High Steel_ The Daring Men Who Built The World's Greatest Skyline Part 4

Another advantage of I I-shapes: they're easy to join to each other, much easier, say, than rounded tubes. The multiple flat faces press flush against each other and give engineers options when they're trying to figure out how to a.s.semble the thousands of members of steel that go into buildings.

One consideration that did not not determine the evolution of determine the evolution of I I-shapes is how ironworkers would climb them and walk them. This part ironworkers figured out for themselves.

Climbing a column is about as close as most people can get to scaling a sheer wall. The common method calls for an ironworker to approach the column from the outside of one of its f.l.a.n.g.es and hook his fingers around its edges-the f.l.a.n.g.e is between an inch and two inches thick-then place the bottoms of his feet against the inside wall of the opposite opposite f.l.a.n.g.e. Now he's hanging there, pressing with his feet, pulling with his arms. If it looks uncomfortable, that's because it is. He starts to climb. His left foot rises and his right hand rises; then his right foot rises and his left hand rises. From this position, he scoots up, his hips swinging side to side. His arms and feet appear to take the weight, but in fact most of the weight is on the backs of his calves. His foot makes a lever, pressing his calf into the inside of the near f.l.a.n.g.e. Using this method, a good climber hardly needs his arms. At any point he could let go and hold himself to the column with his lower legs. f.l.a.n.g.e. Now he's hanging there, pressing with his feet, pulling with his arms. If it looks uncomfortable, that's because it is. He starts to climb. His left foot rises and his right hand rises; then his right foot rises and his left hand rises. From this position, he scoots up, his hips swinging side to side. His arms and feet appear to take the weight, but in fact most of the weight is on the backs of his calves. His foot makes a lever, pressing his calf into the inside of the near f.l.a.n.g.e. Using this method, a good climber hardly needs his arms. At any point he could let go and hold himself to the column with his lower legs.

There are other, less conventional ways to climb. Some ironworkers press their knees and s.h.i.+ns against the outside of the same f.l.a.n.g.e they're grasping with their hands, and then s.h.i.+nny up it. This looks a bit like a baby crawling up a wall. A few connectors prefer this method, though it's difficult to say why, as it has a tendency to shred the skin off a man's s.h.i.+ns. In both cases, the trick isn't strength-many a musclebound hulk has tried and failed to climb a column-but weight distribution, finding the right balance between the push of the legs and the pull of the arms.

Ironworkers, particularly connectors, fly up and down columns all day. They speak of climbing thirty-foot columns as if it were no more difficult or dangerous than, say, walking up a flight of stairs. In fact, climbing columns is very difficult and very dangerous. Descending a column is slightly less difficult but slightly more dangerous. The position is the same, with the ironworker's hands cupping the near f.l.a.n.g.e and his feet pressed against the inside wall of the far f.l.a.n.g.e, but now instead of using his feet to climb, he uses the rubber soles of his boots as brakes to slow his descent. It's a controlled fall.

[image]

Joe Emerson, a connector at Time Warner Center, climbing a column.

(Photo by Michael Doolittle) On a breezy afternoon early in May, Bunny and Jerry finally climbed above the rim of the hole. The rest of the gang stood on the corrugated derrick floor 30 feet below. Columns and beams lay on the floor in more or less the same configuration they would later a.s.sume in the frame. Earlier in the morning, the gang had "shaken out" the steel, arranging it on the derrick floor so as to make setting as efficient as possible. As Jerry and Bunny hoisted themselves up to perch on their respective columns, they could see the other raising gang to the west, shaking out their own loads of steel on the deck. David "Chappie" Charles, the foreman of that gang, was shouting something at Chad Snow, the connector, and Chad was shouting back at Chappie, and everybody was laughing.

Bunny envied the men in Chappie's gang a little. It was easier working with other Mohawks. You knew each other from home; you knew how the other men worked, and you knew their quirks of personality and wasted little time in cultural translation. But it was also true, as Chad Snow once remarked, that you pushed yourself harder when you worked with other Mohawks. In a Mohawk gang, your pride was on the line; you cared what your fellow Mohawks thought of you in a way that you did not of non-Indians. "They're not expecting you to be the best you can be," said Chad of the latter. "You can float a little. But if you work with guys from home, everybody expects you to be the best. You want to make them proud."

There was no time for Bunny to consider such distinctions at the moment. He knelt on the top of his column and looked down. Below, Matt Kugler and John White were preparing the beam. Matt hooked his tag line into a bolthole at one end. Standing a few feet back, John scanned the length of the beam, eyeballing its center and estimating the gauge he'd need for his choker. A choker is a wire cable with an eye on each end. It wraps around the steel like a noose, one eye slipping through the other, the open eye then looping onto the crane hook. Of the two sins a hooker-on must never commit, the first is hooking the steel off center, in which case the piece will rise lopsided and might slip out of its noose. The second is using the wrong gauge of choker. Too thin, the choker will snap. Too thick, the noose won't close tightly around the steel. This was a fairly heavy beam, so John grabbed a ?" choker, then leaned over the center of the beam and looped the cable around it. He pushed the one eye through the other, and pulled hard. The noose tightened. John slipped the open eye over the hook of the crane and nodded to Chett.

"O.K.," said Chett into the yellow squawk-box, "load up real slow."

A hundred feet over their heads, the sheaves at the end of the crane's boom began to turn. The choker pulled snug, biting into the steel. John stamped down on it and rode the beam a few inches, trying to get the choker to bite harder, then hopped off. The beam popped up, see-sawing in its sling. It was Matt's to handle now.

Matt's job was arguably the most difficult and thankless in the gang. The tagline man keeps the steel steady and steers it away from impediments-columns, other beams, ironworkers-in its flight path. Running tagline is like sailing a kite on a bl.u.s.tery day, only the kite weighs several tons. The crane operator controls the broad outlines of the steel's route but he can't check the small unpredictable motions that make a piece of steel potentially lethal: the see-sawing, the yawing, the spinning of a line un-torquing itself, the sudden swing of a piece caught broadside by a gust of wind. Steel moves through the air like a drunken giant, resolute, inexorable, and dangerous. A drifting five-ton beam can take out a brick wall, much less flick a connector off a column. In Newton's second law of motion, the acceleration of an object (a) is determined by the force (F) exerted upon it relative to its ma.s.s (m): a= a=[image]. In this case, m m was a 10,000-pound steel beam. Matt's unenviable job was to be was a 10,000-pound steel beam. Matt's unenviable job was to be F. F.

Matt glanced up, trying to steer the metal while taking long steps across the cluttered deck. Tagline men have little choice but to keep their eyes up, on their errant charge. If they aren't careful, they're liable to walk right off the edge of the deck or, at the very least, bang their s.h.i.+ns and twist their ankles. Too careful, though, and they lose track of the steel and, inevitably, it hits something, and everybody yells. Everybody realizes that tagline is a difficult and thankless job, but they yell just the same. A few days earlier, an apprentice had filled in for Matt and accidentally let a large girder slice inches over the hard hat of a bolter-up and slam into a column, sending a spinetingling s.h.i.+ver through the metal of the entire building.

"Jesus," said Bunny.

"Whoa-that was close," said Jerry.

The bolter-up put his hand on the top of his hard hat as if to make sure his head was still there. Down on the deck, the apprentice grinned sheepishly.

"Watch it, a.s.shole!" somebody shouted. "Christ! You are useless!"

Now Matt let the rope go and the piece flew high over the deck, then started down. Chett spoke softly to the crane operator in the radio. "Nice and slow, that's it, down...down...load down...a hair more...." When the piece dangled almost within reach, Jerry made a downward clockwise motion with his left index finger, then reached up and pulled his end in with his right hand. He brought the web of the beam flush against a plate, so that the holes in each lined up. From his belt he pulled a two-foot-long tapered bar-a connecting bar-and stabbed the skinny end through the matched holes. This held the beam and column in alignment while he dug into his bolt bag and fished out a bolt. With a few spins of the wrist, he removed the nut. He stuck the bolt into the hole, then tightened the nut by hand. On the other side, Bunny straddled the beam and "made" his hole with the tapered handle of his socket wrench. He was still tightening his nut when Jerry stepped out onto the beam. As Jerry started across it, the beam wobbled slightly. This was a fairly wide beam, a header, so the wobble was slight, but thinner pieces could start to oscillate side to side, alive with harmonic vibration. Ironworkers call this motion the "wow" of the beam. If a man feels a wow coming, he'll try to stay ahead of it, and get across the beam before it has a chance to build. This is why you sometimes see an ironworker running, actually running, across a thin beam to get to the other side. He's trying to beat the wow.

Along with climbing columns, walking steel is part of the job description. In fact, it is a prerequisite. Anyone hoping to become an ironworker in New York City has to pa.s.s a physical apt.i.tude test that includes climbing a 15-foot column, walking across a narrow beam, then sliding down the opposite column. The test tends to weed out the frail and the fat. It also weeds out acrophobes. Why an acrophobe would apply to be an ironworker is a mystery, but it happens occasionally.

Once out at a job site, a few apprentices take to walking steel as if they'd been hatched on the edge of a cliff. Most, however, need a few months to adjust. "Ye, G.o.ds!" wrote the builder William Starrett in 1928. "If there ever was an experience to bring to the human body its sense of helplessness and despair, its agonies and terrors, it is the sensation felt by one who has not had training when he suddenly finds himself out on a narrow beam or plank, high above the ground and unprotected by a hand-hold of any kind."

Two things have to occur inside of a young ironworker before he will manage to walk high steel competently. The first of these is psychological; the second is physiological.

Psychologically, the apprentice must learn to control the natural fear that Starrett described. Exactly how afraid he feels initially is probably genetically determined, at least in part, but it's also changeable. Studies suggest that even severe acrophobes can be successfully treated by exposure therapy, in which they are exposed to ever-increasing heights and slowly become accustomed to them.

An ironworker's apprentices.h.i.+p is a crash course in exposure therapy. Ideally, the novice starts working in the hole, near the ground, straddling the beam and scooting along on the bottom f.l.a.n.g.e-"c.o.o.ning" the beam, as it's called. Then he works up his courage and steps onto the top f.l.a.n.g.e of a wide beam, a header perhaps, and tries a few baby steps, then a few more, and gradually it takes. Or doesn't, in which case he might reconsider his career choice.

In the meantime, physiologically, the apprentice is daily improving his balance. Balance is an extraordinarily complex reflex system involving three of our senses-sight, sound, and touch-all of which play critical roles in navigating us through s.p.a.ce. And then there is the all-important sixth sixth sense located in the "vestibular apparatus" of our inner ear. The vestibular apparatus is a labyrinth of tiny curved ca.n.a.ls filled with liquids and gels, and lined with microscopic hairs. What the vestibular apparatus "senses" is gravity. Depending on how the liquids and gels pool and slosh inside these ca.n.a.ls, we are able to distinguish up from down and acceleration from inertia; we are able to dive into swimming pools, ride bikes without training wheels, and walk across dark rooms confident that our feet are on the floor and not on the ceiling. sense located in the "vestibular apparatus" of our inner ear. The vestibular apparatus is a labyrinth of tiny curved ca.n.a.ls filled with liquids and gels, and lined with microscopic hairs. What the vestibular apparatus "senses" is gravity. Depending on how the liquids and gels pool and slosh inside these ca.n.a.ls, we are able to distinguish up from down and acceleration from inertia; we are able to dive into swimming pools, ride bikes without training wheels, and walk across dark rooms confident that our feet are on the floor and not on the ceiling.

As we navigate the world, or even just lay in beds, our brains busily collate input from our vestibular apparatuses with input from our other senses, with yet more more input from nerves that control our muscles and joints (neck and ankles provide especially useful data) and a.s.sorted input from nerves that control our muscles and joints (neck and ankles provide especially useful data) and a.s.sorted other other inputs (the concentration of blood in our bodies), then instantly compute all of this into a three-dimensional matrix through which we ever so blithely saunter. At least, that is, until we find ourselves swooning on an eight-inch-wide beam 200 feet over the sidewalk. inputs (the concentration of blood in our bodies), then instantly compute all of this into a three-dimensional matrix through which we ever so blithely saunter. At least, that is, until we find ourselves swooning on an eight-inch-wide beam 200 feet over the sidewalk.

To what extent is balance innate and to what extent is it learned? According to Dr. Bernard Cohen, a neurologist at Mount Sinai hospital in New York and a specialist in balance disorders, "this is a very basic question we don't have an answer to yet." What Dr. Cohen and his colleagues do do know is that the balance system is highly flexible and adaptable. Which brings us back to ironworkers. know is that the balance system is highly flexible and adaptable. Which brings us back to ironworkers.

In 1909, The Bridgemen's Magazine The Bridgemen's Magazine published the speculations of an engineer on the subject of ironworkers and heights: "If it were possible for the average man to so concentrate his vision on the beam upon which he stands, that he could see nothing else than the beam, there would be no danger of falling. The moment he would catch a glimpse of the abyss on either side he would be gone." The key to balancing up there, thought the engineer, is "concentration of vision." Dr. Cohen agrees that changes in visual perception must somehow account for humans' ability to adapt to life in high place, but won't speculate much beyond this. "There can be a very powerful adaptation of the vestibular-ocular reflex, the interaction between the ears and the eyes. You can change how your eyes move depending on experience and circ.u.mstances. But exactly what goes on with them, I don't know." published the speculations of an engineer on the subject of ironworkers and heights: "If it were possible for the average man to so concentrate his vision on the beam upon which he stands, that he could see nothing else than the beam, there would be no danger of falling. The moment he would catch a glimpse of the abyss on either side he would be gone." The key to balancing up there, thought the engineer, is "concentration of vision." Dr. Cohen agrees that changes in visual perception must somehow account for humans' ability to adapt to life in high place, but won't speculate much beyond this. "There can be a very powerful adaptation of the vestibular-ocular reflex, the interaction between the ears and the eyes. You can change how your eyes move depending on experience and circ.u.mstances. But exactly what goes on with them, I don't know."

Whatever the precise mechanics of adaptation, it is, in the end, difficult, if not impossible, to separate the physiological from the psychological. Fear makes people woozy and disoriented, and this, in turn, makes people more afraid. The biofeedback loop is a dog chasing its own tail. But this dog, to swap aphorisms, is one that can learn new tricks. With the exception of those who are clinically acrophobic or extraordinarily clumsy, most people could learn to walk steel beams high in the sky if only they were willing to apply themselves to it as diligently as ironworkers do. That, of course, is a very big if.

For some ironworkers, c.o.o.ning remains the preferred method of transit long into their careers. It is safer, and if you aren't in any particular hurry, it's a perfectly adequate way to get around. Welders and bolter-ups, for example, can spend hours working on one bay of steel; they hardly ever need need to walk on top of a beam. Most do anyway. c.o.o.ning is awkward and uncomfortable. Also, like "seagulling" (walking with your arms stretched out), it's faintly ignominious. to walk on top of a beam. Most do anyway. c.o.o.ning is awkward and uncomfortable. Also, like "seagulling" (walking with your arms stretched out), it's faintly ignominious.

Connectors have no choice but to walk on top. They move quickly when they set steel, from point to point, traversing the grid. They can pa.s.s whole days with nothing wider than six inches-the width, say, of a hardcover book-beneath their feet. Some days, and these are generally bad days, they set hollow square-shaped beams called tubes. The only way to walk a tube is on top; there is no bottom f.l.a.n.g.e to drop down to if things get hairy.

Jerry walked steel as he did most things, without much fuss. His limbs were loose, his toes turned in slightly, his speed moderate but steady. When he came to a corner, he stepped across it onto the perpendicular beam, and continued along. Bunny walked with more crispness, an almost martial precision. He carved his corners sharply and cleanly, paused a moment to give each new beam a quick scan, then started across it. Every man finds his own way. There is nothing in the apprentice training manual about walking steel. Some men walk with measured deliberateness, heel to toe, heel to toe, as if counting their steps. Others scurry across as if chased by the devil. New ironworkers often walk duck-footed, trying to maximize their lateral support. One veteran connector working in New York in the summer of 2001 leaned forward and bent his knees, contorting his body into an italicized S S. He might have pa.s.sed for an old woman with scoliosis but for the fact that he darted across the beam with astonis.h.i.+ng speed. He brought to mind a python striking prey.

Once an ironworker has learned to walk steel, he has to perform another kind of balancing act: finding the happy medium between comfort and fear. He must be comfortable up there to do the work, but it is possible, and risky, to be too too comfortable. There are stories of men so relaxed they fell asleep while sitting on beams hundreds of feet over the ground. comfortable. There are stories of men so relaxed they fell asleep while sitting on beams hundreds of feet over the ground.

No one at Time Warner Center ever fell asleep, but an agile ironworker did once stop in the middle of a beam to light a cigarette, cupping the match from the wind gusts blowing off the river. Another man counted a wad of cash on a narrow beam. Two others stopped to share a joke, no more than a 10-inch width of steel underfoot-and a concrete floor 30 feet below-then, laughing, pa.s.sed each other and continued on their separate ways. A young ironworker sprinted across a beam, taking the whole length of it in three or four strides, then leaped over a two-foot-wide gap onto the deck. He grabbed a tool and ran back exactly as he had come. He would either make a great ironworker or a dead one.

According to John McMahon, who ran the Inst.i.tute of the Ironworking Industry in Was.h.i.+ngton, D.C., until his retirement in the spring of 2001, it wasn't the young rookie ironworkers who suffered the most accidents; it was the good experienced men. "We used to keep track-we don't anymore-but we used to get all the reports that came in on the guys getting killed. And it would be amazing. You would think it would be either the apprentices or the old guys, but it's not. It's the guys who are at the absolute peak of their game, guys thirty to fifty, that's when most them get hurt. You think, now how how could this be? These guys are physically fit, they're alert, they're strong. I guess it's a case of maybe taking things for granted. They forget to remember just how dangerous it is up there." could this be? These guys are physically fit, they're alert, they're strong. I guess it's a case of maybe taking things for granted. They forget to remember just how dangerous it is up there."

Forgetting to remember: this was the easiest way to get injured on a building. You might be walking along the decking at the top of the building and forget to remember the two-foot-square hole cut in the corrugated metal. Or you might be laying out sections of decking to cover the beams and joist, a fairly simple procedure that caused an enormous number of accidents. A decker would set down a section of deck, then take a step back, forgetting to remember that he was working along the leading edge. ("Leading edge" being the term for that place where the metal ended and the open air began.) It was, strangely, deckers who suffered the highest rate of fatalities among structural ironworkers. Why? McMahon's theory is that decking gives men a false sense of security. They're more inclined to worry about falling when they're walking a thin beam than when they're standing on a sheet of corrugated metal.

The history of ironworkers is replete with tales of men who died because they forgot to remember. Like the man working high on a tower of the George Was.h.i.+ngton Bridge in the early 1930s who burned through most of a steel beam with a torch, then stood up and stepped out onto the very piece he was cutting off. It snapped, he fell, the end. Where was his mind the moment before he made that dreadful choice? What was he thinking? What did he think the moment after?

The right to s.p.a.ce out is one most people take for granted. If an office worker sitting at his desk happens to lose himself for a few moments in a dreamy reverie, it's no great matter. No one dies dies. Ironwork isn't like that. The construction site of a steel-frame building is a three-dimensional field of hazards. Hazards come from above, from below, from every side, and a man up there has to stay alert to these hazards many hours a day. s.p.a.cing out can be lethal.

High in the annals of the lethal s.p.a.ce-out is the perplexing case of Charles Bedell, a gifted young Yale-educated engineer who oversaw the erection of steel on the Williamsburg Bridge. He had been with the bridge from its start four years earlier and he knew every piece of steel in it. He was a measured and conscientious man by nature, the last person on earth you'd expect to lose himself in a pa.s.sing thought. One lovely sunny morning near the end of September of 1900 Bedell made his usual rounds of the bridge. He paused for a moment near the Brooklyn anchorage. He could see his office a hundred feet below. A month earlier, Bedell had been standing down there, on the street, when an ironworker fell and died at his feet. The event had shaken the engineer profoundly. Now, as Bedell stood on the bridge, whittling a stick and thinking about-what?-a 150-ton "traveler" crane crept up behind him, groaning and creaking on its tracks. A man did not have to be particularly light-footed or on the ball to avoid getting hit by the traveler. The crane operator saw Bedell standing there but a.s.sumed the engineer knew the crane was approaching and was just taking his sweet time getting out of the way. Only when it was too late did the operator realize Bedell wasn't planning to move. He shouted a warning. Bedell swung around and saw the crane bearing down. He lifted his right arm as if to grab the boom of the crane, then reeled back. He tumbled over the side of the bridge to his death on the street below.

Connectors were less likely to forget the danger than other ironworkers, because the danger was all too obvious. They had only to glance down to remember it. Most had fallen, and those who had not knew there was always a fair chance they would. Jerry had not fallen, but Bunny had. Chad Snow, the connector in the other gang, had fallen three times. No one stood around and thought about falling-you'd be finished if you did-but you took precautions. On windy days, you put extra bolts in your bolt bag to lower your center of gravity. When you were walking the outside of the building, you leaned in slightly, away from the street, and readied yourself to drop to the lower f.l.a.n.g.e if need be. "You always look for a way out in case something goes wrong," said Bunny. "It becomes second nature. If a person doesn't do it, and something happens, they panic. Or they just stand there and they get hurt." A little bit of fear wasn't only natural, it was necessary. "You gotta be completely nuts if you don't have fear," said Bunny. "If you lose your fear, you put yourself in danger, and everyone around you."

Unlike most young men who became connectors, Bunny had been a timid child. "I was kind of a scared kid. I didn't like to leave my parents. I hated to go away on trips." He first experienced heights as a teenager when, like nearly every other adolescent boy on the reservation, he ventured onto the Black Bridge, an old railroad bridge that crossed the St. Lawrence River onto Kahnawake, and climbed up into its superstructure. Ever since 1886, when the construction of this bridge introduced the Mohawks to ironwork, Indian boys had been going out on it to cheat death; climbing the bridge was an unofficial rite of pa.s.sage. As teenagers, Bunny and his friends would run along the beams and scale the top chords, often at night, hollering and tossing empty beer cans down into the fast black water of the St. Lawrence hundreds of feet below. Every now and then, inevitably, a boy would fall. While this sent a chill through the others, it didn't stop them from going back. It was all right to be afraid. Being afraid was the point. You were afraid but you dealt with the fear and you did it anyway. It's a lesson many of these boys would take with them when they followed their fathers into ironwork.

"To tell you the truth, I still get nervous sometimes," said Bunny. "It does strange things to your mind. Every day I go to work, I look around and pick a person and think, what would he look like if he fell? Stupid things like that. But then you gotta push it out and get to work. You can feel afraid, but you still gotta do the job."

He was quiet for a moment. It was a Monday evening and Bunny was getting ready to turn in early. At work that afternoon, he'd seemed flip and carefree and a little c.o.c.ky. Not tonight. "I just hope that if I fall, I go on the outside," he said. "It's longer that way, but it hurts less when you land."

"Will somebody kill the d.a.m.n bird already?"

Sweat dripping from his face, his T-s.h.i.+rt drenched, Matt squinted up at an eighth-floor balcony across 58th Street, where a mechanical macaw perched on the railing. The bird was a fake, plumed with synthetic feathers and wired with a continuous loop soundtrack: caw-cawcawcaw-caw! caw-cawcawcaw-caw! The owners of the balcony only wanted to keep the pigeons away. Inadvertently, they were driving the ironworkers to madness. The cranes' engines whirred, the jackhammers split the sidewalk, the impact guns of the bolter-ups filled the air with their savage rattle, but the sound that pierced through all of this-the sound that drove the men crazy-was the fake macaw squawking on the railing across the street. The owners of the balcony only wanted to keep the pigeons away. Inadvertently, they were driving the ironworkers to madness. The cranes' engines whirred, the jackhammers split the sidewalk, the impact guns of the bolter-ups filled the air with their savage rattle, but the sound that pierced through all of this-the sound that drove the men crazy-was the fake macaw squawking on the railing across the street.

It was June, and summer was upon the city with all its heat and filth and irritants. The corrugated metal of the derrick floor reflected the sun's rays onto the men, retaining enough heat to cook through the soles of their shoes. When a breeze came, it carried the sweet sticky odor of port-a-pottys through the building. At lunch, the ironworkers sought the shade of Central Park, or a front stoop, or the air-conditioned chill of the Coliseum Bar and Grill.

The summer was off to a poor start. A few weeks earlier-on a Monday, as it happened-a young ironworker named Ron DiPietro had gone into the hole at a job on 56th Street, where ironworkers were erecting a skysc.r.a.per for the Random House publis.h.i.+ng company. He'd fallen two stories, hit something, then fallen three more. He'd survived the fall, but barely. Now, a month later, he remained bedridden, still unable to walk.

Ron's fall hit close to home at Columbus Circle, not simply because it had occurred a few blocks away, but also because many of the men now working at Time Warner had recently arrived from the Random House job and knew Ron well. Ron himself had been due to transfer over to Time Warner within weeks. His gang would still come, but now it would come without him.

The worst thing an ironworker can do after a colleague falls is to dwell on it; better to get back to work, out onto the steel, and put the accident, however awful, behind. Unfortunately, that was not an option right now at Columbus Circle, because the work had slowed to an excruciating pace. The reason was lack of steel. The recent building boom had created so much demand for steel that fabrication mills were having a difficult time keeping up. ADF Group Inc., the fast-growing Canadian fabricator that supplied steel to the Time Warner Center, was overextended: a convention center in Pittsburgh, an airport in Toronto, a stadium in Detroit, not to mention several lesser steel jobs in New York. The company simply could not produce enough fabricated steel to satisfy the demand of all these jobs at once. So instead of the usual nine or ten trucks arriving at Columbus Circle every day, the ironworkers were getting three or four. This was not enough steel to keep four tower cranes busy. It was hardly enough for two.

"Every day, it's the same story," said Joe Kennedy, the ironworkers' superintendent, as he sat in his trailer, surrounded by shop drawings, sounding weary and besieged. "They tell me they got more steel coming just around the corner. But then it never comes. It kills the men. They walk around with their heads down. You're an ironworker, you want to put up some iron and look back over your shoulder at the end of the day and see what you did-this is what they take away from us when we don't have enough steel to set. It's extremely frustrating."

It was particularly frustrating to the raising gangs, who thrived on action and compet.i.tion. Some days, Bunny and Jerry found themselves moving port-a-pottys and Dumpsters around on the crane, tedious and unsatisfying work. Weeks pa.s.sed without noticeable upward progress. The idleness gnawed at Bunny and made him irritable. "To tell you the truth, it sucks," he said one evening after work. "Everybody's p.i.s.sed off, n.o.body's got anything to do, everybody's b.i.t.c.hing and moaning. It's no fun coming to work when it's like this."

One afternoon, Chett Barker, the 55-year-old signalman in Bunny and Jerry's gang, announced that he'd decided to take some time off. The pain in his ankles was nearly constant. Simply walking across the derrick floor was difficult. A few days earlier, one of his ankles had given way. Chett had stumbled and fallen, and now his back bothered him, too. When he left for home that afternoon, he told the men to give him a few weeks for the pain to go away, then he'd be back, good as new. In fact, the pain would not go away and he was gone for good, effectively retired after 37 years in the trade, but he didn't know that yet.

The gang s.h.i.+fted to accommodate his absence. George asked Bunny to take over as signalman temporarily. This gave Matt Kugler the opportunity to move into position as the gang's second connector. Nothing could have thrilled him more. "They can send the rest of them boys away," he announced one afternoon at the Coliseum. "I'll set the whole thing myself. What ya say, Jerry? You and me."

Jerry grinned. "The whole building? I don't know. It's a pretty big building."

By 5:47 on the morning of June 28th, the temperature on the digital screen on the south side of Columbus Circle had reached 78 degrees. "Mostly Sunny," read the forecast on the screen. "Hot and Humid." Already the air felt soupy as the sun rose over the corner of Central Park. You could see how hot the day was going to be in the faces of the early-bird joggers returning from the park, flushed and gasping. Just after six, the first ironworkers began to arrive, rising out of the subways at the end of their long journeys from home. The men got coffee and papers then cl.u.s.tered around the front of the building. The gate opened around 6:30. Some went in, though most lingered out front. At 6:55, Ky Horn, a quiet young connector who worked with Chad Snow, walked out to the paved island in the middle of Broadway and sat on a bench, glancing at the big digital clock. When it turned to 6:59, he stood up and walked back to the gate.

A few hours later, around 11 A.M. A.M., as the mercury shot up past 90, the phone rang in Joe Kennedy's air-conditioned trailer. On the other end was a woman's voice. She needed Bunny to call her, she told Joe; it was urgent. Joe radioed George, the foreman, who relayed the message to Bunny on the derrick floor. Bunny dropped his headset and strode quickly across the floor, his heart pounding-had something happened to one of his daughters? his wife?-then ran up the metal stairs to the trailer.

"What's up, Joe?"

"I don't know. Your wife wants you to call home right away. It's important."

Bunny dialed his number. His wife picked up. "Keith, it's Weedy."

Weedy was the nickname of Bunny's cousin, Kenny McComber, a young ironworker, just 22 years old. He'd been working night s.h.i.+fts near home, retrofitting a bridge over the St. Lawrence River.

"What about him? What happened?"

"There was an accident. One of the outriggers on the crane broke. The rig fell over and pulled him into the water. They can't find him."

"All right, listen," said Bunny. "I'm coming home."

By early afternoon, he was on the New York State Thruway, racing north to Kahnawake.

PART II.

The Bridge

Kahnawake

Interstate 87 changes a few miles north of Albany. The four-lane road has been flat and straight but now it starts to bend and pitch in the foothills of the Adirondacks. The air cools, the traffic thins, and oaks and maples give way to dark pine lit by flashes of white birch. For the Mohawk ironworker returning home, the change is more than superficial. He is just half way to Kahnawake but he has crossed into ancestral land now, the land that Mohawks claimed for hundreds of years and which many Mohawks still believe is theirs, if not in law then at least in spirit. Kanienkeh Kanienkeh-the Land of Flint, as the Mohawks called their dominion-covered more than 15,000 square miles. It extended west from the Hudson River Valley and Lake Champlain over the mountains toward the Great Lakes. The southern border of the territory was the valley of the Mohawk River, where Interstate 90 now runs between Boston and Buffalo. The northern border was the St. Lawrence River in southern Quebec. For the next several hours, everything to the left, through the driver's-side window, once belonged to the Mohawks.

The drive from Manhattan to Kahnawake takes over six hours, though it can be done-G.o.d and the New York State Troopers willing-in five and a half. Before the Northway opened in the 1960s, the journey home took 11 or 12 hours on Route 9, the beautiful and treacherous two-lane road that once served as the main artery between New York and Montreal. The men drank more in those days, often starting with a few beers at a tavern, then sipping all the way home, and the 400-mile drive could be as lethal as the work. These days many of the men make the drive home in one fell swoop. A handful, though, still pull off at Exit 36, about an hour past Albany, for refreshment at the Black Bear.

The Black Bear is a ramshackle but cheery tavern nestled into a hollow where old Route 9 curves into the town of Pottersville. Mohawk ironworkers have been stopping off here since the early 1950s, when an Indian's car broke down one night near the tavern. The owners brought him in, fed him, and gave him a place to sleep. The Indian returned the favor by showing up a week later with fifty homebound ironworkers, and Mohawks have been coming ever since. Fewer men stop at the Black Bear nowadays, but on any given Friday evening a couple dozen ironworkers still pull into the parking lot under the high wall of pines, step out into the mountain air, and walk into the haze of smoke and ethanol fumes and good fellows.h.i.+p. A painting of a Mohawk brave hangs behind the bar. A stuffed bear lunges from a corner of the room. On cold nights, a wood fire crackles in the cast-iron stove at the far end of the bar. A couple of drinks, a few stories, a bite to eat from the restaurant, then the ironworker is back in his car, racing home with renewed urgency over the path that Mohawk ironworkers have been taking for generations-and that Mohawks walked four hundred years earlier on their way to Kahnawake.

Long, long ago, the earth was covered with water and the ancestors lived in the sky. They were the Sky Dwellers. One day, according to the creation myth of the Iroquois, the Great Leader pushed his pregnant daughter through a hole in the sky. As Sky Woman fell, the water animals below prepared to cus.h.i.+on her landing. Water Fowl flew up and took hold of her and lowered her gently onto the back of the Great Sea Turtle. Sky Woman was the first human to live on earth.

The terrestrial Mohawks lived mainly in the area around what is now Albany. Like all Iroquois, they dwelt in longhouses, rectangular bark-covered cabins shared by several families. The women farmed the fertile banks of the Mohawk River for corn and beans and squash, while the men disappeared into the mountain forests for long stretches to hunt for deer and bear and to fish for trout and perch. Occasionally, the Mohawks joined the other nations of Iroquois Confederacy to wage war. They were notoriously fierce warriors. Before going into battle, they took oaths to the sun, praying for victory and promising to eat their victims in sacrifice. They tended to keep that promise. The name "Mohawk" is not itself a Mohawk word. It was given to them by their anxious enemies, the Algonquin. It means "man-eaters."

Of the five (later six) nations of the Iroquois Confederacy, the Mohawks lived farthest to the east, which brought them into early contact with Europeans. First, the Europeans spread their diseases to the Indians, in the form of smallpox, which killed about 5,000-well over half the Mohawks' total population-in a matter of months. Then they imposed their religion, as Jesuit missionaries arrived near Albany in the mid-seventeenth century and began to convert the "sauvages" to Catholicism. In 1676, a large group of converted Mohawks and other Iroquois were persuaded by the missionaries-and perhaps more convincingly by antagonistic non-Christian Mohawks-to travel north and settle on the banks of the St. Lawrence River. The first settlement was at the Lachine Rapids, just east of Montreal. The Indians named it Kahnawake Kahnawake-"By-the-Rapids." The settlement moved upriver several times over the next half century, but held onto its original name. Kahnawake moved one last time, in 1716, to its final, and current, location on the southern banks of the St. Lawrence, eight miles upriver from Montreal.

Life was different on the great river. Along with traditional longhouses, the Mohawks now built st.u.r.dy stone houses and a stone church and rectory for the pursuit of their new religion. But it was commerce, not Christianity, that made the biggest impact on Mohawk culture. The St. Lawrence, reaching from the Atlantic Ocean to the Great Lakes, was fast becoming a superhighway into the interior for European speculators, and the men of Kahnawake worked as river guides, or "voyagers," transporting fur pelts east from the Rockies or south from Hudson Bay. When the fur trade began to dry up in the 1820s, the Mohawks turned to timber rafting, negotiating the goods of white men through the turbulent Lachine Rapids that ran just downriver from the reservation.

Living on the banks of the St. Lawrence placed the Mohawks in proximity to another of the white man's enterprises: the construction of the iron and steel bridges that began to span the river in the middle of the nineteenth century. The first of these was the Victoria Bridge, an iron tubular bridge erected seven miles downstream from Kahnawake in the 1860s. The Canadian Trunk Railroad purchased stone for the bridge piers from a quarry on the reservation, then hired Mohawk boatmen to transport the stone to the bridge site. It's not clear whether the Mohawks climbed up into the superstructure of this bridge, but certainly the Victoria gave them a taste of iron construction. Apparently they liked it. When the Canadian Pacific Railroad undertook a new bridge over the river 20 years later, the Mohawks were determined to partic.i.p.ate more directly.

This time the bridge was closer to home. In fact, one end of it was to be set on land at the northeast corner of the reservation. As part of the contract to obtain land rights, the bridge company agreed to hire Indians to work on the project. Originally, the Indians were meant simply to a.s.sist the bridgemen as day laborers, but they were not content with this supporting role. They began to climb up on the trestles at every opportunity.

"It was quite impossible to keep them off," an official of the Dominion Bridge Company later told the writer Joseph Mitch.e.l.l. "As the work progressed, it became apparent to all concerned that these Indians were very odd in that they did not have any fear of heights. If not watched they would climb up into the spans and walk around up there as cool and collected as the toughest of our riveters.... We decided it would be mutually advantageous to see what these Indians could do, so we picked out some and gave them a little training." Dominion Bridge trained three riveting gangs. The men of these gangs, in turn, trained other Indians. "It turned out," said the man from Dominion Bridge, "that putting riveting tools in their hands was like putting ham with eggs."

A hundred and twenty years later, an ironworker returning home from New York who enters the reservation from the east will pa.s.s through an old stone tunnel that runs under the railroad tracks. If he glances over his right shoulder as he exits the tunnel, he will see the old bridge, two dark humps against the sky. People here call it the Black Bridge. It's a rebuilt double-tracked version of that first bridge, the original bridge where it all began: all the wealth and pride and death and grief.

THE RIVER.

The night Bunny's cousin died was hot and windy. Kenneth "Weedy" McComber was working the graveyard s.h.i.+ft on the deck of the Champlain Bridge, just a few miles downriver from the reservation. Around 3:15 A.M. A.M., he was walking between the crane and the low concrete barrier that ran along the edge of the bridge when one of the outriggers supporting the crane snapped. The crane heaved over the side of the bridge, plunging about a hundred feet into the river. The crane operator managed to scramble out of the cabin moments after it hit the water. The current was so strong he was halfway to the Victoria Bridge by the time the rescue boat got to him.

[image]

Vea Kateri Cemetery, Kahnawake. Many of the graves of fallen ironworkers are marked by steel crosses.

(Photo by the author) There was no sign of Kenneth McComber.

Through dawn and into morning, the Surete du Quebec-the provincial police, known as the SQ-searched the 20-foot-deep water with boats and divers, then later with a helicopter. At 10:15 A.M. A.M. they called off the search. For many people at Kahnawake, this was evidence of the SQ's contempt for the Indians; had the boy been white, some suggested, the search would have gone on far longer. "The SQ performs searches like this during the winter, even under the ice, for days," an angry Kahnawake woman complained to the local newspaper. "Here it isn't even twelve hours and now it's over. That's unforgivable." they called off the search. For many people at Kahnawake, this was evidence of the SQ's contempt for the Indians; had the boy been white, some suggested, the search would have gone on far longer. "The SQ performs searches like this during the winter, even under the ice, for days," an angry Kahnawake woman complained to the local newspaper. "Here it isn't even twelve hours and now it's over. That's unforgivable."

Bunny, his father, and several cousins arrived at Kahnawake that evening, after driving straight home from New York. The men briefly stopped off to pay their respects to the young ironworker's family, then went directly out onto the water in boats that a few of the men kept at the marina. All night, by flashlight, they searched the river downstream of the bridge, looking for signs of Kenneth. Shortly after dawn, another s.h.i.+ft of men arrived to take over the search, and Bunny went home to get some sleep. He was back on the water that afternoon. Several boatloads of relatives and friends had joined in the search, including divers from the reservation's scuba club. One of the divers found a key and a shoe belonging to Kenneth. Both were about 250 feet downriver of the bridge. This seemed to confirm the working a.s.sumption that the fast current had swept Kenneth downstream, meaning his body could be just about anywhere between Montreal and Quebec.

On Friday evening, Bunny visited a medicine man on the reservation. The medicine man burned Indian tobacco, a means of communicating with the Creator, and afterward told Bunny to look for the number 3-this was the number he'd seen in his vision during the tobacco ceremony. The following day, Sat.u.r.day, Bunny and the other men returned to the water to continue the search. That morning, the divers discovered a white barrel on the riverbed under the bridge. On the side of the barrel was a number: 3.

"I looked and I said, 'Holy s.h.i.+t, it's gotta be around this area somewhere,'" Bunny recalled later. "Of all the millions of digits, how can anybody come up with that? The hair stood up behind my neck."

But there were no other finds that day, and by the end of Sat.u.r.day, the search party was frustrated and the family of the young ironworker was despondent. That evening, Bunny went to visit a different medicine man, an ex-ironworker he'd known for years. The second medicine man gave Bunny a new set of clues. "He told me a concrete pillar with some of the concrete broken, I guess by the current. You could see some of the rebar, it was rusty. And he said-he's there. That's where you'll find him."

The broken pillars sounded like the reinforced concrete piers of the bridge. If the medicine man was right, it meant Kenneth's body had not been swept downstream after all, but remained near the spot where he fell. The news excited Bunny. "That night, after that information, I went to everybody's house that was searching. I got in touch with a couple of the divers. I told them what my friend had seen. We had to get everybody out there-everybody together one last time. We had to try one more time."

At six o'clock the next morning, the search party reconvened. The men narrowed their search to the area under the bridge, around the submerged crane. They found nothing. At noon, Bunny came off the water and paid another visit to his friend. The medicine man was fairly confident that Kenneth McComber's body had remained near the bridge but allowed that it might have drifted overnight. "The water is so strong," he told Bunny. "It does what it wants. If you don't find him, go look in the bay. Look for uprooted trees lying in water. Look for a stone fence that was built by humans in the background. If he's not under the bridge, he'd be in that bay, floating. If you go in with a boat, and you get close enough, you can see him. He's facing up."

Bunny returned to the river in the afternoon. Before turning downstream to search the bay, the party continued to look under the crane. "I was hoping he'd still be there," said Bunny, "hoping we didn't have to go downriver. We searched the whole area. We searched on the side of the rig, underneath the platform. But he wasn't there. The divers decided, let's check around the crane one more time. They snagged a rope on the crane, then pulled themselves down toward the crane. They both searched. They looked at each other." Nothing. One of the divers emerged on the surface and climbed into the boat next to Bunny. The other diver emerged from the water a moment later. "Let me check one more time," he told the men in the boats.

"So he went down," said Bunny. "He went underneath the crane, and he went around a little further than he'd gone before. And then he saw him. He was sitting right there, right by the crane. The diver got hold of his hair and pulled him up.... I was more relieved than grieving. That the body had been found. And proving the SQ wrong." Bunny shook his head. "What a h.e.l.l of an experience. Something I don't want to do again. But eventually, it's gonna happen."

Indeed, as Bunny knew, it had happened before, many times. The river had given the Mohawks a great deal in the way of opportunity and prosperity, but it had exacted, in return, a terrible price.

THE GREATEST BRIDGE.

In the spring of 1907, about 40 Kahnawake bridgemen traveled 140 miles down the St. Lawrence to a deep narrow channel 6 miles west of Quebec City. The Indians had been in the bridge-building business for 20 years. They had worked on bridges along the length of the St. Lawrence, and had recently returned from work on an enormous bridge at Cornwall, Ontario, where they probably shared their knowledge of high-steel riveting with another band of Mohawk Indians, the Akwesasnes, who lived on a reservation near Cornwall. Now the men of Kahnawake came east to build an even greater bridge. It was going to be, in fact, the greatest bridge in the world.