What's done is done

Bowersock Hydroelectric Powerhouse 
on the north bank of the Kaw River, 
Lawrence, Kansas, 2011 - 2012

            Click on photos to
            view them full-sized.
            Link at the bottom of
            page to photos inside
            North Powerhouse.

The idea of harnessing the power of water that falls from the sky and then flows ever downstream to the ocean has been around for a long time. The Bowersock Mills and Power Company has been doing that on the south bank of the Kaw River since 1874. Now they’re spending roughly $25 million dollars to build a North Powerhouse.

Here’s the thing: What is done must be done.

I walk across the Kaw River Bridge nearly every day and I have watched mostly men doing this thing. The only woman I noticed, as she sometimes walked across that bridge, was the relatively small woman who heads Bowersock now. The rest of the workers were men, roughly my height and weight.

And I also saw their machines – trucks and backhoes and cranes and more - also made by human hand.

I can’t begin to tell you about everything that was done, but believe me, everything that was done on that north bank of the Kaw and extending across the river was done by the hands of men and, through the extensions of their hands, with tools that they controlled.

We live in a culture in which clicks seem to make amazing things happen.

Imagine if you can, a man handling a crane many times his height. Just the tops of the tracks that creep and scrape the crane along the earth and rock are nearly at eye level. Other men on the ground hook a hook onto a long steel pile many times their height and weight and then the crane operator hoists it into the air, other men maneuvering it into its precise place, so that the pile driving tool that has been suspended from the crane can driving that steel pile into the river bed. Then the process is repeated over and over, one pile driven precisely next to the other around the perimeter of the work site, the crane and the men working atop a platform of dirt and rock that they have constructed themselves extending out into the river. Then men operating bulldozers and backhoes pile more dirt and rock against the steel wall, all of this simply to make it possible for these same men to lay the foundation of the power plant fifty feet below the surface of the river.

In the hole they then dug day after day, they worked, scraping the river bottom, finally drilling holes with an auger nearly as wide as their bodies are thick to a depth many times their individual height down to the bedrock to anchor the power plant they will build to the earth. Each hole was filled with steel rebar and concrete. Then the floor itself was laced with layer upon layer of steel rebar and yet more steel rebar. Then several feet of concrete was poured over all of it - just to make the floor. They started the pour for that floor in the early morning, lights hooked to generators, just in case, so that the contents of perhaps a hundred cement trucks could be transferred though a concrete pumping truck in one day. In other stages of construction, concrete was moved by way of a huge bucket dangling at the end of another of a steel cable from another crane.

Now consider this: this giant of a crane also had to be anchored to the earth with more augered holes and steel and concrete and then erected high into the air, a piece at time, so that a man could climb up the long ladder at the beginning of the work day to sit high in the cab, moving his hands to move the machine that would move the material around the work site.

If this seems complicated beyond belief, trust me, you haven’t heard the half of it.

This tall crane hoisted steel forms, panels perhaps twice as wide as a man is tall and three or four times as tall, occasionally with men holding on to ropes on the corners as the panel was lowered into place so that the wind wouldn’t catch the panel and slam it into more men who were clambering on webs of rebar as they formed up the massive walls.

One floor. Walls. The second floor, where the turbines would be placed in four holes roughly the diameter that a man is tall. Then more walls, and then the third floor and more walls and finally the fourth floor which would hold the generators that will generate the power. Every ton of steel reinforcing, every ton of concrete, was hauled from somewhere else to this place and placed precisely where it belonged.

In case you’ve forgotten, each ton is roughly ten times each worker’s body weight. And the forms and the scaffolding and the tools also had to be moved. And the men also had to move their own bodies.

Internal combustion engines and electrical power were significant in this construction, but if you watched this power plant being built, you could not fail to notice how much of the doing was done with human muscle and brain. And those tools that extended the reach and power of those human workers, they too, came from the same source - brain and muscle.

I’ve barely begun to tell everything. Earth was moved to divert the river while men built another concrete and steel framework for a pressurized rubber tube dam that would hold the river back at an additional depth of about the height of a man. The men cut through the steel and concrete along the top of the existing dam with diamond saw to lay pipes for air that would inflate the dam. It took time and, to reinforce my own point, the material with which this power plant was built - the steel and the concrete – also only came out of the earth through human effort. And the transportation, over distances great, as well as many here as small as an arms length. Sometime fractions of an inch mattered.

Prefabricated steel and concrete beams and panels were lifted into place for the generator house. And then stainless steel roofing. And glass for the windows. And the turbines, and the shafts and the generators themselves. Four of them, each one three times bigger than one of the seven generators in the south unit. And the electrical hardware, conduits and wires. The earth was moved and unmoved. And moved and unmoved again.

The giant crane came down. The steel piles were vibrated back out. The dirt and rock removed, a backhoe scoop and truckload at a time.

Long days. Almost every day in July, to take one extreme month, was hot – a hundred degrees hot.

I walked across the bridge and those men worked, for roughly a year.

Soon, if the rain comes, with a click on a mouse or keyboard, electricity will flow to tens of thousands of homes.

The earth, the raw materials, the rain, the forces of nature, even our human ingenuity, we were given all of that.

We human beings - some of us – make the tools and do the work. Men and women do the lifting, the manipulating of materials, the step by step building of what has been imagined. At every point, human hands directed by human brains an arm’s length away were required to build this power plant.

Look at the men in some of the photographs again. Then look at what they did. It was my privilege to watch them work. Believe me when I tell you that I haven’t told you the half of what they did.

But as has always been true, what is done must be done.

Link to Inside Bowersock North Blogpost

Twelve additional photos taken from inside the power plant.


A forty page book with essentially the same photos and writing is available through Amazon, directly from the author, with limited copies at The Raven. More info at Bowersock book.

Saying nothing at all

If you’re going to write, you could do worse than sit in a chair in front of Signs of Life, your feet resting on another chair, the sun laying low to one side warming the December air. People walk by. A street musician on the bench across the sidewalk sings a song made famous by Alison Krauss, something about saying it best when you say nothing at all. So why then would I write when I could watch and listen?

Street Musician's Banter

I’ll give you a buck if you play a song I like.

I’ll give you a buck if you play a song you like – and you play it well.

I’ll give you a buck if you make me smile.

I’ll give you a buck if you make me cry.

I’ll give you five if you let me sit in – and you have to give it back if I’m good.

We could be here all day and all night.

Here’s a buck, just play.

I’ll sing along if I feel like it for free.

I sat on a plantar not far.

She tuned her painted guitar.

She then sang a tune I had heard,

but I didn’t hear every word.

Then she looked my way and thanked me

and I hadn’t given her any money,

but I gave her my name, when she asked,

and then she did the same.

Here’s the verse,

if your ears are perked.

Her name is Linda and she wondered out loud

if we might be related after I had jokingly said

that the Bert character on Sesame Street was no kin of mine.

Linda said her family went back to Scandinavia,

I said mine came from Holland.

So our hair and our skin were close relatives after all.

We chatted a bit,

but I didn’t gather that she was an anthropologist by profession.

She had a nice voice.

Pardon me. I’m certainly not satisfied with how that sounds.

Linda could carry a tune all the way across the sidewalk

and have it echo all the way back to the other side of the street

with change to spare,

which was only in part what she seemed to be after.

She came to sing.

I asked her if she knew any Leonard Cohen.

She said she did, but not by heart. She smiled.

She offered me her book, it was titled,

‘Hard Times’ and something or other.

So I asked if she knew the tune by that name

written by Stephen Foster.

Linda said she’d like to sing it,

although I didn’t know her well enough to

feel what she was feeling.

Linda sang the song through

and along the way made a buck or two.

I sang a little harmony on the chorus.

She offered that she’d seen me around.

And I had recognized the lime green bicycle I’d seen her riding before.

Finally I nodded, turned, and walked away.

She had more tunes to play

and change to collect.

An economist would say our exchange had been worth a buck –

minus the ever creeping inflation.

But I didn’t notice any of their kind pausing if they walked by.

I never asked Linda if she knew any good old hymn tunes.

I was thinking of ‘Till we meet again.’

Linda was just a street musician,

and I was a passerby.

A little music in the air,

more if you wanted to listen.

Crossing Mass at 9th St.

In the folds

of her dark green

sweater

lie hills and valleys

of sunlight and shadow,

each one a new horizon

across her form.

She walked ahead of me,

her face looking forward,

pale sneakers

marking the pavement

with disappearing steps.

Working Poet

What would poets do

if everyone paid attention

to the universe,

that is, pieces of it

at a time?

Maybe poets would

just have to try to live

for a living.

And what would

be the satisfaction

in that?

Of course, that’s just

silly.

Poet’s write first

because that’s how

they pay attention.

And what is

the satisfaction

in living

anyway?

I really

should just

go for a walk.

Maybe I’ll stop

for an egg crème

and think about the

chocolate syrup,

or the milk,

or the soda water,

or the smooth, cold

stones of clear ice

that carry the flavors -

just a hint -

of chocolate milk

with a little fizz.

I really should just

stop.

Maybe there’s a bench:

A poet’s life

can be so very

tedious and tiresome,

finding satisfaction

in such small increments.

Maybe I should just

breathe

more deeply.

Something a little funny about race

Three black girls

sat in a corner

of Central Field.

An old white male

watched them

from across the way.

Presumptions are made

all the time

based on the color of skin,

of age, of gender.

It’s simpler that way.

Several years ago

these girls would have learned

how to add their ages together

and would still find that their total is

less than my single sum.

But are we equal to?

My people,

I presume those generations long gone

to be mine,

they came to this part of the world

some years well after

their people, more presumptions made,

were freed in this country’s

Civil War,

skirmishes for their freedom

breaking out from time to time

to this very day.

So many simplifications

in telling the tales.

Their people.

My people.

People of my skin color

and my gender,

were mindlessly  and maliciously

raping and lynching

those people of darker hues -

so long ago by these girls lives,

yet so very near the time of my own birth

in this land of the not yet fully free.

All this matters,

the math and the history,

but today I care about something else.

These school girls must have seen me coming

and I hope their merry laughter

is of a simple sort,

and I smile at what I presume

young girls might find that is funny

in a ruddy face and aging gait.

If only we each get our turn.

And then they rose,

their kinky black hair,

their skinny-jeaned legs

like scissors in harmony,

and the three girls scampered up the hill

and vanished behind the school house doors.

I presumed they were my people,

from the way they giggled.

Why wouldn’t I?

It’s better that way.

A smallish river

When’s the last time you watched a bird fly?

Not an event to write home about, I don’t suppose.

But what is?

Air and water,

earth and fire.

But unless we took nearly everything for granted, we would be constantly dumbstruck, awestruck - struck.

But we have breaths to take, and on and on, and we really must get on with our lives.

Even so, consider this gull I saw: white, on the smallish side, without a known species name.

He or she – I can’t tell you that detail either – has been flying over a stretch of the Kaw River in front of me for several minutes getting on with her life.

Just off this sandbar, the river appears to move in two directions at once: downstream, in smallish ripples along the far bank, pulled by gravity, and upstream, smallish ripples, pushed in front of the wind.

The gull makes a vigorous flutter with her wings, then drops to the surface of the river for an instant or two, then, with her wings, lifts herself into the air and a flies a few feet farther downstream, where she repeats her motions again, and then, again, she flutters and then drops, only to lift off again. Occasionally she settles onto the river, just floating for a few seconds, but then she is back to her flight.

At some point she lengthens her stroke and wheels around and flies, perhaps 50 yards upstream, then turns, and begins the process again.

This ordinary, smallish gull flew within my field of vision for several minutes, and then she was gone, flying somewhere else.

I sit here on the sandbar, not entirely dumbstruck as evidenced by these words.

But that gull was something to see.

And now between me and the sun, its radience coming through the thinning clouds, the sun, I tell you, is reflected in its brilliance on smallish ripples of the river, which in my aging eyes, spark with rays along skewed points of a compass, spikes of stabbing light, faster than my brain can record, a cluster of them drifting down near the far bank, and then nearer to me, more scattered, they appear to be pushed upstream by the wind.

Larger gulls wheel over the smallish rapids where the Kaw tumbles a little perhaps a hundred yards upstream.

Maybe I’ll walk over and see.

Sun and sand, wind and water, flying gulls.

Nothing much to write home about.

Veteran's Day

This guy, a little older and scruffier than me,

who now and then sits on the sidewalk

in his Army green jacket,

back against the wall,

his damaged leg outstretched,

looking for all the world

like he plays a broken Vietnam Vet on TV,

stopped me after all these years

and asked for a cigarette.

I told him I didn’t smoke.

Then he said he needed $30

to buy a used pea coat before winter.

He said he’d give me $60 next month.

I replied that I didn’t have that kind of money on me.

I walked away.

He hasn’t spoken to me since.

I had a cocklebur stuck in my sock

I wandered down among the rocks and weeds

near the edge of the water.

The river was low.

Some pale purple asters glimmered like sequins

woven into the grasses.

I bent over to pick up a rock.

Why not?

And stuck it into my pocket.

I climbed back up to the top of the levee

and headed up the curve of the earth

tilting back away from the sun,

coursing lower,

although I couldn’t see it.

The sky was overcast,

yet still reflected in the river.

As I crossed over the bridge,

I felt an itch at my ankle.

I kept on walking,

each step a reminder

that I had stepped off

the hard and level path

before.

Finally, I bent over

and found a cocklebur stuck in my sock.

I had a cocklebur stuck in my sock.

October Blue

It’s a beautiful world

and not simply because

the Lawrence sky is October blue

and a woman young enough to be my daughter

strolls down the sidewalk,

her belly stretching her pink T-shirt

while pushing her stroller,

her first-born child looking out;

and not because of the young college couple,

who chat as they cross my path,

the young woman,

her slender legs stretching

her shiny, black leggings,

her pink toenails dancing along

the sidewalk bricks;

or the middle-school girl,

who ties her water-splotched, maroon T-shirt

in a knot above her midriff,

and then dashes behind my bench

to clamber up a tree,

her rust-haired friend running behind,

hand to her bulging rosy cheeks,

only to spray the still green ground,

laughing, when she finally reaches the tree

which shelters her nimble friend.

Come to think of it,

that is all there is to it,

after all.

Birds of a feather

From the curve of the bridge

I looked away,

and then in front of me

soundless bursts of wind

dove onto the surface

of the river

and fanned out in woven ripples

like flocks of air in reflected sky.

Here and there they swirled

while the gulls waiting

in the rock-strewn shallows

paid them no heed.

And where have all the leaves gone?

Only a few float beneath my feet.

If only the sun

weren’t still so warm on my back,

or the careless clouds

drifting through my view of the river

above and also below, the

wind plays as if tomorrow

were just another day.

Perhaps I’ll wait a little longer,

heedless of the weather,

just in case this wind flies south for the winter.

People that matter, a little

It was a crisp October morning and I had decided to walk Dawn up the hill. The yellow-leaved tree across from Kennedy’s house was situated such that the low morning sun reflected directly back into our eyes.

As we climbed the steps, single file, up behind Melrose Place, two college women with slender legs and backpacks cruised on up past us. They were already well up the drive toward the Chancellor’s Residence when we reached the top of the stairs.

I commented that I couldn’t remember what it actually felt like to be their age.

Having dropped Dawn at Blake for her class, I walked along Jayhawk Boulevard, observing the sunlight on the trees and buildings and a trickle of students. I had turned toward home when I came upon a striking young woman walking toward the sun that was in my eyes. She had long dark hair, gray leggings, and calf-length boots striking a steady cadence on the sidewalk. I soon passed her by, but I had stopped to examine the frost on the dark red coleus leaves in front of Watson Library.

Nina – I’ll call her that, partly because I once knew a woman who unexpectedly came to mind named Tina when I was about Nina’s age. Nina walked up to me and spoke to me.

She mistakenly thought I might be with KU Maintenance and said she was supposed to write a story about skateboarders on campus. I told her I was rarely on campus but that I saw skateboarders on Mass St., and in the hundreds of times I saw them, they mostly got away with skating on those sidewalks.

She smiled at me, a gap between her teeth in a pretty face, a little unsure, I thought. But Nina said maybe she could make a story out of that; she had already gotten a bureaucratic brush-off about what they thought of skateboarders from official channels.

I told her of the time I had seen a group of skateboarders trying to pop their boards into the air and ride them along the concrete traffic barrier in front of the side door at the Eldridge Hotel. Police had been called and were in the process of sitting the young men down for a lecture or tickets or whatever, I didn’t stay to find out.

Nina had pulled out her digital recorder, to capture this bit of a nearly non-story. She politely took my name and spelling, and asked if it would be alright if she characterized me as a Lawrence resident. We walked a few steps together and I asked her if her story was for the Daily Kansan.

She said, yes, and then at the corner, she said it was nice to meet me, and I walked on down 14^th Street.

I listened to the receding cadence of her boot heels and thought about how she was young and pretty and persistent and unsure.

And I wondered whatever became of Tina.

Wind

One should be clear from the outset,

one is not the same as another,

but this is how I write poetry, sometimes.

I walk around with my eyes open,

I listen with my ears,

I make some effort to notice the things

that make an impression on me.

And then I go to bed at a reasonable hour.

And being the age I am,

I wake in the middle of the night -

sometimes the needle on the phonograph skips,

and the needle just ticks –

round and round and round it ticks -

until I finally get up and sit in front of a page.

And then I let the lines go down,

I let one word follow another,

until there are no more.

It can’t be as simple as that, you say?

I once had a boat.

I bought it for five hundred dollars.

I futzed with the lights on the trailer.

I hitched it to my Mazda pickup

and I drove it to the lake.

I spent an hour or so rigging the mast and sails,

and then I backed it into the water.

I kept one hand on the rudder

and one eye on the billowing sail,

and yes, it’s was simple as that.

If I don’t have to make the water

and I don’t have to make the wind blow,

there’s not much more to sailing than that.

I was never the greatest of sailors,

but I felt what it was

to fly over the water

in the face of the wind.

On that boat on that lake,

I could feel the wind and the water.

And if it were not for poetry,

I’d buy another boat,

one the size of a long wagon,

and I’d pull it behind me as I walked along the shore,

I’d set the sail by the river’s edge,

and wait for the wind to blow.

It would be as simple as that.

Bras across the Kaw

Walking across the river Kaw one October day,

bras of all colors and sizes were strung along the railing

from one end of the bridge to the other,

cups catching the wind, moving.

A nodding acquaintance approached -

he’s usually appreciative of the day -  

a couple of older men, crossing a bridge,

decorated with bras.

I cracked, “Are they having a sidewalk sale?”

He paused, already a step past me, then replied,

 “Where’s the rest of them?”

We laughed - and walked on.

Then … walking toward home,

Sarah Mclachlan was singing “In the Arms of the Angel”

from the jewelry store’s outdoor speakers.

I was already a step past when I heard something.

Call it music, call it poetry.

It’s what stops me.
Her voice: “…find some comfort here…”

I made a little circle

and stood underneath the speaker.

As I listened to the rest of the song,

I watched some of the rest of them walking by.

Oblivious to the music -

to impending death.

Embracing the day,

and the arm of the person they were with.

Venn Diagram

Imagine an immense circle of all the poems ever written,

intersected with a smaller circle of people

inclined to read poetry,

the points that would represent my writing

would be too small to be rendered at this scale.

But there would still be points of mine

in that lens shape between circle A and circle B.

And then there would be an immense amount of pointless space.

Putting it another way,

imagine I were a market gardener.

There would be an immense amount of compost,

the unread words tossed on a heap.

But in raising poems,

the cost of seed and soil is remarkably low,

and the time, well, time is another of those things

you can’t take with you.

Many might find it odd that I would write so many words,

the market for the kind I write being what it is,

yet I find curious satisfaction

in composing thoughts

that will be left to decompose.

You are looking at the harvest.

And now I imagine your wry grin,

your non-existent self,

in an infinite universe in which I turn out to be mistaken,

not no one not reading these very words.

This is how we all live, after all.

I, your pointless unpublished poet,

imagined that it was so,

the Venn diagram and all

and that we are

what we are,

and who,

and why

not that any of it would stop me from thinking what follows,

after all,

and I smiled my own wry grin,

as I left a sack of zucchini on your doorstep

and I walked away.

Who but a writer uses words

like doorstep,

anyway?

Remarking on faces on Mass Street

This has been said before

but I frequently see remarkable faces.

Yet I feel it bears repeating.

Two such faces just walked by the bench where I sit.

I’m afraid I don’t have the ability to do justice to all these faces.

Earlier, there was this astonishingly beautiful face of a young woman,

the wind cunningly blowing wisps of her straight dark hair

across her face as she tried to talk on her phone.

But her’s is not the face I would have you focus on –

it will be easily noticed without my help.

There was an older man sitting on a bench farther down the street,

a soft smile, the sun on his pale scalp, only wisps remaining…

But oh, there are so many other remarkable faces, but never mind.

There’s no use my writing yet more words that will likely be overlooked.

See these remarkable faces for yourself, if you will.

This round-face boy with a sippy cup just stumbled by

in the company of two more remarkable faces.

I probably only have this one chance to see them. 

Hot Pepper Boy

I happened upon a young man in South Park.

I suspect the girls his age would say he was a beautiful boy, hoping to run their hands through his dark, thick, wavy hair, wanting to touch the corners of his sweet mouth with their fingers.

He was bent over purple-leaved plants, his young, shirtless back to the sun, blue jeans low on his slender hips, harvesting the cherry-sized, the cherry red, fruit of what I saw as ornamental pepper plants.

I hear they’re really hot, I said.

Without a word, he look over at me, and then, with the slightest of smiles, he reached into his pouch, not far from a full gallon of the shiny, round, reddest of red peppers.

The boy held one out to me, speaking only with his eyes.

I heard that they’re really hot, really, repeating only what little I knew.

He smiled at me. Or perhaps he looked at me only with the amusement he felt, and he turned and bent back to his task.

Good luck with those peppers, I said, as I turned and walked on.

Two scary guys

A ragged panhandler sits, clothes dirty and torn, a poorly lettered cardboard sign on the sidewalk. You cross to the other side of the street, just to be safe.

Then there approaches a man in a suit and a scowl on his face, mixed with fear, as if he has a bomb strapped to his heart, the button under his own thumb, and you cross back to the other side.

Who are you afraid of?

            And now with line breaks:

A ragged panhandler sits,

clothes dirty and torn,

with a poorly lettered cardboard sign,

on the sidewalk.

You cross to the other side of the street,

just to be safe.

Then there approaches a man in a suit

and a scowl on his face,

mixed with a little fear,

as if he has a bomb strapped to his heart,

the button under his own thumb,

and you cross back to the other side.

Who are you afraid of?

Rainmaker

It started to sprinkle as I stepped onto the porch.

But this far into the drought I didn’t turn back for an umbrella.

I dared the sky to soak me to the skin as I headed for the river.

But the dark gray cloud came to nothing more than a tease.

I’d like to think the sky was bluffing,

but I suspect it didn’t even notice my play,

walking defiantly through the dusty alley.

I’m not the master at this game,

but only one of us can die laughing.

Sequence

What does that brick mean?

Now that one?

And now the sidewalk

full of them,

weeds and grass

coming through the gaps,

the next stretch clear,

the pattern:

one brick blocking my path,

the next pointing the way.

What does that brick-shaped

patch of unbounded sky mean?

And now that next patch

of sky blue,

unshaped,

unsegmented,

not-brick,
and then the one after the next,
stretching to the horizon -

what does it mean?

And now I walk on concrete.

What does this crossing line mean?

And the next?

And the next?

And the next?

I will end this inconsequence,

except for one more.

A man sleeps on the next bench over.

A boy plays in the fountain,

the front of his pants and shirt soaked,

his hands feeling the motion

and the waterness

of the water.

And I sit, here,

scribbling

in the shade.

What do I mean?