To me there is little more beautiful than the slow but insistent work of man, the kind that I think of as "one foot in front of the other" work. My father recently put up a barn, a large and complicated one, with one buddy in the span of couple of months. I asked him how it could be done, and he told me "by hitting nails. Most things, when you come right down to it, are all about repeating a tedious action a thousand times."I watched these guys digging this hole throughout one foggy morning and afternoon. They began by slamming up the concrete, then they starting using the earth mover. A lot of it, though, had to be dug by hand. That's where the slow but insistent part comes in.
And me, I was busy writing a final project, but I kept coming around every twenty minutes or so with my camera, unable to keep away, so that by the end of their very gritty day, they would straighten up and wave when they saw me. And eventually, both my project, and the whole, were complete.
What they plan to do with the gapping hole in the middle of our quad...now that's a mystery. Maybe its a trap for elephants.
