Musings Of A Muddled Male

The Importance of a Tether, and other Life’s Lessons

By Bob Stevens, The Muddled Male

       I was a young boy long before OSHA set out to eliminate every conceivable work-area hazard that government bureaucrats could dream up.  OSHA, for those of you unfamiliar with government acronyms, stands for Occupational Safety and Health Administration.  What living in a pre-OSHA era meant to an inquisitive young boy growing up in Devils Slide was that by cutting across the swinging-bridge that spanned the river and walking half a mile to the east I could wander almost unnoticed through a whole cement plant full of fascinating and, admittedly, dangerous machinery.  By dangerous I mean buildings filled with crushers, rotating kilns, ball mills, giant rotating sprockets, trip hazards, high voltage electrical panels, fast moving belt-conveyers, chain bucket conveyers, and auger conveyers moving the product through the various stages of production used to make cement.  The ball mills constituted an especially attractive temptation for boys who were always looking for ammunition for their flippers.

       Part of the cement making process involved tumbling the product in a series of giant, rotating cylinders filled with the product plus heavy steel spheres.  Tumbled together long enough those heavy spheres would gradually crush the product into smaller and smaller particles as the product moved from mill to mill with each succeeding mill being filled with smaller and smaller diameter steel spheres until the product became fine dust.  The spheres in the last mill started out being approximately half inch in diameter, the perfect size for flipper ammunition.  In time the spheres would become pitted and deformed so that they were no longer round.  At that point they would be removed and replaced with new, round, steel spheres.  The worn spheres would then be piled on the floor to eventually be sent off to a refinery to be melted and turned back into smooth round spheres.  If, while wandering through the plant, we came upon a pile of small worn spheres we would load up our pockets with the best flipper-ammo a young man could ever hope to find.  Two pockets full of steel spheres required a really strong belt cinched really, really tight around a little boy’s waist just to keep his pants from falling down around his ankles.  But it was all worth it because not even a magpie could dodge the lop-sided steel projectile shot with careful aim by a little boy pretending he was on a big-game hunt.

       Across the railroad tracks and over the highway to the west, however, was peace and tranquility.  Just the opposite of the noisy, dusty, dangerous plant.  With a little climb one could be atop a mountain bench situated at the bottom of Powder Hollow and overlooking the town of Devils Slide.  The name Powder Hollow came from earlier times when the cement plant stored dynamite there for use in an annual blast to loosen additional raw materials from the mountain needed for the making of cement.  For me, the bench was the ideal take-off and landing field from which to fly my kite.  Not a store-bought kite, mind you, but one made by me out of scrap wood, kite string, newspaper, and glue made out of flour mixed with water and a little sugar.  The wind blew down through Powder Hollow and across the bench toward the town.  If I made the kite correctly with a properly designed tail and enough kite string I could launch the kite and fly it across the highway and the railroad tracks to float above the town a quarter of a mile away.

       I learned three very important life lessons from those experiences.  The first was that a strong belt cinched tightly around a boy’s waist may keep his pants up, but it won’t keep the steel spheres from wearing a hole in his pocket and dropping onto the ground like Hansel and Gretel crumbs to help him find his way home where he is about to get a” whupping.”  The second was that if I ever expected to make a second kite I had better clean up the saw dust from cutting the kite sticks for the first kite and hang my dad’s rip-saw back on its special nail if I ever wanted to use his tools again.

       The third and most important lesson was that if a kite doesn’t have a tether it will simply flutter and fall instead of rising when the wind blows.  So young people and husbands, listen up.  Those rules that you think are holding you back and preventing you from having fun, might be there specifically to help you soar, at least that is what Ann, my wife, claims.