High Steel: The Daring Men Who Built the World's Greatest Skyline (18 page)

What, then, does explain the persistence of Mohawks in high steel ironwork for 120 years? If you ask a Mohawk ironworker this question, he is likely to shrug and blame it on luck. “I’m just glad we didn’t
go into plumbing,” is how a young ironworker named J. R. Phillips put it. “Nobody would be interested in us if we were plumbers.”

Ironwork happened to become available to the Mohawks at a time when few occupations were open to them, and they were happy for it. They stuck with it because it paid well and they’d learned it well; it offered a lucrative, if perilous, niche. Were they good at it? Yes. Was it exciting work? Yes. Did it provide its practitioners with pride? Certainly. But in all likelihood, these were secondary considerations, and fortuity, not genetic or cultural destiny, best explains the Mohawks’ predilection for high steel; and practicality, not anthropology, best explains their footloose ways. In the end, the most remarkable aspect of the Mohawks’ itinerancy is not how far they went away from home but how much effort they always made to come back.

In 1949, Joseph Mitchell wrote that the Mohawks showed signs of “permanence” in Brooklyn. Ten years later, their population there peaked at around 800. Ten years after that, they were all but gone. The Mohawks’ exit from Brooklyn was triggered, in part, by the soaring crime rates that hit New York City in the 1960s. At the same time, many native communities in the United States and Canada were undergoing cultural retrenchment, embracing their Indian heritage and rejecting assimilation into mainstream white culture. At Kahnawake, this new sentiment found expression in the growing popularity of the Longhouse religion, a traditionalist faith based on the teachings of an eighteenth-century Iroquois prophet named Handsome Lake. It found expression, as well, in the determination of many Mohawks to return and live on the reservation, on the land of their ancestors.

The simplest explanation for why the Mohawks left Brooklyn, though, was neither crime nor culture. It was a highway. In the 1960s, Interstate 87 was extended north beyond Albany to the Canadian border. The new road, the Adirondack Northway, halved the
driving time to Kahnawake, making weekly commutes plausible if not quite pleasurable. Now the ironworkers could board in Brooklyn during the week and return home to their families on the weekends. Which is what they have been doing, in greater or lesser numbers, ever since.

HOME

On a steamy Sunday afternoon in late July, Bunny drove to the outskirts of the reservation to visit his cousin’s grave. Kenneth McComber had been laid to rest in the wide yard between the Longhouse and the quiet two-lane highway leading out to the golf courses. A knee-high mound of dead flowers and bright ribbons marked the grave. Clumps of upturned dirt lay scattered in the grass. A holly bush and wildflowers grew nearby. Bunny stood at the grave for a few minutes, his hands tucked into the pockets of his cut-offs, then turned and walked across the yard to the Longhouse. His flip-flops skimmed through the grass.

The front door of the Longhouse was unlocked. Bunny pulled it open and stepped inside. The air was cool and smelled of cut pine. Everything was wood—floor, ceiling, walls, benches—except the iron stoves at each end and the light fixtures hanging from the ceiling. Afternoon sun slanted through the windows. A month earlier, the Longhouse had been filled with the grief and tears of mourners. Now it was empty and tranquil. According to Handsome Lake, the Iroquois founder of the Longhouse religion, the spirits of the dead rise into the sky and travel the Sky Road (the Milky Way) to heaven. That is where Kenneth McComber had gone now. The light in heaven was forever dazzling, promised Handsome Lake, and the air was fragrant with the sweetness of wild raspberries that grew there in abundance.

Back outside, Bunny ducked into his car. He turned out of the
parking lot onto Route 207. The windows were open and the radio was set to K103, Kahnawake’s local radio station. Bunny smoked and piloted the big sedan toward the center of the reservation. He was subdued, maybe pensive after the visit to his cousin’s grave or maybe just listening to the music. It was a Sunday afternoon. Earlier in the day he’d taken one of his daughters into Montreal to go shopping. Soon he’d go home and eat dinner with his family, then lie down for an hour or two before setting out for New York.

Bunny cruised down Old Malone’s Highway, a sort of main street for the reservation, lined with gas stations and shops and restaurants. He waved to a guy passing the other way in a pickup, then turned off Old Malone’s into the welter of side streets.

It is one of the oddities of modern Kahnawake that most of its streets still follow the maze of the dirt trails scuffed out by ancestors who lived on the reservation hundreds of years ago. As a result, it is entirely possible for an outsider to believe he is driving east for ten minutes and end up, somehow, west of where he started. To make navigating somewhat more challenging to the outsider—and this must be partly the point—none of the streets off Old Malone’s Highway are named. Street names are unnecessary in a community where everybody already knows where everybody else lives.

Other than the streets, which have always been loopy and nameless, life has changed considerably on the reservation over the last century. No longer does Kahnawake resemble the small rustic village with outlying farms that it was at the time of the Quebec Bridge disaster. The population has quadrupled to 8,000. The Catholic Church now shares its formerly exclusive metaphysical turf with Pentecostals and Presbyterians and the followers of the Longhouse. The town’s infrastructure is thoroughly modern. Plumbing did not arrive here until the late 1950s, but you’d never know it from the countless swimming pools shimmering in backyards.

Altogether, Kahnawake is a prosperous, even idyllic place where you can feel, at moments, as if you’ve stepped back in time—not to
1907 but to 1957, to a suburban tableau of kids in bathing suits sprinting across lawns from house to house, pool to pool, and young moms calling to each other over back fences, while friendly local police officers (they’re called Peacekeepers here) glide by in cherry tops, waving through open windows. Crime is low. Families usually live in close proximity to each other, brother by brother, adult children near elderly parents. On summer weekends, the reservation gives itself over to recreation, to the bustling community pool and the canoe club, to speedboating on the river, and, most of all, to golf. No less than four golf courses accommodate the residents of the reservation. This is one of the other oddities of Kahnawake: there must be as many acres of links per capita here as anywhere in the world.

Bunny drove by the canoe club and the community pool, then turned at the old stone church, the Mission of St. Francis Xavier. Beyond the church, the St. Lawrence glinted and boats plied the Seaway. Farther along the river, children played lacrosse on the wide green lawn next to the Cultural Center. An odd dark structure rose from the grass there: two steel columns, about 10 yards apart, joined at the top by a steel crossbeam. It looked like the sort of modern sculpture you might expect to find on the campus of a well-endowed liberal arts college, but in fact its purpose was sport, not art. The steel had been erected some years ago for field day competitions. Ironworkers would take turns racing up and down the columns (sometimes greased to make the sport a little more interesting). Bunny remembered the competition from his childhood as a thrilling event, but it had been stopped years ago. “Too many guys were getting their pride hurt, I think is what happened.”

As Bunny continued along the river, he passed a tall steel cross erected in 1907 to commemorate the dead of the Quebec Bridge—a reminder that the pleasures of life at Kahnawake have not come cheaply—then drove through a tunnel under the railroad tracks. He
turned sharply into a small gravel lot and parked. He got out and walked to the steps that rose to the bluff where the tracks ran. A uniformed sentry came out of a small shack near the tracks. “Where are you going?” she asked Bunny.

“Out onto the bridge. Any trains coming?”

She gave him a once-over, enough to satisfy herself that he was a Kahnawake Mohawk and therefore entitled to trespass. “You’ve got some time,” she responded casually, then stepped back into the shack.

On the sentry’s vague assurance—
some time,
whatever that meant—Bunny climbed the stairs to the railroad tracks, then started walking across the short drawbridge that spanned the Seaway. He continued out onto the dark steel of the Canadian Pacific Railroad bridge.

This latter bridge is the rebuilt version of the Canadian Pacific Railroad span where Mohawk ironworkers got their start in 1886: the same Black Bridge where Bunny, and so many other young Mohawks, first pitted their skill and courage against high steel. A great many stories regarding the Black Bridge circulate around Kahnawake. Some of these stories involve daredevil stunts, like the one about the boys who rode their bikes over the bridge—not on the rail bed, which would have been challenging enough, but on the 16-inch-wide top chord of the bridge. One ironworker dismissed this account as extremely unlikely—
The top chord? Ridiculous!
—then proceeded to tell a story of a fire-breathing white horse that haunted the bridge, which he swore was
absolutely
true.

Bunny had his own story about the bridge. A few years back, a German journalist had come to town to write an article on Mohawk ironworkers. He asked Bunny to take him to the bridge. They walked out, as Bunny was now doing, to where the top chord curved sharply up from the track bed. When they got to the chord, the German started to climb it, as so many boys had done over the years. He apparently felt a need to experience the Mohawk gestalt.
He was almost near the top when he suddenly froze. He could not go up, he could not come down. He was locked in a full-blown attack of acrophobia. Bunny spoke to him quietly for a while, then climbed behind him and walked him down, step by step. The German promised to send the article when it was done, but Bunny never heard from him after that.

Looking down now beyond the wooden ties, Bunny could see one of the endless barges pushing down the Seaway toward Quebec. He could see the river, too, of course—the river in which so many Indians had drowned and died, the river of wealth and grief. Still wearing flip-flops, Bunny walked over to the edge of the ties and leaped up onto a box girder running along the edge of the bridge. He stood there for a few moments, looking across the river toward Lachine and down toward Montreal. Then he stepped down onto the track bed and strolled back to land. It was time to go home and get ready for the week ahead.

MEMORY

A few days later, a retired ironworker named Alec McComber sat in the air-conditioned bar of Kahnawake’s Knights of Columbus Hall, sipping Bud Light from a bottle. The bar was nearly empty, just Alec and few younger men who had some time to kill on a Tuesday. Bunny and the other ironworkers were gone, off to New York and elsewhere, and the reservation was quiet. Outside, in the heat of the late afternoon, kids were doing bike tricks on the melting parking lot. Alec’s dog, an old black mongrel named Jimbo, snoozed in the shade of a pickup truck.

Alec McComber was 84 years old, which made him one of the oldest ex-ironworkers alive in Kahnawake. Neither the work nor the itinerant lifestyle—the heavy drinking, the fatty diet, the all-night travel—were conducive to longevity, but he had managed to defeat
the risk factors. He appeared fit and in robust health.

Alec believed he might be related to Bunny, and to Kenneth McComber, the boy who’d recently died, but he wasn’t sure precisely how. Like Diabos and Beauvais and Kirbys and Skyes and Horns and Snows and Deers, McCombers were plentiful at Kahnawake and hard to sort. A great many of these McCombers were, like Alec, ironworkers.

Alec had been in the trade for 50 years. Thirty-four of those years he was a foreman, mainly for Bethlehem Steel. He’d worked all over America, Alaska to Florida to New York. He’d had a reputation as a hard-driving, demanding pusher. He was known by his men as “One-More-Piece Alec,” because there was always time to set one more piece before quitting. It was difficult to see the hard boss now beneath the bleary green eyes and the sweet, nearly toothless smile, but some of the old authority was still there. When Alec spoke about the old days, the younger men at the bar listened attentively, occasionally helping him out with a detail or two.

Not that Alec needed much help. His memory was uncannily sharp. He recalled the gauge of chokers and the precise weight of girders he’d handled half a century ago. He remembered how toggle bents were used to hold up the cantilevered arms of the Rainbow Bridge over Niagara Falls while it was under construction in 1940, and he remembered the weight of the heaviest sections of steel on that bridge (75 tons) and the size of the gap between the two arms of the cantilever when they were complete (18 inches). He remembered details of tricking up columns for the Chase Manhattan Building in New York (54 tons each, using a 75-ton derrick supported by one-and-a-half-inch guy wires). He remembered the name of the boat that ferried him and three other men from Sydney, Nova Scotia, to Port Au Basque, Newfoundland, on their way to Gander to help build an airplane hangar for the Royal Canadian Air Force in 1940 (the SS
Caribou
), and he remembered the name of the policeman they met in St. John’s after riding a narrow-gauge train 600 miles
across Newfoundland—and overshooting their stop by a couple hundred miles (Sergeant Mahoney).

“This was wartime, understand? So he looks at us Indians and he wants to know who the hell are we. Well, we explained the situation, and he made a call to Montreal and got it all straightened out. ‘You boys, you’re all right,’ he said. ‘Sleep here overnight. And in the morning, get back on the train. You only passed your job about two hundred miles back.’”