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The Tower

Nic Bernstein

In my neighborhood there stands a tall spire, known as "The Water Tower." This is not a reservoir type of water tower, like those you find in many communities – large bulbous tanks sitting atop stilt legs – no, this is a beautiful Gothic tower which surrounds a standpipe, and it sits majestically upon a bluff overlooking the lake.

When I was a child, we always called this "Rapunzel's tower," and wove fabulous tales about the goings on within it's walls. In later years, my mother explained to me what it really was, and how the tall pipe filled part way with water would serve to dampen the vibrations and surges caused by all of the old steam engines which were fed by the city's water supply. But she also related another story to me, one which struck me as very interesting at the time, and which I have remembered for all of these years.

It would seem that in the days before cartridge loading weapons, when muzzle loaders still ruled the battlefield, people were always looking for a better way to make the ammunition used in these guns. The pellets or balls shot by these guns are called rounds because, in order to travel down the barrel of the gun with the greatest possible efficiency, they had to be very round. The slightest un-roundness would cause the ball to wedge somewhat in the barrel, slowing it down. And, the rounder the rounds could be made, the closer to the diameter of the barrel they could be made, thereby creating a better seal and getting more power from the charge. Obviously then, a very round round could be made to travel a greater distance with the same charge, allowing you to kill your enemy when he was even farther away.

American soldiers in the revolutionary war didn't have very round rounds, and they didn't have very many of them. Hence the old saying, "Don't shoot until you see the whites of their eye's." Actually seeing the whites of the eyes of the person you are about to kill has a distinctly unsettling effect upon most soldiers, so there is a constant striving towards allowing yourself to get further and further away from your enemy before putting your round into them and ending their life. This is where physics enters the picture. If you want to make a round very round, it helps if it starts off as round as possible. If you look closely at a drop of water while it falls, you will see that it is very nearly perfectly round. Someone figured out that if you drop molten lead from a great height into a tank of water, the lead will become very nearly perfectly round while it falls through the air, and will then harden that way when it hits the water, producing a very round round.

All that is needed then to make very round rounds so that you can stay far away from the people you intend to kill, is a tall place from which to drop your molten lead, and some water down below you to un-melt the lead when its done getting round. This, my mother explained to me, was what the Water Tower was perfectly suited for.

Now, I don't know if the Water Tower was ever actually used in this capacity, but it sure sounded more interesting to me than serving as a stand pipe. When I think about those molten drops of lead falling several stories, I somehow think about hardship. To me, hardship is like if you were an onion, sitting at the bottom of the Water Tower, and up above someone drops a round on you. The round falls, gaining speed and momentum all the way until, finally, it hits you. Now since you're an onion, you can't exactly get up and move out of the way. All you can do is sit there while this round is falling ever faster towards you. And when it finally hits you, it tears through all of the layers which nature has built you out of, layer after layer, until it settles in your heart. That is what hardship is all about. It leaves you with a gaping hole through all of your layers, and a chunk of lead in your heart.

Whenever I look at the Water Tower, which I can see through my office window, I think of hardship. When I see it now, I think of it as the hardship tower, and I imagine some poor soul standing at the top of it dropping lead rounds onto onions and making hardship. One by one, these onions roll out of the base of the tower, with a gaping hole through all of their layers, and a chunk of lead in their heart. Sometimes, one of those onions is me.