Handling Things Together

Last week we were repairing an old wall at Cleabarrow farm near Windermere. Martyn, Joe, Pat and Tony, all members of the DSWA of UK carried this heavy lintel stone over to the new opening we had created in the stone wall. They placed it over the opening to finish the top section of 'hog hole' we were building. Everyone had different 'skill levels' but the job got done smoothly and efficiently.

Handling a big stone requires that everybody works together. If one person lifts too much, someone else will end having to work harder to compensate for the imbalance, while another's efforts to help lift may become redundant. It is important to share the load equally. Cooperation involves not so much duplicating or copying what others do, but finding where there is both a place and opportunity to support the weight, and then simply fitting in. Each hand has a unique responsibility to balance the load without tipping up everyone else. There is danger of hurting someone if there isn't communication. There is danger of hands or people getting crushed if someone lets his end down (or lifts it too high) without telling people. Deferring to oneanother helps too. This isn't the place for hands to show off or compete or insist that they are more officially qualified. This isn't the place for too many hands either, no matter how good their intentions.

Does the right hand know what the left is doing?

Hand tools are useful in building a wall. Of course people have built some pretty amazing walls without the use of even tools such as hammers and chisels. But a hammer definitely helps. It is an extension of the fist which is pretty useless when it comes to breaking rocks. And a chisel I suppose is like an extension of the fingernails. They (fingernails) are good at splitting and prying open things and scratching lumps off things, but not rocks.

So hands that are thinking wisely about laying stone efficiently choose hand tools to make their life easier. I didnt say less dangerous. As soon as you introduce the simplest of hand tools you introduce an element of danger. It will be more easy to get the job done but more easy to get hurt too . The trade off for efficiency has always been thus.

If I walk to work, I get there slower. If I bicycle there, I will likely get there faster but I risk falling off and breaking my arm. If I drive, it gets me there even faster but I increase the severity of the consequences if I drive badly, or someone else does.

Hands can get hurt all the time if they are not thinking. Usually it is from a rock rolling or dropping onto to a finger or a thumb. But hands usually take more of a beating from each other. My right hand has smashed the daylights out of my left hand many times. I've got chips of stone in them and splinters of handles and scratches and grazes from all sorts of configurations of using my tools.

It seems funny to think hands can inflict so much pain on each other. But if the hands are thinking at all, they try to minimize these confrontations and unlike stonemasons they almost always 'make up' right away if one of them hurts the other.