These hands, that have known metal

It’s been years since they have touched my hands, but still I remember how it felt to hold them. The sensation, of dirt sliding along the palm as metal bars are moved and shifted in space, is pleasant in its own gritty kind of way. How the metal always felt cold at first blush, even on warm days, until they had been handled enough times by enough hands. Eventually, they would turn warm in the sun, like all things will, but just like the bones of our bodies, the metal bars of scaffolding take time to absorb the heat of the day.

I have, alongside others, built scaffolding so high you think it might touch the hem of God’s dangling skirt. Together, we have wrapped around the walls of a building, scaled in size and proportion to allow for height, and use, and wind. We have considered the weight of the bodies on it, and what they might require. Planks and guardrails and places to tie off to in case of an incident. Although I failed all of my high school math classes in spectacular fashion, my job became doing calculations in my head on the fly, and sometimes I think if math class had been held outside while building something I might have succeeded. There I was an academic failure, accounting for height and width to adjust the ratio and calculate an appropriate base size. I have been trained and certified, and re-certified again. When we would ask about rules that felt arbitrary at times, if not overkill, they would tell us a very basic and common refrain, that all of these regulations are sentences written in blood.

Spend enough time working a skilled trade, and you will know the weight of this with intimate detail. How the body stores each memory, every skipped step and cut corner, storied by sore muscles and healed scars. I can tell you that when I close my eyes, I can remember how it felt to walk up to the top of a six-foot step ladder, and put my foot on the top rung they tell you to never use. How I balanced on it “just to see if this is enough height,” and how my foot slipped below me. I can tell you I remember falling. I can recall striking my head on the ladder, lying on its side on the ground next to an exposed length of rebar. I can remember the bitter darkness of unconsciousness, and then hands on my body shaking me, and speaking my name in a concerned tone. I can remember waking up, and feeling the mark on my forehead forming where it had hit the metal side of the ladder. I can remember seeing the rebar I was almost impaled on. It is there as a ghost every day now in my memory. Sometimes, when my intrusive thoughts are stronger than my rationale self, I wonder if I actually died that day, or any of the other days where death came so close while I was working. What if this is the afterlife? After all, how can I be so lucky to have walked away from so many sentences written in blood? Who am I to deserve anything as perfect as this life of memories, these soft hands, when I am just a failure after all.

Often when you are working with your hands, you are being perceived, and rarely is it positive. There is always someone watching. Sometimes it’s an old man out for a walk who wants to look and ponder, and will give you his thoughts on process if approached. Sometimes it’s a foreman, or a safety compliance officer with a tired pad of paper. Sometimes it’s a random assortment of keen observers, who are eager to see what comes of all this hustle and bustle. To work with your hands in public is to be seen covered in dirt and sweat, to be gruff and curt and tired. To be seen as a body, but less than a person. To be something other. To be labourers, to be working class, but a different kind of working class. To be simple. To be nothing at all. To be annoyances, or nuisances, or bodies that were moving too slow. Hands covered in the detritus of labour that are never enough. If only they moved faster, if only they were better, and cleaner. If only they could be perfect, then this wouldn’t be so hard for those with porcelain skin watching from great distance.

Sometimes, the rules of labour don’t make sense to those who are unfamiliar with its tedious nuances. Sometimes a scaffold seems too high, or simply put, it is too much. The bones of it are erected too slowly, and they form too broad a skeleton. This whole mess could be a scissor lift maybe, or some kind of bucket truck. Bodies that will never climb so high on metal rungs and bars clipped together by hands working together will make wild assertions to its proper usage. They will imagine themselves so clever for their observations because they passed math classes and all the others, and so they deserve to be smarter than those tired and weathered hands. Their opinions on all things correct.

A tarp will be pulled tight on the skeleton to protect from the weather, to protect the distant air and the bodies observing from a distance. It will be pulled tight like skin, and it will create a degree of protection for the lives and bodies inside who would rather just climb and do their work, then be free to go home and finally rest. They are aware of the perception of them, and would rather work in the same comfort afforded so many others, that is to say relative privacy and peace.

On Friday, I watched a video of people with soft hands yelling “shame” as a tarp was pulled up on scaffolding on the side of the Kennedy Centre, as if the men who had built this structure to climb are the same who demanded a name be haphazardly drilled into the marble walls of this hallowed institution. As if they are responsible for so much of the troubled air that plagues us, and deserve to take the brunt of people's abject anger. I saw people post photos, and brag about the lengths to which some will have to overcome in order to peer through the tarp to capture them on film. These bodies less than human, hounded and catalogued, hidden away by some grand conspiracy of a tarp on the side of a wall. Who deserve nothing but the bitter perception of any who want a target for all their slings and arrows.

The people who built this scaffold are not the problem, and although I don’t know their political affiliations, the point remains the same. They are working class, the same as any others, doing a job that most would rather not do despite their insistence of a better way. They are building a scaffold in full view of so many that are eager to see the scars of recent history erased and healed over, as if that could happen so quickly. So many eager onlookers who want to watch each letter come off, as if a name removed in reverse erases the spell and reverts us back to some degree of normalcy. Those working on the scaffold become less real, ideas of lives to be studied and discussed. How they function is a great mystery, although many will profess to a deep understanding of their secrets. They will become less human, and something other, the way that those who work with dirty hands often become.

I am a third generation tradesperson, and so I come from this same sense of other. All of this work, a memory in my body. I can imagine frantic calls made by barking voices that demanded the work be done, and quick. I can imagine the stress of knowing just how many people were going to be bearing judgmental witness to it. I can hear someone saying, “we do this by the book,” in a way that threatens reprisal on any one body that would rather step to the top rung of their ladder. I can see the line items on an invoice for each piece of equipment that many will agree is overkill. I can hear someone say better safe than sorry, a sentiment written at the feet of a grave.

Someone posts a theory online that the letters were installed in a bucket truck in an hour, and so the removal should be just the same. I wonder if anyone is aware of the tether connecting the ease of which all these hated things happened, and wanting the same swift satisfaction of return. It will take a while to fix and heal these scars, and it is perhaps important that it does. Each sentence and each memory is a line written in blood, that will remind us of what has happened, and what has led to the theories that allow us to build a better theory for moving forward. We are in danger now because so many steps have been skipped, and it’s important to remember how the dirt brushes against skin as metal rungs are passed from hand to hand. Consider that there are hard-earned lessons in how we safely, and steadily, dismantle all this. If we move slow and careful, we can calculate the ratio of the height and width of our desires, so we might build a base strong enough to reach towering heights.