I have always loved the fabric analogy for life. You know, one thread, easily broken, is joined with many others to make cloth that is very strong. “The people, united, will never...” You know how it goes.
I work with cloth for a living. I also know a garment of strong fabric can be ruined when a single thread is pulled. Right now, I am thinking of the single threads in a different way. I’m thinking of them as webs of energy in life: pluck one, and the effect is felt across the fabric. Sometimes, it’s a great feeling!
I think I felt a thread plucked recently when my great friend Tony Clark told me of an article he had read in an old, Spring, 1904, edition of the Willimantic Daily Chronicle. The story was about the building of a new railroad bridge in Willimantic. We can still see the bridge, looking southeast from the Footbridge. Tony was interested with the image of eight men, two to each of four windlasses, lifting the beam weighing “400 pounds to the foot, and which is about 105 feet long,” according to the article.
A windlass is a device that lets workers wind rope, chain or cable around a spool to lift great weight. It is often used in combination with gears or different sized pulleys to enable the relatively small force of human strength to move tremendous weight. This was the case in the article Tony read. I did the arithmetic and found the iron girder in the story weighed in the neighborhood of 42,000 pounds!
Try a Little Elbow Grease!
Old vs. New: Getting the Job Done
As a young boy, I learned how to use a “come-along” and a chain fall, which are both similar to a windlass, to move very large boulders and pull out tree stumps on land we were clearing. With these simple machines, my brother and I, as preteens, were able to move boulders much larger than either of us. Talk about empowerment!
Tony and I had a great talk about work we’ve done and how the world has changed. I was already primed for the conversation. A few days earlier I had watched some workers on a hydraulic platform replaced some of the caulking on the outside of the WILI building.
This got me to thinking about the work crews I used to watch in lower Manhattan. Many of the crews were from other countries and they brought techniques from Ireland, Jamaica, Russia, Mexico, China. Often these techniques used brain and brawn to do a lot of work modern Americans are used to seeing done with heavy, power equipment.
By Mark Svetz
Or in another case, “Get your knee under that shovel handle. Don’t try to lift that with your back.” I knew somehow, although I think I didn’t appreciate how valuable it was until much later, that my father was giving me the benefit of his practical experience from a life of hard work. I am grateful to him now.
That thread vibrated again a few days later, down at the Wrench. The Wrench in the Works Collective, runs a space at 861 Main Street, Willimantic, for concerts, readings, workshops and, like this time, great conversation. A few of us were sitting around talking, when one man said something about technology freeing people from the drudgery of repetitive tasks.
We had a lively talk about the relative advantages of technology. I have been thinking a lot lately that we should, maybe, reign in all the science for a while. I remember a teacher when I was at Community College, many years ago, who wished we could “call a moratorium on science, to give philosophy a chance to catch up.” He struck a chord with me then, and I am inclined to agree with him today.
At one point at the Wrench, our friend asked “Would you rather have to go to a stream and haul water, or just turn on the faucet?”
Sarah surprised him, I think, when she quickly answered, “I’d rather haul water.”
I’m pretty sure I agree with Sarah. I would rather live in a community where it was possible and practical to haul water. I wish there were a way to slow it all down enough so that some of our communities could, once again, be like that.
A community, after all, is formed when a group of people recognize they need one another to build a life in a sometimes difficult world. In my vision, technology enables us to stand alone and watch a machine do the work. I’d rather have a person on the other end of the rope, working in consort with me to get a job done.
Our lives have been accelerating so quickly in the direction of greater complexity. As I search for ways to simplify, I’m trying to keep things on a scale where human power still moves a lot. It seems to resonate across the fabric of my life.
Now, I wonder where and how it will vibrate next?
Mark Svetz and Sarah Winter own Clothworks, a shop on Church Street in Downtown Willimantic, where they make and sell clothing and bags. They may soon have a treadle sewing machine that runs on foot power.
For example, Sarah and I watched, over a few days, while three men on one of those hydraulic platforms swung sledge hammers by hand and knocked down an entire six-story building! They didn’t even have to close the sidewalk. At other sites in the neighborhood, crews from a different tradition bring in a crane and block the street until the work is done.
I watched masons building a six-story building out of concrete block and brick. They hauled every single brick, every single block, up from the street with a rope and pulley. One man on the bottom, one man on the top.
I saw this repeatedly in our neighborhood during the building boom of the 90s. One crew hauls concrete blocks with a rope and pulley, while on a different project, the crew erects a huge elevator, blocking half a street for weeks on end, to accomplish essentially the same work. I developed a fascination for how much can be done, more or less by hand.
The elegance and grace of people using their bodies to accomplish enormous amounts of work is worth watching. It also reminded me of things I was told as a boy.
“Put your back into that,” my father would yell as we raised a rock a few inches to get a smaller rock under it. “Lay into it. Like you mean it, now!”
WILLIMANTIC –July, 2007
