I discovered an unexpected benefit to all my lifting and diet minding this week… it helps me in my relatively new “hobby” job which at times requires me to get into small spaces and climb ladders and hoist things around.
My “hobby” job is some part-time work I do as an assistant pipe organ technician, something I started last spring. I have always had an interest in pipe organs, having studied the playing of them in college and indeed own a small one myself, and I kind of stumbled into this job. I work with a guy who has his own business doing this and I tag along with him when he needs another set of hands. I have worked on only a handful of jobs with him since last spring and until this week it was strictly easy stuff as far as fitness requirements go. So far we’ve done only tuning, which requires me to simply sit at the console (keyboards) and hold down keys while he tunes pipes in the chambers.
This week I was with him on a couple of jobs. On the one job we were doing an evaluation of an organ that has had little to no attention for many years, and is over 80 years old, and assessment was needed of its current condition and what can/should be done with it. We both climbed up into the chamber, which was accessed only through a small hatch in a ceiling in the church we were in. In my larger days, I think it would have been a rather close fit getting through that hatch, not to mention the climbing required up small ladders to hoist my former bulk around. Once inside the the chamber we had to climb to the upper level of this organ and that was through another hatch, which I think was a bit smaller than the main one we had already gone through.
On the second job that day we were tuning and he ran into a problem with very large pipe he was trying to tune (the low C of a 16′ Bombarde for those who know about these things). He called for me to come into the chamber with him. This particular organ is very large and the pipes are just jammed everywhere in the chamber and there isn’t a lot of room to move around. You have to be a bit of an acrobat to get into the chamber in the first place, crawling through a small hatch in a wall of the chancel in the church, and then you have to traverse a couple of levels in the thing to get where the pipe in question was located. Again, it would have been a chore in my formerly larger size to do all that. Then I had to climb about six feet up a ladder and hold myself there and reach across to help unsnag the upper end of the resonator of this very large pipe so he could get at the part of the pipe containing the reed that needed attention to be tuned properly.
I didn’t think about it at the time, but after I got home that evening I got to thinking about all the physical things I had to do that day and how not too long ago it wouldn’t have been as effortless as it was. I was rather proud of myself for making the “right” decision to get into this lifting stuff, and this was a great side benefit that I hadn’t even imagined, nor was even a possibility at the time I started.
I want to be able to keep climbing around inside pipe organs (yeah, I’m weird), so I’m definitely gonna keep liftin’.
Leave Comment