distraction.
I'd learned from the visitor-center exhibits that Brutus was built right where it stands (being too big to move). There used to be a lot of coal here, and Brutus's job was to remove the rock and dirt on top of the coal so smaller shovels could get at it. Once the coal was gone, Brutus didn't have anything to do. Instead of scrapping it, the mining company donated the shovel and the land it was on to some local organization that fixed it up for tours.
Pop sure did like a tour. He stopped at every single site listed in the self-guiding brochure and read the explanation out loud. Stop number one was the bucket, or “dipper, which held ninety cubic yards or approximately one hundred forty tons of material.” Area-wise, the dipper was as big as our living room and almost twice as high.
Gee was acting sulky—he and Pop had probably had words about Cannonball Paul—so he refused to stand with me in the dipper to have our picture taken. But the iron teeth that stuck out from the lower jaw might have spooked him a little; in fact, now that he was up close and personal with this humongous thing, he seemed subdued—as if its sheer size had packed him into a ball of subduedness.
Once we were
inside
the humongous thing, though, he started expanding again. Inside Big Brutus is an ADHD fun house: rollers, gears, cables, ladders, and lots of portholes labeled KEEP OUT.
I don't know if “porthole” is the right word, but they were definitely holes, about four feet long, built into the metal walls. Pop said they led to the guts of the machine, where crewmen used to crawl around oiling parts. Ofcourse Gee disappeared into one the minute my back was turned, and when I started looking for him he popped out: “Pow! I'm a human cannonball!”
I grabbed him by the sleeve and pointed to the wall. “Look what it says: KEEP OUT. Two words. Which one do you not understand?”
“Hey!” Pop called from station eighteen. “Listen to this: ‘The main hoist was operated by eight five-hundred-horsepower DC electric motors. There are eight hundred feet of cable on each side.
All those numbers started to mean something when we got to the boom. There's a narrow door beside the operator's cab that lets you go right out on it. Then you can climb 150 feet of steps to the observation platform at the top.
I was dying to climb those steps, but first we had to discuss my age, because nobody under thirteen was allowed on the boom. I was almost thirteen—just four more months. Pop suggested talking to the gift-store lady for special permission, and I had to wonder if he wanted to gaze into her heavy-duty mascara again. But it was a long walk back to the gift shop, so he decided to let me fudge a little. First I would watch Gee (who'd never pass for thirteen) while Pop finished the self-guided tour in peace, and then we would switch off.
Easier said than done, of course—try keeping a hyper seven-year-old occupied in a big machine full of ladders and I-beams and holes that say KEEP OUT. To make it worse, a couple of teenage boys with floppy tank tops joined us and set a bad example by ducking in and out of the holes themselves.
Finally, Pop returned to take charge of Gee, and when I got my chance to climb to the top of those 150 steps, it was worth the effort. I could see all the way to Missouri, or it sure seemed like it. Kent Clark talks about stepping back to look at the big picture, and if that wasn't a big picture I don't know what is: miles and miles of land rolled out in every direction like a huge gray-green quilt marked with roads, dotted with houses and little towns, stitched up with tiny tractors. It all looked so normal—except for the fact that I was seeing it from the boom of a sixteen-story electric shovel out in the middle of nowhere. I looked with one eye, then the other, then with both eyes a little squinty wondering if there was some kind of inspiration to be had from this particular big picture.
Then I heard my
I'd learned from the visitor-center exhibits that Brutus was built right where it stands (being too big to move). There used to be a lot of coal here, and Brutus's job was to remove the rock and dirt on top of the coal so smaller shovels could get at it. Once the coal was gone, Brutus didn't have anything to do. Instead of scrapping it, the mining company donated the shovel and the land it was on to some local organization that fixed it up for tours.
Pop sure did like a tour. He stopped at every single site listed in the self-guiding brochure and read the explanation out loud. Stop number one was the bucket, or “dipper, which held ninety cubic yards or approximately one hundred forty tons of material.” Area-wise, the dipper was as big as our living room and almost twice as high.
Gee was acting sulky—he and Pop had probably had words about Cannonball Paul—so he refused to stand with me in the dipper to have our picture taken. But the iron teeth that stuck out from the lower jaw might have spooked him a little; in fact, now that he was up close and personal with this humongous thing, he seemed subdued—as if its sheer size had packed him into a ball of subduedness.
Once we were
inside
the humongous thing, though, he started expanding again. Inside Big Brutus is an ADHD fun house: rollers, gears, cables, ladders, and lots of portholes labeled KEEP OUT.
I don't know if “porthole” is the right word, but they were definitely holes, about four feet long, built into the metal walls. Pop said they led to the guts of the machine, where crewmen used to crawl around oiling parts. Ofcourse Gee disappeared into one the minute my back was turned, and when I started looking for him he popped out: “Pow! I'm a human cannonball!”
I grabbed him by the sleeve and pointed to the wall. “Look what it says: KEEP OUT. Two words. Which one do you not understand?”
“Hey!” Pop called from station eighteen. “Listen to this: ‘The main hoist was operated by eight five-hundred-horsepower DC electric motors. There are eight hundred feet of cable on each side.
All those numbers started to mean something when we got to the boom. There's a narrow door beside the operator's cab that lets you go right out on it. Then you can climb 150 feet of steps to the observation platform at the top.
I was dying to climb those steps, but first we had to discuss my age, because nobody under thirteen was allowed on the boom. I was almost thirteen—just four more months. Pop suggested talking to the gift-store lady for special permission, and I had to wonder if he wanted to gaze into her heavy-duty mascara again. But it was a long walk back to the gift shop, so he decided to let me fudge a little. First I would watch Gee (who'd never pass for thirteen) while Pop finished the self-guided tour in peace, and then we would switch off.
Easier said than done, of course—try keeping a hyper seven-year-old occupied in a big machine full of ladders and I-beams and holes that say KEEP OUT. To make it worse, a couple of teenage boys with floppy tank tops joined us and set a bad example by ducking in and out of the holes themselves.
Finally, Pop returned to take charge of Gee, and when I got my chance to climb to the top of those 150 steps, it was worth the effort. I could see all the way to Missouri, or it sure seemed like it. Kent Clark talks about stepping back to look at the big picture, and if that wasn't a big picture I don't know what is: miles and miles of land rolled out in every direction like a huge gray-green quilt marked with roads, dotted with houses and little towns, stitched up with tiny tractors. It all looked so normal—except for the fact that I was seeing it from the boom of a sixteen-story electric shovel out in the middle of nowhere. I looked with one eye, then the other, then with both eyes a little squinty wondering if there was some kind of inspiration to be had from this particular big picture.
Then I heard my
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