Some years ago I fell in love with dark chocolate. On a visit to Paris in the early 90’s, I discovered extra-fine dark chocolate normally used in cooking. It was inexpensive, and I was eating it by the half-pound. Boy howdy, let me tell you that such chocolate consumed regularly was a means of near-hallucination. I drank coffee back then, too, and smoked cigarettes, a deadly triple combination of habits I later gave up on doctor’s orders. Now I just drink a bit of coffee of a morning and try not to eat more than one chocolate candy at a time. Moderation is best for intended longevity.

Bag of Cacao, Bonampak Murals, Chiapas, Mexico, circa 790CE

Infrared photograph, © David W Wooddell

     Chocolate, in the form of cocoa derived from the cacao bean has been with us for a long time. Skilled at fine-tuning plants for agriculture, the Maya may have perfected Theobroma cacao: “naturally selecting prized cultivars for their hi-flavor, bringing forth the finest cacáo ever cultivated on Earth.” The Maya also perfected the pineapple from the bromiliad plant by crossbreeding strains of plants selectively to produce the fruit they desired.

     They probably helped give us maize, too. The dates in the sacred Maya text Popul Vhu indicate it was around 7900 BCE when maize was created. The Maya venerate corn as the source of life, it is central to the creation myth in illustrations, including at Bonampak. They also mixed maize with cacao for a strong, hearty drink.

     So maybe (am I reaching here?) the Maya turned some cacao into an un-sweetened chocolate spread, kind of an ancient version of Nutella: The Original Hazelnut Spread®? Certainly, they had no shortage of nut trees in that part of the world, going as far south as the Amazon.

     But that is sheer speculation.

     What seems to be known is the Maya consumed hot chocolate without sugar in it, making the beverage powerfully bitter and strong. (Kind of like that unsweetened extra-fine chocolate I was eating in Paris). It became the hit in Paris after the Spanish introduced cocoa to Europe, along with another new world native fruit, the tomato (Columbus brought the tomato back on the first voyage), 

     Tea was still the thing at the time, but coffee (Coffea arabica) would soon appear in Europe as beverage of choice, brought to the west from Arabia, perhaps via trade with India and the east, or directly as has been documented elsewhere in history. It was not long until the appearance of coffee houses in sixteenth century Europe. Tobacco would arrive from the new world, also courtesy of the Spanish in 1518, and then all of Europe would be addicted to the same stuff that had me in its grips during that trip to Paris. (Andorfer, 15;  Higman, 152; Hodge, vol. 4, 768)

     At Bonampak, Chiapas, in one of the famous three rooms of painted pre-Hispanic Mayan murals, cacao appears in a royal scene in which a bag full of the commodity is evidently the city’s riches, perhaps the very riches on which the royal family was founded. Currency is what you make it, anything can be used as a means of exchange. Gold was important, but cacao was wealth! (Coe, 131)

     Photographing the Bonampak Murals in black and white infrared film was a lot better than chocolate: it meant that we could see through the age of time, through pigments used to paint the murals, and down through the layers to the red under-drawing, as well as to define the black outlines of important figures, a method the Maya artist used to emphasize the important players in a scene. In this scene at Bonampak, the cacao was one of the important elements, clearly labeled and impressive.

     The Maya used various substances to find the vision serpent, which was their way of communing with spirits, ancestors, gods and demons. It is possible that they made strong solutions of fermented cacao and used them in enema solutions. Such practice gave a short trip to the cosmic experience they sought, and almost certainly to the sacred thunderjar. (Coe, 181)

    This give new meaning to the long-standing question: Where did the ancient Maya go?

                    — David W Wooddell

Sources:

“A Concise History of Cacao” http://www.c-spot.com/atlas/historical-timeline/

Andorfer, T. The Complete Idiot’s Guide to Coffee and Tea, Penguin, 2006

Coe, M. The Maya 5th Ed. Thames & Hudson, 1993, p. 131, 180

Higman, B.W. How Food Made History, John Wiley & Sons, 2004

Hodge, F.W. Handbook of American Indians North of Mexico, Volume 4, Smithsonian Institution

Don’t Turn That Dial

© David W Wooddell, April 2, 2012

When I was younger, I worked in a factory on the other side of town: it was an easy place to make money and the work was not that difficult. I was assigned to Eddie’s crew of assemblers. He was not the foreman, but thought he was. Eddie was middle-aged, but seemed ancient to me when I was 20. He had a work bench that was personalized in a lot of ways, and everyone knew you didn’t fool around with Eddie’s workbench. His radio was set to GodAwfulCountry, one of the many local stations that seemed to find one terrible-twang after another.

Eddie was short, probably no more than five feet four inches, and more than a bit round at the waist. Tending to wear blue jeans that still had a crisp blue color, they were turned up the regulation two inches at the cuff, and being the summer he wore short-sleeve sport shirts in subtle plaids with the short sleeves rolled up to expose the white t-shirt he wore underneath. He carried a gray metal lunch box with a thermos of coffee in it, and would not ever think of buying anything from the roach-coach that came around at break and lunchtime. His wife made his lunch, and it was substantial.

Whether Eddie was or was not the smartest kid in the class when he graduated from high school was immaterial, that had been at least some thirty years before. But he paid attention to newsbreaks on GodAwfulCountry, as did the rest of us in his work gang. And sometimes, that was pure entertainment. For instance, I was working there the year we sent the first moon buggy up in space to land on the moon. Eddie listened to a news report on his ever present radio and then slammed his hand down on the workbench.

“Goddam gomernt,” he proclaimed, “Ain’t it just like them to send that moon-buggy up there and then leave it for the Rooskies to go up and steal!” He went on about the idea of the Roossians “joy-riding around the moon in our moon-buggy,” and had us all in stitches from laughing so hard, it was such a ridiculous thought. That just pissed him off even more.  Eddie was the salt of the earth — and of the skies, too, as one of the boys used to jest. No amount of rational discussion would convince Eddie that the Russians did not have any intent or need to steal the moon-buggy – they’d never even landed on the moon, and never would.

Those country western songs got tiresome. “Old dog tree, ever faaaaaaith-full” comedian Jonathan Winters once characterized it, and that pretty much said all that needed saying. If you dared change the radio station to rock or a classical station out of nearby Mansfield, Eddie would absolutely froth at the mouth. “Gawddammit! Who’s been farting around with my radio!” He would storm and rage and stomp around and the foreman would eventually come over and tell us to knock it off and settle down to work. It was good fun, and Eddie played his part well. We did that about once a week for the entertainment value alone. Repetitive assembly in such a factory is easy, except for the boredom of doing the same mechanical process over and over and then some more. We needed levity to keep the mood light.

Eddie was such a fan-boy for certain musicians. “Hello, Dolly,” the man on the radio would sing. “Hello, Porter” we would all warble in high-pitched falsetto voices in imitation of Dolly Parton. Eddie worshiped the ground Dolly stood on and would have licked it like a squirrel cleaning up spilt gravy if given half a chance. He would lunge to turn up the volumn when he heard his crush singing. “That’s Dolly Parton and Porter Wagner!” 

“Does Dolly Do Porter, or is it that Porter Duz Dolly?” one of us would ask, very solemn-like in reference to the then-current television and radio commercials for a brand of laundry and dish-washer detergent called Duz in which the young Dolly Parton would crow about the free dishes she received in her box of Duhzzzz.

Eddie normally sat with his back to us at his workbench. He built subassemblies of the gripper devices that clamp onto bowling pins when the pin spotter swings down at a bowling alley to pick up the standing pins left after someone misses them with their bowling ball. Another guy was in charge of running matched sets of wires through the triangular frame where the clampers hung after assembly.

My job was to bolt the clampers onto the frame, connect the wires in the right order, and then send the frame on to the tester, who ran a diagnostic test through the wires to make sure they were connected in the right order and made the clampers work a few times to see if they were wired properly. I used an air-powered drill with a quick-change fitting on the end to hex-bolt the clampers onto the frame, and it made a lot of noise, as I had discovered on mornings when I was hung-over or suffering from lack of sleep from staying out too late the night before.

One morning we came in early to the shop and we super-glued Eddie’s radio dial to the classical station out of Mansfield.

By the time Eddie rolled in, the glue had dried nicely and that radio was never going to play any station other than the classical station over to Mansfield. It was one of those old-fashioned plastic-housing radios with the marbled finish, you could buy them at the hardware store back then, with a large twist dial for the stations, a selector switch for AM/FM and a large dial for the volume. FM was new back then, and good FM receivers were not inexpensive.

We all worked in quiet for a while, all of us shuffling around and setting out our tools and getting ready to make some noise. Finally, one of us broke: “Eddie, why don’t you turn on some music,” someone suggested. “Gettin’ kind of lonesome here without Dolly.” The other young’uns, as Eddie liked to call us, snickered at our work stations.

Eddie flipped the radio on and went to work, but it was only moments before he discovered that his favorite station had been changed. “Who changed the radio station?” he demanded. I revved up the pneumatic drill and let it chatter loosely on a hex bolt so no one outside of our area could hear Eddie’s complaint. Every time he demanded who had done it, I did chuchuchuchuchcubrraaaaaat with the drill. Grins were on every face except Eddie’s as he stormed into the usual routine.

And then he reached for the dial and tried to turn it and the radio turned almost a 360 in his hand. Eddie let out a howl that could have been heard by Billy on his forklift at the receiving dock at the other end of the factory. Coming out of nowhere, with no warm up to warn others, since I had covered Eddie’s usual warm-up with the chattering of the drill,  Eddie ranted, screamed, swore, and carried-on as loud as he could shout. Then he flipped.

Charging in my direction with a ball-peen hammer, he backed off when I revved the drill in his direction. It was clear that our prank had crossed a line, and someone could get hurt, though it would not be from my hand, the drill was just for scare. He turned in the direction of the guy who wired the frames, but the foreman showed up and managed to collar Eddie and turn him around and frog-marched him off the work floor.

We didn’t see Eddie for a few days, the foreman announced that Eddie was taking some time off. Our prank had turned more serious than we’d thought. Ganging up on Eddie had seemed hilarious at the time, but from such stuff can nascent bullies be turned into the real thing with a just a bit more persistence. It was time to grow up, and the lesson was not lost on me. No more ganging-up on anyone, it was childish, rude, and yes, it smacked of the bully. I didn’t want to be that guy.

We were given a talking-to, and told to buy a new radio for Eddie. “Have it ready for him when he comes back to work on Monday,” the foreman told us. When he came back, his face positively lit up when he saw the new radio on his workbench. Eddie sheepishly admitted he’d been a bit obsessed with his country western station on the radio. He promised to mix in other kinds of music in the future, and came around and apologized to us each individually, and we said, “Oh, Eddie, that’s all right, and we’re sorry to make you so mad.”

We came in on Tuesday and the radio was playing something other than country music. “You boys are right,” Eddie announced, “I’m turning over a new leaf,” proud to be so liberal and enlightened. Eddie had found the local station that played nothing but polka. Ooompa, pa pa pa, Ooompa.

***

The Reason Rally claimed to be the largest assembly of atheists: it brought together thoughtful people, some who are musicians and satirists, others who are poets, comedians, essayists, philosophers, and community activists. They used the rally to express what they believe, and what they think others should understand about atheists. They are a literate bunch: poetry, song, essay, and humorous stories enlivened the conference, but the serious work was to demonstrate that there are numbers on the side of the non-religious, they are not a demographic to be dismissed. Somewhere around ten to twenty percent of the US population are either atheists or are non-believers, freethinkers, or agnostics. Bringing them together at one place in a body of people of all age, race, sex, and profession shows them to be adamant about their rights, insisting on the lawfully-given right of the non-religious to define themselves.

Many atheists are moral and ethical. So then why do the religious claim that Atheists are not good people? Isn’t it up to those who make such a claim to offer some measurable proof of their assertion? As far as I can determine, there are no crime, or significant other statistics to support the view that there is something wrong with atheists, morally, ethically, or when it comes to crime. It’s all just grumbling and trash talking from some who claim that only people of their religion can be good. But what about the statistics that show that people overall, including the ones who claim to be religious, commit crimes and make morally and ethically bad decisions. 

Daniel Moynihan, Senator and sage of American politics said it best: You are entitled to your own opinion, but you are not entitled to your own facts. 

****

Spring was just then starting to show, but I noticed how many trees had not lost their leaves from last fall. Yesterday, I was at Calvert Cliffs State Park near Lusby. MD. and noticed some of the same kinds of trees had also not lost their leaves. Maybe it is just something to do with that species. Spring was much farther along, of course, as warm as it has been, four days can mean a lot of new growth. Being right on the bay may also give an advantage of slighty warmer microclimate: as we walked toward the Chesapeake Bay, the plants became noticeably farther along in their spring bloom. 

From parking lot to the shore, one travels past a freshwater marsh, and then a stream. Today is International Water Day, so my recent exploration of the freshwater marsh at Calvert Cliffs was a great chance to admire the engineering of  beavers. 

A few more images from my field trip to Calvert Cliffs is here.

National Geographics Cats & Dogs

I spent a few months this past year working on a special edition of National Geographic magazine on this very subject, Cats & Dogs, sharing research fact-checking with another former NGM staff researcher, Michelle Harris. The text is from Cathy Newman, Virginia Morrell, Jenny Holland and others, and the photographs are from the archives of NGS as well as from freelancers around the globe such as Carli Davidson. This is an informative, fun, colorful and heartwarming special issue. I’m hoping the readers will buy it at the newsstands, because it is sold only online and at newsstands and your grocery checkout.

But back to my dog Kiah. Here’s a recent snapshot of him at the College Park Dog Park. He’s a pretty dog, so everyone assumes he’s a girl, or a “Lassie” or is fussy about getting dirty. Shetland sheepdogs are hearty working dogs, with coats designed to keep off the elements. He does not like to get his boy bits wet, though, sometimes attempting “big air” to keep them dry. On second thought, maybe I won’t teach him how to drive.

Kiah Charges The Water at his favorite Dog Park

The city is asking for permission for Food Trucks to park along 7th Street at the Mall, but the National Park service is quibbling over this. They have a rule that no one should transact business on park property. Evidently, hotdogs and indigestion from their sanctioned food stand is ok, and should be all that is needed by way of food down on our big walkway past the monuments and museums. Some of those hot dogs ought to be encased in plastic for your protection. Why not allow the food trucks? Surely, people will walk on your grass at the curb, but don’t you think that too is part of American life? Getting a decent grilled cheese sandwich instead of the age-old tubesteak?

It wasn’t accidental that I asked NGS for permission to do this. I worked there for a couple of decades and know the employees of NGS are very proud of their work to make the physical building operations at National Geographic as eco-friendly as possible. According to, Robert Ciine, Vice President in charge of the building’s operations, they are once again appying for LEED certification, a mark of approval for environmental awareness and good practices. They are the leaders in the field of LEED for existing buildings. It is a worthwhile achievement, and has demonstrated to other businesses how they can save money while helping the environment.

The other major reason I asked NGS for help may seem a bit absurd, but it has to do with permission to use a tripod, or even to photograph at all within the District of Columbia. They understand photography at NGS, but the rest of the city doesn’t really get that it takes time and patience to make a really good photograph. In DC, it’s a matter of access, too. Photography is a first amendment right, but someone forgot to tell that to the various government authorities in DC that have regulated the who, what, where and when photography can be done “for commercial purposes.” (and yes, they consider a photography class a commercial purpose)

The DC government wants $150 for still photography. And they want proof of a million dollar insurance polcy “listing the “Government of the District of Columbia” as additional insured.” The city is willing to waive the insurance clause for studnts, but not the $150 fee per student for the permit to make still photos.

The Capitol Police control permits for tripod use and all photography on any of the grounds of the Capitol, or within the building itself.

All of the green spaces in the city are under the authority of the National Park Police, who may or may not  give permits for tripod use.

Private building owners are ever more wary of granting permission to photography students to allow them to photograph their buildings. Many of the building owners in Georgetown regularly send their security guards out to move the students away with threats of arrest for trespassing.

Add all of that up, and finding a decent place for a photo class to make architecture shots in DC becomes a ridiculously difficult endeavor. 

Thanks, Bob Cline and NGS for helping us out. The photography students did well that day, according to their Teaching Assistant Kat Forder and Instructor John Pellet. Here are a few of my snapshots of the class catching the light coming up on a cold morning in the courtyard at National Geographic. 

I never set out to be in front of the lens, and that’s ok, I’m a photographer, researcher, writer and not a professional model. But as with many in my profession, I have enough stand-in experience as a model to know how it is in the studio when on the lens side of the camera. I’ve ben photographed numerous times in the process of helping to make photo illustration, and one time it landed me on the cover of US News & World Report as a terrorist. 

Let me be perfectly clear — I was not a terrorist. I only played one for a cover story on international terrorism. The story ran just days after Aldo Moro, the kidnapped Italian politician was discovered dead as his terrorist kidnappers, the Red Brigade dumped his body as a message of some kind (disdain, hate, who can tell what’s in the minds of terrorists? It’s not like they are normal people, they are thugs.)

For the cover shoot, I brought in my favorite ex-army parka, one that I picked up at a real army surplus sale back in high school. It had been on countless camping trips and excursions all through my late teen and college years, and since I was a bearded, long-haired kind of guy, I thought the army-ness of the coat would lend a certain look to the terror cover image. I also picked up a couple of balaclava-style stocking caps, because the Red Army Faction/Baader-Meinhoff gang were wearing them.

Photo editor Berni Schoenfield brought his gun to the session: a .44 magnum, it was a real Dirty Harry type of revolver. The gun was a beast, so Berni figured it would lend the right kind of threatening image to the photo illustration we were making for the cover.  

But I have a big head. No, I don’t mean ego-wise, although I probably have my moments. Physically, I carry the Scottish blood of someone with a large head, so when I held the pistol up next to my face in a mockery of James Bond, the .44 magnum did not look all that large. In fact, after the magazine came out with my picture on the cover, one over-eager reader wrote to the editors that our photo illustration was a failure because no self-respecting terrorist would use a .22 caliber revolver. Berni was allowed to answer that one, to the effect that cover model Wooddell has such a large head that it dwarfs even the Dirty Harry .44 magnum he is holding. Or something along those line.

On the Cover of USN&WR

When the image appeared on the cover of US News and World Report dated May 22, 1978, it was credited: photo by USN&WR. As I recall, the staff photographers Thomas J O’Halloran and Warren K Leffler worked on the cover shoot together, with special projects photo editor Berni Schoenfield standing over their shoulders, directing the studio session.

No, they didn’t pay me extra at USN&WR for playing cover model for the day. It was all in the day’s work for someone in the picture department, but I did get a free ham from the company at the holidays, an employee perk of that media company that was patronizing and yet appreciated at the same time. Each year they gave the employees a choice between a ham and turkey. As Berni would say, only a putz would take the turkey. 

Some of the modeling jobs I worked on at Nation’s Business include a hand-model cover shoot with David Valdez and Gary Kieffer collaborating on the photography for a story by staff editor Henry Eason.

Popcorn hand model

Popcorn in NB

A life-style/health article was about eating healthy snacks: Photography was by Judith Sloan, one of my favorite freelancers when I was picture editor at Nation’s Business.  (Polaroid lighting test on left — B&W in the magazine from color transparency)

Sneezing

Managing Editor Henry Altman Sneezing for Nation’s Business

Directing the managing editor Henry Altman on how to sneeze dramatically for the camera in this polaroid, but the veteran copy editor himself stood in with a great sense of humor for the real deal. Photo by Nation’s Business staff photographer (and former New York Times contract photographer) T. Michael Keza, 

Credit card hand model for Nation’s Business

One last hand-model job, this one is a mystery to me today, but I think it was for a story on credit card fraud — or maybe the dangers of smoking, who knows, some of us still smoked back then. Here the polaroid is somewhat posterized by my scanner. 

Maybe one of the photographers can comment — who shot the credit card image? Valdez, Kieffer, or Keza? 

- David W Wooddell, November 13, 2011

With Rocket the Pretty Good Dog, photo by Daniel L Wooddell March 2008

I am a storyteller.

I wear many hats. For some people, a job is one single type of work. They wear one hat at work,. and come home and put on their at-home hat, and then maybe later they put on their parent-coach hat and help out with the kid’s sports team, or the parent-homework-helper hat, and steer their child through the intricacies of the American revolution or multiplication tables. 

My work require multiple hats. A freelance researcher has many ways of adding expertise in a subject. It does not necessarily transcend into being a good businessman, but being sole proprietor of one’s research and photography business means wearing all the hats. I do the books, correspondence, and appointments.  I file it, whatever it is, and since I save anything that may be useful for a project, I have my work cut out for me just to put away the stuff that should be in my files. 

I’m my own IT guy, so I buy the software for my Macintosh computers: both are older G4-based machines and should be upgraded fairly soon so I can keep smooth integration with my software and online capabilities. I research what kind of computer to buy next. I did hire someone to put together this website, and thankfully she also assists with security stuff because it was up only a little while before the first hacker attacks. 

I’m my own librarian, I have shelves and shelves of books, and more books in boxes here at the office, and also in a storage facility. I do my own bibliographic searches, as well as my own research, and rather than just using research to support my own endeavors, which is how most people use research, I also work as a freelance editorial, art, and photography researcher for high-end clients who want fine resolution and accuracy in their products. In fact, I don’t work for clients who just want to gloss from the Cliff Notes. Standards of accuracy and reporting are important to me.

I’m currently on contract doing editorial research for a geology book, Planet Earth: A Tenant’s Manual by Frank H. T. Rhodes, it’s about living on planet earth responsibly. (Cornell University Press, spring 2012) I’m also contract researcher for a variety of stories for National Geographic Magazine, and I’m thankful that the subjects are varied — pets; hydrologic flow on a major river system; military history. I recently worked a contract on the demographics of immigration in Europe and was overwhelmed by the statistics: to paraphrase a line from Bob Dylan’s “Desolation Row” — “don’t send me no more statistics, no.”

On what spare time I have, I am trying to finish re-writing and editing a history of a military regiment. the 31st Virginia Infantry (1861–1865). A Confederate regiment from what was then western Virginia, and mostly from counties that seceded during the war to become the new state of West Virginia, this regiment is poorly understood by most people. I have a personal connection by way of an ancestor and distant family members.

One thing unifies all of the editorial work — it is storytelling. I put on my storytelling hat for all that. 

David W Wooddell

Growing up in north-central Ohio, we had plenty of hot days, humid from so much corn growing next to our house on the edge of town. That cornfield sometimes was allowed to lie fallow, or was planted with a crop of soybeans to re-fix the nitrogen in the soil. The farmer had loaned our neighborhood a piece of his field, on the agreement that we wouldn’t run through his corn any more, and we kept the grass mowed and used it to play baseball and football and fly kites. Out there one could get away from the houses and see a long ways toward the horizon.

We had fresh produce in seemingly unlimited quantities, tomatoes as big as a baby’s head, and green beans to die for, especially cooked the West Virginia way with bacon or ham until they were nearly soft. Cucumbers, green-onions and melon arrived at our front door, carried by door-to-door salesman from a place called Celeryville, a huge produce farm that employed youngsters to sell their stuff in the summer, going from house to house. Summer was good in north-central Ohio, not least for the frequent tornadoes.

My mother’s favorite movie was Wizard of Oz, and she was terrified by the word tornado. The very idea of one would send her into a panic and she’d yell, “Everyone, run to the basement, there’s a tornado!” Didn’t matter if the local AM radio station said the tornado was in the next county, or the next town over, she’d always announce that everyone should head for the basement until the “all clear.” Dad would groan, because he didn’t have a choice, he had to go down there with her. Not my brother and me – one word of a tornado and we went out the back door like the two young terrors we were, because we wanted to see the tornado. We were pretty sure we were faster than any tornado on Earth, and we didn’t know anyone who’d actually been injured by one, much less taken up and floated about.

My older brother and I often spotted funnel clouds off in the distance while we stood in t-shirts, summer shorts and tennis shoes in the July or August heat, out there on the ball field. That part of Ohio was kind of flat, with some rolling hills, and from the vantage point on the edge of town we could see the funnels form as the cloud dropped down and turned triangular, and then at the last minute a bit of cloud would seem to come up from the ground to join it and the tornado was in business. One day we saw a cow come flying up with the dirt and stuff, and get jettisoned out of the funnel, and we knew some farm family would be having steak that night. Mom would be ‘fit-to-be-tied,” as she called it, that we’d have the nerve to go outside when such a terrible danger was in the offing, but we were never punished for it. And who wouldn’t want to see a cow fly?

A number of years later I was working carpentry in Columbus, Ohio, one of the many jobs I worded to pay for my college education. I had learned to swing a hammer, could measure accurately, was well-balanced, and much to my horror, able to calm my fears enough for “walking walls.” Walking walls is a rare experience in a young man’s life. When a wooden framed house is built of 2x4’s and 2x10’s, there is usually a stage when the framing walls have been built and raised, with some light insulated sheathing attached to the outside frames, and the floors decked in with plywood. The triangular roof trusses have not been added, so it looks like an open framed box. For a two-story house with a basement, that means from the top of the house, before the trusses and joists have been added, it is a drop of 30 or more feet to the ground. If you happen to be standing on the 10-inch wide top of the wall above the opening to the poured concrete basement when you fall, it’s a bit farther and a lot harder when you land.

So there I was that summer, walking the tops of walls of a partially-built new house. Bobby, the lead carpenter had decided I would be good as the second man in the truss-hanging operation. A rented crane arrived, along with the truckload of pre-made trusses – they are those triangular things you see on top of houses, with a beam at the bottom called the joist, and they are heavy and big. The crane lifts the truss and places it approximately where the boss tells him to place it, suspended a few inches off the top of the wall, and the two lucky carpenters who are walking the walls try not to get bumped off by any sway of the truss, and using their hammers to kind of prod it into stopping, they wait until the right moment, the truss is lowered to the top of the wall, and — bam, bam, bam, wham! You drive in a spike with a 20-ounce framing hammer, and then pound in a couple of more nails, and attach that truss to the top of the wall. You have to kneel down at the last minute, or bend over from the waist, all the while just standing on a 10-inch wide beam with no safety net and nothing to hold onto. Whatever you do, you can’t hold onto the truss to catch your balance because it’ll move if you do, or fall over and bring the rest of the trusses down like triangular-framed dominoes, and probably take you with them.

One morning, hot and humid with threats of rain for later in the day, we were hanging trusses on a two-story monstrosity of a house in a new subdivision. We were halfway through with the trusses when I noticed the sky was darkening into that familiar deep blue and purple mass in the distance that meant a major storm coming. Zip, some lightning started appearing in the distant horizon. We were non-union and didn’t get paid if we got sent home, and that summer we’d already been sent home a lot because of thunderstorms. I looked over at Bobby, the lead carpenter, standing on the opposite wall from me, and he shrugged and motioned for the crane to bring up the next truss.

Pretty soon the wind was kicking up, and I was worried about being blown off the top of the wall, and the sky became more defined as the storm drew closer. I could see the angry, boiling clouds grow heavy and start to droop, not all that far away it seemed. When you are on the top of a wall in a partially-built sub-division on the outskirts of a city you have a scope of vision to the horizon that is rather sweeping. So I wasn’t surprised that I could see the formation of a tornado off in the distance. Meanwhile, we kept hanging trusses with the wind swirling and making the trusses sway on the end of the crane’s cable as they came up and were lowered into position, prompting no end of four-letter words and oaths and imprecations at the unwieldy mass of wood we were trying to manhandle into position.

We’d already been up on the walls a couple of hours by then, and the tension of muscles keeping balance, of bending down on one knee and nailing the truss to the wall cap, of then standing up unassisted, like an acrobat in work-boots, was starting to get to me. The one tornado had become two in the distance, and then looking around, I spotted one coming down in some other part of the city, and all the while lightning striking where it wanted down from the sky, and the booms of thunder ripping the air. Shortly before noon, we finished hanging the last truss and I slid down the ladder to the ground with legs like rubber a-tremble. The rest of the crew were waiting to go home, every piece of equipment loaded in the pickup trucks. “You two are crazy,” they said, and Bobby and I shook hands, aware of the slight understatement of that fact, and I headed for my old Blue Buick with 100,000 miles on the odometer and the blue and white seats faded and stained from all kinds of unmentionables, including too many trips to the drive-in movies with my girlfriend of summers long-past.

I don’t walk walls anymore, or hang trusses: my body is not nimble enough for that, and trifocals play hell with one’s aim with a hammer. But to this day, I don’t fear tornadoes. I don’t personally know anyone who has died from one, or been swept up in the air like that cow I saw as a youngster, so long ago on a hot, summer, Ohio day. I don’t really enjoy Wizard of Oz, all that much, though. I think it’s the flying monkeys that scare me the most.

DWW