Empathy and Curiosity

“Tote that barge, lift that bale,

Get a little drunk and you land in jail.”

- “Old Man River” Show Boat, 1927, lyrics 

by Oscar Hammerstein II.

I am cognizant of, and thankful for, the fact that neither I nor my ancestors needed to serve King Cotton by hauling around those bales of cotton weighing hundreds of pounds. That unenviable task fell, literally, onto the backs of the poor farmers and enslaved people of the American South in the 1800s. 

However, as a retired university professor whose 75th birthday looms a couple of weeks away, confronted with 30-some packing boxes of books weighing 80 lbs apiece that need to go from the garage floor to a basement storage area, my heart goes out to those unfortunate souls and, by extension, to whoever had to “tote” the multi-ton blocks of stone to build the pyramids - in the ancient kingdoms in Egypt or Mesoamerica.

The internet is remarkably silent on the question of how the bales of cotton went the short route from field to bales, and then how the bales found their way on to more mechanical conveyances. I have my suspicions. A number of illustrations show bales of cotton stacked on wagons pulled by mules. But nowhere can I find a discussion of how the bales got onto the wagons. That is like saying, “then Schrag’s book boxes were moved from the garage into the basement.”

But neglecting to mention: “The boxes were first wrestled onto a hand cart with one flat wheel, dragged onto a towel, slid across the floor and a rug for a dozen feet to the top of the stairs where they were bumped, one stair at a time (13 of them), down to the towel awaiting in the basement where they were dragged across hardwood and concrete floors for about 20 feet to their final/temporary resting place waiting to be unpacked once the bookcases found their place.”

The issue of moving giant pyramid stones suffers no such neglect. Articles, websites and videos posit multiple hypotheses as to how this was accomplished. Descriptions of hundreds of workers, (the question of paid or enslaved fosters lively debates), ramps, logs, sand moisturizers, even magical transportation all get their share of attention. However as neither my garage nor basement have ramps or sand, not to mention hundreds of workers. There is only one, me, unpaid. Christine broke her arm falling over a bale of cotton - actually a packing crate - back in Raleigh so is no practical assistance in the toting and hauling of 80 lb. book boxes. So none of the pyramid speculation has any bearing on my current situation.

Back in the early 1800s, in England, the Luddites attacked and destroyed “new” weaving looms because they feared the new technology would “steal” their jobs. If any of you are aware of technology that will steal my job as chief book box hauler, please feel free to inform me. No Luddites need apply.