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Old Ways

A friend of mine is a shipwright and carpenter, frequently involved with old construction. While he'll allow that his predecessors in the trades did a lot of fine things, he's also dismayed by the amount of shoddy work he finds. "People talk about how the Old Ways were better, how we don't know how to build right any more, how we don't have any skills," he says,"but when I've torn apart some of these old boats and buildings, I sometimes find that they were just slammed together, and the only reason that they lasted as long as they did is that they had really big, amazingly clear, tight-grained wood, and that they used a lot of nails."

I thought about this the other day when I was in the office of Washington State's governor. The governor wasn't in; I was there to install the last of many backup suspension cables for the large-to-massive chandeliers that festoon the Capitol building. We got the job as part of the team that repaired and upgraded the structure after an earthquake a few years ago. We used Vectran rope, sized to the fixture at hand, to supplement the chain that was the primary suspension method.

Now this building was put up in the 1920's, and has held together pretty well for all the years since. It is from the Massive Pile of Stone school of architecture, a classic megalith of a thing, with a multistory wing on either side of a 200-something-foot dome. A stairway as wide as a river delta leads up to giraffe-accessible bronze doors, and just about every interior surface is plated with marble, artfully cut and fitted. It's an amazing place, full of the kind of attention to detail that exemplifies old-style artisanship. With a few exceptions.

No, no, I don't mean that anything was slammed together'. Far from it, the level of care and skill that went into that place is stupefying. And not just the things that are in public view. In the course of our work, we talked to electricians, plumbers, masons, painters, etc., and they all marveled at the wonderfully overbuilt and elegant stuff they came across in the course of the upgrade. We did too, especially in the degree of detail in the carvings and castings of those old light fixtures - things that you couldn't even see from more than five feet away, on fixtures that hung more like fifty feet from the nearest viewer. The exceptions to excellence tended, instead, to be conceptual mistakes, or the results of working with limited technology. So wiring, a marvel of modernity when it was installed, was, in contemporary terms, enough to give an electrical inspector the dry heaves. And plastered walls, great vast panels that bounded the legislative chambers, threatened to cause a sharp decrease in the lawyer population, should another quake occur. In these instances and others, technology had made real advances in the past eighty years.

Our job involved all the chandeliers that hung in important offices, and over pedestrian exit pathways, so that bureaucrats won't have to dodge plummeting Art Deco masterpieces in the event of another quake. The chains that most of the chandeliers hang from, including the ones in the Governor's office, are of a peculiar design, with unwelded links, joined at the bottom or top. So the weight on each link tends to force it open. Bad. At least two chandeliers had fallen during or after the quake, and we found some that were close to having a link fail. Before we came along, the only thing holding the chandelier up, in the event of link failure, would have been the shiny new wiring that had just been installed.

"What were they thinking?", we asked ourselves as we rove and secured our Vectran lanyards. Did they really think that this was the right chain for the job? Was the chain meant to be decorative, and a predecessor of our lanyards meant to take the load? We didn't know. We only knew that, for all practical purposes, our work was the primary suspension, and the wiring the secondary. We worked out a method by which our lines took at least half the total loads, so that in the event of chain failure the effects of shock loading would be minimized. And we developed an evolution of the Stays'l Halyard Hitch to secure the lower end, to compensate for the slickness of the rope. And we scaled the Vectran to compensate for the severe weakening effects of knots on this material.

So, to get back to the Governor's office, I found myself surrounded by some of the best work in human history. Amazing masonry, beautiful design, lovely fixtures, and all in an edifice, no matter how much compromised by greed and shortsightedness, still dedicated to the surpassingly noble concept that humans can conduct their lives in harmony - or at least in workable chaos. Nothing around me was perfect, but all of it had in it evidence of an intent to approach perfection.

As someone who works at times on traditional rigs, I, too, have come across things that only held together because they were massive. I, too, have been disappointed, grieved even, that riggers from the olden days were not the high-minded artistes I might want them to be. Likewise I have often felt pity for the sailors and riggers of old who didn't have Dacron, or epoxy, or computer modeling, or all the other marvels that we can make use of today. But a little reflection shows that my pity is misplaced; the point is not to have the best for what you do, but to do the best with what you have. Not everybody aspires to this nowadays, and not everybody did in times past, but enough of us did - and do - that there is some beauty and graciousness and balance in our lives, whereas by purely rational, skeptical standards there should be none. The Old Ways, the ways we revere, are the ways of those who struggle against the temptation to be merely adequate, who won't listen to the insistent, cynical voice that keeps repeating, "What's the point?", and who leave behind structures and ideas and arts that help the next generation see what the point might be.

Fair leads,
Brion Toss