Shovel, Steel and Spirit

The Kelpies (and TC) at Grangermouth on the Forth and Clyde Canal

Are we doing anything today that will be useful and beautiful three hundred years from now? The question was irresistible at 4MPH on the Leeds and Liverpool canal. This 2,700 mile network of amazements were crafted by shovel, designed by impossibly bold engineers to move coal, limestone and Wedgewood china to the factories and markets before railroads and later roads and later computers. They were built shovel by shovel, snaking up, down and across high hills using the locks imagined by Leonardo DaVinci (who could not have imagined 2,000 miles of interlocking canals). Tunnels hewed by pick centuries ago still work. Aqueducts built by nameless artisans still gracefully carry canals high over rivers.

Up from the canal I am caught and taught by the many more thousands of miles of dry-stone fences that measure every hill (and dale, of course—it’s Yorkshire) into pastures. Hands chose and placed each stone so carefully that they are useful today without cement, plastic or wire.

The canals, like everything in Scotland and England, thrive today in a constantly negotiated creative tension between every level of government and a dense mesh of volunteer societies, organizations, trusts and determinedly eccentric people.

Americans take credit for the volunteerism that powers our grass roots democracy, but it’s actually the Scots and Brits who invented it (along with canals, steam engines and computers). Their civic life is vital, muscular and kind where the American version has grown coarse, proud and polarized. Democratic systems live on the complex social life in which people work together to do many collective things, not just those explicitly political. This is especially true today as the mechanics of modern interconnected systems are so easily tamed and gamed, abstracted from lived life; froth blown by artificial non-intelligence.

The canals did not survive the centuries on their own. Everything made by and among humans has to be tended, repaired and protected by and among us. The best of any one generation only lasts when the next considers it worth tending and passing on. The canals were eclipsed by rail and eventually the climate-melting petroleum vehicles we consider normal. One by one the canals were abandoned, their locks and mechanisms rusted and blocked by careless new highway bridges. Surprisingly, after the decimations of world war two a most preposterous British style citizen movement brought the canals back to life. Technically the right to navigate was as British as voting, but somebody had to make it possible again. As always it began with two eccentric couples who created the  Inland Waterways Association in a converted bedroom. Using all the movement arts—including no small civil disobedience—it made the canals visible to governments and eventually thousands of people who volunteered. They waded into and cleaned industrial canals. And they voted. Today the canals are managed by a “trust” which blends philanthropy, government funding and countless volunteer hours.

Why bother? In our nano-age, a 4mph thrill ride is not obviously useful. But there is brilliance in the odd. The canals are an ecological life web linking hundreds of protected wetlands and sensitive natural areas. Hundreds of small towns without their founding factories have lively new industries focused on the 35,000 canal boats that putter back and forth and the many more hikers, bikers and gongoozlers of the combined natural spectacle that is now fiercely beloved.  The gongoozlers (canal talk for idle spectators) tend to vote. Like the stacked stone walls, a billion things have to be done well for something to exist at all; and if done really well, earn enough love to be protected by another generation.

I don’t know anything in the United States built by my generation likely to here in three hundred years. We might borrow from Jimmy Carter a tiny bit of credit for the Arctic National Wildlife Reserve—as it has taken constant battles to protect it (not all won and done, yet).

I once would have said that American democracy had been built for another ten generations, But under my generation’s watch it has wobbled and withered to where I’m not entirely sure it will make it another 56 days. That depends on millions of gongoozlers suspending their idle onlooking long enough to vote.

And then after democracy has once more been voted back to life and away from the abyss; what then? In Scotland, Yorkshire or North Carolina there are rivers and forests to tend, neighbors to visit, plenty of beating back the dead hand of greed while extending the gentle one attached to our own arms. And finding the Spirit that moves every human toward each other and the inexpressible wonders we call “natural.”

A final note about the comprehensive genius of the Scots. Their Forth and Clyde Canal started in 1668, the last shovel in 1690. It was the super highway on which the Scottish revolutions rode, industrial, intellectual and religious. And then, as in England, the canal eventually became superfluous and left behind until retrieved by civic movement in the 1990s. This was marked for the ages by two astonishing feats blending engineering and practical art: the Falkirk Wheel, which this engineer’s son breathless at how it used Archimedes principle of displacement, insane steel work and graceful art to link two canals separated by an 80 feet drop. (A later blog….).

Even more astonishing is the Kelpies–largest equine sculpture in the world honoring the massive horses that pulled the barges which sits just a few miles down the canal where it meets the river (the Forth; the Clyde being at the other end in Glasgow). Although the bankers and barons claimed credit, the canal was built on the thousands of nameless men with shovels and these massive beasts. Those barons have their little statues, now with signs explaining their ugly complicity in the tobacco and slave trade. None of those bald men had anything like the Kelpies.

The Scots saw in the canal horses the mythic Kelpie horse spirits of the sea that protect those who travel by water. When TC and I were there in the (rare) Scottish sun the stainless-steel Kelpies were alive and vital, heads a hundred feet above us little humans. The artist left us to the imagine the rest of the horses that would reach another two hundred feet below where the muscle would have flexed. I love the part we can’t see as much as the stainless steel dazzling above.

My engineering father taught me to appreciate the underneath part of a bridge, so I think about what makes canals and, yes, civic life durable, beautiful and life-giving. Art helps us see, engineering to see how, shovel and steel to make it real, Spirit to give our own lives in common purpose for another generation.