steam

warning: there's a pile of photos at the bottom.

when someone says jamboree you ought to always at least consider whether you can go. when you hear that there will be steam engines, you decide you can probably go and all that's left is to figure out what time. but when you find out the engines will be older than your grandparents used to be, you kiss the dog goodbye, put on your shoes and get in the car.

this is how we end up at hanford mills on a saturday morning, cool and sunny, with a few of the leaves already deciding on a new season, no matter what the calendar says. and there is little left to say about hanford mills during the antique steam engine jamboree except that if you didn't go it may stab at your heart a little to look at these pictures and see what you missed. there will be another september next year and during it another jamboree, but for this year, feast your eyes on the prettiest oil reservoirs you've ever seen and know these cogs and belts and gears, every spinning and whirring hunk of metal, has been hissing and humming and breathing longer than you.

and maybe the best thing about the mill is the herd of old guys, tinkerers, guys my grandma would have called real corkers. some of them have built their own machines and hover over them on the grass all around the mill. some of them are responsible for the care of, or at least information about, the larger, more intimidating dragons inside. it doesn't matter. these guys have the sorts of relationships with these machines that let them give you a lesson on history, physics and math all while making you think they're just visiting with you a little bit.

now, maybe the reason i like these guys is because all of them are, down deep, just different versions of a man i've heard stories from all my life. my own uncle jay can tell a story about anything and can make you believe you're right there breathing the same air as whoever he's telling you about. that man can tell you anything and make you want to hear it again. the way he laughs at something he knows he's going to tell you before he's got the words out will have you hanging on each word, waiting to get at the ones you know are making him laugh. maybe it is the way they sound like him, like everything they say is them confiding a secret, but i do know that when they talk about the pounds per square inch of steam pressure in an engine making things happen my eyes are wide and i am listening to how these machines live.

and maybe it's because so much of what we manufacture today is made to be disposable, made to ease into its own obsolescence without us even noticing, that i don't see as much prettiness in the shape of my laptop, in the way it is held together or in its rubbery feet. maybe a hundred years from now someone will weep over the beauty of the thing, how the keys are so elegant or how clever the clasp is and because i use it every day i just can't see all that loveliness. but i can see it in everything in the mill and i like to get up close to these machines when i can, see who made them and where, even if i can't quite figure out what each one of them does. i can see the perfect roundness of the wheels and gears, see the wood worn to something that is almost beyond wood in its softness.

as a child i would have wanted to live at this mill, steeped in the scents of sawdust and metal and oil, listening to water rush over the mill wheel and all those versions of my uncle jay, soft-voiced and laughing, explaining the whole world.