The Weekly Screed (#772)

Fix it, America
by David Benjamin

“Knowledge is of two kinds. We know a subject ourselves, or we know where we can find information upon it.”
— Samuel Johnson

MADISON, Wis. — Sam Johnson’s observation on the nature of knowledge keeps coming back to me, sometimes unexpectedly. The latest occasion was a comment by Paul Krugman in the Times about the percentage of American jobs devoted to manufacturing.

Despite assertions by politicians about factories being the backbone of the U.S. economy, the actual share of jobs in skilled manufacturing at its peak never reached 30 percent. Krugman wrote, “To get some perspective: in 1979, on the eve of the great surge in inequality, manufacturing accounted for more than 20 percent of employment. In the 1960s it was more than 25 percent.”

In those ‘60s, when I was a kid, my maternal grandfather T.J. was a master plumber, a farmer and a smalltime land baron. My dad was a house painter, which he hated, and a bartender, which he loved too much. Mom, who had to get a job after she fled Dad, waited on tables, sold appliances and occasionally sat in the dark, smoking a cigarette and wondering where it all went wrong.

The closest we had to “manufacturing” among my extended family of soldiers, sailors, plumbers, barbers, barkeeps, butchers, hash-slingers, cobblers, mechanics, housewives, Avon ladies, traveling men and shitkickers was my grandpa, Archie, who worked at the Milwaukee Road frog shops.

A “frog,” in railroad parlance, is not an aquatic amphibian. It’s a huge mechanical slab that makes it possible for a train to shift course onto an alternate roadbed. A frog is an elegant piece of brute engineering that imposes order on the great railyards of the world, forming mighty, moveable laceworks of steel — shifting, clanking and screaming in concert — that turn gold in the angled glow at sunrise and aspire to art.

For a century, railroads recycled their worn switches in infernal blacksmith shops manned by machinists, where the reek of scorched iron and a fine mist of toxic steeldust floated from lung to lung. Archie put in 40 years at the frog shops, coming home every day blackfaced with soot. It took him ten minutes with pumice soap to scrub the grit and iron filings from the creases in his hands.

Archie never made anything new for the Milwaukee Road. He was a repairman. He belonged to a team who, in their small way, kept the vast flow of goods and people all over America trundling on its prosperous way.

Sometime around mid-century, railroads began closing repair shops and firing their human muscle, opting to discard their broken switches and busted turnouts. One by one, the railroads went broke. The Milwaukee Road shops, still operating in Tomah when Archie retired, are gone now. The railroad went belly-up in 1980 and the shops are now an empty space next to Highway 12.

Walk down any railbed in America today and you’ll find — quietly rusting among the ties and tracks — a small fortune in salvageable (or re-useable) spikes, switch handles, fishplates, rail joints, e-clips and other high-carbon sculptures, all turned to waste because America has stopped fixing things.

In Sam Johnson’s formulation, we’re depending solely on what we already know. We don’t look anything up or ask someone else. We’ve decided not to fix, or even acknowledge, the hole in our brain.

History teaches that the fixing of all the old things made before creates more jobs than the making did. Fixing things is beautiful work because it conveys to manmade objects an intimation of immortality. I know there are frogs out there, somewhere on the rotting railbeds between Chicago and the Pacific, that Archie reamed and cut, fitted, brazed, welded, ground, sanded and polished. Those frogs are still holding up, perhaps barely. But they’d hold up for another 50 years if there were a frog shop and a few proud machinists to bring them in and restore their blue-black fortitude.

When Archie got off work, he kept fixing things, at the pioneer bungalow on Pearl Street where Annie and he raised my dad, then me. When they moved in, their home had no basement. So Arch dug one, and put a new furnace down there, wore out that furnace and installed a new one. In 1928, he built a garage and laid a concrete path from house to garage to the little cold-water cottage at the bottom of the lot. He also planted a couple of blue spruces that grew 50 feet and toppled over in a gale, at which he planted two new ones. There were also a juniper, a maple and a birch that he dug up in the woods and hauled to Pearl Street— not to mention the honeysuckle bush, the willow and the bridal wreath, which I don’t know where they came from. He rebuilt my grandma’s kitchen, put in trellises, planted a rhubarb patch and graveled around the foundation so Annie could grow digitalis, violets, columbine and bachelor’s buttons.

Archie was, every day — at work, at home — repairing and rebuilding, upgrading, replenishing, embellishing. It was how he made his living and, mostly, how he spent it. The neighbors did the same — Tillie on the right, the Kimptons on the left, the Koniceks and Herdriches across the street. Anyone who let his upkeep slip was a bad neighbor.

I think of my grandfather, Arch, as a symbol — perhaps a hero — for an America that was always fixing things that broke, or oiling them, tightening them, smoothing and painting them before they had the chance to break. He knew that what you fix ahead of time will cost less than if you let it go to hell and have to buy a new one.

I wonder if we’ve become a nation throwing good stuff away before its time, not fixing things and not even looking around to see what needs fixing — a place where we’re all each other’s bad neighbor.