Rudy by Rudy Ruettiger Page B

mind I was already moving on. I was thinking about what it would be like to be here, going to that little school across the street, and coming to these football games whenever I wanted—with or without her by my side.

    I always imagined there would be something remarkable about the most important day of my life. Maybe we all do that. You’d think there would be a certain sense of foreboding, a feeling in the air when you get out of bed. Something to tell you, “Hey, watch out. Big accident coming today.” Or, “Pay attention, Rudy. This day’s a biggie!”
    But life’s not like that. Things happen. Boom! No warning.
    When I think back on it, the only thing that stood out about that Saturday as I headed into work at the power plant was that nothing stood out. Nothing. Not even the weather. The skies were gray. Overcast. Typical. Bland. That’s it.
    Compared to the weekdays, Saturdays at the plant were kind of quiet. The demand for electricity never stops, of course, so the actual mechanisms that deliver the power were just as loud as ever: the constant whoosh of pressurized steam, the pounding metal and resounding thud of feeder chutes opening and closing in sequence as they drop their heavy loads of coal onto the conveyor belts and the powerful crunch of pulverizing rock as all that coal moved steadily through the crusher. Yet on Saturdays and Sundays, the managers and crew were somehow more relaxed. A little less urgent. That pent-up energy of waiting for the weekend was gone, and for guys stuck on the weekend shift, I guess there was a sense of resignation. A sense that the work just had to get done, period. So even in the lunchroom, where things were rowdy on a Thursday or Friday, it wasn’t. It was quiet.
    I ate lunch with Siskel that day. I sat across from him and we pulled our packed sandwiches from metal lunch pails just as you’d expect guys like us to be eating from, just as we did every other day. I don’t even remember what we talked about. It simply wasn’t a standout conversation. It wasn’t one of those times that he listened to me talk about dreaming of going to Notre Dame, or when he backed me up and told me to stop talking and go do it. A month had passed since I had first laid eyes on Holy Cross, and I hadn’t really done anything about it. I had just fallen back into the same old routine of work, home, work, home, work. It wasn’t one of those times when Siskel opened up either, wishing out loud that he’d become that doctor like he knew he could have. No. Siskel didn’t really talk much anyway, unless I said something to him first. So it was just an everyday, run-of-the-mill conversation. No significance.
    After lunch, we all went back to what we were doing. I was an equipment attendant at that time. It was up to me to check all the equipment, make sure everything was oiled and running right. If there was a problem, it was up to me to shut things down, if necessary, so the electrician or mechanic could get in there and fix it. There was a procedure to everything, a sequence, so no one would get hurt. And it was a big, big deal that we take things one step at a time.
    Siskel was a mechanic, so we’d wind up working together often. After I’d shut something down, I’d watch him work, and I’d always bug him with questions because he was so good at what he did. I always admired his work ethic. He knew what he was doing. After all those years on the job, whatever he did, he did it well.
    On this particular afternoon, after lunch was over, I was adding hydrogen to a low-pressure unit, a process that takes about twenty minutes to complete. There’s a lot of waiting around at a power plant job, and this was one of the classic cases. I stood there waiting and waiting for the unit to fill, daydreaming a little bit, when all of a sudden I got a call on my radio from the control operator.
    â€œRudy, C1 tunnel, got a trip. You