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Guest Post: Difficult Feats, Pointless Tasks

 

My friend Jacob Haverfield is a naturalist, among other things. What follows are a couple of excerpts from a letter he once sent me, about adventures out in various fields. I will try to avoid building things up too much, but will say that this is stuff to savor.

The first section is about his time documenting an invasive plant species in the desert. The second is about birding. Enjoy.

  1. Climbing Through Thorns

I have yet to develop or discover a vocabulary which accurately describes much if anything at all about trying to move through an environment populated, or rather dominated, by “Salt-cedar.” Salt-cedar ingeniously pushes out all other forms of under-story or competing natives by copiously shedding its salt- laden leaves into a thick litter on the ground, stifling all other seedlings in a kind of toxic blanket. It can grow unspeakably large – as tall and broad as a 30-foot cottonwood – but seems more commonly to top out at about 9 –12 feet.  It is unspeakably difficult to move through. Only Himalayan blackberry would be more horrific. If a fire were to break out while you were in the center of even a smallish stand of Salt-cedar, your odds of escaping would not be good; not only is the ground a tinderbox of leaf-litter, and the “forest” thick with dead shoots, but the bare fact is that you cannot move beyond a predictably,  unbelievably slow speed. You are impeded. You either cannot stand up because it is so thick, and therefore must crawl, or you cannot move forward because it is so thick. It is common to spend an hour and a half traversing 800 linear feet of flat ground. We often emerge looking as though we had encountered a mountain lion somewhere in the middle. We are filthy, covered in black Tamarisk dust: a glassy, charcoal-like substance that when you are thrashing through the thickets fills the air much like a cloud of burning pencil graphite.

Claustrophobia is a common sensation. If you have crawled your way into this shit, there are no shortcuts for getting back out. The branches are strong enough that you build upper-body strength pushing against their springy masses, but not so strong as to let you climb very high. Sometimes you can walk suspended above the ground by as much as six feet, but not on what you would think of as limbs, more a chaotic basket of many branches whose overlapping points miraculously, though precariously, suspend you for a time on a springy thicket which inevitably collapses, leaving you entangled like a Christmas tree ornament.  Protective glasses are essential, as your face is gouged at from every sudden and surprising angle at regular intervals of say three stabs to the face per foot of progress. It is rather like having a tree grab you by the face as you pass through. If you find yourself in a “clearing” within this horrifying jungle, wherein you have a few inches between your face and some pointy-ended branch, you stand (if you can) and survey the strange freedom of your limbs’ extension as if this might be a master bedroom, or a spacious campsite.

It could be worse, and it often is. But there is something about enduring these degrading afternoons which sharpens the sense of humor. Performing difficult feats to accomplish pointless tasks seems to be good for humans, for some reason.

2. Birding Is Your Ideas About Birds

The people I am working with are generally of a wonderful sort.  Birding is an imaginative exercise as much as a taxonomic one. The interpretation of birdsong requires imagination in order to distinguish one call from another, a feat which is absolutely essential to identification, both to distinguish visually similar members of different species, and because birds are so often heard and not seen.  Associations and descriptive analogy are commonplace – as with the unforgettable “quick, three beers” which describes the Olive-sided Flycatcher’s song so well, and establishes it firmly in your mind. Working with nerdy musicians means I am privy to a lot of apt musical descriptions and comical associations.   Bird songs are described as “the broken robot”, or “the ghost call”, or “the digital trill”, the typewriter “chak, chak chak” call note of Bewick’s Wren. It is absolutely essential to find some way for your mind to play this trick, to sort through a cacophony of blended species noise, and separate the strands by identifiable monikers. Needless to say many, many, birds sound grossly alike, and only some part of their song stands alone or is unique. The more you listen, the more they sound different, and the more startlingly the diversity reveals itself. As soon as you have one bird placed in your mind, identifiable by song, then room is made to hear the next baffling call. It is rather like hearing one long garbled call, and then focusing the light, and seeing that in fact fifteen separate species are singing.

Identifying a bird requires a lot of detective work, running a storm of vague signals through the kludge of your mind and trying to come to some conclusion.  We listen to a lot of recordings to drill, but local dialect can be surprising.  Sonograms are interesting to give you a sense of the rhythm or spacing of notes.  Obviously there are the guide books; each has its strengths and weaknesses. In an unexpected way guidebooks can be misleading by being too “perfect.” A book filled with coffee-table-worthy photographs of good focus, close-up detail, and perfect lighting and contrast may seem like a good choice for getting a sense of what a bird looks like, but I’m starting to suspect that a better ― that is more realistic ― field-readying type would contain only distant images, high-contrast (either too bright or too dark), half-hidden or blurred by movement; that is to say a nebulous cloud of vague clues. A puzzle, requiring imagination.

You gather as many clues as you can, none of which exclusively identifies the bird, and attempt to triangulate certainty, a linked series which together forms an image.  In a very weird way birding is about your ideas about birds. Flight pattern (flutter, swoop, wobble, dart), location (high, low, mid), prominence or hiddenness, environment. A bird’s age or molting stage dramatically affects its appearance, and posture can make a bird look remarkably different (if it’s hunched or elongated). The good birders look at a swarm of hundreds of ducks of several types, all on a pond together, and swiftly somehow find the few, rare species.

 

If you are new to this blog, you might like to click Here to seek out other articles. If enough of you enjoyed this piece, and if you let me know, I will put up some more of Jacob’s work. I hope this happens — he has a great bit about the Grand Canyon.

As always, I’ll mention that you can scroll down to the bottom of this page if you would like to receive email notifications of new posts. We’ve just passed the magical 1,000 subscription mark. Join in the fun.

Oh, and cruise through our Shop if you are interested in superlative rigging gear, services, and educational materials.

Fair leads,

Brion

 

 

Puzzle Contest: Anomalous Sheets, the Answer

 

Our most recent Puzzle garnered a record high number of views – and a record low number of answers, so I guess it was a tough-but-interesting one. Here it is:

There are two sailboats going to weather in a breeze. They have identical waterline lengths, and identical sail plans, with a main and a jib each, of identical sizes. Both are in identical true windspeed, in clear air, in the same sea state, temperature, etc., and their sails are trimmed for maximum efficiency. But the sheet load on one of the boats is fully four times the sheet load on the other. How can this be?

As I mentioned in some posted hints, knowing the sheet load is the basis for selecting all of the rope, blocks, winches, and other hardware associated with the sheets. If you err on the too-light side, things can break, which can be painful or worse. And if you err on the too-heavy side, things can be painfully and needlessly expensive.

The answer in short: sheet load varies directly with the size of the sail, but varies with the square of the apparent windspeed. So if your boat is going, say, twice as fast as another boat, in the same true windspeed, your sheet load will be four times higher, even if the sails are identical, because the apparent wind is twice as fast. You can, as the puzzle says, have identical sails, course, and waterline, and have both boats be trimmed utterly efficiently, and still have hugely different loads.

As some of you said, there are other things that could make a difference. For instance, if one of the boats has too little ballast, a shallow keel, and badly-stowed gear, and the other boat has a lot of lead at the bottom of a deep keel, and also has a bunch of large people sitting on the weather rail, then the latter could stand up and absorb a lot more wind energy than the former, and thus get lots more load on its sheets, potentially even four times more, without needing to go twice as fast as the other boat. It all depends on how hard the wind is blowing, and how easy it is to knock the other boat over.

These factors were nicely combined by our winner this week, so it is time to introduce him. Congratulations Terveisin Janne Immonen, your name was randomly selected from the (tiny) pool of correct answers!

Here is what Janne had to say:

Answer is a case of weight distribution. The boat with heavier sheet load has lower CG and thus more RM and thus gets more umph from the sails. That raises sheet loads, speed, and apparent wind speed which results in even more sheet load.

 

Janne, be in touch for where to send your copy of the Rigger’s Apprentice.

For all of you out there who kinda-sort thought they knew the answer, but didn’t send it in, come on, take a chance next time, especially because next week the prize is going to be from a Famous Guest Presenter, to be announced when the Puzzle is posted, next Wednesday, May 9th.

Meanwhile feel free to indulge yourself reading what is now a sizable backlog of articles and Puzzles on this blog, like “To Engineer Is Human,”“ the three-part “Return” series, “How to Build a Wisconsin Supper Club,” and many more.

Also feel free to wander through our Shop of rigging essentials, and the rest of the site.

Oh, just one more thing: I am perhaps irrationally excited to announce that we now have over 1,000 subscribers to this blog. It seems to be catching on. If you would like to receive email notifications of new posts, just scroll down and sign in.

Fair leads,

Brion Toss

 

 

 

 

Hints for the Anomalous Sheets Puzzle

The current Puzzle appears to have some of you stumped. The principles behind it are of serious importance when it comes to choosing things like sheets, blocks, and winches for your boat, so I’m going to take the step of offering some more hints on the answer. These hints are meant to help with some of the possible answers.

Here is the puzzle: There are two sailboats going to weather in a breeze. They have identical waterline lengths, and identical sail plans, with an identical main and a jib on each boat. Both are in identical true windspeed, in clear air, in the same sea state, temperature, etc., and their sails are trimmed for maximum efficiency. But the sheet loads on one of the boats are fully four times the sheet loads on the other. How can this be?

 

First hint: heavy boats can – and often do – have lower sheet loads than lighter ones of the same size. So ask yourself, what is a big characteristic of very light boats? Why would you make a boat light?

Second hint. With two boats of exactly the same size and weight, one might have higher sheet loads than the other, depending on how the weight is distributed.

Third hint: The Mother of All Winds is Apparent.

 

If you think you have an answer (or two, or three), post to puzzle@briontoss.com. Deadline for entries is noon Pacific Time, Monday April 30th. We will randomly choose a winner from among the sufficiently realistic entries, and announce the winner on May 2nd. Our Fabulous Prize this week: a copy of my book, The Rigger’s Apprentice, complete with suitable inscription and autograph.

To see my most recent post, about rigging misadventures aboard the bark Sea Cloud, visit here.

 

Adventures in Maintenance, “Sea Cloud” Edition

 

Many years ago, I spent a few months as a rigger aboard the bark Sea Cloud. With about 32,000 square feet of sail when everything is up, this is a vessel that demands a good deal of skill, attention, and energy from its crew. Usually we were up to the challenges it provided. But sometimes, not so much…

 

  1. The Spike

A crewmember, we’ll call him Todd, was up on the foremast, when he dropped his marlingspike. It seems amazing to say it, but he had no lanyard on the tool, so it promptly hurtled towards the deck, far below.

This was a yachty-style spike, with a flattened handle end with a slot cut in it, for opening shackles. It made for a lousy shackle wrench, but had excellent aerodynamic properties, so the spike quickly oriented pointy-side-down.

Directly below was the narrow elevated deck in front of the wheelhouse, and standing on that deck, conversing, were the first mate and the bosun. They were perhaps an arm’s length apart. The bosun later said, “We were just chatting, and suddenly I felt a puff of air on my cheek, and in the same instant heard a sharp THWACK, and I looked down and saw this pissy little spike buried about two inches into the teak deck. It was vibrating.”

The bosun and the mate looked at the spike, then looked aloft, and saw Todd, frozen in place, with the horrified/relieved/embarrassed expression that people wear when they have narrowly avoided killing somebody. The bosun gestured him back down to deck, and without saying a word walked him to the tool locker and handed him a needle gun. This is basically a cross between a multi-pronged tattoo machine and a jackhammer. It is ostensibly for chipping rust off metal surfaces, but is actually a form of corporal punishment, meted out by bosuns to deserving souls. A few hours with use will leave you deaf, numb, and with aching joints and a stunned brain.

 

  1. The Sheave

After performing a suitable duration of penance, Todd was let back into the more pleasant workings of the ship, and was eventually assigned the tricky task of removing the foremast’s t’gallant halyard sheave for repair. This sheave, essentially a 50 lb. bronze hockey puck with a hole for an axle, was set in the mast, well over 100 feet above deck. Todd went up with all suitable tools – with lanyards on all of them – and set about his work. He wasn’t worried about the sheave falling out, as it was stuck fast in its mortise, so he began by driving the axle out, seizing its own lanyard onto it as it emerged from the side of the mast.

At first, he couldn’t figure out how to put a lanyard on the sheave before driving it out, but then he noticed the nice convenient hole where the axle used to be, so he threaded a piece of rope through the mast and the sheave, tied the ends together around the mast, and commenced bashing on the sheave with a hammer and punch. I am not making this up. Naturally the sheave severed the rope as it slid out of the mortise, and Todd watched, with a horrible sense of déjà vu, as the sheave plummeted towards deck.

This time it fell aft and a little to starboard of where his marlingspike had gone, right towards a rack of five windsurfer boards that were stored outside the captain’s cabin. The deck was spared serious damage because the sheave was slowed by its passage through every single board. The captain heard the noise of the impact, opened his door, looked at the remains of the boards, looked up, looked back at the boards, shook his head, and went back into his cabin. Todd became reacquainted with the needle gun.

 

  1. The Trapeze

We had a monster of a rugby-playing, beer-drinking, ponderous deckhand we’ll call Glen. He was a guy with a face that could make a freight train take a dirt road, but he was not unpleasant to be around. Except when he slept; when he slept he would more or less continuously cough, sneeze, snore, fart, burp and talk, sometimes all at once, all night long. When he was awake, he was occasionally handy for moving large heavy objects, and he came to take pride in his strength. His station was on the mizzen mast, and his favorite job was to furl squaresails. To perform this task you lay out on the footropes, lean way forward over the yard, grab fistfuls of canvas, and heave them up onto the top of the yard, then go back for more. Glen was very tall, with gorilla-length arms, so he could gather in and hoist a lot of canvas. As he developed his technique, people started watching him instead of helping to furl. They were amazed and complimentary about what he could do. Glen was pleased, and they didn’t have to work as hard, so everybody was happy.

One day, at the peak of his abilities, Glen was on the mizzen lower topsail yard, pretty much furling the entire port side of the sail all by himself, when the yard captain – let’s call him Chris – came out on the yard. He wanted to get to the outboard end, to tidy up the sail out there, so as he approached Glen he said, “Just hold on a moment, I’m going to step behind you.” Glen leaned forward and was still, and Chris thought this meant it was okay to pass by, so he unclipped from the jackstay and stepped behind. But Glen hadn’t heard him, didn’t even know he was there; he was so still because he was concentrating, bracing himself for a world-record furling heave, which he exploded into at precisely the wrong moment, knocking Chris completely off the yard.

I was looking aft at that moment, and saw Chris silhouetted, spread-eagled in thin air. It was an awful moment, because it was obvious that Chris was about to take a probably-fatal fall. But when Glen pulled up on the sail, it caused his feet to push the footrope back, like a trapeze swinging into the reach of Chris. He grabbed it as he fell, hung swinging for a moment, then calmly asked Glen to move inboard, whereupon he swung back up to the yard, and finished furling the sail. Shortly thereafter, Glen became familiar with the workings of a needle gun.

 

  1. The Helper

Some days are perfect, and this one looks like it is going to be one of them. The sea is a series of gentle, regular, sparkling swells, the morning sky is an impossible shade of blue, with just enough clouds to keep the sun from overdoing it, and there is a pleasant breeze driving us along. My job this morning is to attend to a misbehaving yard band at the main t’gallant. It is a complex task, involving coordination with deck crew to tighten and slacken assorted strings, plus lots of parts to secure and switch out, plus a good deal of semi-acrobatic choreography at the end of the yard. The work requires more than one person aloft, and the bosun has assigned a stolid, steady German to help me. We’ll call him Heinrich. Together we festoon ourselves with tools and parts, and begin to climb.

I lead the way as we climb the lower shrouds, to the top of the lower mast, which is taller than most sailboat masts. We clamber out on the futtocks, up onto the platform, and commence climbing the topmast shrouds, and out on the next set of futtocks, and then up the t’gallant shrouds. By now we can feel the sway of the boat. We are well over 100 feet up, and motion that is scarcely noticeable at deck has become travel through an arc of 20 feet or more. We keep going, and eventually we lay out onto the yard, and make our way to its finely-tapered end. I am organizing my thoughts about the order of business when Heinrich catches up, sidling along the footrope, and comes to a stop next to me.

“Ohh,” he says. I am as drunk as shit.” Then he throws up.

“Right,” I say, “Back to deck. You first.”

So we make our way inboard to the mast, back down all those shrouds, back to where the bosun is waiting for us, wondering what the bloody hell is going on. Heinrich sheepishly explains, and the bosun nods sympathetically.

“Oh, sounds like you feel awful,” says the bosun. “I’ve got just the thing for a cure.” And he heads for the tool locker.

 

 

The Sea Cloud is still sailing, still magnificent, and no doubt still providing its crew with challenges and delights. To see about being a crewmember, visit Unicrew.

If you’d prefer to be a passenger, visit Sea Cloud Cruises.

Enjoy the story? Looking for more? You’re in luck! “Falling,” which in includes all of these stories along with other tales from aloft, both thrilling and amusing, is now for sale on Amazon.com in handy e-book form! Or click here to get it on Apple iBooks!

From dropped tools to collapsed towers to near-fatal falls, the litany of accidents and near-accidents is long… and the sometimes miraculous outcomes are both instructive and thought-provoking.

Not a technical manual, “Falling” is nonetheless a must-have companion in the library of anyone working at heights.

Our current Puzzle has gotten a lot of interest, but so far not many entries. If you are up for a challenge, you can see it here. Hints: sheet load does not mean the clew load divided by a purchase; and true wind is not the only wind.

If you would like to read other articles and puzzles, you can dig in here.

 

Thanks for all the ongoing kind words that so many of you have sent about my writing. If you know someone who might also enjoy this site, please let them know where to find me. You and they can subscribe for email notifications at the bottom of this page.

 

 

Puzzle Contest: Anomalous Sheets

There are two sailboats going to weather in a breeze. They have identical waterline lengths, and identical sail plans, with an identical main and a jib on each boat. Both are in identical true windspeed, in clear air, in the same sea state, temperature, etc., and their sails are trimmed for maximum efficiency. But the sheet loads on one of the boats are fully four times the sheet loads on the other. How can this be?

There are several possible answers that we know of, and probably several more that you creative puzzle-solvers will come up with. Send your answer(s) to Puzzle Contest by noon, Pacific time, April 30th. In case the link doesn’t work for you, that address is puzzle@briontoss.com. Please don’t post your answers online. We will randomly choose a winner from among the sufficiently realistic entries, and announce the winner on May 2nd. Our Fabulous Prize this week: a copy of my book, The Rigger’s Apprentice, complete with suitable inscription and autograph.

 

On a separate note, thanks to all of you who were in touch to say that you liked my most recent article, To Engineer Is Human. You can find it and other posts and puzzles in this site’s Blog section. In the near future, I’ll be posting some Special Guest Articles, so stand by.

And if you’d like to receive email notifications when new posts go up, you can scroll down to subscribe.

To Engineer is Human

 

 

All sailboat rigging is engineered, which is to say that, somewhere along the line, someone gave some thought to how much load was going to come where, and worked to make everything strong enough that things probably wouldn’t break.  This engineering might have been done to the fifteenth decimal place, using near-sentient computers to track vectors, moduli, moments, accelerated loads, and all the other variables we’ve managed to identify, quantify, and give Latinate names to.  Or the engineering’s most visible outward manifestation might have been the squint in the eyes of the semi-literate artisan who gauged all those variables from a somewhat less formalized data base.  Neither approach, by itself, would necessarily be a guarantor of success or failure, nor would any other single approach, because  intuition, memory, comparison, analysis, analogy, and all the other mental tools available to us are only tools, only ways to filter and massage and play with information.  We get it right – sometimes – but that’s a long way from saying that the process of engineering leads inevitably to structural satori.  In the words of writer Henry Petroski, “To engineer is human”; we do our best, but the outcome is an expression of our own wonderfully, quirkily imperfect minds.

 

In rigging, I believe the imperfection is often amplified, because the general populace understands tension structures much less well than they understand buildings, engines, plumbing, and other common technologies. You get a lot more anomalous, off-the-chart weirdness in rigging than you get in other engineered forms; people charge in, thinking “It’s just some strings holding up a stick; how complex can it be?”  I once had a client who wanted to make a really dangerous modification to his mast, making it taller without compensating for the changes in unsupported length or the decreased staying angles.  I went through the numbers, but to no avail.  “Brion”, he finally said, “I’m a hydraulics engineer, I know what I’m doing”.  I was too stunned to speak for a minute. Obviously he saw rig design as an intrinsically simple exercise and hydraulics engineering as an intrinsically involved one, so that if you had mastered the latter you had somehow mastered the former. That this was not the case was brought home by the behavior of the mast after his modifications.

 

So riggers operate under a double design challenge: they must deal with an exquisitely elaborated, multi-variable, constantly evolving art; and they must fight the prevalent assumption that what they’re doing is somewhat less mentally challenging than cleaning a swimming pool.

If they’re not up to those challenges, what you get is, as it turns out, an all-too-typical contemporary sailboat rig:  wire too big or too small; weak and/or corrosion-prone terminals; weak and/or foul-led chainplates and tangs; out-of-tune tune: frustratingly-led running rig of less-than-ideal construction; and all the other details, profound and incremental, that add up to decreased performance, safety, sailing ease, and appearance.

 

There are two reasons that we don’t see more rig failures than we do. The first is that sailboats live in in an “artificial safety factor,” because they are – or should be – engineered to withstand far higher loads than they are ever likely to see in their entire lives. A typical monohull rig, for instance, should be engineered to withstand loads at the vessel’s maximum righting moment, which might occur at about 60 degrees of heel. This is not an angle that a boat is likely to see, but it could happen, so we have to design around the possibility. Not content with that, we layer on a considerable safety factor, too. In the real world one has to be kind of crazy to heel one’s boat even as much as 30 degrees. Too much spilled coffee and sliding sailors. That kind of heel does happen, and it can feel scary, but the loads there are at maybe a quarter of the strength of the rig. Multihulls tend to live closer to their maximum righting moment, which is one reason that for them we compensate with an even higher safety factor.

Since our rigs are so much stronger than they need to be, they hardly ever break, so it is easy to be lulled into a false sense of security. The trouble is that you don’t get to choose when your boat goes to full righting moment – you could get caught by a gust at any time. Perhaps more significantly, as we are lulled things degrade, and sometimes, given attitudes about rigging, they weren’t optimal to begin with.

The second reason we don’t see more rig failures is that, somewhere along the line, there usually are people in design and fabrication who understand what is actually happening in a rig, and are taking things seriously. They produce gear that is so strong, so appropriate, so right for the job, that it’s hard to foul it up completely. You might think of this as the social aspect of engineering; at any remotely advanced technological level, making things is a team effort, and the members of a good team can make up for the shortcomings of other team members.  Every time I install a toggle on a rig, I take it on faith, backed up by experience, that the people who smelt the ore, formulated the alloy, formed the plate, set the specs on the bending machine, and made the clevis pins, knew what they were doing. Or at least that most of them did. What is more, I have to believe that they cared about what they were doing, and that part of that caring was expressed in educating others, bringing them along for their own sake, as well as the sake of the team. If they do this, I can keep counting on them. This caring is a blessing on every piece of gear I install. If it is absent, all of my elaborate calculations, fussing, and opinions on what’s right are reduced, at least, in their significance.

I believe that all of us want to do things well, and that we only need to become acquainted with the rewards of doing things well: satisfaction; autonomy; a sense that you are part of something greater than yourself; and the inspiring burden of knowing that you are responsible for the safety of other people. And yes, on the mundane side, a likelihood of ongoing employment. This urge to do well is so strong that, to paraphrase Mr. Petroski, you might say that to be human is to engineer.

 

 

Note: If the above appealed to you, then you will probably enjoy Mr. Petroski’s book To Engineer is Human. It inspired the title of this piece, and its content, and much of my professional and personal life. You can find it through any bookstore worthy of the name.

 

Our catalog has been largely overhauled recently, thanks to the tender ministrations of our friend and techie Scott Wilson. Take a look around. Thanks, Scott.

You’ll find lots of other articles in the blog section of our site. I always love hearing from you, so feel free to chime in with suggestions, corrections, puzzle ideas, etc.

 

 

louis-xiv-bathroom-after

Rigging the Bathroom, the Answer

In last week’s Puzzle we took up the topic of privacy in a hotel bathroom. Here is the setup:

 

In the illustration above there is a hotel bathroom. The doors on either side open into adjacent rooms, which share the bathroom. In similar situations, hotels (and private residences) have put locks on the doors, so that someone in the bathroom could be assured of privacy, and all they have to do is to unlock the other door before they return to their own room.

Unfortunately, people often forget to unlock the other door. Pounding and shouting ensue. But in this hotel, the management came up with a solution, involving two short pieces of rope, that solved the problem perfectly. What did they do?

This situation is an ancient one, at least as old as bedrooms with shared bathrooms, and the difficulties of the arrangement might well be part of the reason that so few bedrooms nowadays feature shared bathrooms.

But as Henry Petroski notes in his wonderful book, The Evolution of Useful Things, the management of L’Hotel Louis XIV came up with a solution for it:

Rigging the Bathroom Answer, Petroski

I specified rope in my version, but the hotel used leather straps. Either way the solution is to hook, shackle, or tie the two pieces together when you are in the bathroom. Because the doors open into the rooms, this prevents either door from being opened. Privacy is assured against entry from both rooms. You have to disconnect the two pieces in order to leave, thus also automatically unlocking the neighbor’s door.

Before we get to the alternate answers, including one major doozy, let’s pause to congratulate our winner…. Greg Bridges! Congratulations, Greg. Be in touch to tell me where to send your copy of The Sailmaker’s Apprentice, a truly significant book, and one I recommend to all sailors. Heck, it is such a beautiful book, I’d recommend it to anyone. Lots of other interesting things going on at the author’s site, The Artful Sailor

Several entrants said you don’t need two pieces – just one long one that you loop over one doorknob or the other. This has a certain appeal, but you would need doorknobs that could securely and easily hold and release a loop that was placed on them. You’d also be dealing with an inconveniently long piece, that would live on the floor.

Other entrants came up with wonderfully complicated solutions, some of which might actually work, assuming the hotel’s bathroom-lock-retrofit budget was unlimited. My favorite was contributed by last week’s winner, Aaron Drake. His solution was terrifyingly impressive, and I am now in search of a bathroom to try it out on. If you are ready for an engineering marvel, see Aaron’s Bathroom Rig.

We are now close to having one thousand subscriptions to this blog. Thanks to all of you for your gracious and enthusiastic support. If you’d like to receive notice of a new article or puzzle, scroll down and subscribe.

If you would like to read more of my work, click Here. The current article involves a freight train, a rock festival, and a much, much younger me. And I warmly invite you to visit our Catalog.

Next week’s Puzzle: Anomalous Sheets.

Fair leads,

Brion Toss

An Earnest of Intent Picture

An Earnest of Intent

,

The track ran across the property on a steep-sided, 20-foot-tall embankment. I could see the rails shining in the bright starlight. They stretched off into the glacial plains near Tenino, Washington. A train horn sounded, far away, then again, closer. Chopper handed me the ends of two very, very long extension cords, and said, “When I say go, you plug them together.”

The tracks bisected a 90-acre ranch that was to be the site of a rock festival, Sky River II. It was 1969. At the other end of the country, a much bigger festival was gearing up in Woodstock, New York. But even our smaller event was expected to draw a couple-hundred-thousand people or so. The plan was to have folks park on one side of the embankment, and then funnel them into the performance area through a narrow notch, topped by a trestle, in the middle of the property. Our hope was that thereby at least some people might actually pay to get in. But we were dealing with hippies here, so we understood that quite a few of them were likely to scramble up the embankment, cross the tracks, and scramble down. The problem was the train, an express that brought boxcars full of apples from Wenatchee, and brought them at about sixty miles per hour. If we couldn’t slow that train way down, it seemed inevitable that some number of stoned/daredevil/oblivious gate-crashers were going to get smushed.

So we called up the railroad company, told them our story, asked for a little consideration. They sent out men in suits and hardhats, in a car mounted on train wheels that rolled to a stop near the trestle. The men got out, looked around, pointed, conferred, got back in the car, and drove away. The train kept coming through at sixty.

We called the railroad again, and again, as the date of the festival neared. I was on the crew that built the stage and the vendor shacks, among other things, and every day I saw the train hurtle by, and every day I worried a bit more. We all did. Once, some local kids were lolling on the trestle, watching us longhairs at our work, and the combination of the noise we were making, and the music they were playing, and the novelty we provided resulted in their not noticing that a train was bearing down on them. Fortunately it was a very short trestle, and they were able to get out of the way. But in a few more days there was going to be high-decibel music playing around the clock, for a lot of people. So we called and pleaded some more, but the train kept barreling through.

Our work days were long, and often stretched well into the night, so we would set up generator-powered lights, and drag them and their cables hither and yon. I worked with a man named Chopper, who was the wise, knowledgeable, skillful reason that we had any hope of successfully assembling the needed infrastructure. He was a carpenter, a plumber, an electrician, a labor mediator, a cook, and more. It was said that he could light a campfire in the rain, using green twigs, a pack of wet ZigZag papers, and a single match. We all worshipped him, and we all learned a lot from him.

With the passage of years, I have come to realize that he was also maybe a bit, um, impulsive. But at the time he just seemed creative. One night, with the opening just a few days away, he asked me to help him with a little project. It was late, and I had been running a Ditch Witch all day, then laboring under the lights building the stage, but I said sure. Together we dragged a couple of work lights, on their stands, over to the trestle. We carried one of them up the embankment on one side, then climbed down and took the other one up on the other side. Then we snaked cables from them to a generator, and rigged a separate pair of cords that ran to a junction that connected all the components. We dragged those cords up the embankment, settled in, and waited.

Crickets, a little sough of wind, the hum of the generator, and then that horn, approaching. The train appeared from around a bend, its big headlights jiddering a bit as it thundered towards us. As it got closer its mass and power became palpable. The ground began to shake. When it was about half a mile away, Chopper shouted, “Go!”

I shoved the plugs together, and instantly two bright lights lit up, about five feet off the ground, directly adjacent to the tracks. From where we sat – and from the cab of the train – it looked rather like the lights of a train coming the other way. It didn’t make any sense, but it didn’t have to. The engineer immediately locked up the brakes, and there commenced the most glorious, terrifying, massive skid imaginable. The engines slid past us, speed barely diminished, followed by the boxcars. Huge showers of sparks flew off the wheels, and the air was filled with the sound of steel squealing on steel, and of boxcars slamming into each other. Car after car went by, the speed of the whole assembly gradually diminishing until it all came to a stop, with the last cars hulking next to us, and the front of the train at least a mile past where the skid had started.

For a minute or two there was just some hissing of valves, and the distant thrum of idling engines. Then the train slowly gathered way, accelerated, and made its way into the night.

The next day, and right through the festival, every train slowed to a crawl as it neared the site. Once I saw it stop to let some hitch hikers off. The crew waved at the crowd.

 

There is an ancient term, “An earnest of intent.” It means a sort of downpayment. It is a promise that you will follow through, and evidence that you can follow through. It lets the other person know that you are serious.

 

 

Note: A few years after the events described here, Alfred D’Attore wrote a story on a whole different topic, but with a related theme. With apologies to him, I’ve used the same title.

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Puzzle Contest: Rigging the Bathroom

In the illustration above there is a hotel bathroom. The doors on either side open into adjacent rooms, which share the bathroom. In similar situations, hotels (and private residences) have put locks on the doors, so that someone in the bathroom could be assured of privacy, and all they have to do is to unlock the other door before they return to their own room.

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The Old Ways

 

A friend of mine is a shipwright and carpenter, so he is frequently involved with old construction as well as new, afloat and ashore. While he’ll allow that his predecessors 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 buildings and boats, I find that parts of them 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 one 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 chandeliers that festoon the Capitol building. We got the job as part of the team that was repairing and upgrading the structure after an earthquake. We used Vectran, sized to the fixture at hand (the chandeliers ranged in weight from about 40 lbs to about 9 tons), to provide a backup to the chain that was the primary suspension method.

This building was finished in 1928, and has held together pretty well. 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 dome that is over 200 feet high. An entrance 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, on a correspondingly large scale. It’s an amazing place, full of the kind of attention to detail that exemplifies old-school artisanship. But it is also possessed of some truly execrable, what-were-they-thinking-of construction, the kinds of details that make one wonder what else is whacko.

For instance, the priceless chandeliers that hang above all of the interior walkways are held up by chain that was formed by just butting the ends of the links together — no welding involved. And not just butted together, but butted at the narrow end of the link, so the load tends to wedge the ends apart. Which is precisely what happened; one of these chandeliers fell down in the earthquake, and another two crashed to the floor before we could get our safety lines on. There were noticeable gaps in the links of many of the fixtures we worked on, indicating that they were not far from failing, which to us meant that our backup suspension was more like a secondary primary suspension, if you know what I mean.

Anyway, I don’t mean for this to be only a let’s-slam-those-old-guys essay; while it is true that you can see lots other bad examples in that old building, they are often right next to works of incredible artisanship. At the Capitol, any time we would walk  into a room we would be likely to find some masons or carpenters or painters there, shaking their heads. Sometimes they’d be shaking their heads in exasperation, sometimes in amazement. They might be marveling at a multi-compound-cut corner piece, or an expanse of trompe l’oeil, or they might be looking at some awkward wudge of bricks and mortar that had been hidden behind artful trim. The thing is, all of this work has held together for 90 years, which is a whole lot longer than many of today’s buildings can hope for. Mass, materials quality, and sound overall design were all on the side of the Old Ones, so they could afford to be rough in the details that didn’t show, but even the rough bits were as a rule not shoddy.

Anyway, a theme emerges as one examines the work: in matters of out-and-out artisanship, the kind of skilled fabrication that is utterly dependent on the talent and conscientiousness of the artisan, those builders set the bar extremely high, and you could see their successors, ostensibly on site to repair or prevent temblor damage, recalibrating their own standards, their own aspirations, their own idea of what “done right” means.

The art of building, compromised though it may have been in some ways by greed, a lessening of emphasis on beauty-for-its-own-sake, and, yes, the unavailability of once-common grades and dimensions of materials, has not simply decayed over the years. Far from it. Builders nowadays may be driven too often to put up disposable — and ugly — buildings, but the wiring in those buildings is far less likely to kill their inhabitants than in the Old Days. Likewise the plumbing is likely to work more reliable, with less waste, and the structure is less likely to fall down in an earthquake. And some of the things we construct today would have stupefied our predecessors. We do more with less, we engineer it better, and sometimes we even make it beautiful and durable. Rather than abandoning the skill- and beauty-oriented virtues of the Old Ways, we embrace them, aspire to them, manifest them.

My hope is that, if our predecessors could see some of our work, they would be shaking their heads in awe and admiration at some of the buildings and boats that we are putting together today. I hope they would say something like, “They don’t have much to work with, but they sure make the best of it.” That would make a good slogan for the New Ways.

 

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