Da Kine

Joe Kine, one of the last high scalers to perform this amazing job, is a reminder that it is the heart and the soul of every individual which allows celebrations to spread across the globe. We're talking from international soccer to a day set aside to commemorate independence. For, without one, then none.

Joe Kine, how I would have liked to know you, the way you felt hanging so high in the sky against that red-black canyon wall. Did you ever fear for your life, were there moments that kept you wondering if today would be your last? Or did you just get used to what you were doing, not thinking of the danger so much as the job at hand?

Well, here's to you, Joe. And to the sculpture at the dam which celebrates your life as a high scaler. Though you were so much more than a scaler in your own "kine-ness" you represented then and now what we will always need in the future--a human being to be celebrated for performing the extraordinaire.

Crying for fair

Fair. Equivalent. Equal. Only in mathematics can we celebrate such an expression when it means what one gets the other gets as well. Mothers and teachers make such distinctions quite often because children come to expect this, are told being fair is the best way to be.

And yet there is war.

Thus on this side of the equation someone wants something for which the one on the other cannot or will not give. Mutually both sides cry for fair. They fight for it. Are diligent until the end for it. And so a warrior that has learned what fair is by way of upbringing or education must then learn how to fight for what they believe fairness is.

In the 1930's as the Hoover Dam was just starting to be built, if a man got a job working on this project he probably didn't cry for fair when he was told he'd only make four dollars a day and be expected to work eight hours straight. In fact, most workers accepted this wage with great satisfaction, just to have a job at all, even though many had earned twice the amount and more before the depression.

Thus maybe being "fair" is really just ideology, unless of course it's mathematics.
However, for those who have fought a war on behalf of fairness, towards an idea of what fair is, let that person be honored for it, to the nth degree.

For without the people who take a stand for what they believe, there is only mathematics, and in that the equation of humankind becomes nil.

Dam Daze

Sometimes I imagine the heat of it all, down in the canyon, mid summer. I imagine walking inside one of the diversion tunnels, where the stale air was said to reach 140 degrees or more. I see myself riding a huge jumbo rig back up against the rock inside this tunnel, handing off the dynamite or Hercules to my partner to set into the rock. The sweat is dripping and we don't notice it anymore, our job is getting done. Our work at hand is so important to us we nearly faint from heat exhaustion but barely notice the stagger in our walk, the weak grip we take as we exit the tunnel waiting for the blast to complete...
The exciting times of working and living so close to the bone, being so taxed, unaware of anything else but the work...this is not the life of kings and queens, but rather of somebody that has left behind peaceful desires for a paycheck and yes, the knowledge I've done a good job. Yet, being in the tunnel, suffocating from heat, sweating to exhaustion, muscle to muscle, the heaviness of it all, it seems as if it's all I ever wanted. Otherwise, knowing the ridiculousness of the job, (cutting into walls of canyon rock for what good reason but to build a dam that would "control" a river for the benefit of development?) wouldn't I walk right out? Take a ferry across river, hike my way into the mountains, live off the land as I went? But nobody did that. And if they did they were no hero.
Sometimes I imagine what we'd be like if we didn't follow what we were made to believe. Yet we do follow...and we do the work...and at the end of the day we are too tired for much dreaming. And then we return...into the heat mist of the next day...