To the nameless craftsmen — whose quiet labor gives shape to memory.
The sun rises. You climb seven hundred stairs before the work begins.
The pay is fifty cents an hour. Enough to feed and clothe the family.
At the top, they strap you into a bosun chair. Steel cables. A winch. A drop.
You face a billion years of granite.
Armed with a seventy-five-pound jackhammer.
Drill.
Your body thrown against force that does not give.
Not all jobs are the same. This one is beyond the paycheck.
Other men pack the holes with dynamite.
They haul you back up before the blast.
The mountain jumps.
Smoke and broken stone fall away.
Then they lower you back down into the dust.
Drill, again.
Nature fights back with hellish heat and bone-deep cold.
The wind drives dust into your lungs.
At day's end, you are a ghost.
Covered head to toe in white granite dust.
Compressed air is used in an attempt to make you look human again.
After a while, the dust just becomes part of you.
The heartbeat of the operation is at the base of the mountain.
The stone is so hard, drill bits go dull in less than twenty minutes.
Blacksmiths forging and tempering all day.
Smoke rising from coal and burning steel.
One man sharpening as many as five hundred drill bits before sundown.
The face of the mountain is changing.
Man against mountain.
Men against time.
Trying to outlast both.
One day you will be gone.
History will recite the names of the great men you carved.
There will be no mention of your own.
The mountain will remember.
It has to be enough.
Some men are remembered in stone.
Others are remembered only by what they left behind.