Foundry

I welded mostly on the knuckle turntable. A steel wheel, maybe fifteen feet across, with I-bars welded to it like the hour markings on a clock. There were three sections around the wheel. One for a loader to put knuckles in between the I-bars and remove the finished knuckles. A second section had a booth around it with rubber curtains. That is the welder's booth. On either side, a red button to stop the wheel, and in front of the welder, above the wheel's axis was a gaping hood that sucked up dust and fumes. To the right was a cage around a motor that turned a large tire. The tire pressed to the turntable, and kept it moving. The third section was the air arcer, curtained off like the welder. There, another toothless but respected man used an air arc to cut the steel nubs off the casting. Air arcing is melting metal and then shooting the molten out with compressed air in a noisy cone of spark and smoke. Then the knuckles, welded and air arced, went back to the loader, a boy of eighteen, who used a winch on a yellow I-beam overhead to lift the knuckles off the table and onto a tray to be taken away.

The winches were on every few support beams. Sometimes, when I worked in the open, I would look up to see men leaning forward like draft animals to pull the I-bar around on it's hinge. The bar was ten or so feet above them, and they pulled it by the winch hook and controller, one in each hand. They'd lean, their hands high, the weight of their bodies up in their arms instead of on their feet, and they'd look like large marionettes, attached at the hand to the rod above them. They rarely go out of the swoop of their bar. All day, the bar swings back and forth, and they sway under it.

When I wasn't frustrated in the booth, I would look up to see the black opening that swooped up to suck out all the air around me. I began to think of the turntable as a large spinning woman, whose skirts I worked under all day. The likeness to Chaplin's Modern Times was so striking that I couldn't laugh, and any self pity felt illegitimate. Jeff would turn the table up, and I'd scramble to weld as fast as the table offered more and more knuckles.

Eventually, I found a sort of dance. I can still sort of remember it. Push, pull,flip up, flip over, and the last part, the grace of it, was to spin the ninety five pound shape on it's head correctly into place for the air arcer. This is all done with the left hand only, because the right hand holds the stinger, the electrode. But you don't really use your arm, you use your body weight. It is very taichi like in that your whole body moves the piece. In the end, you simply sway forward, sway left, sway right, and back. Your body moves the metal and your arm guides. Four hundred and fifty times in eight hours.

Never have your hand beneath the knuckle. When it falls, let it. I tried to catch a knuckle a few times, and once the knuckle caught my finger between itself and the corner of the I-bar, and my fingernail died and fell off.

The dance is impossible to teach exactly, and it seems like everyone who learns the turntable does it their own way. The dance is imperative. You could never weld enough knuckles in a day without a dance, and maybe more importantly, you could never let your body go on autopilot without a dance.

The Dance is elaborated and spiced by the movements of the right hand with the stinger. The left hand might hold the knuckle up in suspense as the right hand globs on metal to a crack, and a satisfying release when both hands let go and the knuckle spins down into place like a high diver. Other bits of personal flair include the jerk of your neck as you flick down the welding hood. Finally, when you dance with ease, you add song.

At first, I sang to pass the time, and to keep my morale. The foundry is loud, and everyone wears ear plugs, so no one can hear much. Most people were also wearing respirators, or sometimes airstreams, which are helmets that look like props from sci-fi movies, fully enclosing the head, so everyone's voice was muffled. I sang loud, because no one could hear me. I thought I might seem silly, singing in the foundry.

One day, as I watched Jeff weld, I heard him sing beautifully. Really beautifully. In his voice is a love of singing, and a love of his own voice. I don't mean that he “loved his own voice” in a self important sense, but that he knew how to make sounds that pleased him, and he celebrated his voice to himself, and sang with comfort and confidence.

“I heard you singing a little bit ago.”

“Oh yeah. You gotta sing. Or you'll go crazy. You go around here and everybody's singing to themselves.”

“You've got a good voice.”

“Yeah, you know, there's no job that ain't work, there's no job that you gowna love, but maybe music. I could spend hours in the studio, doing production. I think if things mighta been different, I'da been making music. That ain't work to me.”

He is the lead welder, in a huge building of men singing to themselves unabashedly.