Brown Wool, Twelve Winters

Every October a parcel arrives from my aunt in the Bregenzerwald, and inside it is the same sweater: brown, thick, the sleeves a little too long, the collar a little too wide. She has been knitting them since I was seventeen. I own four by now. One of them lives in the workshop, hanging on a nail, and that is the one I actually wear.

Winter work is not dramatic. It is small and cold. You cannot do fine work in gloves — you cannot feel a bolt seat itself — so you take them off, and the metal pulls the heat out of your fingers in under a minute. Then you put them back on. Then you take them off again.

The tower at minus twelve

Last February we changed a sheave liner on tower nine, twelve below, with the wind coming up the slope. Two of us on the platform, one on the radio below. Four hours for a part you could hold in one hand. Nothing about that is a complaint. That is simply the shape of the job.

In the cold you do not get faster. You get slower and more exact, or somebody gets hurt.

I learned that from Herr B., who trained me and who could hear a bad bearing from the bottom of a tower without looking up. He never once told me to be careful. He simply worked in a way that made carelessness look stupid, and after two years of standing next to it, some of it stuck.

What the wool is for

The sweater smells of rope grease and coffee and, faintly, of the wood stove in my aunt's kitchen. I wash it twice a winter, which she says is not enough and I say is exactly enough. The grease never fully comes out. I have decided that this is not a problem that needs solving.

In the evening I hang it back on the nail and walk home in the dark, and the cold gets into my shoulders, and I think about the tower, the four hours, the part you could hold in one hand. Then I eat, and I sleep, and the sweater waits in the workshop for the next cold morning.