The summer that Joshua, our oldest grandchild, was seven,
he helped me build a stone dam across the brook below our house
in rural New Hampshire. His main job was to crank the handle
of the kind of small winch known as a come-along in order to
keep the tension on steel chains running from a large tree to
slabs of granite, some as long as eight feet and weighing
several tons; my job was to use long steel levers to maneuver
the granite forward on rollers placed on sheets of plywood.
Each slab had to be moved about fifty or sixty feet from where
they had been dumped after being hauled from an old barn
foundation.
At the start of our project, I explained to my young
helper the basic mechanical principles involved in our work.
A practical and pragmatic child, Joshua quickly articulated a
basic principle of his own: that the come-alongs with blue handles
were superior to the ones with red handles.
Let me explain that the brand of come-alongs I use is
available in two models: the kind with a red handle has a twelve foot
long cable and a lifting capacity of one ton; the model with the
blue handle is idientical except that the cable passes around a
pulley, which means it can lift two tons but has only half the
effective pulling length.
Joshua disliked using the come-alongs with red handles
because it took him twice as much effort as the ones with
blue handles. But he understood why I wanted him to start
each new pull with that model: to take up the slack in the
hundred or so feet of heavy chain between the tree and the
stone being moved. Once the chain was taut, I would attach a
blue-handled device to make his work easier. Why couldn't he
use the blue-handled come-along to take up the slack? He
could--but that would double the amount of time and effort
it would take for me to unwind the cable.
* * *
Joshua will come of voting age in time for the 2012
election. Perhaps by then our political system will be so polarized
that there will be only two levers in each voting booth: one with a
red handle, the other with a blue. If that comes to pass, I
think he'll be able to apply the essential lesson he learned at the
age of seven: that if there's heavy lifting to be done, if
you really want to get things moving, it's better to pull the blue
handle.