Panel People
17 July 2007 17:15![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
skonen_bladesThis was my fourth summer paving the flat parts of Nevada with solar panels. Up in Canada during my teens, I’d been a treeplanter and this wasn’t much different. The project had been going on for four years and looked like it would go on for another six.
Petra still liked me, I thought, but she was with Johan now. I could understand. I hadn’t been that good to her and now I’d lost her. I’d tried to be what she wanted but my natural jerk tendencies just took hold of me whenever I got angry. My head was too filled up with ‘being a man’ after a childhood of punishments every time I was gentle or weak. We’d split up the summer before.
Just dumb luck that she ended up on my panel crew with Johan. They didn’t break up the couples. Single panel layers like me could be slotted anywhere.
I noticed the glint of a diamond on her finger. Must have cost Johan everything he had.
A summer under the cruel desert sun will teach you about yourself. The sun teaches you your limits and it teaches you the elastic nature of time.
The solar panels were printed off and cut into lightweight, paper-thin wafers before being loaded into heavy groups of four hundred panels each. These panel-blocks slotted nicely into our backpacks.
To lay the panels, we reached back in a motion as old as archery to grab a panel, flopped it down onto the dusty ground and latched two of the corners to the panels already laid. We dusted the leads, sprayed the protectant and walked two steps backward to do the next one.
Sometimes, people walking backwards would walk right into a canyon. One had to concentrate.
We put the black thermal side down and the shiny blue solar side facing up.
It was a mechanical and quick motion that needed to be done in a relaxed manner at a steady pace without being straining. New guys came in and raced ahead only to burn out with tennis elbow or RSI halfway through the season.
People asked why this process isn’t automated but the answer was obvious. It was always cheaper to employ meat to do this kind of work. You didn’t have to repair a human. You just hired a new one.
A few Workers Board lawsuits had resulted in the relative guarantee of job safety but you needed to pay attention. Water rations, sunscreen, night tents, proper gear and clothing, everything was yours and needed to be looked after.
I kept thinking of the Fremen from that Dune book and Arabs dressed in pristine white robes on camels. I thought about the Egyptians and their total capitulation to Ra, the sun god.
I felt like I could teach them all a thing or two about desert living by now.
Petra pretended I wasn’t there after an initial smile on the truck and that suited me fine. No use getting into a conversation that only had one possible awkward ending when there was work to be done. The truck stopped after an hour and we all got out.
I marched forward up the dusty walkway with the crew until the edge of where the other team had stopped before us. The irregular border spread out in a jagged line for miles on either side of us. Half of us went single-file to the east and half of us went single-file to the west. All across Nevada, hundreds of other teams were doing the same.
From orbit, the tiles were bright, sky-coloured, shining, square kilometers with thin sandy walkways in between. We were turning the desert into a grid; an energy-producing azure powder-blue plaid. Vegas and Reno truly looked like unreal cities sprouting from fields of shining sapphire glass.
America’s desert was becoming the colour of a tropical ocean. Baby-blue batteries. Powder-blue powerhouses.
This was America in action. The earth was done giving up her oil. The Wind and Sun Speech given by Clinton Jr. was famous. America would be great again and serve as an example to the rest of world like the days of the space race in the sixties, she said. We would be back on top and prove that energy could still be taken from places that wouldn’t harm the environment, she said.
And goddamned if she wasn’t right. We didn’t have the bodies for the bicycle farms of China. We’d dammed up all of the rivers that we could. The wind farms and geothermal drills were giving us a good deal of energy but still not enough to compete.
Our entire country was batteries not included. Paving Nevada with solar panels was going to recharge the entire country’s economy. Regular repair and upkeep would keep almost five percent of the entire continent’s population employed.
Panel People. Redbacks. Sunkids. Desert Rats. There were many names for us, depending on where you came from.
Petra and I were the only two people from the town where we grew up.
Petra went west with her man. With a sigh of relief and a little sadness, I went East. It would be two weeks before the supply trucks ran out and we had to return to base for more water, food and the next printout of panels, before we had to see each other again.
The sun screamed down at all of us. We were ants on the hot ground. I looked up through reflective lenses and smiled at the sun’s punishment, daring it to do its worst.
I walked to my grid point designation, reached back over my shoulder for a panel, and got to work.
tags
Petra still liked me, I thought, but she was with Johan now. I could understand. I hadn’t been that good to her and now I’d lost her. I’d tried to be what she wanted but my natural jerk tendencies just took hold of me whenever I got angry. My head was too filled up with ‘being a man’ after a childhood of punishments every time I was gentle or weak. We’d split up the summer before.
Just dumb luck that she ended up on my panel crew with Johan. They didn’t break up the couples. Single panel layers like me could be slotted anywhere.
I noticed the glint of a diamond on her finger. Must have cost Johan everything he had.
A summer under the cruel desert sun will teach you about yourself. The sun teaches you your limits and it teaches you the elastic nature of time.
The solar panels were printed off and cut into lightweight, paper-thin wafers before being loaded into heavy groups of four hundred panels each. These panel-blocks slotted nicely into our backpacks.
To lay the panels, we reached back in a motion as old as archery to grab a panel, flopped it down onto the dusty ground and latched two of the corners to the panels already laid. We dusted the leads, sprayed the protectant and walked two steps backward to do the next one.
Sometimes, people walking backwards would walk right into a canyon. One had to concentrate.
We put the black thermal side down and the shiny blue solar side facing up.
It was a mechanical and quick motion that needed to be done in a relaxed manner at a steady pace without being straining. New guys came in and raced ahead only to burn out with tennis elbow or RSI halfway through the season.
People asked why this process isn’t automated but the answer was obvious. It was always cheaper to employ meat to do this kind of work. You didn’t have to repair a human. You just hired a new one.
A few Workers Board lawsuits had resulted in the relative guarantee of job safety but you needed to pay attention. Water rations, sunscreen, night tents, proper gear and clothing, everything was yours and needed to be looked after.
I kept thinking of the Fremen from that Dune book and Arabs dressed in pristine white robes on camels. I thought about the Egyptians and their total capitulation to Ra, the sun god.
I felt like I could teach them all a thing or two about desert living by now.
Petra pretended I wasn’t there after an initial smile on the truck and that suited me fine. No use getting into a conversation that only had one possible awkward ending when there was work to be done. The truck stopped after an hour and we all got out.
I marched forward up the dusty walkway with the crew until the edge of where the other team had stopped before us. The irregular border spread out in a jagged line for miles on either side of us. Half of us went single-file to the east and half of us went single-file to the west. All across Nevada, hundreds of other teams were doing the same.
From orbit, the tiles were bright, sky-coloured, shining, square kilometers with thin sandy walkways in between. We were turning the desert into a grid; an energy-producing azure powder-blue plaid. Vegas and Reno truly looked like unreal cities sprouting from fields of shining sapphire glass.
America’s desert was becoming the colour of a tropical ocean. Baby-blue batteries. Powder-blue powerhouses.
This was America in action. The earth was done giving up her oil. The Wind and Sun Speech given by Clinton Jr. was famous. America would be great again and serve as an example to the rest of world like the days of the space race in the sixties, she said. We would be back on top and prove that energy could still be taken from places that wouldn’t harm the environment, she said.
And goddamned if she wasn’t right. We didn’t have the bodies for the bicycle farms of China. We’d dammed up all of the rivers that we could. The wind farms and geothermal drills were giving us a good deal of energy but still not enough to compete.
Our entire country was batteries not included. Paving Nevada with solar panels was going to recharge the entire country’s economy. Regular repair and upkeep would keep almost five percent of the entire continent’s population employed.
Panel People. Redbacks. Sunkids. Desert Rats. There were many names for us, depending on where you came from.
Petra and I were the only two people from the town where we grew up.
Petra went west with her man. With a sigh of relief and a little sadness, I went East. It would be two weeks before the supply trucks ran out and we had to return to base for more water, food and the next printout of panels, before we had to see each other again.
The sun screamed down at all of us. We were ants on the hot ground. I looked up through reflective lenses and smiled at the sun’s punishment, daring it to do its worst.
I walked to my grid point designation, reached back over my shoulder for a panel, and got to work.
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Date: 27 Jan 2009 09:13 (UTC)