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The NOVA obelisk heads toward the heavens as
engineers atop the container wall study the ropes and
workers below remove sand from trapdoors.
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In the Groove
by Peter Tyson
September 1, 1999
I'll cut to the chase: We got the obelisk into the turning
groove just as the sun was setting last night, and it now
rests at a proud angle of roughly 75°, ready for the
attempt to pull it the final 15° to upright a week from
Saturday. The sand-pit operation was a complete, unmitigated
success.
Now, I thought of writing this dispatch in such a way as to
build the tension slowly, drag out the day's events, keep you
guessing about how well we did, and only at the very end, just
when you were becoming exasperated with not knowing the
result, have Rick Brown or one of his colleagues blurt out,
"We're in the turning groove!"
But that's not the way it worked yesterday at the quarry. Not
at all. Though the day did have its moments of heightened
expectancy and muted wonder and celebratory high-fives, all in
all it had about as much drama as a fencepost-raising.
And that's what was so impressive about it.
Brown and his crack team of timberframers, engineers,
sculptors, and ready-for-anything laborers had thought of
everything, had planned for everything, had tested everything.
Their skill and professionalism shone through in every action.
There were no disagreements, no moments of doubt, not a single
unexpected surprise. The operation went like clockwork. To
wit:
10:30 a.m.
When I arrive at the quarry, Brown's crew has been removing
the sand from the pit since Monday afternoon, and the obelisk
lies at an angle of about 40°. This is already higher
than crews on the two previous attempts to raise an obelisk
achieved.
A shoveler's-eye view of the obelisk settling down as
sand is cleared.
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11:15 a.m.
"We're approaching a critical threshold of 45°, when the
ropes will become stressed," <Mark Lehner> tells me.
This is the point at which a much greater portion of the
25-ton stone's weight begins bearing down on the three-inch
ropes slung around its butt end and on the ever-lowering sand
pile on which it rests.
11:45 a.m.
With a sudden creak of the ropes tightening around the pivot
and braking timbers, the obelisk shifts down a few more
inches, stopping at an angle of 46°. Each creak is a
teeth-clenching, all-bets-are-off kind of sound, as primal and
unsettling and unignorable as thunder.
12:08 p.m.
"Rick, what happened?" Julia Cort, the NOVA producer, calls
from ground level as a loud creak and obelisk-shifting occurs
and a flurry of voices is heard 20 feet above. Brown,
crouching out of sight on the high wall of the sand pit,
answers with the calm assurance of one fully in control: "It
rolled down, rolled forward, and shifted a little bit." Just
what he expected: In the team's effort to bring the obelisk
flawlessly into the turning groove, those three elements are
the ones he and his team are ever striving to balance, namely,
guiding the obelisk butt end down toward the pedestal stone
while also pivoting it back toward the ramp wall and keeping
it aligned with the pedestal stone's turning groove, which
remains invisible several feet down beneath the sand.
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The monolith early yesterday afternoon.
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12:20 p.m.
Another sit-up-and-take-notice creak of the ropes, and the
obelisk lies at 52°. Though the ropes and timbers are
making all the noise, the sand, on which the obelisk has
rested from the get-go, is doing most of the work. Strangely,
a moment comes when none of the 30 or so people on the
construction and film crews is talking, and a brief, startling
silence reigns over the quarry.
1:40 p.m.
After a pause for lunch, we go at it again, and now there's a
big leap, from 52° to 58° in one great,
gut-crunching lurch. "We knew everything would intensify after
45°, and that's exactly what's happening," Brown tells me
as we gaze at the ever-sinking sand. It's mesmerizing to watch
the sand's angle of repose suddenly become disrupted as
workers dig out the heap from below. A leading edge of
cascading sand triggered by a new cavity below advances up the
heap of its own accord, like a living thing. "It's very
fractal," Lehner says, standing beside us. "A little avalanche
within a bigger avalanche." With the operation going so
smoothly, we're free to admire such a riveting force of
nature.
Continue: 2:30 p.m.
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