Grace Covill-Grennan
from ANC059: Blockhead
lineage
It’s complicated, what I feel toward the building trades. A deep allegiance and solidarity with other workers of all trades. The oldness and memory of the trade. Pride in the work of a crew that one is a part of. The lingering sweetness of praise from masters of the craft. The thrill of slowly grasping more and more of the huge, complex process of building a structure. Crassness, cussing, trash talk. The gallows humor with crewmates that comes from laboring together for months in exhausting, stressful, injurious ways.
The tools of the trade, the bare essentials, are ancient, elegant things of beauty. Passed from hand to hand, remade and tinkered with over generations, they have been winnowed and shaped into near-perfect forms. The chalk line, one of my favorite tools, has been in use since at least the builders of ancient Egypt. The hammer is thought to be one of the most ancient tools, in its earliest, handleless form, ever used by humans. The system by which we categorize nail sizes, 8d, 16d, etc., derives the d from denarius, the currency of the Roman Empire. A friend in the trades once worked with a siding subcontractor, an older guy, who still used a water level to set a starting line around the house. Piping water through tubes to find equal elevations worked best for him because, unlike a laser, it remains usable and accurate around corners, without lines of sight.
Similarly ancient, from time immemorial, are the ways that I and other tradesfolk are taught to see, feel, evaluate, modify, and move our building medium (wood, stone, metal, mortar, sod, plaster, concrete, clay, cob) by older tradespeople through an embodied knowing. I’ve found it hard to describe to non-craftspeople, or people who don’t use their bodies in skilled work. There’s a way wood becomes something you manually experience differently, more deeply. A way you start to see knots, grain, wane, warping; a way you start to recognize crowning, cupping, bowing, plumbness, squareness, straightness; a way you start to move with and carry lumber on your shoulders, above your head, a balancing and familiarity; a way you start to know when to keep hammering a stick in, and when to knock it out and shave it down; it’s a way of starting to grow into the hands and eyes of your teachers, and of theirs, and of theirs, and of theirs. A way of physically knowing a material that somehow is transmitted culturally but grounded outside purely cultural or aesthetic modes; it’s a socially structured obedience to the commandments of wood: how it enters and maintains, or fails to maintain, integrity in various forms and configurations.
I love that I’ve never submitted a resume for a job in the trades. At least where I’ve worked, there are no credentials or degrees: you show up and show what you can do. I love greeting workers from other trades as we see each other in the morning, setting out our tools, drinking from thermoses, preparing for the day. The deep, warming satisfaction of hard-earned competence. Walking back to the trucks from a jobsite with my crewmate, Hannah, and a sledge over my shoulder, looking at the sunset, feeling tired and at peace. Seeing my own past clumsiness and mistakes in the gestures of young people learning the trade and being buoyed by a natural urge to help, teach, and amuse them.
The pains, odiousness, and frustrations of the menial, repetitive, tricky, touchy tasks that can only be appreciated in all their glorious tortuousness through direct experience. And the catharsis of shouting obscenities to express these torments. The pleasures of rows of plumb studs; touching a finger in pine resin and breathing the smell deeply; tilting up walls on a count of three; dust motes in light slicing through a house with no roof yet; neat stacks of lumber; curled planer shavings on a sunny floor; careful, pointed miters; freshly laid tiles in straight, square rows. And the pain of sitting apart from the crew at lunch because it’s clear they’d rather eat without me; the knowledge that with some people, I can never earn or work my way out of condescension. For every part of me that proudly claims this craft and its obsessive, honest, rude, ancient, pragmatic, ingenious spirit, I feel equal parts an outsider, a wrongful heir.
The tools of the trade, the bare essentials, are ancient, elegant things of beauty. Passed from hand to hand, remade and tinkered with over generations, they have been winnowed and shaped into near-perfect forms. The chalk line, one of my favorite tools, has been in use since at least the builders of ancient Egypt. The hammer is thought to be one of the most ancient tools, in its earliest, handleless form, ever used by humans. The system by which we categorize nail sizes, 8d, 16d, etc., derives the d from denarius, the currency of the Roman Empire. A friend in the trades once worked with a siding subcontractor, an older guy, who still used a water level to set a starting line around the house. Piping water through tubes to find equal elevations worked best for him because, unlike a laser, it remains usable and accurate around corners, without lines of sight.
Similarly ancient, from time immemorial, are the ways that I and other tradesfolk are taught to see, feel, evaluate, modify, and move our building medium (wood, stone, metal, mortar, sod, plaster, concrete, clay, cob) by older tradespeople through an embodied knowing. I’ve found it hard to describe to non-craftspeople, or people who don’t use their bodies in skilled work. There’s a way wood becomes something you manually experience differently, more deeply. A way you start to see knots, grain, wane, warping; a way you start to recognize crowning, cupping, bowing, plumbness, squareness, straightness; a way you start to move with and carry lumber on your shoulders, above your head, a balancing and familiarity; a way you start to know when to keep hammering a stick in, and when to knock it out and shave it down; it’s a way of starting to grow into the hands and eyes of your teachers, and of theirs, and of theirs, and of theirs. A way of physically knowing a material that somehow is transmitted culturally but grounded outside purely cultural or aesthetic modes; it’s a socially structured obedience to the commandments of wood: how it enters and maintains, or fails to maintain, integrity in various forms and configurations.
I love that I’ve never submitted a resume for a job in the trades. At least where I’ve worked, there are no credentials or degrees: you show up and show what you can do. I love greeting workers from other trades as we see each other in the morning, setting out our tools, drinking from thermoses, preparing for the day. The deep, warming satisfaction of hard-earned competence. Walking back to the trucks from a jobsite with my crewmate, Hannah, and a sledge over my shoulder, looking at the sunset, feeling tired and at peace. Seeing my own past clumsiness and mistakes in the gestures of young people learning the trade and being buoyed by a natural urge to help, teach, and amuse them.
The pains, odiousness, and frustrations of the menial, repetitive, tricky, touchy tasks that can only be appreciated in all their glorious tortuousness through direct experience. And the catharsis of shouting obscenities to express these torments. The pleasures of rows of plumb studs; touching a finger in pine resin and breathing the smell deeply; tilting up walls on a count of three; dust motes in light slicing through a house with no roof yet; neat stacks of lumber; curled planer shavings on a sunny floor; careful, pointed miters; freshly laid tiles in straight, square rows. And the pain of sitting apart from the crew at lunch because it’s clear they’d rather eat without me; the knowledge that with some people, I can never earn or work my way out of condescension. For every part of me that proudly claims this craft and its obsessive, honest, rude, ancient, pragmatic, ingenious spirit, I feel equal parts an outsider, a wrongful heir.
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