OCTOBER 20, 2024 – As Archimedes (circa 287 B.C.E. – circa 212 B.C.E.) famously said, “Give me a place to stand, and with a lever I will move the world.” Today I thought a lot about the Greek-Syracusan polymath, as I worked a lever repeatedly to move my sailboat lift from the lake up onto land and out of sight for the next five months. Thanks to the law of the lever laid down by the Ancient Greek, I managed the entire operation by myself with only one swearing incident.
If you read yesterday’s post, you know that Saturday’s dock (no. 2) removal efforts brought both defeat and victory: I failed to remove four of the five dock sections, but I succeeded in avoiding the very real risk of serious injury. Today, however, I battled again my compulsion to “finish the task”; to confront the challenge from which I’d backed down. To convince myself to maintain yesterday’s better judgment, I offered a “win-win” proposal: If I agreed NOT to risk my neck removing the rest of the dock, I’d allow myself to pull the boat lift out of the lake. This would not be an easy task, but it was less fraught with risk, and I’d managed it numerous times in the past—with proper leverage.
What I’d never attempted, however, was maneuvering the lift out of the water while the dock is in place. This presented some novel challenges, but after proper analysis, I managed to overcome them. With a bit of “old wiry man brawn,” I coaxed the clumsy aluminum lift onto the dock, with the two side cross-members of the lift lying perpendicular to the dock run. What was especially cool about this arrangement was that since the decking fits inside the aluminum dock frame and about a quarter-inch below the edges of the frame, the lift cross-members were resting on the aluminum dock frame, not the cedar decking. Accordingly, by tying a rope to the lift, I could easily slide the lift along the dock frame to within striking distance of terra firma.
In anticipation of the transition from dock to land, I deployed additional “old wiry man brawn” to raise one corner of the lift and use my foot to kick a block of wood under it. I then stuck the pipe lever under the slightly raised corner, and by getting down on my knees, I was able to use the dock itself as a fulcrum. With the lever doing its job (thank you Archimedes), I raised the lift farther so I could slide one of my two eight-foot-long 4 x 4 beams under one cross member of the lift. I repeated this three times until the whole lift was atop the two beams[1].
Now I was now in business, given that the four corner posts of the lift were off the ground and on the outside of each beam. My system allowed me to move the lift to exactly the spot I’d intended to store it, a good 25 feet away from the end of the dock. I could just as easily have moved it 250 yards if a thousand trees hadn’t stood in the way.
This accomplishment gave me great satisfaction, especially since I hadn’t considered the possibility at the time of yesterday’s defeat-victory. It felt as though my team had lost the state basketball tournament championship game in a spectacular upset against a 10th seeded team. But in the consolation game, I overcame the previous day’s loss and scored a whopping 27 points, including six for six at the line.
How sweet a comeback this was, especially on such a gorgeous fall day, when the trees were in their colorful prime and the mercury soared to 70F.
To celebrate, I took a long hike in the tree garden, and from the heights, admired the heavenly view of earth in autumn.
Subscribe to this blog and receive notifications of new posts by email.
© 2024 by Eric Nilsson
