, got a pastrami and swiss bagelnini.
The break was technically only supposed to be a half hour, but nobody really cared if they went over by a few minutes. As long as the beach was ready to go by Memorial Day, that was what mattered, and they’d make it happen.
Sometimes they had to put off work for storms—they could hardly work on the beach when the ocean was raging against the seawall. The weather forecast said there wouldn’t be any storms, but Juan knew not to trust it, and put plenty of padding in their schedule in case of unpredicted weather.
Juan and Chris both got coffees for the road, and after a brief deliberation, Corduroy did, too. Her backhoe had a cupholder and it would be a shame not to use it for something.
•••
They picked up where they’d left off, clearing the Mariott’s pathway, and then moved on as the fog cleared. Some people on the decks and balconies of the Hilton watched them working; some people got out their cell phones and filmed them. As she bashed down a winter dune, she wondered how they’d react if she stopped her backhoe and started filming them filming her. They probably wouldn’t like it.
For others, they were as much a part of the beach scene as the seagulls and hordes of tourists, something that almost faded into the background. Land-locked tourists might be fascinated by construction machines preparing a beach for the tourist season, while the locals were used to it, expected it. Two years in the wheelhouse wasn’t enough to be sure what the normal schedule was, but Corduroy was a smart pony and could figure it out even if the weather and the ocean were fickle..
•••
They worked their way south. Juan’s goal for the day was to get to where the short dunes and stubby beach grasses ended. 27th Street, five more blocks, and they could make it. They were a well-oiled machine, they knew their jobs and what everyone on the crew would do. The backhoes and the wheel loader all had radios so they could talk to each other but they didn’t really need to coordinate all that much. Whenever she or Chris finished an access path, they’d move on to the next one, and Juan would always pick up the sand and carry it off, or even get his wheel loader up the paths where it would fit.
She knew how to judge where it would fit, and that saved time. She didn’t have to carry the sand she couldn’t smooth out back to the beach proper; she could leave it in a pile by the kink and he’d come and fetch it.
•••
Work became a routine, as it did every day. Her backhoe had two radios, one for talking to her co-workers and one for listening to. At first, she’d left the second one off; her job shouldn’t have distractions. But then she’d gotten used to her job, and then it had kinda gotten routine and when nopony was talking on the other radio it was kinda lonely, and now here she was belting out Alone along with Heart as she scooped sand and dumped it out for Juan to pick up and disperse.
Her backhoe liked her singing.
•••
Their final break of the day came as they were digging out in front of Dunes Manor. By mutual agreement, they didn’t take an official break—although their time cards would indicate that they had—but instead just had a brief work stoppage.
Corduroy kicked back in her seat and sipped her now-cold coffee, her backhoe turned to face the water. She was in her own little wheelhouse, with nothing in front of her except for a short expanse of sand and then the ocean, almost like a captain at the bridge of her ship.
And she was a captain at the bridge of her ship; even if there wasn’t a crew. It would respond to her commands. It did her bidding with a gentle hoof on the controls, either on the sand or on the city streets. It could and did dig holes and trenches that the city wanted dug, and from the spring to the fall it fought the relentless ocean, moving sand by the scoop or bucket.
She glanced at the city behind her, wondering what it might look like if there wasn’t a seawall to protect it and a team of diligent workers taking away all the sand that the ocean piled up. Would it be buried in dunes, or sunk in the sea like First Street had been?
It would be a very different place, wilder and less predictable. Nobody would want to build so close, although the peninsula was thin and they couldn’t really back up too much to let the ocean have what was rightfully hers, or what she might claim. In a way, it was no different than the weatherponies back home ensuring that ponies had the weather they wanted.
She didn’t like the tourists all that much; the town had a different nature when they were there. But the tourists were necessary; without them she wouldn’t have a job, and there wouldn’t be so many restaurants or opportunities on the beach. Further south, just past the inlet, lay Assateague Island, an almost deserted park where horses ran wild and where a different kind of tourist flocked.
In theory, it was within swimming distance, but she hadn’t tried. She wasn’t much of a swimmer anyway. Going into the ocean and getting splashed by waves was fun, so long as she could feel the bottom under her hooves.
•••
They ended the day at 26th Street, clearing in front of the Flagship Oceanfront Hotel. The nearest beach access was a couple blocks back on 30th Street, and her paycheck kept on coming even after she’d moved the last grain of sand. Machines had to be driven back to their barn, then they had to be cleaned and sometimes washed and then put away for the night. If it wasn’t for the risk of the ocean claiming them, they could have been left on the beach, and everypony could have ridden home in the pickup.
The weather had gotten better and better as the day went on, and while the ocean’s still too cold for any but the most hearty to brave it, the beach has a good amount of traffic for the off-season. Instead of running up the sand, Juan decided to take the road back to the barn, and their little convoy keeps to the slow lane with the pickup bringing up the rear. It’s not the heaviest, but people understand it. Backhoes and wheel loaders confuse them.
•••
Some days she rides home with Juan, some days she takes a bus. Some days she sleeps on the beach; if the ponies down on Assateague Island can do it, so can she. It wasn't always a routine, but now it is; they clock out and Juan asks if she wants a ride and he won’t press her if she declines, just ask if she wants a ride in the morning.
Some days Juan isn’t eager to get home, either. The ocean has got him, too; maybe neither of them can afford to actually live oceanfront but the beach is free and practically ungoverned and its call is hard to ignore.
•••
Juan raced the fog on the way home. A few tendrils reached out on the peninsula and then they were on the bridge. She could see it building in the rearview mirror, but they were ahead of it as they crossed the bridge back to the mainland. Sometimes it liked to stay over Ocean City, other times it wanted to go more inland.
He dropped her off in front of her apartment and waited until she’d opened the front door to leave.
There was nothing of interest in her mailbox, just a few offers that weren’t worth the paper they were printed on. Corduroy spit them out on her desk and set to making a simple dinner as the ocean fog began embracing her apartment.
She was home, so she didn’t have to cover the yawn as she walked into her tiny kitchen and grabbed salad fixins out of the fridge. A gust of wind brought salt air and a tendril of fog into her apartment.
Her apartment had a balcony, the perfect place to eat dinner and watch the fog consume the city. If she stayed up long enough, it would be gone, and if she stayed up longer it would be back. Corduroy sat on her balcony and ate her salad then put her bowl aside and eventually left her balcony and climbed into her bed.