David Gray "This Years Love"

What better way to understand the human condition by way of Hoover Dam than to say it is a monument to the very core of love...it is this years love as it was that years love and into the future, again met with love. Not for the creation itself but for those involved in the act of creation, the coming together, for being the instrument, the example, for exacting the permanent quality of love itself.

The Tour

Touring the Hoover Dam is a bittersweet experience. It is for one a tourist destination, aka trap. So many visitors to one site, the air is full of "I gotta have something to remind me where I've been," yet the gift store had only a few books on the subject, with a lot of stuff made in foreign countries, which belies the fact that the Hoover Dam supposedly is an icon of American ingenuity...don't get me started. Anyway, with the trapping is also a sense of wonder and awe, as in "can you believe what it took to build this dam?" mixed with all the dam jokes you can imagine...my dam feet hurt, when will this dam tour start, I've never seen such dam tourists...

Meanwhile, crossing the dam by way of being inside the dam is an experience which is a bit heady, considering the location is seven hundred feet above bedrock--an unusual location and half-freaky if you are claustrophobic. Nevertheless, this interior "space" gives the dam's exterior another face, the way one might understand how a clock works by being inside of it.

Often the best part of the tour are the comments by the tour guides. For instance, today a guide suggested that the actual dam was an amazing feat to build, but he believed tunneling the four diversion tunnels were equally impressive, considering safety standards at the time and the fact that each tunnel is almost a mile in length--what with blasting dynamite and racing to get out before the blasts occured...

Anyway, this is exactly why a story on the men who built the dam needs telling, and not just building the dam, but those who worked inside those diversion tunnels. Just like being inside the dam walls, the story of the workers themselves tells how the dam was built.

Hero's Journey Part III--the supernatural aide

Joseph Campbell's Hero's Journey regards the supernatural aide as the helper, the mentor, the one person that gives the hero instructions that he or she could not receive any other way or from any other person. It is why the helper is considered supernatural, because he or she seems to come from out of nowhere.

In the novel, Hard Luck, Jake Adams struggles as the underdog of Eddie McIntyre. Eddie's searing put downs, which appear as joking around, means Jake not only questions Eddie's friendship, he compares himself to Eddie constantly. This exacts jealousy, which only frustrates Jake even more.

As a result, when Jake meets the Apache on the job, he is taught he doesn't have to put up with anything that penetrates his psyche the way that Eddie does. In other words, the Apache understands Jake's frustration and shows him ways to cope.

The summer of 1931 without unions in place to establish regulations to protect the workers from extreme working conditions, and carrying fears of unemployment just beneath the surface, these men were examples of their own kind of tough. They had to look out for, whether they knew it or not, someone or something to help them in a way that wouldn't change the hardship but change their ability to deal with it.

As the desert was unforgiving, the work unforgiving, the men forgave the conditions surrounding them and forged on, each with a supernatural aide, a helper, somebody in their lives that provided the supernatural help needed to endure.

E Clampus Vitus- Railroad Pass

Historically, the Railroad Pass Casino deserves to be celebrated. Not for the fact it is the oldest remaining casino in Nevada, established September 1931, but because of why it was established in the first place. As an outlet of recreation and entertainment for those working on the dam.

It seems all work and no play makes the animal, human or otherwise, dull.
And there was nothing dull in 1931 as the dam was beginning to be the entity it would become. Men desired a place to meet women, um, duh. They also wanted a place where their play was not regulated, where a sense of freedom could be found. Not freedom itself, for that would be considered scandalous. No, the sense of freedom, up there near the top of the desolate canyon of the desert the men enjoyed the feeling of being nearly free.

Hero's Journey Part II

To get a job, any job that paid you enough to eat and have a roof over your head, this was "all" a man was looking for during the 1930s Depression. His needs seemed desperate to obtain, his wants seemingly without virtue. The Depression at that time had tilted life out of balance and it caused fear in men they'd never expected nor experienced. To be refused meant the same thing for many people. Thus when one was refused a job or opportunity there was a rally among others in the same situation.

Part II of Joseph Campbell's Hero's Journey (see June 14 Blog to connect to part I) is the Refusal of the Call. In the story Hard Luck the emotions of everyone are riding on an exterior refusal, in other words the refusal for citizens of the U.S. to get what they need was predominant. When fourteen year old Jake Adams knows things are changing because of his response to other people he's around, he refuses the call to allow these changes to take place. Eddie McIntyre is quick to keep Jake in his place, limiting his esteem, and Jake allows this. Cora White is a girl Jake is interested in, but does she know it? And the boss, (and there are many) challenges Jake at every turn and Jake questions his ability rather than rises up to it.

All along, the sentiment of the time is also heaving downward onto Jake. He will need help now to let the changes that need to happen occur. But who will Jake turn to? Part III Supernatural Aid...

Hero's Journey part 1

According to Joseph Campbell, the Hero's Journey is an archetypal pattern forming the under-structure of every story ever told. It is a pattern that illuminates the stages everyone must go through in order to grow. It's a journey of personal evolution that every human being can identify with. And it all begins with The Call to Adventure.

The Call to Adventure is the point at which the person is first given an idea or notice that everything is going to change, whether he or she knows it or not.

In the historical fiction novel Hard Luck, newly orphaned 14 year old Jake Adams arrives at the site where the Hoover Dam will soon be built. Camping in Ragtown, near the Colorado River, with thousands of others like him waiting to get a job at the dam, he is confronted with three things informing him that change is in the forecast. For one, he meets his antagonist Eddie McIntyre, a bit older and a lot more independent, Eddie sees Jake's hidden side the way a gardener knows what's planted underground. Secondly, there's Cora White, a pretty girl that is ill when Jake meets her and he's able to help her get well using his family medicine. Thirdly, there's the big boss that arrives in Ragtown with an entourage to investigate the passage upriver to the dam. Jake is impressed with the way he stays cool despite men literally begging him for a job.

For this story it is other people in Jake's life that furnish the impetus for change. As Jake confronts the mystery that these three individuals hold for him in his life, he can't get closer to them without sensing the change that is about to occur in his life.

Part II will consider what Campbell refers to as The Refusal of the Call.

A day of rest

Today was a day off. A day decidedly "free" in which there was bike riding, preparing a nice meal, relaxing with entertainment of my choice. It was time that "recharged" for more work, necessary is how it felt, needed as much as water itself.

When considering the workers inside the 140 degree diversion tunnels, working shifts from 4 am to 12 noon or 4 pm to 12 midnight, every single day with no day off for months at a time, the stress seems unimaginable. Four dollars a day with a buck fifty taken out of that for meals, these were overworked underpaid champions of a project that could not be recreated in the same way today.

Yet it's interesting the values at the time the dam was being built, in that the men could eat their fill of all kinds of food at every meal, but to keep their job they had to continue on, like the river itself, to meet the demands seemingly already etched before them.

Which is why the width of the tunnels, the height of the dam, all the work inspires admiration and at the same time is a reminder that such amazing feats often require a negligence of need.