Common Ground: The Way We Weld

April 2007 | Life, the Universe and Everything

The Way We Weld

By Laine Bergeson

Some people wish they’d been born taller. Others pine for violet eyes or golden hair. I dream a different dream: I want — just for a day — to look butch.

At 5 foot, 2 inches, 105 pounds, with Orphan Annie freckles and hair that, for laziness or familiarity, always finds its way into pigtails, I may have inner fierceness to spare, but I exhibit no outward signs of brutishness whatsoever. I’ve long lamented the incurable sticky sweetness the world sees in my countenance, so I decided to remake my image: it was time to master the butchest of butch activities.

So I bought a pair of Carhartt overalls, hopped a plane to New Mexico, and joined six other women — at 30, I was the youngest participant — for a weeklong Women’s Welding Workshop.

Spitfore Forge, like the rest of Taos, sits in the shadow of Taos Mountain, a sacred peak with whom the blessed, the lucky and the high are said to be able to communicate. It has drawn innumerable artists — D.H. Lawrence, Georgia O’Keefe, Ansel Adams — to the valleys below it. The mountain did not talk to me (or if it did, I could not hear it over the din of the chop saw), but I noticed that things seemed more possible here than back home in Minneapolis, and my dreams came strangely to life at night.

The forge itself is a cozy (if that word could fairly be used to describe a metal shop) two rooms filled with all the tools of the trade: a hand-built forge, two curvaceous anvils, at least 3 MIG welders, assorted grinders, tongs and vices, and a much-derided plasma cutter that hangs out under the sink in the kitchen. The plasma cutters are beloved by some metal workers, but at Spitfire, sheets of metal get sliced the old-fashioned way: with the pant-wettingly terrifying power of an oxy-acetylene cutting torch.

Our first lesson was in metallurgy, and in what metals can and can’t be welded together. Or, rather, which metals can be welded together with only minimal damage to the lungs and which ones can be welded together to create fumes that will induce nothing short of complete respiratory failure. It was during this lesson that I got my first inkling of the dangers inherent in metal work — and in the actual resilience and toughness this art requires, something that had not dawned on me before. I just wanted to look tough, not be tough.

I didn’t panic until the shop safety lesson. We were given an intimate tour through all the injuries that could befall us, none of them minor: searing our retinas, metal shards lodged in our eyeballs, burning flesh, cutting off a hand, electrocution. An oxy-acetylene torch can burn as high as 5,800 degrees F, so even if it is not igniting your pants or engaging in some other misdemeanor, it is being held by your bare hand, a few inches from skin, no more than a foot and a half from your eyeballs.

Still, my first time lighting the thing was strangely empowering. I had to extinguish and relight it about seven times before I stopped gasping audibly when the torch came to life, kicked back and burst into yellow-white flames. Soon I was cutting through sheet metal with the 6,000 degree F heat, watching the metal glow orange, become molten and then sever completely and split into two as I moved the torch across it.

We learned different techniques and skills — welding and grinding, sanding and forging — as the week wore on, slowly getting comfortable, if not confident, on each. But then, sometime on Thursday, there was a moment — this tangible, mystical moment — when everything coalesced and, as one, we went from reluctant torchbearers to women who really, really dug setting metal on fire. I overheard one of my classmates tell the teacher, who was offering to help her at the forge: “I’ve got it. I’ll call you if I need you.”

Something had happened. We had become tough. I had become tough. It was exhilarating.

The last half of the week was devoted to projects of our own design. We were given parameters, but no template, and set loose. High on my newfound passion for metal, I drew three different designs and covered about 20 blank pages in drawings, but one quickly emerged as my favorite.

I worked furiously to finish before the Friday afternoon critique, and managed, just barely. I felt powerful and, for the first time, really, ever: butch. Paradoxically, at that moment I didn’t care what others saw in me. I just felt tough, which somehow seemed to calm my deeper inner need to appear so.

Which is a good thing, since all possible claims to butchness were rendered moot by my project: I had forged a steel purse.

Laine Bergeson is a writer and editor in Minneapolis, MN.

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