Vertical Integration

A degree in theater is vertical integration, a degree in bookkeeping is horizontal. I only started building houses because I'd built scenery, houses are easier, because you don't have to take them apart. Also because you're never intimidated by a project; sure, I could dig a tunnel, sure, I could build a bridge, I can build a house that won't blow away in a storm. Ronnie had sold me a gnarly tomato that he swore I'd love, and I have to say it was one of the best things I've ever eaten. I'm at a loss to explain how taste and smell can explode in that way. I'd cooked bacon, so the house smelled great, and built an outstanding BLT, which had reminded me of a golf course in Florida, where I used to dive in the shallow lake at night, collecting errant drives, which I sold to the driving range for pocket change. I often spent this money at sandwich shops, on a BLT, with a limeade. In Key West I collected Sea Cucumbers for the aquarium, and would buy a turtle burger at a great seafood shack across from the docks (we had turtle burgers at school lunch on Fridays, cheaper than bringing ground beef from the mainland). In the cooperage book, this quote, talking about Scottish coopers having different names for various tools: "A cresset is a lummie, and a downright, a plucker, while the beek iron is a study." I could live in Scotland, I love their slant on English, but I hear that the weather is terrible. I know that a cresset is the fire of shavings built under a cask after soaking or steaming, thus a lummie, with ties to illumination, and that a downright is the curved plane used to smooth the outside of a barrel (plucking off the roughness), and a beek iron is the anvil used for riveting hoops, which, I suppose, is always a study. A hoop was made slightly smaller (an inch on a large barrel) than the space it would occupy, to draw the staves together. A piece of dried reed was often placed between the staves as a kind of gasket. Von Guericke's first vacuum experiments used a brewery 'extra stout' barrel. The 'extra stout' just refers to the thickness of the staves, an inch and a half in this case. Any thickness only adds to the surface area where the bevels meet. Someplace, in the piles of paper around here, there's a reproduction of a great photograph of a cooper and his day's work, which was replacing the stave where the bung-hole was drilled. Twelve in one day. The bung-hole stave always failed, end-grain, but he had a pattern stave and he could knock the hoops off a barrel and replace one in short-order. Even as early as Roman times the staves were sequentially numbered, barrels were built, then knocked apart, then shipped wherever they were needed. Anybody could put them back together. These were probably the first kits. IKEA translated into Swiss and back into English.