Wednesday, April 4, 2007

In praise of Boeing engineers

It’s a Sunday afternoon in March; I’m in my garage, watching a cardboard U-Haul box. The box is just outside the garage door. In it is an electric hotplate, a pan I bought at Value Village for 99 cents, two dowels, a screen, two thermometers, some wood chips, and two salmon fillets. It’s a homemade salmon smoker.

Last summer I tried to make homemade downriggers for salmon fishing, using clothesline, dumbbells, and clothespins… I have higher hopes for my salmon smoker a la Alton Brown. But these two inventions remind me of something about Seattle, something that I think is being lost - the practical ingenuity and mechanical aptitude of the Boeing Engineer.

I have been fortunate enough to be involved with two groups where that creative thought had really come to the forefront. There is a sailboat called an International 14. 14’s have very limited rules: the boat has to be 14 feet long, and have a certain amount of sail area, and a few other restrictions – but it is truly a boat for tinkerers. The largest fleets in North America used to be Seattle (Boeing) and Long Beach (McDonald Douglas). In Seattle the 14 fleet has dwindled, as fleets of other, larger boats have evolved. These new boats are often expensive, and frequently are cared for by professional managers, who hire out various maintenance……no tinkering by the owners.

The ski area we go to, which is supported by volunteers, has an amazing “garage” quality to it – currently the big mechanical guys are a Boeing lead mechanic and a guy from the UW Applied Physics Lab. These guys spend a lot of energy maintaining our 3 rope tows and the WWII-era snow cats that are used transport skiers and snowboarders up to the lodge and back. As well, they keep our cranky 70 year old wood-burning furnace alive. We are lucky to have them, their knowledge, and their interest in spending an inordinate amount of their free time making things work.

Growing up in Seattle, hydroplanes were the big deal. They used old WWII aircraft motors for engines, before switching to Vietnam turbine helicopter motors. The other big enclave for Hydros was Detroit. You know, the center of the American automotive industry…. The pit crews of those hydros were guys who played around with the motors in the evenings in the winter, and took vacation time in the summer to make the races.

The most visible part of the economy of Seattle has changed – it’s gone from Boeing Engineers that worked on interesting projects in their garage, to one of Microsoft developers who stay up late writing code, only to burn out at 42 and go raise goats on San Juan Island.

It’s moved from being a blue collar city, where the industrial area by Boeing Field, Interbay, Ballard and even south Lake Union were filled with manufacturing, maritime support, and even the Rainier breweries to a city of condos, boutiques, and intellectual ingenuity rather than mechanical aptitude and the use of one's hands.

And somewhere it seems that the soul of Seattle has left – and all that’s left is a shell of individuals, rather than a city-wide community.

The old Seattle guy I’m talking about would look at the cardboard box smoker, and say – “That’s a great idea, I bet if we made an adjustment here, and changed that with this piece of foil, and made this rotate with a small motor I have in my tool box, we’d really have something!” The new one would laugh, and say they just bought a super deluxe $700 smoker from Smith and Hawken in forest green.

I’m sharing my salmon with the old guys!