Tower: Faith, Vertigo, and Amateur Construction

by Henderson, Bill

• ISBN13: 9780865476141
• ISBN10: 0865476144
• Format: Paperback
• Copyright: 2001-04-01
• Publisher: Farrar Straus & Giroux

Summary

Tower is Bill Henderson's winning personal account of erecting, by hand and almost entirely on his own, a wooden tower on a plot of land in Maine. For Henderson, constructing the edifice -- which he resolutely declares to have "no purpose", religious or utilitarian -- is an exercise in faith and self-reliance. Henderson guides us through the details of design and construction with clear illustrations and humor, often digressing to contemplate the various towers of Yeats, Joyce, Sam Rodia, and Gustave Eiffel. The finished result is not only Henderson's completed tower, in which we share an inspiring sense of accomplishment, but a revelatory insight into what motivates the builders and thinkers who precede our own efforts to gain a higher viewpoint.

Excerpts

Chapter One

TOWER?

A few summers ago in Maine, I built a tower on a high hill overlooking the sea. This is a book, both practical and personal, about why and how I raised that tower.

    If you have ever considered constructing a tower in your backyard--or if you have ever suffered from vertigo or a wavering of your faith--you may be interested in this little volume.

    You may think that building a tower is beyond your reach, that it has to be a huge swaying beast, like Chicago's Sears Tower or one of the towers of New York's World Trade Center. But in my case, three stories, counting the deck at the peak, suited me just fine.

    You may wish to go higher, and I suggest that you go as high as you like, but in many communities zoning restrictions will hold you below the treetops. You are, after all, contemplating an impractical, frivolous, and idiosyncratic structure, and zoning rules are designed to protect real estate values against the likes of you. A tower down the road is not what most citizens fancy. Also, your next-door neighbor may worry that you will block the sun (try not to).

    And of course, as I did, you will have to endure the ever-ready phallus-substitute cracks. When this happens, point out to your detractors that the poet William Butler Yeats also had to listen to similar Freudian cheap shots from his friend Ezra Pound, who ignorantly dubbed Yeats's Thoor Ballylee "Ballyphallus." You might tell your critics that the historical connection of sex and towers has more to do with the Babylonian god Marduk frolicking with a priestess atop his giant ziggurat than any mere physical resemblance of organ and object.

    Failing this, you might avoid the word "tower" and tell naysayers, your zoning board, and neighbors that you are planning a studio, a slim, tall studio. "Studio" carries a tone of seriousness, culture, and the rest. People like that.

    If you live in the country, as I do part of the year, you may build any tower you like without too many explanations. I include several tower appreciations later that you may want to contemplate in planning your own spire.

    I prefer a tower that stands by itself, unattached to house or other structure, and that is not built for practical, religious, or propagandist purposes. This preference leaves out a host of things that would like to call themselves towers, like the Canadian National Railroad Tower in Toronto (1,805 feet) and the wire-supported towers in Fargo, North Dakota (2,063 feet), and Warsaw, Poland (2,117 feet).

    I do not appreciate phony towers like Howard Roark's titanic fictional skyscraper in Ayn Rand's novel The Fountainhead or Donald Trump's nonfiction fake, Trump Tower. These I classify as mere utilitarian erections. They are named towers for the romance of the term, but there isn't a rivet of romance in them.

    Like all skyscrapers, they were conceived thanks to the fateful invention of the Otis elevator in 1857. Mr. Otis made the climbing of stairs unnecessary. It was only a matter of time before the first skyscraper appeared, in 1883, and the race upward was on. Soon a slew of faux towers shot up, each aiming to be loftier and more imposing than somebody else's peak, and always symbolizing the overpowering interest of financial returns in a frenzied commercial culture that cares for little else. These air-conditioned beehives are all business: not an ounce of fun or folly in any of them.

    Other towers you will not find in these pages: fire towers, transmission towers, gun towers (with one exception), grain silos, Muslim prayer towers, church steeples, the Washington Monument, grain elevators, tuna boat towers, water towers, the Statue of Liberty, gas towers, lighthouses--anything that has been thrust up with some practical, religious, or propagandist agenda.

    About "thrust up": this book's towers reach to the sky; they do not thrust; although some, like the Tower of Babel, do a bit of thrusting and reaching at the same time, and there's a tad of propaganda in Babel, too. No tower is perfect, including my own, as will become quickly apparent.

    Before I leave the bogus phallic symbolism issue entirely, I might note that the preferred angle of an alert penis is 45 degrees downward in most cases and almost never straight up like a tower. And in tower building, size does not matter. In fact, small is lovely. Consider, for instance, Winifred Lutz's art installation in Abington, Pennsylvania -- a roofless stone tower that she aligned perfectly to capture the sun's rays through narrow slits at the winter solstice. Her delightful whimsy is only fifteen feet tall.

    Stokes Castle in Nevada's Shoshone Mountains is a square three-story plaything built for the mining and railroad baron Anson Phelps Stokes in 1896. Situated just off the Pony Express Trail at 6,431 feet elevation, Stokes's tower is modeled on ancient buildings he had admired while touring Rome. Stokes occupied it for two months in the summer of 1897 and then abandoned it forever. You can visit Stokes Castle near Austin, Nevada, and marvel at the fresh, clean air, the enormous views, and the silence of the Shoshones. Perhaps it was the silence that scared off the busy Stokes.

    Less lonely but even smaller is the sixteen-square-foot Teahouse Tower on Fanette Island in California's Lake Tahoe. Constructed of rough stones in 1929, it is sited on a hill and is almost as wide as it is high. The island and its tower are a child's fantasyland.

    There are hundreds, if not thousands, of tiny towers to appreciate. You remember how as a child you made them out of sand or blocks or tin cans? Such a memory inspired the psychiatrist Carl Gustav Jung to raise his own tower on the banks of a Swiss lake. Two inches or 3,000 feet, the size of the tower is of no importance. All are mere pebbles on the earth's surface. It is the tall imagination that counts, in this book at least.

    And the utter joy of building counts, too. As I said, my tower on that Maine hill is only three stories high, including the roof deck. Building up to that deck--with simple tools, no electricity, and little help--was a major satisfaction, indeed a salvation, during a year that saw several of my young friends diagnosed with cancer, my marriage shaken, and my faith often in shambles.

    As E. B. White, the New Yorker writer, who once lived near my hill in the village of Brooklin, said: "Practically the most satisfying thing on earth (especially after fifteen years of trying to put English sentences together against time) is to be able to square off a board of dry white pine, saw to the line (allowing for the thickness of the pencil point) and have the thing fit perfectly."

    Practically nothing in my tower fit perfectly, but I tried to make it fit well enough so that the tower would not topple in the first gust.

    Since there are no books or plans for building towers, if I had questions I visited people who were house-, shed-, or barn-building in the area and studied how they framed, sheathed, and roofed.

    Or I talked to my friend A. J. Billings, proprietor of Batter's Lumber in Deer Isle. A.J. knows his sticks, and he's a superb teacher. He's a first-rate trumpeter, too, the star of the island's Fourth of July ceremonies. During the parade, A.J. and the dozen members of the town band sit on folding chairs on a slight rise in a field at the end of Deer Isle village's tiny main street. Everybody shows up for the parade and many of the residents concoct homemade floats and polish up old cars to participate. A.J. and the band vigorously play "Semper Fidelis," "The Thunderer," "The Stars and Stripes Forever," and all the marches by Maine composer R. B. Hall in their repertoire, which is considerable. Every summer, A.J. flies to New York City for bugle lessons.

    A.J. taught me all I know about building, and he was ready with his Maine humor, too, comparing me to Tom Sawyer in the woods and joking about my tower blowing down with me on it. In Maine you know you have been provisionally accepted in the construction fraternity when you're the butt of jokes like that.

Copyright © 2000 Bill Henderson. All rights reserved.