Just the 'Fax, man

Big deal. If you measured work in headaches and not just sweat, you'd know that Barb and Linda do the real heavy lifting around here.

"We gotta be a mother confessor, a big sister," Linda says in a tone of voice that leads you to believe she doesn't maintain a deep reserve of respect for the Carhartt crybabies. "The guys come in here and you hear their stories" -- here her voice changes to that of a toddler tattletale -- "of their kids, their jobs, their wives." She shakes her head. "Bunch of sob sisters, I swear. We're the mother confessors of Lafarge."

Anthony Camera

Nighthawks at the diner: Tom's caters to all types at all hours.

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Barb nods. "All their whining and crying."

"Sometimes," says Linda, "you just want to pull out a gun and go postal, I swear. Every now and then, somebody's got an attitude problem."

"Just like us," Barb cautions.

"Everybody's entitled to one," agrees Linda.

Both women shake their heads. It's lunchtime, and the bosses are gone. So what? Barb and Linda have a combined forty years of experience working at the scale house on the eastern boundary of the aggregate mine ground into the Hogback where the plains swell into mountain. Who's going to bother them now?

Both women wear sweatshirts and jeans. Barb moves her long hair in and out of a giant clip on the back of her head. Linda wears a large, craft-fair turquoise-and-silver ring on every finger and leans out the door to smoke her cigarettes. The trucks stop in front of their office to get weighed, then roll by and out of the mine.

The quarry is classic Front Range Colorado. Where else could you find a hard-rock mine surrounded by a popular Jefferson County Open Space hiking and biking park on one side, an amusement park on another, and some of the priciest real estate in the area on one more border? And all of it not two miles up the road from Denver West and Colorado Mills, one of the busiest retail centers in the state.

The business spreads over 200 acres up into the hills. About half of that has been mined out over the past three decades, with the pace of extraction accelerating. As Denver has grown, so has the demand for rock. Twenty years ago, about 750,000 tons of granite left the grounds each year. Now the mountain loses about three million tons annually.

For anyone who's counting, that means that Barb and Linda have probably watched about 100 million pounds of granite roll by. They've survived three different owners. The tapestry of their lives is covered in a fine granite dust.

Next month, Barb will celebrate her 21st year of working here. She lives only two miles away and rarely misses a day. Sometimes she drives over to the mine on a snowmobile. Linda's husband hauled gravel for a while; her brother still does. "It's like the Simon boys," she explains, nodding as a truck rumbles by in a cloud of gray dust. "Shit, the whole family's into trucking."

"It's a hard way to go," Barb sighs.

"Sunup to sundown," agrees Linda.

"All summer," nods Barb. "If you don't make your money in the summer, you're in trouble."

"I've seen trucks go out of here at 100,000 pounds," says Linda. "'Course, the legal limit is 80,000. That was years ago, though."

"And now all the trucks have to go up the road and onto I-70," says Barb. "They can't drive through Golden anymore."

"The residents don't like the Jake brake to disturb them," Linda explains in her nasal, nah-nah, fake sympathy voice. "I kind of like the Jake." She loosens her lips and makes the low growl of a truck gearing down -- puttttllllrrrr. "It's a nice noise."

"I remember when Magic Mountain opened next door," Linda says. "I played for the opening of it when I was thirteen. I played clarinet for Colorado's only all-girl band. You had to quit when you turned fourteen. It was only for little kids."

Looking over at Heritage Square, she adds, "It was supposed to be a big theme park. They were talking about selling to Disney. It's gone downhill, but I love those shops they have up there."

"It's old-timey," says Barb.

On a busy summer day, between 800 and 900 trucks pass by the scale house, carrying 28,000 tons of rock out of the hill. Occasionally Linda and Barb talk to the men over their radios or lean out the side window and shoot the breeze. "Some of these drivers we've known since they've been teenagers," says Linda. "Like Kevin DeCarlo."

"Oh, yeah," Barb nods. "He worked his butt off."

"I think he started before he was eighteen," says Linda. "'Course, nobody checked back then."

"Here comes Frankie Joe!" exclaims Barb as a driver in a white cowboy hat drives up, waving. "He's been here as long as I have."

"Oh, God, yes," says Linda. "Frankie Joe. And Tony Spano, the Bellios. They've been around since I started."

"There's more and more women drivers every day," Linda adds.

"It's the only way a single woman can work and make a man's living these days," says Barb.