No kid of mine is going to scrub any toilets for a living, my old man, a janitor, would always bark at me, having come home from work, read my hastily prepared homework, ripped it to shreds and called me in from playing outside to do it over.

Daddy, at least, got that right about doing hard work. I don't know nearly enough Spanish.

I thought of him the other morning as I drove to work in the relative comfort of my air conditioned pickup, past four men who were sweating like beasts, shovels flinging dirt, trying to dig a hole deep enough to reach a severed cable.

You've probably seen men like them and had the same thought in recent days as temperatures seemingly refuse to dip below 90: Better them than me. I even know unemployed guys who think the same thing.

I turned the truck around.

They knew as much English as I did Spanish, which is how I deciphered "cable" and "cut." Of the work, I also got "is no problem," that they "like it and the pay very much."

All of which is how I found myself driving around the city, standing in front yards and in the streets with hardworking men like them, just chatting.

I wanted to find the guy doing the hardest, nastiest job in town amid the humid, 90-plus heat of Tuesday, doing work that would put me, one hour in, smack in the hospital.

His name was Miguel Guiterrez. He is 21 years old, and is a member of a crew of seven men who were digging block-long trenches and filling them with asphalt at 38th Avenue and Bryant Street.

He was following behind a backhoe and men with shovels to tamp down and level the sandy brown earth they had left behind. Up the street was an idling, red and white dump truck filled with 300-degree road asphalt that would be dumped into the trench once the tamping was completed.

Miguel Guiterrez, though, would not be done. He would grab a shovel, toss around and attempt to level the black, steaming goo before climbing aboard a mini-roller that would flatten it out - all in 95-degree heat.

"That asphalt, man, that's no joke," he half moans.

"You just drink a lot of water and Gatorade to keep from dehydrating and passing out."

But it is just a job, he said, nodding as if to convince me and himself, sweat literally pouring from beneath his white hard hat.

"Sure, I thought of maybe working an office job, but I'd do the same thing every day. Here, we go all over Colorado, we see different places, we do different things.

"And we like our job," he added, as if asking me not to pity him. "We like working hard."

About two miles up 38th Avenue, the Richards are sweating and grunting in the midday heat.

Richard Meisinger Jr., 39, is on the business end of the shovel. Richard Dyer, 50, is flattening out what his partner is tossing in. They work for Xcel Energy.

"Oh, this is a little one," Richard Dyer says of the hole his partner has dug to drop a line into the traffic signal box across the street from the new shopping center that is rising on the site of the old Elitch Gardens. "Most of the ones we dig are at least four feet - you know, for traffic-light poles."

He has been doing this work for 30 years now; his partner for 18. They don't mind it, they say. You just drink a lot of water.

Their next job is what they call "rubber gloving." It is putting on thick rubber gloves and a thick rubber contraption that sort of resembles football shoulder pads. They have to work the overhead lines. The outfit will allow them to survive 25,000 volts should something go wrong.

"In this heat, in that stuff, the sweat just pours off of you," Richard Meisinger Jr. explains. "By the time you're done, you actually look like you've peed your pants."Ah, but theirs was easy work compared with what the boys at 33rd Avenue and Shoshone Street had just tackled, laying a quarter-acre of softball-size white rocks and mulch at a new apartment complex.

The leader of the four was a man who said his name was Jose, and that he was 25. He eyed me suspiciously.

A full truck of mulch and a half-filled truck with more stone awaited them. They were sweating hard, seated in the shade next to a camp stove on which they were heating carne asada and tortillas. It was lunchtime.

"This beats making hamburgers," Jose explained in badly broken English.

"Yes, I have gone after work inside, in the offices. They look at me, and quickly say, oh, no, we filled the job. So we do this because you need a job for your kids, for your family. But I think we are the better ones out here. We work with our hands."

He doesn't know how long he will work today. All that he knows is once they empty the two waiting trucks, there is another job at a different house.

He and the others dream, they said, of one day being moved into a sod or planting job. It is the best.

"It is all green," Jose explained, "and it lives. When they die, I cry, too."

And to think, the most work I did that very same day was to tell you their story.

johnsonw@RockyMountainNews.com or 303-954-2763

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