Black Hills (48 page)

P
AHA
S
APA WALKS OUT
onto the wooden pedestrian promenade deck with the stone towers rising before him. To the right and left below him run the trains. Big Bill said that Colonel Roebling had put in cable cars like those in San Francisco, which ran by simply clamping onto an endless turning wire rope beneath them, but those had been superseded in the following decades first by regular trolley cars and then by train cars of the sort that ran everywhere else in New York and Brooklyn on elevated tracks. Glancing at the trains whooshing by into their steel-and-wood protective coverings, Paha Sapa guesses that it won’t be many years until they too are removed and the automobile traffic lanes widened from two lanes in each direction to three.

Even with only two lanes in each direction, the autos are making a roaring racket below and to each side of the promenade deck. Paha Sapa has to smile when he thinks of Colonel Roebling—and his father, John, in the 1850s—designing this bridge for pedestrian and horse-and-carriage traffic, only to have erected a structure so sturdy that it could handle millions upon millions of Fords and Chevys and
Stutzes and Studebakers and Dodges and Packards and trucks of all sizes. The traffic is heavier this morning, Paha Sapa notices, coming
toward
Manhattan than it is going out.

The seemingly endless promenade deck is busy but not crowded. Even here the majority of walkers—men holding their hats against the light breeze, the far fewer women occasionally clutching at blowing skirts much shorter than is the style among
wasichu wiyapi
in South Dakota—are coming toward the city.

It’s a perfect day to stroll on the promenade of the Brooklyn Bridge. Even with the wind, it’s warmer out here away from the building shadows. Paha Sapa glances at his cheap drugstore watch: a little after eight a.m. He wonders what kind of jobs these men are hurrying toward that would start so late.

Just as a range of mountains, say the Tetons or Rockies, is best appreciated from a distance, farther away from the occluding foothills, so the skyline of New York City becomes more impressive the farther he walks out away from it. All the high buildings from the downtown running north along the river’s edge gleam gold in the morning light, and some of the higher skyscrapers behind that first line of structures rise so high and are so reflective that they appear to be columns of light themselves. Paha Sapa sees the light reflecting brightly from a very tall building farther north and wonders if it’s the new Chrysler Building that some in South Dakota think is constructed completely of steel.

Ahead of him, the first of the two towers rises 276 feet and 6 inches from the river’s surface. How many times did Big Bill Slovak repeat all these facts and precise numbers to Paha Sapa down there in the dangerous dark hole of the Holy Terror? Paha Sapa did not mind at the time; a repetition of certain facts and figures can be
wakan
, a sacred thing all by itself, a sort of mantra.

The East River and all of Manhattan are now festooned with bridges, fifty years after the completion of this first one, but these others—including the Manhattan Bridge so visible just to the northeast and the Williamsburg Bridge upriver beyond it—are made of steel and iron. They are, to Paha Sapa’s eye on this beautiful first day of April, actively ugly compared to the graceful but eternal-looking twin stone towers that suspend the Brooklyn Bridge.

He knows that these are not just the highest but the
only
such stone towers in North America, but it’s with some small sense of shock that he realizes that no other stone monuments to the human spirit, beyond these Roebling stone towers with their double gothic arches, exist in America other than Gutzon Borglum’s emerging stone heads in the Black Hills.

It’s a busy season of blasting there—Borglum is ready to give up work on the sketched-in Jefferson head to the left of George Washington (as one looks up at the monument) and is already blasting away rock to the right of Washington in search of better carving stone for a replacement Jefferson—and Borglum threatened to fire Paha Sapa when he asked for the six days off.

“So, are you satisfied? Can we go back to Park Avenue now and see if she’s home?”

—
No. Be silent until I say you can speak again. The appointment is at four p.m., and Mrs. Elmer in Brooklyn was very clear to say that we should not present ourselves—myself—before that time. So… silence. If I hear another word from you before I ask for it, I’ll skip the appointment and take the train home today and save myself several days’ pay.

No response. The only sounds are the rush of the trains, the hum of traffic on the bridge pavement, the slight whisper of wind through the giant cables and countless suspending bridge wires, and the constant honk–rumble–muted roar from the city behind them.

Paha Sapa hears voices and goes to the railing of the promenade deck. Four men in coveralls are on a scaffold strung below, smoking cigarettes and laughing, while one of them makes a halfhearted display of passing a paintbrush over the scrolled metalwork descending below the wood floor of the deck.

Paha Sapa clears his throat.

—
Excuse me…. Can any of you gentlemen tell me if there’s a Mr. Farrington working on the bridge today?

The four look up and two of them laugh. The fattest one, a short man who seems to be in charge of the work detail, laughs the loudest.

—
Hey, what’s with you, old fellow? Are those braids? Are you a Chinaman or some kind of Indian?

—
Some kind of Indian.

The short, fat man in the stained overalls laughs again.

—
Good, ’cause I don’t think we allow any old Chinamen to cross the bridge on Saturdays. Not unless they pay a toll, anyways.

—
Do you know if there’s a Mr. Farrington still working here? E. F. Farrington… I don’t know what the
E
or
F
stands for. I promised a friend I’d look him up.

The four men look at one another and mumble and there’s more laughter. Paha Sapa doesn’t have to work hard to imagine what Mr. Borglum would do if he came across some of his workers smoking on the job, only pretending to work, and treating visitors to the monument with this disrespect. As Lincoln Borglum once said to him—
After a while, everyone realizes that my father wears those big boots all the time for a reason.

A tall man with a straggly mustache—Jeff to the fat crew leader’s Mutt (Paha Sapa had always gotten the two comic strip characters mixed up until he met a tall, skinny, mustached worker at the Monument named Jefferson “Jeff” Greer, not to be confused with “Big Dick” Huntimer or Hoot or Little Hoot Leach)—gives out a strange giggle for a grown man and says—

—
Yeah, well, Chief, Mr. Farrington’s still working here. He’s up on the top of the nearest tower. He’s one of the bosses.

Paha Sapa blinks at this news. If Farrington had been thirty when Big Bill Slovak met him in 1870, he’d be ninety-three now. Hardly the age for someone to be employed and still working atop one of the towers here. A son, perhaps?

—
E. F. Farrington? Master mechanic? Older man or young?

More inexplicable giggling from the men below. It’s the Mutt crew chief who answers this time.

—
Farrington’s a mechanic, yeah. And he’s as old as Moses’s molars. Don’t know about the “master” part, though. You oughta go up and ask him.

Paha Sapa looks up at the looming stone tower. He knows there’s no stairway inside or on the outside of the solid-stone double-arched monolith, much less an elevator.

—
It’s all right if I go up?

The tall one, the Mutt, answers.

—
Sure, Chief. The bridge is open to the public, ain’t it? We don’t even charge for you to walk across no more. Go ahead.

Paha Sapa is squinting into the sun.

—
How?

Short, fat Jeff answers and the sudden silence of the other three is suspicious.

—
Oh, any of the four cables will take you up. I prefer the one to the right of the promenade. If you fall from that one, you don’t go all the way to the river—the tracks or promenade or car lanes’ll break your fall.

—
Thank you.

Paha Sapa has had enough of these men. He hopes that they’re not typical of all New Yorkers.

Mutt speaks again.

—
Think nothing of it, Sitting Bull. Say hi to your squaw for us when you get back to the reservation.

F
OUR CABLES
run the width of the river and beyond, each finding support just below the summit of its respective tower. Two of the cables rise on either side of the promenade here at the beginning of the long walk and arch up to the Brooklyn Tower, some 208 supporting cable wires, called suspenders, coming down from them, more scores of diagonal cable wires—“stays” in naval terminology—also coming down from the tower to help support the roadway. In the center of the river, coming down to the roadway, the four cables dip in that most perfect of geometric forms—a catenary curve. Paha Sapa’s son, Robert, who loved math and science so much but who often seemed more poet than geometrician, once described a catenary curve to Paha Sapa as “the universe’s most artistic and elegant response to gravity—the signature of God.”

Paha Sapa also knows that each of the four major cables on each side ends in a giant anchorage, each anchorage an eighty-foot tower in its own right—a sight when the bridge was first built and New York was a low city—and each weighing 60,000 tons. And in each of those anchorages, all that weight of the towers, the roadway, the trains, the people, the thousands of miles of wire, and the dead weight of the cables themselves is carried, the way the flying buttresses of medieval cathedrals carry the weight of gravity from the arched interior, into anchor plates each weighing more than twenty-three tons a plate, and
those plates, sitting at the bottom of a stone mass equal to a 60,000-ton pyramid, are linked to anchor bars twelve and a half feet long, which link to smaller links, which eventually lead to red-painted giant iron eyebars protruding from the huge anchorage of stone, iron, and steel, each eyebar connected to its cable, the four cables together sustaining the full weight of the bridge.

But none of that is important to Paha Sapa now. He has to decide if one of the four cables is actually walkable. He wants to talk to this Mr. Farrington.

So Paha Sapa stands at the south railing of the promenade, looking down at one of the four broad cables that runs up to the tower. At this point it dips below the level of the promenade deck and, farther back toward the New York shore, beneath the level of the bridge itself. The metal-covered and white-painted cable is not very large for something carrying so much weight—only 153⁄4 inches in diameter, the same size as the other three supporting cables—but he remembers that there are 5,434 wires in each major cable, each of those wires bundled and crimped in clusters of other cables within the main cables.

Big Bill Slovak loved that number—5,434. He thought there was something mystical about it. Even
wasichus
, it seemed, had their faith in spirits and signs.

Paha Sapa easily vaults over the low railing onto the cable that descends past the promenade on the right side. It’s easy enough to balance on—a pipe with a diameter just under sixteen inches—but the painted and curved metal is slippery. He wishes again that he hadn’t worn these uncomfortable and slick-soled cheap dress shoes.

He guesses that the cable rises about 750 to 800 feet from this point to its pass-through notch near the top of the tower about 275 feet above the river. Big Bill could have told him the exact length. Actually, he
did
tell him the exact length of the supported land span of the bridge here and its cable, 930 feet, but that span (and its cable running alongside behind him) runs behind him a couple of hundred feet to the anchorage.

Perhaps about 725 feet of rising cable ahead of him. And it rises at an angle of about 35 degrees. Not sounding very steep until you’re actually
on
such a pitch or slope, Paha Sapa knows from his many years
in mines and his two years at Mount Rushmore. Then a slip can be a dangerous thing.

There is a skinny cable running alongside the cable on the right side of the main cable and hanging about a foot out and perhaps three and a half feet higher than the big cable. It’s a handrail of sorts, but one would almost have to lean out over the drop to hang on to it. The gap between the main cable and the “handrail” thread of steel is considerable. Paha Sapa assumes it’s used more for some sort of harnesses or for hooking on gear or lowering equipment to scaffolds suspended from the main cable than as any sort of real railing.

He hops back over the railing onto the promenade deck. Several men bustling by look at him strangely but obviously assume he’s a bridge worker and hurry on.

Walking back to where the rude clowns were on their scaffold hanging out of sight below the promenade deck, Paha Sapa looks at the untidy pile of material they left up on the deck. It’s only the coil of extra rope that interests him. He lifts one end, stretches it, examines it. It’s not what he’d choose to replace his eighth-inch steel cable to hang off Abe Lincoln’s nose in his bosun’s chair while carrying a steam drill but it’s better than clothesline.