The metal was too hot to touch. Even with gloves.
I was ten years old, standing in the Arizona desert holding a bag of screws that weighed almost as much as I did, watching my dad and grandpa work 30 feet up on scaffolding. The thermometer on the side of our camper read 118 degrees. But that number didn't capture it. Not really.
The air felt like opening an oven door and leaning your face inside. Every breath burned going down. The metal panels we were installing had been sitting in the sun all morning – they measured 175 degrees on the surface. You'd grab one wrong and have blisters before you could let go.
We weren't building a shed. We weren't building a garage. We were building a 75-foot by 175-foot commercial metal shop in the middle of nowhere. A building the size of most warehouses.
And we were a family crew with two kids on it.
***
We tried working days. It nearly killed us.
Water bottles left in the shade, and shade in the Arizona desert is a joke, just slightly less direct sun, turned too hot to drink within an hour. Not warm. Hot. Like someone had heated them on a stove. We bought one of those expensive coolers, the kind with commercials showing ice lasting seven days. Marketing lies. It couldn't hold through a single afternoon.
My dad watched my brother and me moving slower and slower through the heat one day, looked at the thermometer, and made the call.
"We're switching to nights."
***
The generators kicked on at sunset. Work lights flickered to life – harsh white light cutting through the desert dark, throwing sharp shadows across the sand.
The temperature had dropped to 95 degrees. It felt like mercy.
My brother and I were the runners. That's what they called us. Not because we were kids, because that was the job. Someone on the scaffolding needs a drill? You run and get it. More screws? You grab the bag and climb.
The scaffolding swayed every time you went up. Every single time. Especially when you were carrying something heavy and trying not to think about the desert floor 30 feet below you.
The adults would tack each metal panel into place with a few screws – just enough to hold. Then we'd follow behind, driving in the rest. Forty screws per panel. Panel after panel after panel. My hands cramped around the drill. My arms trembled from holding it overhead. But you didn't stop until the panel was finished.
Then you moved to the next one.
About an hour into that first night shift, I heard them.
Yipping. Then howling. High-pitched sounds that made my stomach pull tight.
***
Coyotes. Everywhere.
Just outside the ring of our work lights, circling in the darkness. You couldn't see them most of the time, just movement in the shadows, and then a pair of eyes catching the light. Green reflections that would appear, hold, and vanish.
The sound never stopped. The whole pack calling to each other, tracking us. Where we were. What we were doing. Whether we were a threat or something else.
I was ten years old. Exhausted. Hauling bags of screws up swaying scaffolding in the middle of the night while wild animals circled below.
My dad and grandpa just kept working. Steady. Calm. Like this was normal. Like it was just part of the job.
So I kept climbing.
***
One morning, or maybe afternoon, time stopped meaning much when you worked nights and slept days, my dad walked me over to the forklift.
"You're going to learn this today."
I looked at it. The machine was bigger than our truck. The forks alone probably weighed more than my dad.
"We need someone moving materials while we're up on the walls. You can do this."
It wasn't a question.
So I learned. Forks up. Forks down. Forward, backward, turning without tipping the load. How to judge clearance when you're carrying something wider than the machine itself. How to not kill yourself or anyone else.
I was ten years old, operating heavy equipment on an active construction site. Not because it was a fun father-son moment. Because we needed every hand working and there was nobody else.
What I remember most about that isn't feeling proud or capable. It's the quiet fear in my chest, this low hum of please don't let me screw up and hurt someone. And then just doing it anyway.
***
Every single day, I wanted to quit.
Not in the "man, this is tough" way people say when they're telling a story at a dinner party. I mean lying in that camper with my whole body screaming, blisters splitting open on my palms, knowing I had another twelve-hour shift waiting for me, and thinking: I can't do this anymore.
But you didn't get to quit. Not in my family. Not on this job.
My dad would wake us when it was time. You got up. You got dressed. You walked outside and picked up where you left off.
There was no negotiation. No "I'm tired." No "I don't feel like it." The building wasn't finished. So we worked.
Some mornings I'd be so wrung out I'd nearly fall asleep standing up, leaning against a stack of materials while waiting for someone to call down for something. My brother would elbow me. Stay awake. And I would. Because you had to.
***
About two weeks in, my Uncle Kelly drove out to help for a week.
Kelly is the kind of person who can have you crying laughing within five minutes of meeting him. He finds something funny in everything, and he makes sure you find it too.
We were miserable. The heat, the exhaustion, the monotony of panel after panel after panel. It had ground us down to almost nothing.
But Uncle Kelly would be up on that scaffolding telling stories, doing impressions, finding the absurdity in everything, and suddenly the work didn't feel quite as heavy. You'd be laughing so hard you'd have to set the drill down and catch your breath.
I didn't know it then, but he was teaching me something I'd carry for the rest of my life.
You can't control the conditions. You can't make the job easier. You can't make the heat go away or the deadline move. But you can control the atmosphere. You can make people laugh. And that turns the unbearable into something you can get through.
I still do that. Every job. When things go sideways, when the weather is brutal, when nothing is going right, I find something to laugh about. Not because it fixes anything. Because it makes it possible to keep going.
***
We lived in a camper on site. No water heater.
You'd think the shower water would be warm... it sat in a tank underneath the camper in the desert all day. But it wasn't. It stayed cold enough to make you gasp the second it hit your skin. Sharp. Shocking. The kind of cold that wakes up every nerve in your body whether you want it to or not.
But after a shift, covered in dust, soaked in sweat, so tired your hands shook when you tried to unbutton your shirt, that cold water felt like the best thing in the world. Because it meant you were done. It meant food was next. It meant you could stop.
I don't know how my dad did it. Working as hard as any of us, running the whole job site, keeping everything on track, and every single night, there was dinner. Real dinner. Steak and potatoes and roasted vegetables, eaten outside the camper after dark with the work lights off and the generators finally quiet.
We'd sit there in the silence, too spent to say much, just eating. And the food tasted like nothing has tasted since. When your body has been burning that hard for that many hours, a meal becomes something sacred.
I can still taste those dinners. Still feel that silence.
***
There was a night, I couldn't tell you which one, they'd all run together by then, when I was climbing down the scaffolding with an empty screw bag, and my legs just stopped.
Not a stumble. Not a slip. My muscles simply quit responding. Like a switch flipped off.
I caught myself. Didn't fall. But I couldn't make my legs move again. So I sat down right there on the scaffolding, fifteen feet up, and I just... stayed.
I couldn't make myself climb the rest of the way down. Couldn't make myself do anything. I was ten years old and my body was done.
My dad noticed.
He walked over. Looked up at me. I was sure he was going to tell me to get down. Get moving. Get back to work. Because that's how it worked, you didn't stop.
Instead, he climbed up.
He sat down next to me on that scaffolding. Didn't say a word. We just sat together for a minute, looking out at the half-finished building and the desert dark beyond the lights and the green eyes still blinking out there in the nothing.
Then, quiet:
"You're doing good work."
Four words. That's all he said. Then he climbed back down and picked his drill back up.
I sat there for another minute. Maybe two.
Then I climbed down. Grabbed a fresh bag of screws. Climbed back up.
***
The last night we worked on that building, I stood back and looked at it.
This massive thing. 75 by 175 feet of steel framing and metal panels, rising out of the desert floor like it had always been there. A commercial structure the size of a warehouse.
Every panel I'd followed behind and screwed tight. Every trip up that scaffolding with tools and materials. Every night working through the dark while coyotes circled at the edge of our light.
I was ten years old.
I didn't feel proud, not yet. I was too tired for that. But something had shifted in me, down in a place I wouldn't have the words for until years later. Some foundational understanding of what I was capable of, buried so deep it became part of how I was built.
***
I didn't realize what that summer had given me until I started stacking hard things on top of it and none of them broke me.
High school sports – coaches screaming, two-a-days in the heat – felt manageable. I'd already done harder, younger.
Oil rigs at eighteen. Brutal work. Long hours. Dangerous conditions. But I had a reference point. I'd been ten years old on scaffolding at midnight with coyotes howling, and I hadn't quit then.
Starting my own contracting company. Taking on projects that push every limit – tight timelines, difficult conditions, the kind of jobs other crews walk away from. Every single time, that ten-year-old shows up. The one who learned before middle school that you don't stop when it gets hard. You don't stop when your body says quit. You don't stop until the building is finished.
***
The coyotes are gone now. The desert is behind me. Montana winters have replaced Arizona heat.
But I'm still that kid on the scaffolding.
I still build things for a living. I still show up when it's hard, especially when it's hard. And I still hear my dad's voice on the nights when a project pushes me to the edge of what I think I can handle.
You're doing good work.
So I grab my tools. And I keep going.
***
Kane Purcella is the owner of KP General Contracting, LLC, based in Billings, Montana. If you have a project that needs doing right, get in touch.