The Touch of the Machine

New York, NY - Peter - Thursday, April 25th, 2002 : goo

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The Luddites had it all wrong; machines are a beautiful thing. Eccentric as that statement might seem, its a rare child that isn't on the verge of being utterly transfixed when walking past heavy machinery. I remember once, as a child, going to visit a water-wheel-powered mill; I sat and watched the looms and spindles cycle, the warp caressing the weft. I sat for what approached an hour or so; it seems that my 7 year old attention span outlasted that of my 37 year old mother. I was transfixed by the machine.

Daily, I pass countless scores of children who seem drawn by some uncharted force to machinery. The springtime-afternoon park is a place where lots of landscaping, patching and road repair is happening; along with such work comes bulldozers and steamrollers, flatbed trucks and bucket loaders. The children flock to these. When freshly off duty at 5pm, the children climb on the machines, all careful to avoid the still-warm-to-the-touch exhaust stacks, all wary (thanks to their admonishing parents) of grease and dirt. Perhaps children have a sixth sense, one that appeals to the scent of diesel.

Today, I was walking down 5th Avenue. There at 68th street, major road-patching was happening. Awakened in me was some latent curiosity, some fixation. I walked over to the working back-hoe as it enchanted, disregarding the workers' curios stares as I palmed the dense corroded steel of the machines, my oblong reflection in the shiny hydraulics, the matte sun-absorbing surface around the grease-fittings. The dump-truck pouring asphalt was equipped with a set of four telescoping hydraulics. I watched the steam jet out of the binding rings as the truck raised its bed. I watched the mirror-gleaming hydraulic rods appear from within each other, telescoping, raising, forcing the bucket to lay a fresh cubic ton of steamy, stinky pavement.

I palmed the side of the truck as it lowered. Its curious that I was allowed to approach the working machines so closely, but I registered a definitive look of sympathy from the sweaty workers. At first, I thought it was their resignation to the whiles of a passing eccentric; then, I realized it was the look of men wishing to share my enchantment, the fickle ability to love the very machines they earned their paycheck on; the return to that child-like naivety that allows them to find an energy within the hydraulics and moving parts, the enchantment of the mechanical, the soul of the machine.

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