He stood there in the distance. He looked good. He looked maybe a bit weathered and had not been oiled in a long time. Did I see that wink, and did I hear a deep good-natured grumble when I rubbed his forehead? Amiably I walloped his shields, fondled his full-grown antlers and swung myself on his back in one go.
Kè-Gaghell, a beast of a job, this chop of beast. I pictured him in some primeval time, living on the edge of water and ice. Hence the claws on the webbed fingers. The armoured back is for breaking ice from underneath with the forehead in the lead. With kind-of a gill movement the shields speed him through the water and sledge him across the ice when on his back, as a Rider on the Storm. The eyes are embedded in sockets of horn turned eyebrows, even the antlers are armour-plated. Because of the twist in the spine you can sit on his back fairly comfortably, if you are dressing to the right.
He took three years, sometimes until the dead of night and lethally risky. Stuff with chainsaws, half under the trunk. And a Jack that was just not very steady, but mostly enough.
I had an axe welded upon a heavy steel pipe, with a straight bite for a cleaver. With the chain I sawed vertical breads, as deep as the sapwood. With a Lignum Vitae mallet of two kilos on the rear end of the pipe it split off the breads, sometimes by manually swinging its momentum. He stood on blocks and planks, also of ironwood, fixed by kegs.
Jas and me together rolled the clean core, over two and a half tonnes, on pipes into the barn. Suddenly he ran away and we looked each other in the eye and halted the jumbo, in perfect synch and with the precious precision, justbefore it rolled the shed wall to smithereens. That was a good comrade moment.
I hunted for suitable names but to no avail. It would need to sound like a primordial cry. And then Gep entered the shed with Anne Linde upon her arm and Lindje stretched out her one-year-old finger to the monster that had progressed to the state of imagination and said 'Kè-Gaghell'. I have immediately chalked its phonetics on the cobbwebbed concrete wall and it might be there still, flanked by the death dates of John Lennon and Jas.
And from that moment on Kè-Gaghell became a friend of the family.
At that time I drank beer, which was quite helpful. I used the crates upside down to stand upon, on the side for low seating or on the short side for normal sitting work. With my Jack I could reel up five tonnes and I still use him. I intend to roll some heavy boulders in front of my kitchen to break the waves of the rising sea level.
I still see the cracked star in the glass of a Groningen gallery. Where Kè-Gaghell with an elegant swing on a hoist pushed in a window with his right claw. He flanked a wood gallery in Utrecht for over a year. Then he moved territory to the Nieuweschans Spa, where he now stands guard in the sculpture garden. Very robust, the hidden power graced by hair cracks, with an elegance carried and covered by arrow-shaped shields. These have their origin as an explanation for the V-shape that sometimes travels across a puddle.
Kè-Gaghell was more than a fantasy. He stood for the idea of 'Biofiction'. Existing Nature inspired me with her multiformity, but limited my imagination. Therefore I did not dally to bestow properties on my creations after my own fancy, thereto equipped with suitable attributes.
Now he stood there, alonely in the melting snow. He has effortlessly survived the winter. For a moment I felt like a father feels about his child. Then I went on, without looking back.
We can go on again for many a year.
YouTube: Kè-Gaghell