All Things Together

1

Blue Collars and Bright Splendors

On Becoming Un-Wonderblind
I am the fool of this story, and no rebel shall hurl me from my throne.

—G. K. Chesterton, Orthodoxy


Earth’s crammed with heaven,
And every common bush afire with God,
But only he who sees takes off his shoes;
The rest sit round and pluck blackberries.

—Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Aurora Leigh


It is the fall. An uneven V of geese croon their way south through a bright September sky. A stubborn summer is finally giving up the ghost as cooler air whispers rumors of snows to come. You can almost smell the winter storms approaching if you have lived here long enough. Born here, I can sense the shifts in the sky and the changes of cadence in the birdsongs. But in this moment, I am not thinking of the goodness of a rooted life, one that intimately knows a place and cares to read its rhythms and decipher its signs. I am not delighting in the soft bite of the autumn air or the riot of colors spreading through the locust trees. I am not present to a world “charged with the grandeur of God.” No. I feel like a clenched fist. More Saruman than Wendell Berry.

I don’t want to be here.

It is midmorning, and I am in a dingy alley between a collapsing foreclosed home and the old shop fronts of Main Street in the town where I have lived most of my life—Longmont, Colorado. Once known as a cow town on the Front Range, an agricultural community harvesting sugar beets and pumping out metric tons of their bleached sugar, it is now a tech-minded city following the silicon ways of Boulder, its sophisticated neighbor. Here, set against the ancient sentinels of the Rocky Mountains, the towering smokestack of the defunct Great Western Sugar Mill still haunts the skyline—an icon of change and abandoned ways. Its doors closed and its great machines were silenced the year I was born.

A few miles from that long-quiet smokestack, my hands are jammed into heavy leather gloves and my brown Carhartts are smeared dark from the morning’s labors. I am lethargic and irritable. Uncomfortable in my skin—cracking my knuckles and biting my lips. I don’t want to be here. I vowed I never would be. So how did I get here?

This is not how my life was supposed to go.

I had zero desire to take up the blue-collared mantle of the family business. Nowhere in my dreams of any desired future were these scenes of turning wrenches or salvaging scrap. Yet here I am, broken pipes in hand and a creeping legion of discontent in my contracted heart. I never set out to work as a service plumber. But now I am spending my days in the dark spaces of homes across town, taking up company with the broken things.

I, I, I—so many I’s. This is symptomatic of my problem, but I can’t see it. Not yet.

For well over a year, we had been collecting old scrap from our service jobs—cracked copper pipes, battered chrome faucets, broken brass valves, tangles of aluminum, and old leaden waste pipes from turn-of-the-century homes. “One man’s trash is another man’s treasure” was one of the oft-spoken mottos of blue-collar redemption we lived by. Over time, angular bits and pieces of metal, the unseen guts of old homes, had ended up in our warehouse. The warehouse, just across the alley from the boarded-up home, was in the back of a worn-down 1940s vanilla-brick building that had once been the only bowling alley in town. Now gutted, a few faded bowling pins and lightning strikes remain painted on the structural cinder block walls inside—the concrete still harboring half a century of nicotine. No more glossy wooden lanes, gaudy trophies, or glowing pinball machines.

Sometimes it is hard to imagine how these discarded twistings and long-forgotten fragments were once artfully threaded throughout the walls of new homes, part of a clever network of metal-bound rivers that brought water on demand. These dirty and discarded things were once gleaming channels of life, carrying clean water to draw a bath for a child, fill a pan for mom’s vegetable soup, or water the petunias and dad’s fussed-over heirloom tomato plants. Yet entropy has overtaken them, relentlessly going about its unraveling ways. These pipes were part of ingenious systems all now sadly disassembled, disordered, and distorted. The work of craftsmen now sinking into de-creation. Their integrity could not hold. It is the way of things—to unravel and dissolve, for beautiful order to slouch toward bedlam. Things fall apart. Cheery thoughts, I know. Hang in there.

Today, the master plumber has tasked me to drag out the salvage bins and sort the bits and pieces we have collected. Lead into this pile. Copper and brass over here and there. Slouching and grumbling, I feel rather dragon-like (no epic horde of gold, though—just these piles of bent metal). I should make it clear: This is not merely a sour mood on a rough Monday. This has become the concave posture of my soul. A collapse. It is the broke-down, ungrateful way I am inhabiting the world. Incurvatus in se. I have become a grumble. Combing through the tangled mess of metal, I busy my mind as I keep banging my knuckles about: How did I get here, sifting through a graveyard of copper bones, pulled from the bodies of countless houses? Some of the “bones” resurrect a memory of the home from which it came—a floor plan, a faucet fixed, a conversation with a homeowner about a book on the shelf or family picture on the wall, or a sudden recollection of where the crawl space and water shutoff valve were located.

I throw a brass shower valve into a pile. Waste. So much waste—and my life feels part of it. To cope, I suppose (or maybe it is sheer pride), I grow philosophical and think: There’s something sad about all this. This scrap is the stuff of human ingenuity. This smart technology—temperature-controlled living water at our fingertips within the comfort of our homes—has changed civilizations. Brilliant, really. Almost like magic.

Yet it goes mostly unnoticed and unappreciated, hidden behind the scenes, veiled behind drywall until a toilet backs up or the hot water goes cold. Hidden until we are inconvenienced or we smell our own mortality. We grow so accustomed to good things. Numb to wonders of innovation and savvy design. It’s never enough. We take so much for granted. We are wonderblind.

This is my mind urgently searching while my hands are reluctantly working. I suppose I am desperately looking for some meaning, some hidden purpose, some revelatory thought to redeem these seemingly wasted motions, moments, and months. How can I salvage more than these pipes? How can I salvage the fragments of my hopes for how my life would go?

I can feel the resentment in my jaw and teeth. And in the buzzing frustration of it all, there is a profound disconnect between my thoughts and my body. I am a man in pieces. Riven. Cracked about. Hands and feet, eyes and heart and mind all jumbled and going in different directions as I go about the motions.

In this moment I am unable to feel in my body the importance of my job. There is zero sense of the sacred. No awareness of the glory all around. The comic irony is that I am the one who is wonderblind—unable to see the value of the blue collar I am wearing. Unable to hear the beauty in a dove’s call descending from the metal rain gutter above. I am numb to any goodness of the moment. Not an ounce of mirth in my bones.

And then comes the fire.

Finished with my bleak sorting assignment, I watch the master plumber drag into the alleyway what looks like a small cauldron attached to a blowtorch and a propane tank. On his instruction, we begin throwing the scavenged lead pipes into the heavy cauldron. He turns the noisy burner on. Golden fire flashes. Meditatively, we watch the burning. Without talking, we take in the flame’s brilliant dance. Fire has a way of snaring the imagination of little boys and grown men alike.

Slowly, the tangle of dirty metal melts in the thick iron bowl. It merges. It pools. It smooths. My nose wrinkles at the sour smoke, and my eyes squint at the blaring flame—this is certainly not an OSHA-approved activity. But no surprise here, as this master is old school. He plays by different rules from a previous age. Not politically correct in the slightest, he talks about the “old ways.” He has plumbing hacks that won’t be found in any recent manual. He has stories to tell and retell. He has scars on his hands from slipped wrenches and blowtorched pipes, his marked skin authenticating years of experience. His hands hold scars that say, “I know a better way.”

As the heat continues, the wrecked pipes dissolve into a dreary pool, a brown and gray simmering stew. Fire boiling a dull metal-mud under an autumn sky—it all feels a bit primeval. Elemental. Like an ancient recipe for some enchantment. Lines from Macbeth come to mind: “Double, double toil and trouble; / Fire burn and caldron bubble. / Fillet of a fenny snake, / In the caldron boil and bake.” That, I suppose, is what happens when a literature major becomes a plumber’s grumbling apprentice.

Then something happens.