baptized by argon

I want to start out this post with a little picture of my surroundings at the moment, because I'm so grateful to be where I am right now: at home, for the first evening in a while, sitting on my desk typing and listening to John Mellencamp. I've been at college since 8 this morning, and while I love it, you can't go around blasting Petty and Mellencamp in the college library. It's not academically accepted. At home, I can do this, and since I don't find myself here as much as I used to be, I'm taking advantage of the opportunity.

Like I mentioned, I love college. In fact I'm completely shocked by how much I love it. Who would have ever thought that Emma, who used to scribble nasty things all over her math book at the kitchen table, would be this happy to go to school full-time?! I guess it just goes to show how many things have changed in a few years' time. I appreciate a lot of things I didn't used to, and going to college is sure one of them. 

 My intention in writing this is not to talk about how much I love school, because that's not a topic a lot of people want to hear about seeing as it kind of makes me sound dreamy-eyed and fake.

 What I really want to do is tell you about one of my classes in particular, because it's something way different than anything I've done before. Besides that I think I ought to write about it before I go back tomorrow, maybe give myself some fresh perspective and keep myself from freaking out prematurely.

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I'm talking about my welding class!

Why, you ask, am I taking welding?

Welding is an extremely useful skill to have, especially for people who a) work on farm equipment, and b) work on cars, both of which things I want to know how to do. There's a pretty good welding program at my school, so I'd heard some about it, but to tell you the truth, the main reason I registered for Applied Welding this semester isn't why most people get into it. Last semester I took only three classes, one of which I loved but still breezed through easily and two of which were such a - well, joke - that I got the idea college in general was going to be a big travesty. So when it came time to register for Spring classes I really wanted to make myself work a little harder. And I liked the sound of 'applied.'

So I'm taking welding.

I'm getting used to doing a lot of things most people don't expect me to do. In my fire department I'm the only girl, and the only active member under 40 years old, and so it's not weird anymore to be surrounded by men who smoke and swear and act all tough. In fact it's getting to be normal. In my welding class there's one other girl; most of the students are men, past college-age, who work for the engine plant in town and are being paid by their company to take this "skilled trades" program. Even their books are being paid for, which isn't really fair, but I'm not complaining.

The first day of class, my teacher went over the syllabus, gave us some rough safety guidelines, and gave us a test on the kinds of light rays produced by metal arc welding that can blind you. This scared me a little, but I like being scared a little.

The second day of class, the teacher walked in and sat down with the newspaper in his hand. He then proceeded to read the headlines, as well as comment on the spelling and pronunciation of people's names. He then talked for a little while about welding techniques, and soon we were dismissed to the shop down the hall. This was when I started to get more than a little scared, because I realized we were actually going to start welding. 

I have never been in a welding shop in my life. I have never even seen it done. I barely know what it is, or that's what I was thinking then, when they handed me a leather coat and a helmet and some gloves about ten sizes too big for my hands. I looked at the teacher, but I couldn't figure out what he was going to make me do. He's one of those people who is so smart and knows what they're teaching so well, that they can't even remember what it was like to not know a thing about it, and so it's pretty impossible for them to go back to level zero and explain it to someone who's never held an electrode in all their life and doesn't even know which end to put into the clamp and which to touch to the metal. I realized that he had done all the explaining he was going to do. I followed the other guys into the shop and took my spot at one of the tables in between two of the screens. Behind me was a big electric welder and a cylinder of compressed argon, and on my workstation was a chipper, a brush, and a handful of electrodes. I was given a scrap piece of metal to practice on, and that was it.

Of course, some of these old-timers had done this before. In no time the sounds of torches and chipping and the forced ventilators over every station filled up the space around me, and the smell of  heated metal stung my senses. I looked at the machine behind me, set to 124 amperes (do you know how many amperes it takes to kill a person?), looked in my hand, at the clamp holding the electrode, and pulled the helmet shield over my eyes. All I could see was black.

My first thought was, I am going to die.

Either from asphyxiation, or the ultraviolet light rays when I accidentally looked at the torch flame, or I'd catch on fire from the sparks flying underneath the screen from the guy welding next to me. Or I'd inhale the gas fumes filling up the air around me and pass out dead on the floor before I could even scream for help. I'm going to die, I thought, and I'm not even going to know it.

In such a case, some would give up, but not Emma. Unfortunately the teacher had left the premises. My plan was to go find him and tell him to come hold my hand while I acclimated myself to the foreign surroundings.

But at that point I had the electrode in my hand, stuck in the clamp, and I didn't know how to get it out without squeezing the handle to release it. But wait, I thought, isn't that how you get it to light? I had watched the guy next to me do it and I thought so. How in the heck were you supposed to get the rod out of there without lighting it up and burning up your hand or your face or the whole building? I couldn't set it down, or the whole place for sure would go up. I stood there and pondered this issue for a few geological ages, until the guy on the other side of my screen poked his head around. Probably because he didn't hear any action from my direction and assumed I was dead.

"How's it going?" he asked, when he saw that I was, in fact, still standing.

"It's not," I said. "How do you get this thing" - I pointed, looking dumb, "out of this thing?"

He acted like he knew, but I don't think he really did either, because I saw him flinch a little as he yanked the rod out. He thought it might explode too. But maybe that was just because I looked so terrified.

With that small problem taken care of, I flopped in my oversized jacket out to find the teacher. The good-for-nothing son-of-a-gun was over in the other part of the room, having a good old time moving sheets of metal around with a forklift. I made myself known to him. 

"Do you have a piece of string I can tie around my gloves? They keep falling off," I said, because I didn't want him to know I didn't know how to light the rod.

He hopped off the forklift and looked me up and down. He scratched his head. "What size coat are you wearing?" he said.

After giving me some duct tape to wrap around my gloves, we went into his office. There I took off my coat, which was a 2XL. He looked around for a small, but, not being able to find one, gave me a large instead, which was some improvement. "How's it going?" he asked, which is the way men always say it, even when they don't give a crap.

I should have used the Monty Python line - "I'm not dead yet!" - but I don't know the guy too well and frankly, I wasn't in the mood to be funny. "I'm getting used to it," I said instead, which was partly true. I was getting used to the loud chipping all around me, at least, to the point where I could barely hear it anymore. In fact, I could barely hear anything. But I was gratified to find I still had my eyesight, which was my main concern because I had to drive home.

I went back to my little cubicle, with duct tape on my wrists, looking like an idiot and feeling faint. I thought, this is stupid. A lot of these guys have done this before; I'll just go watch one of them. I went to the guy nextdoor, where all the sparks were coming from. "Can I watch you?" I said.

"Sure, you can watch," he said. "I'm terrible at this. I've never done it before."

Well, I thought, you're sure going at it pretty hard for never having done it before. Sparks were flying like a forest fire over there. I decided he might not be the best one to observe and started to back away, tripping on the cord from the welder behind me.

"Luke over there is pretty good, he's done it before," the guy said. So I went over to Luke, who is shorter than me but wears a 2XL coat. "Can I watch you?" I said.

"Sure," he said, "I don't care."

The thing about welding is, you can't look at what you're doing, or you will go blind. You have to wear the helmet, and the thing about the helmet is, you can't see anything but the torch flame when you're welding. This means that before you light it, you can't see what you're doing, so you have to almost position the rod, then quickly flip your shield down before you touch it. That's what lights it, by the way - just the touch. You don't squeeze anything or push anything. They forgot to tell Emma that.

I watched Luke for awhile, and he seemed pretty chill. "Ok thanks," I said, and proceeded back to my own home base. I picked up the clamp and fit the rod into it. I took a deep breath, but that was a bad idea because all I got was fumes. I put my helmet down and closed my eyes, which was overkill because I couldn't see anyway, but I couldn't be careful enough. The rod hit the metal and it lit.

There! I could see it! It was green and scary, like the evil spirits in Disney princess movies. Suddenly the flame stopped. I tried to rip the rod away but it stuck. Well, darn, I thought. This can't be good. I tried ripping it again, and this time it disconnected. I flipped up my shield. There was a weld there, and underneath a big old black spot, like where a crater hits the earth. My weld looked like the one in picture examples where they say, here's a good weld, here's a bad one, this one's too long, this one's too short. Mine looked like the very worst of the worst. But I was flying on the wings of joy. I had actually done it!

No matter everyone else around me, including the other girl, had been practicing for hours now and had started on their projects. I had lit the torch! I had made a weld! And even better, I was still alive and breathing! I felt like celebrating. I didn't feel like trying it again.

I was still there for a few more hours though, so I figured I had better. I kept getting the rod stuck over and over again and I was getting rather depressed. After awhile my neighbor to the left stuck his head around again. "Getting the hang of it?"

 "I'm having trouble with it sticking," I told him. He turned my amperes up, which freaked me out, and then told me to try it. What a huge difference! "Thanks!" I said. What would I do without the working man here? Teacher-boy over there sure isn't giving me what I paid for.

My other friend, an older Italian gentleman whose name I feel just terrible for forgetting, came over to see how I was doing. He showed me where I could dip my practice piece into water to cool it off. I did, and it hissed from the temperature change and I felt just like a blacksmith. That made my day better.

Finally five o'clock came. I wouldn't have known, because I didn't have a clock. Suddenly a bunch of guys started sweeping the floor and picking up their stuff and leaving. I looked around and decided I'd better leave too. I held my breath before I flipped the switch on my machine off, but it didn't blow up. It stopped making noise and died down completely and I think I breathed for the first time in four hours.

"Start on your block yet?" one of the guys asked me, referring to the project we were to have begun.

I just laughed. Inside I'm thinking, are you kidding me? It's all I can do to weld a straight line! It's all I can do to keep the rod from slipping through my hands with these huge freaking gloves on! My ears are ringing from listening to the sounds of a thousand anvils pounding on metal and I've probably been inhaling toxic fumes and I feel like I've been in an underground dungeon for forty days and forty nights and no, I did not start on my block, because I have zero confidence that I can even remotely accomplish what is expected, and I don't want to completely f*** it up before I even begin, and this whole thing still scares the living heck out of me so bad I'm sweating under this heavy size large coat and I have brushburn on my wrists where I taped the gloves on. And I love it, I thought.

My first experience welding was what I guess you might call "baptism by fire." More like baptism by argon gas.

I stepped out into the cold, hard, sort-of clean air of Western NY and felt happier than I have in a long time to see the sky, even though it was gray. (I think I mentioned I live in Western NY.) The city was quiet compared to inside the shop. I could move again - I could feel my head, without that horrible thing strapped onto it. The air smelled fresh compared to the hard metallic smells of fire and gas and all those things that the textbooks say are "odorless." I saw the world through a new lense. In fact, it was a little bit foggy...

That was when I realized I was still wearing my plastic safety glasses.

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If you made it all the way through that, thanks so much for reading! I felt I had to expel some of that before I'd be ready to go back to class tomorrow. :)

~Emma

(I would like to add that *I* do not look like this when I'm welding, nor does anyone, nor should anyone. Sparks are going to burn her arms and then her ponytail is going to catch on fire. It's not going to be good. I took a class.)