It was a summer over fifty years ago. I and my brand new Marine second lieutenant husband were traveling from west coast to east on the way to his new duty station on the Atlantic coast. It was all a new adventure, heading into what we knew not. We talked and talked as our car labored up the narrow twisting roads that led us over the Rockies and down into the plains on the other side. The windows were open in this era before air conditioning, and the western sun beat down on us relentlessly, the only breeze created by the movement of the car. The roads were full of summer vacationers, but also full of road crews getting work done during the only season the high mountains would allow. We often came around a bend to find the ubiquitous construction worker holding the dreaded Stop/ Slow sign which meant another delay in the baking sun.
We sighed as we came around another bend with yet another worker holding that sign. But this time it was strikingly different. Although dressed in the de regueur work boots, jeans, and florescent vest, a long blond braid descended from the back of the hard hat. I blinked. I had never seen a female construction worker and, moreover, had not imagined that a woman could hold this kind of job. This moment was one of those small notable sights that litter a lifetime, for all these years later I can still see her as if it was yesterday, standing by the side of the mountain road holding that sign --- a statue to the future.
I could write up this little vignette as a beginning of the change for women in the workplace, but all these years later it does not represent that to me. Now I am left wondering what that young woman had to put up with to hold that job. I can almost guarantee that this pioneer suffered innuendos, exclusions, and difficulties. In that fleeting moment as we passed her, I could tell she was about my age, yet pushing the envelope in a male profession. I am left wishing I could find her today to tell her, a half century later, how much I appreciate her not just for myself, but for my daughters and granddaughters as well.