Better Off_ Flipping the Switch on Technology - Eric Brende [43]
Nearby a stonemason was laying concrete block for horse stalls. It took me a while to make out his rapid movements. First he would lift, with the whisk of his trowel, a bladeful of mortar from a hawk board. Then, setting the dollop on a block, he would stretch it out like a noodle along the upper edge. He repeated the mortar-lengthening process on the opposite block edge, and on the vertical edges of the adjacent block—quickly, fft-fft—and then, before the mortar had time to slide off, jammed the next block against it.
Next to him was a beardless youth of about sixteen, studying and imitating his teacher. Why couldn’t the apprentice see how obvious the technique was? He used either too much or too little mortar, so it bulged or thinned out unevenly along his strips. The mortar fell off or his blocks wouldn’t lie square. He was clumsy, slow, and overly careful. If only he would forget about trying and just plunge ahead, like his master.
My eyes at last fell on a task for a beginner like me. A man was shoveling gravel and spreading it around the floor of one of the unfinished rooms. I inquired if I could assist him.
“Sure,” he said bashfully. His name was Rob. With a self-conscious smile, large bright eyes, dimples, and a red nose, he at first averted his gaze and kept his thoughts to himself. But as I spread gravel beside him awhile, he began to relax. He would occasionally rest his spade to talk. He began to try to teach me bits of Pennsylvania Dutch dialect, and as he did so, his face blossomed with pleasure as if he were discovering his own language for the first time.
Another fellow was stirring concrete alongside us, and he looked like Rob—Rob with a tanner nose and squarer features. Not surprisingly, he turned out to be Rob’s brother, and he stirred the concrete as if he had three arms. Consumed by work, he uttered only the barest verbal necessaries, occasionally chuckling or raising an eyebrow as he overheard our conversation.
Rob and I finished spreading the gravel, and John moved into the hard job that came next: pouring the concrete over the floor.
Modern construction crews have long since relinquished this task to the cement truck. John, however, pushed his wheelbarrow of concrete rapidly up a skinny plank spanning the unfinished floor, and at the precise moment upturned it, releasing the molten mixture over the gravel.
The feat inspired in me a sudden bravado, and I volunteered to follow John. A tall, muscular man nearby winked at me. “I secretly wanted you to,” he said. “That way I don’t have to do that.” I recognized him as one of Mr. Miller’s sons-in-law, the one who had loaned us our furniture.
“Howie doesn’t like to work,” someone else chimed in sarcastically.
“Is that why he’s so thin and shriveled?” I rejoined.
Howie looked at his feet and blushed. He was surely bigger and stronger than anyone here. His forearms flayed out broad and rippling, like ropes braided together. His shoulders were like mountain flanks. Yet from the little I had heard about him, I knew that he, like the Millers, had grown up surrounded by modern technology. He hadn’t come from Pennsylvania, but from somewhere in Indiana, possibly near a weightlifting gym.
Another voice added, “They might say, if you work too much, you do get thin and shriveled.”
“He is a little long.”
“You might build up muscle too.”
“How tall are you?” I asked him.
“Oh, about an inch over.”
“Six foot one?”
“Five foot twelve and a half.”
“That was a modest way of putting it.”
Howie smiled wider and wider in spite of himself. Modesty was cracking.
“I remember,” howled another fellow, “how ashamed I used to always get in school at weighing day, when I came out so much less than the rest. Then one day I passed Joe in length, but not in weight.” Eyes now fell on a young fellow, rail-thin, talking to us and turning the crank of the cement mixer. “I may be longer, but I still am skinny.” The skinny one, Eli, I soon learned, was the group’s scholar. Though