I was knocked sideways by the death of a friend I’d been close to for the better part of a decade, then broke off with abruptly after a difficult and painful time. I hadn’t spoken to him for four winters, then I got a phone call from a mutual friend. “He’s dying,” she told me. “He asked me to call you.”
I almost didn’t go to the hospital to speak with him, and when I did go, I stayed only a couple of hours. I was torn by the complex emotions that swirled around the meeting. It was a shock to see him, a tall, strong man, strapped to a hospital bed. Nurses had tied him down because he attempted to pull out the tubes running into his arms and chest. He was dying of lung cancer, and he had only a few days left to live. We sat and looked at each other, didn’t say much. There was a world of things we could have talked about, needed to say, but none of it got said.
That night, after I left, a respirator was inserted, silencing his voice forever, and three days later he died. I sat with him during his final hours and held his hand as he passed out of this life. It was the first time I had ever seen a person die. To pass the time during the sleepless nights that followed, I wrote everything I could remember about him, about our time together, anything I could think of, so that something of him that no one else could testify to would be preserved. I had completely lost touch with his family and friends, and no one in my current circle knew him. I had no one to talk to about him, and I felt completely disorientated by distress.
A few weeks later, something unusual happened: the hospital he died in installed a tower crane directly outside its front entrance.
They were building a new cancer treatment center. In busy urban settings like that hospital’s entrance, space is at a premium. Construction sites in such high-traffic areas have to be kept as small as possible to interfere as little as possible with the essential business taking place, and tower cranes, which have about the same above-ground footprint as a telephone booth, can pluck materials off of trucks on the sidelines and place them exactly where they are needed with minimal intrusion into the life surrounding the site. The hospital was in a suburban residential area where most buildings are one or two storeys tall and construction sites are not typically pressed for space. I have lived in the area for decades, and this was the first tower crane I ever saw in the neighborhood.
In Southeast Michigan’s skyscraper districts—downtown Detroit, Southfield, and Troy—tower cranes are common enough. I’ve seen many over the years, but none that looked like this one. Its arm could reach all the way from the front of the hospital to the sidewalk across the parking lot. It had an angled counterweight that looked sleek and stylish, and it was painted bright red. It looked brand new, and in fact, it was. The crane company had purchased it very recently from the manufacturer, Manitowoc Potain. At that time and in that place, it instantly reminded me of my friend. The crane operator, if he or she cared to, could look in the window of the room where my friend had died barely a month before. I couldn’t help but see in it his height and slenderness and strength. It was as if he had come back to life as a tower crane.
I became obsessed with the crane. It was visible for miles because it was so much taller than just about every other structure in the neighborhood. The only things in the area that are taller are the pylons which carry high-tension power lines through the Detroit Edison service corridor a few blocks east of the hospital. I had to drive past the crane every day on errands. When I went out for exercise, I bicycled past it. It was even visible from the parking lot outside my house. I started taking photographs of it, studying its structure and learning how to draw it from memory. I came to think of the crane as a character who lived near me, a handsome guy I had a crush on. I researched the crane company, discovered what model the crane was, read all about it and tower cranes in general. I visited the construction site, talked to the manager, and was told that the crane would be out there for about a year, six months of which had already elapsed. As it turned out, the crane was on site for a year and six months, in which time I built two bodies of work around it: over 3,000 photographs and a series of 42 drawings which combined images of the crane with images from the many road trips my friend and I had taken during our time together.
Scrolling quickly through some of the photos I took, I realized I had the ability to create brief stop-motion animated films. Every day I took dozens of pictures of the crane in rapid-fire sequence with a point-and-shoot snapshot camera, then at home set them to flash by at 24 frames per second in a slideshow program. The illusion of movement is astonishing. In these little filmlets, the crane swings around, lifts and lowers loads, rotates gently back and forth in high winds, blinks its red aircraft-warning lights in sequence after dark. I have not yet edited the photographs into a finished video, mainly because my laptop is not up to the task. It’s impossible to do anything more than string the images together in the rudimentary software I possess, and creating a single sequence out of all the images invariably crashes the computer. I’ve archived the photos against some future date when I have the wherewithal to do the job.
The drawings, however, are another matter. I know a person who teaches animation. He was nominated for a student Academy Award back in the 1980s, and he specializes in stop-motion work. His knowledge and skill are formidable, and his enthusiasm for his medium is infectious. He saw my drawings and said, “Animate them. NOW.” He taught me how to use professional animation software and photograph the drawings. I composed a soundtrack using the program Audacity, which he added to the visuals when he compiled the elements into a video.
The drawings were created in the small drawing books I carry in my purse, using a Pelikan fountain pen and washable ink at first and then a 0.50mm Rapidograph pen filled with waterproof India ink. I carry a 4″ x 6″ book of 80-lb drawing paper with me everywhere, and do my drawing while waiting in line, killing time before appointments, or taking a break during the day. I often do minutely detailed, fully realized series of works in these little books, and the Tower Crane series is an example of how I take an idea and think out its implications and visual possibilities.
The images are drawn in roughly the 16:9 aspect ratio of a motion picture screen, and they have the scale for measuring the image area drawn in by hand above and to the left of the image. Drawing these scales freehand was the first part of making these images, a ritual that served to clear my mind and allow me to focus on what the drawing would contain.
In the beginning, I focused on the tower crane and images remembered from our trips into the rural areas of Michigan’s Thumb, the peninsula that pokes out into Lake Huron between Saginaw Bay and Ontario. As I worked, however, I moved from reminiscing and combining these memories with the tower crane to thinking of the process of letting go after a person dies.
There is a native wildflower, an orange strain of hemerocallis that grows everywhere in Michigan, but particularly in drainage ditches and other damp places. They spread easily, often taking over large areas, and huge clumps of them grow along the roads in the countryside my friend and I loved so much. When I was a child, a cluster of hemerocallis grew around the telephone pole in our back yard. My mother always referred to them as tiger lilies, and that is what I call them.
Some of my most vivid memories of our travels are images of my friend sitting in the driver’s seat of my car, framed by a backdrop of tiger lilies seen through the window alongside him. I was always struck by the sight, because he and those flowers had a great deal in common. Tiger lilies are tall and gangly flowers, and he was a tall, gangly guy. They stick out in the landscape the way his eccentricities made him stick out anyplace he went, and yet if one looked closely, one could appreciate both for their graceful form and delicate flesh, their luminosity and subtlety. Another common name for these flowers is daylily, because their blooms last but a day. Tiger lilies, as evanescent as human lives, became characters in the drama playing out in my drawings.
In the closing sequence of drawings, energy passes between the tower crane and a tiger lily.
The current flows through the scenes in which our life together was set.
The energy roils from chaos into darkness.
Then it finally trails out as the force dissipates.
In the end, there is nothing but static.
When the construction project no longer needed its services, the tower crane was disassembled using a smaller crane, loaded onto six tractor-trailer trucks, and hauled away. I was sad to see it go after enjoying the sight of it for a year and a half. However, I’d visited it every night for a week beforehand and sat for a long while watching its arm swinging back and forth lazily in the wind, the three aircraft lights on the arm flashing in sequence, front, tail, center, then all three at once. Sitting silently in its presence, I was able to say more than one goodbye.
Spacetime Curvature 
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