Whirligigs, Windmills and Waterwheels
Spinning and spinning and spinning . . .
Do you remember when you were a little kid and you made your first pinwheel? A square of paper with different colors on each side, cut from each corner almost to the middle, then every other piece folded down and pinned to the center, with a stick at the back, and voila! You could run around the yard and that thing would spin and spin, whistling a little in the air, flashing its two colors into a pretty blur.
(Mmm, Mom used to make pinwheel pecan-cinnamon rolls for a treat, but that’s another story.)
A neighbor kid had an uncle who made yard art, like a canary bird with the body shape cut from wood, and two “wings” that looked like kayak paddles painted red, one on each side attached through the middle with a nail so they’d spin in the wind, and the bird would seem to fly. He called them whirligigs.
This morning, while eating breakfast on the deck in Bali, I heard a whoop-whoop sound, which I thought might be a monkey or a large bird in the jungle, but the staff person I asked laughed and shook his head, then walked over to the edge of the deck and leaned out and pointed low into the sky. On top of a tall bamboo pole, maybe 30 feet in the air, was a two-foot wide windmill blade with what appeared to be a sounding box behind it, and as the wind increased, the whoop-whoop sound grew louder, then faded as the wind fell. I asked if it was something to do with the temple, but he shook his head. I asked if it was just for a family, for fun, and he nodded. But that’s about as much as I could learn because of our language differences. [Note: Later, another staff person told me they’re called “spinner-r-r-s” (with rolled R).]
Spinning things fascinated me when I was small, and we kids used to play a game called Helicopter, where you’d hold your arms out perpendicular to your body, and then spin around as fast as you could until you fell over from being too dizzy. I can’t remember the point of the game. Was it to be the last one standing? Who knows, but we laughed ourselves silly yelling “helicopter crash!”
I loved windmills, too, although I never saw one in person until I was an adult. Mom had some Delft blue dishes that had windmill decorations on them and we thought they were so exotic. Then Disney came out with The Moonspinners movie . . . I can’t remember anything about it at all except that Hayley Mills was in it (that’s why we watched it), and it had windmills in it. IMDb had some stills from the movie and I saw they were Greek windmills. Might have to watch that again, just for nostalgia.
There was probably a chance to see windmills in Holland when I was in Amsterdam for a week at age 18, but I was more interested in van Gogh and spent all my time in the museums.
My first real windmill was the Dutch windmill in San Francisco, at Golden Gate Park. There are two of them at the end of the park near the ocean. The first was built in 1902 and the other one soon after. During their heyday, they pumped a million and a half gallons of water every day for the residents of the City. By the time I discovered them in the mid-70s, they had fallen into disrepair and weren’t working any longer, which seemed very sad to me, but there are restoration plans in the works.
The first-ever historical windmill didn’t look at all like the Dutch windmills we think of today. A horizontal windmill is recorded as having been used in Persia in the 9th Century. Short blades revolved around a vertical pole, like a modern revolving glass door, with wood instead of glass.
The vertical windmill, the vaned windmill we’re familiar with, first appeared in the 12th Century in Flanders and northern France. Both horizontal and vertical windmills were used to pump water and mill grain.
Another popular way to mill grain was with the water wheel. A very large wooden wheel was set vertically (or, rarely, horizontally) with blades or buckets to catch the water, which in turn turned the grindstone inside the mill. Water wheels were also used to power sawmills, paper mills and textile mills.
The only water wheel I’ve ever seen was the nonworking replica of the mill at Sutter’s Mill, near Placerville, California. Carpenter James Marshall was building a water-powered sawmill for John Sutter, when Marshall discovered gold in the American River, and that started the California Gold Rush in 1848. Built under the mill, it was a vertical wheel with very wide vanes — it looked like the paddlewheel of an old steamboat.
The ancient Greeks invented water mills, about 280–220 BCE. Antipater of Thessalonica praised the water wheel because it decreased the need for hard work:
Hold back your hand from the mill, you grinding girls; even if the cockcrow heralds the dawn, sleep on. For Demeter has imposed the labor of your hands on the nymphs, who leaping down upon the topmost part of the wheel, rotate its axle; with encircling cogs, it turns the weight of the Nisyrian millstones. If we learn to feast toil-free on the fruits of the earth, we taste again the golden age.
Windmills and watermills represent the golden age to me. Granted, there was a huge amount of labor involved with either, but I have romanticized the past to a bucolic peaceful place, before industrialization. Alas, with the coming of cheap electricity, machinery replaced water power, and most windmills and watermills stopped being used except in small villages or, now, in museums.
Since the only windmills and water wheels I’ve seen were not working, I’ve added a few working models to my Bucket List:
The world’s largest working water wheel is in the town of Laxey, on the Isle of Man, over 22 meters in diameter and over 2 meters wide. It was built to pump water out of mine shafts.
There’s a beautiful small wooden water wheel at the castle of Nymphenburg near Munich, Germany, that has both paddles and buckets. Even though it was built over 200 years ago, it still powers two fountains in the castle courtyard.
I’d like to see the windmills in Sakura, Japan, Chios, Greece, and I can’t miss the windmills all over the Netherlands.
Oh, I misremembered. I’ve seen modern working windmills in the American Midwest, like you’d see in the Wizard of Oz, tall towers with small vanes, used to pump water for stock. I’ve also seen the enormous, futuristic wind turbines, 90 meters tall, in the wind farms in the Altamont Pass east of San Francisco, California. Stark and powerful, they’re not friendly at all.
I’ll stick with my golden age dream and visit waterwheels and windmills that are as cozy as pinwheels.
