Hammering Man

"Hammering Man" in Seattle and other cities stands as a tribute to workers.

The "hammering man" on Block 832 in Plainfield is a sign of the times.

The 48-foot tall kinetic sculpture outside the Seattle Art Museum wields his hammer from 7 a.m. to 10 p.m. daily, but gets Labor Day off. His work is silent.

Our guy is at it whenever he gets a truckful of junk and is anything but silent. He brings home all kinds of metal cast-offs and uses his hammer to bust them apart for transport to a scrap yard.

We sometimes have the same kind of operation going on next door.

In addition, several people riffle through the trash on our block to pick out metal and take it away in bags or on bicycles or trucks, for processing wherever they live.

Hammering Man is symbolic of the worker. For our guys, scavenging is their work. One who uses a yellow kiddie trailer on his bike for his haul told me he goes all over Plainfield and beyond, collecting salable bits of copper from appliance cords or costly metals from the insides of old television sets.

Technically, when somebody brings home truckloads of junk and uses his back yard to process it, he is in effect creating an illegal transfer station. But given the number of scavengers we have seen over the past year, these operations are obviously just the means of augmenting or earning income in a very bad economy.

I sometimes wish our hammering guy would hold it down a little, as he often accompanies his smashing-up with loud, lewd conversations with somebody who sits in the yard. Easy for me to say - I have my pension and Social Security and not many needs. Just to put gas in his pickup truck must cost hammering guy a chunk of his profits from scavenging.

So if I go out to commune with nature and tend to the garden, I just have to turn the Walkman radio up a little higher to offset his racket. Maybe when the economy improves, he will pick up some other kind of work. Maybe he will at least take Labor Day off.

--Bernice