We've Got The County Covered
We've Got The County Covered
Here’s today’s riddle: “What’s the first thing a guy with a high IQ does when a cement mixer growls its way into his yard?”
“He gets out of the way.”
The beast has at least eight tires. These you can count; there may be more underneath, out of sight.
The ground shakes under the weight of the beast.
This particular beast belongs to a big company where somebody likes orange and white.
Not only are the reflective rectangles stuck along the side of the flat-bed part of the truck bright orange, but other parts of it are orange as well, as are other touches here and there and the T-shirt on the young trainee.
The cement mixer arrived at 3:07 on a sunny afternoon and left at exactly 4:00.
In the meantime, without wasting the least bit or time or material, 14 holes in which have been stood 14 big strong uprights are filled with well-mixed and churned concrete mixture.
A shop is being built. The uprights are very much stronger than the two by fours which are the bones of a normal stick-built house.
Yet even so, the 14 upright pieces of lumber recall Rameses’s Temple at Luxor, Egypt.
Is that silly? Well, they’re all perfectly vertical.
Why does all this remind me of Art Nouveau?
No good reason, because Art Nouveau is characterized by its “undulating, asymmetrical” and sinuous line.
Side trip: An art student told me once that Art Nouveau, popular from 1890 to 1910, fell out of fashion because there were no straight lines in it, and people couldn’t stand seeing only undulating, asymmetrical lines.
After hearing that, I wondered what the Plains Indians, lacking severely vertical trees, straight-edges, rulers, carpenter’s levels, and the like, did for straight lines.
Maybe a need to see straight lines is a cultural thing and people who lived outdoors were satisfied to see a straight horizon now and then, or a butte very flat on top when viewed from a distance.
Anyway, the 14 heavy uprights in the new shop caused a horde of thoughts and impressions to flit through this observer’s memory.
The most interesting thing about the cement truck was the chute which conveyed the well-mixed, wet cement to wherever the builder needed it to be.
I’d like to call that wet, plopping cement a slurry, but I don’t think that’s the right term. Isn’t a slurry thinner, runnier, than cement is when it is poured?
There is so much gravel in the wet cement that slurry just doesn’t seem to be the right word.
Anyway, plop went the wet cement into the numerous holes.
One man stood there pushing a shovel straight down into each hole, very much like the way bakers run a silver knife down into cake batter to get out any air bubbles that might be in it.
“Is that to get the air bubbles out?” I asked.
“No, it’s to make sure that all sides of the hole get the same amount of cement.”
Next question: “How many cubic yards of cement go into each hole?”
The small holes got half a yard. The big hole, which had two uprights in it, was getting a yard and a third because it had been “over-dug.”
When all the holes had been filled and touched up to the satisfaction of the crew, a high-pressure water hose appeared from somewhere or nowhere to wash out the chute.
Washing was a simple process because the chute is only half there—a C in cross-section, cut side up.
The chute is smooth inside so that the wet cement will slide willingly down from the cement mixer to wherever the crew directs the flow.
Then at the end of the job, the chute has to be thoroughly washed out so that none of the cement solidifies in it, to impede the next job.
The chute comes apart into four pieces. Three pieces of the chute are all alike.
On the side of the cement mixer is a bracket shaped something like a scroll.
The end of each piece of the chute is also curved like a scroll. A crew member just gave each piece a little jerk and it came apart neatly.
Then the man hung up the three pieces of the chute on the side of the cement mixer, out of the way, secure, to wait for the next job.
The fourth piece of the chute remained attached to the cement mixer, simply pushed sideways to be out of the way.
I wondered about any innovations that a cement mixer might be subject to.
It’s a huge machine but it is basically simple and I suspect that not much about it has changed in decades, nor does it need to.
It’s already high-tech enough.
At 4:00 on the dot, the great, lumbering machine rumbled its way down the driveway and out of our ken, exactly 53 minutes after it had arrived.
Had I missed something, or is a cement mixer, in spite of its impressive size, actually pretty safe to work with?
