IN WHICH WE VISIT A PLACE OF UNUSUAL FEARS AND PERILS
AS I went time and again to the great East River Bridge, the new one whose huge steel towers were drawing to full height in the last months of the century, I found myself under a growing impression that here at last was a business with not only danger in it, but fear of danger. Divers and steeple-climbers I had seen who pronounced their work perfectly safe (though I knew better), and balloonists of the same mind about perils of the air; there were none, they declared, despite a list of deaths to prove the contrary. And so on with others. But here on the bridge were men who showed by little things, and sometimes admitted, that they were afraid of the black-ribbed monster. And it seemed to me that these were men with the best kind of grit in them, for although they were afraid of the bridge, they were not afraid of their fear, and they stuck to their job week after week, month after month, facing the same old peril until—well—
I came upon this fear of the bridge the very first time I sought leave to go upon the unfinished structure. It was in a little shanty of an office on the Brooklyn side, where, after some talk, I suggested to an assistant engineer, bent over his plans, that I would like to take a picture or two from the top of the tower. That seemed a simple enough thing.
"Think you can keep your head up there?" said he, with a sharp look.
I told him I had climbed to a steeple-top.
"Yes. But you were lashed fast then in a swing, and had a rope to hold on to. Here you've got to climb up by yourself without anything to hold on to, and it's twice as high as the average steeple."
"How high is that?" I asked.
"Well, the saddles are three hundred and forty feet above the river."
"Saddles?"
"That's what we call 'em. They're beds of steel on top of the towers for the cables to rest on—nice little beds weighing thirty-six tons each."
"Oh!" said I. "How do you get them up?"
"Swing 'em up with steam-derricks and cables. Guess you wouldn't care for that job, hanging out on one o' those booms by your eyelashes."
"Perhaps not," I admitted. "But I'd like to watch it."
He said I must see somebody with more authority, and turned to his plans.
"You don't feel in danger yourself, do you," I persisted, "when you go up?"
"Don't, eh?" he answered. "Well, I nearly got cut in two the other day by a plate-washer. It fell over a hundred feet, and went two inches slam into a piece of timber I was standing on." Then he explained what havoc a small piece of iron—some stray bolt or hammer—can work after a long drop.
"That plate-washer," said he, "weighed only two pounds and a half when it began to fall; but it weighed as much as you do when it struck—and you're a fair size."
THE WORK OF THE BRIDGE-BUILDERS. A TOWER OF THE NEW EAST RIVER BRIDGE. THIS PHOTOGRAPH ALSO ILLUSTRATES THE NARROW ESCAPE OF JACK MCGREGGOR ON THE SWINGING COLUMN. (SEE [PAGE 192].)
"Is that based on calculation," said I, "or is it a joke?"
"It's based on the laws of gravitation," he answered, "and it's no joke for the man who gets hit. Say, why don't you go down in the yard and look around a little?"
I told him I would, and presently went down into the yard, a noisy, confusing place, where the wind was humming through a forest of scaffolding that held the bare black roadway skeleton a hundred feet overhead. It was a long street of iron resting on a long street of wood, with timber and steel built up in X's on X's, the whole rising in an easy slant to yonder grim tower that loomed heavy and ugly against the sky, a huge bow-legged H with the upper half stretched to a great length, and each leg piled up with more black X's held by two enormous ones between. It looked for all the world as if it had come ready made in a box and had been jointed together like children's blocks, which is about the truth, for this great bridge was finished on paper, then in all its parts, before ever a beam of it saw the East River. As I drew near its feet (which could take a row of houses between heel and toe) I had the illusion, due to bigness and height, that the whole tower was rocking toward me under the hurrying clouds; and at first I did not see the workmen swarming over it, they were so tiny.
But they were making noise enough, these workmen, with their striking and hoisting and shouting. There was the ring of hammers, the chunk-chunk of engines, the hiss of steam, the mellow sound of planks falling on planks, and the angry clash of metal. Presently, far up the sides of the tower, I made out painters dangling on scaffolding or crawling out on girders, busy with scrapers and brushes. And higher still I saw the glow of red-hot iron, where the riveters were working. And at the very top I watched black dots of men swing out over the gulf on the monster derrick-booms, or haul on the guiding-lines. And from time to time the signal-bell would send its impatient call to the throttle-man below, six strokes, four strokes, one stroke, telling him what to do with his engine, and to do it quick.
The yardmen seemed to get on in the din by a system of strange yells. Here were a score of sturdy fellows doing something with a long steel floor-beam. They were working in scattered groups, some on the ground, some on the roadway overhead. It was lower pulley-blocks, and spread out flapping cables, and hitch fast the load, all without any hurry. Suddenly a man at the left would put a hand to his mouth and sing out: "Hey-y-y!" and a man overhead would answer: "Yeow-yeow-yeow!" and then they all would cry: "Ho-hoo-ho-hoooo!" and up would go the floor-beam, twisting as she lifted, a nice little load of ten tons, and presently clang down on her lofty bed like a peal of high-pitched thunder.
I chanced to be talking with the yard foreman when there came such a sudden clang, and then I saw an easy-going, rather stolid man pass through a singular transformation. Like a piece of bent steel he sprang back, every muscle in him tense, and up came his arms for defense, and there in his eyes was the look I came to know that meant terror of the bridge, and fear of sudden death. To me, unfamiliar with the constant danger, that clang meant nothing; to him it was like a snarl of the grave.
"Better stand back here," said he, and led me over by the air-compressing engine, where we were out of range.
Then he told how a superintendent of construction had been nearly killed not long before by a piece of falling iron, just where we were standing. And looking up through the criss-cross maze, with openings everywhere from ground to sky, with workmen everywhere handling loose iron, I realized that this was a kind of slow-fire battle-field, not so very glorious, but deadly enough, with shots coming from sky to earth every ten minutes, every half-hour—who can know at what moment the man above him will drop something, or at what moment he himself will drop something on the man below! A tiered-up battle-field, this, where each black X, with its hammers and bolts and busy gang, is a haphazard battery against all the X's below, and a helpless target under all the X's above.
"Why, sir," said the foreman, "that tower went into a reg'lar panic one day because some fool new man on top upset a keg o' bolts. Sounded as if the whole business was coming down on us."
I began to realize what tension these men work under, what vital force they waste in vague alarms!
"'THERE WAS PAT, FAST ASLEEP, LEGS DANGLING, HEAD NODDING, AS COMFORTABLE AS YOU PLEASE.'"
"It's queer, though," continued the foreman, "how the boys get used to it. See those timbers right at the top that come together in a point? We call that an A-frame; it's for the hoisting. Well, the boys walk those cross-timbers all the time, say a length of thirty feet and a width of one. It's nothing on the ground, but up there with the wind blowing—well, you try it. I saw one fellow do a thing that knocked me. He stopped half-way across a timber not over eight inches wide, took out his match-box, stood on his right foot, lifted his left foot, and struck a match on his left heel. Then he nursed the flame in his hands, got his pipe going good, and walked on across the timber. Wha'd' ye think of that? There he was, balanced on one foot, sir, with an awful death on either side, and the wind just whooping—all because his pipe went out. I wouldn't do it for—for— Well, I wouldn't do it."
"Why didn't he wait to light his pipe until he got across?" I asked.
The foreman shook his head. "I give it up. He just happened to think of it then, and he done it. That's the way they are, some of 'em. Why, there was another fellow, Pat Reagan, as good a man as we've got, and he went sound asleep one day last summer,—it was a nice warm day,—sitting on the top-chord. That's a long, narrow girder at the very highest point of the end-span. First thing we knew, there was Pat, legs dangling, head nodding, comfortable as you please. A few inches either way would have fixed him forever; but he stuck there, by an Irishman's luck, until two of his mates climbed up softly and grabbed him. They didn't dare yell for fear he'd be startled and fall."
While we were talking the wind had strengthened, and now every line and rope on the structure stood out straight from the sides, and swirls of spray from hoisting engines overhead flew across the yard, also occasional splinters. The foreman hurried a man aloft with orders to lash fast everything.
"There's a hard blow coming up," he predicted, "and it 'wouldn't do a thing' to those big timbers on the tower if we left 'em around loose! People have no idea what force is in the wind. Why, sir, I've seen it blow a keg of railroad spikes off that tower clean across the yard. And one day two planks thirteen feet long and two inches thick went flying over the whole approach-works right plumb through the front of a saloon out on the street. That made eight hundred feet the wind carried those planks. As for coats and overalls, why, we've watched lots of 'em start from the tower-top and sail off over Brooklyn city like kites—yes, sir, like kites; and nobody ever knew where they landed."
"I don't see how the men keep their footing in such a gale," I remarked.
"Well," said he, "we order them down when it blows an out-and-out gale, but they work in 'most anything short of a gale. And it's a wonder how they do it. It's not so bad if the wind is steady, for then you can lean against it, same as a man leans on a bicycle going around a curve; but—"
"Do you mean," I interrupted, "that they walk narrow girders leaning against the wind—against a hard wind?"
"Certainly; they have to. But that's not the worst of it. Suppose a man is leaning just enough to balance the wind, and suddenly the wind lets up, say on a gusty day. Then where's your man? Or suppose it's winter and the whole bridge is coated with ice, so that walking girders is like sliding on glass. Then where is he, especially when it's blowing tricky blasts? Oh, it's no dream, my friend, working on a bridge!"
And I, in hearty accord with that opinion, betook me back to the office, where I read just outside the door this ominous notice: "All accidents must be reported as soon as possible, or claims therefor will be disregarded."
A workman came up at this moment, and, with a half-smile, asked if I knew their motto, the motto of the bridge-men.
"No," said I; "what is it?"
"'We never die,'" said he, with a grim glance at the notice; "we don't have to." Then, pointing overhead: "Come up and see us. I'll introduce you to the boys."