I worked in the bindery
at Ripon Printers again last night. This morning, these old bones ache. Yet it is good for them to ache, is it not? The feel of it reminds me where I've come from - the common dirt - and helps me to keep from getting too big for my britches, literally as well as metaphorically.
For eight hours last night, I was drilling books one at a time in my patented style which had one of the fellows working with me saying: "Your arms must get tired...."
"No," I said, "it's my back that gives out first."
Yet I can keep it up for eight hours. That's the farm-boy custom - you put yourself to the task and you lean into it and you don't look back. The only time the company is making money on my work is while the drill is actually going through the book.
It helps if you are a little bit ambidextrous. With the right hand, you hold the book in place under the drill heads, then remove it and move it to the side so it can be put into a box. With the left hand, you take the next book off the stack to your left, put it into position waiting to go under the drill, and - as your right hand removes the finished book - you slide the undrilled one into place. Your right hand comes back and holds the book in place; your left hand goes back to the stack at your left to get another book.
And how does the book get drilled? You foot - either right or left, and you'll alternate as the evening goes on - steps down on the pedal which lowers the drillheads into the book. Because the lowering of drill bits to and through the book is so slow - the slowest part of the operation - I keep trying to establish a rhythm which starts the drill in motion half a beat before the book is finally in place. There is plenty of time to let off the foot pedal if the bits are approaching the book before the book is where it should be. Yet I would never make a mandolin player, chunking on the off-beat, or a drummer doing the downbeat and upbeat and offbeat all. Only rarely am I able to sustain the most efficient rhythm. It takes concentration, and a bit more faith than I have, apparently, a bit more sense of certainty that the book will be in place by the time the drill bits touch it. I try to make my foot go that half beat early, and my foot resists.
The whole operation is a bit like a centipede walking, I suppose, in that you may become paralyzed if you think too much about how you do it. The beauty of the physical motion is that it can become almost a zen meditation - you become the motion; you are in the moment, in the movement. You lean into it. You go. You glide.
It looks as if you are doing something fast - and indeed with this technique you are one kick-ass drill operator - yet it all goes slow. You have all the time the drill is in the book to move your right hand to hold the book that is being drilled, to let go with your left hand and use it to get the next book into position waiting to be drilled. You have at least twice the time you need - that's how slow the drill is.
Using my technique, you can move a lot of books in eight hours, but you can't move them all. The fellow on the forklift keeps bringing another skid out of storage every time he hauls a skid of finished books off to the shipping department. It is always a mind-numbing crush of books needing to be drilled. I never like to know exactly how many are left to do. I would rather be lost in that moment - right hand moving the drilled book away, left hand moving the next book into place, the foot already sending the drill bits toward their business.
That moment. You're gazing off serene and beatific, and the fellow working next to you says: "Your arms must get tired...."
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