JOURNEY MAN
A Carpenter’s Story
By Daniel Foster

TRANSPO 72

In the spring of 1972 I was living on a commune in rural Virginia named Skymont.  About 175 of us, including many kids, were living on a former boys camp about 90 minutes west of Washington, D.C.  It wasn’t a dope-smoking, longhair commune.  All of us were involved in a spiritual practice and we wanted to join with others in the practice in an effort to live a more spiritually based life.

I was playing bass and singing in a band for several months, but that eventually came to an end and I began to do construction once again.

Eight or ten of us signed on to work on a project at Dulles Airport, which was about an hour and a quarter away.  The project was a series of small buildings being constructed for a transportation exposition to be held during the summer, called Transpo 72.  It would feature exhibits by many manufacturers displaying a wide variety of transportation systems and products, including aircraft and monorails and all sorts of ‘people-mover’ systems.

We were constructing a series of shells for exhibitor use.  These were laid out in a strip of connected units about 300 feet long.  Each shell was constructed of panels about 5 inches thick with a translucent skin on either side of a honeycomb inner material.  The panels were each roughly 5 feet long and 5 feet wide, though they weren’t square or rectangular.  Each had five or six sides and the panels were connected to form a sort of geodesic structure, similar to a dome, but not perfectly round.  They were pretty space-age.

We were assembling these shells on a long concrete pad.  Each of the units was assembled by bolting the concave metal edges of the panels to round metal tubing through predrilled holes.  After the first few panels of each unit were assembled, forming a perimeter, the building would grow upward: space-age building blocks.  A team of several guys would put each unit together with various individuals running support in one fashion or another.  We had been working on the project for several days and the whole assembly was taking shape.  As we neared lunch one day, each unit was covered by 4 or 5 guys standing on top of the structures, fitting and bolting the remaining panels.  There were probably fifty guys working on the project and a dozen or fifteen individual, but connected, shells.

At noon all of us workers took our lunches and sat together some distance from the long strip of nearly completed units, where some stacked pallets provided convenient seating.  As we sat, looking out toward the units 75 feet away, a wind came up.

It was a strange, rogue wind.  It must have been shaped and directed by the series of buildings to the north of our project, including the terminal complex.  It seemed to come out of nowhere.  It lifted the first shell on the left of our view and raised it.  Gradually at first, then slowly and steadily, the wind raised the edge of the unit 2, 5, 10, then 20 feet up into the air, then bending it in an arc toward the remaining units to the right.  Then the next unit, connected to it, was lifted, and the next, all of it rising as if in slow motion.  We saw the whole connected strip arcing: lifted and peeled into the air, then separating and the pieces falling and scattered along the wide concrete pad.  The entire complex was destroyed.

All of us had been on, under, or around those shells only 10 minutes before.  Because it was lunch not a soul had been either on or near the units.  I suppose there’s a chance the weight of the workers on the shells might have kept them from lifting, but I am much more inclined to believe that men, too, would have been lifted to fly and fall and there would have been many injuries, some of them very serious.

It was an incredibly lucky day, at least for those of us who had been on those shells only minutes before.

Most jobs end slowly, with a whimper, not a bang.  You see the end in sight and are moving slowly toward it, until you are finishing up the very last details.  The end is not so much a feeling of completion as a feeling of turning it over to others.  It ceases being yours.  It becomes someone else’s.  I am usually sad to see a project go.

There was nothing for us to do with the broken shells of Transpo 72.  We were simply told to leave; nothing completed, nothing to turn over.  I think the site was to be left untouched for insurance adjusters to view.  Some workers would be called back to pick up the pieces, but it did not turn out to be any of us.  It was the last day on the job.  We were all sent home and never called back.

I do not know how the exhibition planners replaced the exhibitor spaces that had been blown away that day, but these were only a small part of the entire exhibition and Transpo 72 did indeed take place a few months later.

The exhibition was marred by several accidents, with three crash deaths occurring before the watching eyes of onlookers.  One was a hang-glider pilot, another a pylon racer and the third was a member of the U.S. Air Force Thunderbirds, who ejected after his plane stalled in a vertical maneuver, and who would have been safe but his parachute canopy was blown by a wind into the blazing fire of the crashed jet.

The event was, according to the Wall Street Journal, “the biggest show the government has put on since World War II.”  It was intended to be the first of many recurring Air and Transportation trade show events to be held at Dulles Airport, but as a result of the fatal accidents there have been no other such shows held there.