Screw, Gear, and Lever
May 13, 2022
The North, Middle, and South Sisters are a familiar family of mountains in Oregon’s mighty Cascade Range. Together, they are known as the Three Sisters.
Their earliest English names were given as (or, perhaps, translated into) Faith, Hope, and Charity in the 1840s by a man named Jason Lee, who spent a great deal of his time among the local indigenous Native Americans.* Lee was one of the settlers who journeyed through the Oregon Trail. He wanted to learn from, discuss, and share with these Indians of the American West.
As the story goes, Lee learned from these Americans the meaning of the Three Sisters.
The Three Sisters is a an indigenous tradition‡ of companion planting, that is, the planting of crops in a way that leverages natural mutualistic relationships. Humans may insert themselves into this type of multiple-mutualism by tending and keeping such a garden, in return receiving nutritious food from the crops.
In the case of the famous Three Sisters, the companions are Beans, Squash, and Corn.
The North Sister: Faith, Beans, reaches for her other sisters with twining stems, holding them together as unified companions. She forms root nodules as a habitat for rhizobacteria, then offers sugar, water, and minerals to these microbes in exchange for nitrogen, other nutrients, and protection by what is called the rhizosphere. She also forms a relationship with mycorrhizae fungi, which integrate into her roots and branch out deeper into the soil, extending her faithful reach for nutrients while enabling access into smaller crevices.
The Middle Sister: Hope, Squash, enjoys this nitrogen and covers the earth’s crust with her broad leaves. This keeps the ground cool and moist—she is a living mulch. With her prickly, tough leaves, her hope is to defend the Sisters’ territory from hungry or wandering animals.
The South Sister: Charity,§ Corn, the tallest, stands straight up and provides the backbone. While she benefits from the nitrogen of the beans and protection of the squash, the corn serves as a pole for the beloved beans to climb up from the mulchy squash into the fresh, clear sunlight.
Squash secures the roots, and Beans climbs Corn to reach the sun;
With Hope as an anchor,** Faith trails Charity†† to find the light.
The Screw, Gear, and Lever follow a similar mutualism. In the foundational words of Robert Fulton (the developer of the steamboat) in 1796:
“The mechanic should sit down among levers, screws, wedges, wheels, etc.
like a poet among the letters of the alphabet.”
In our case, the “letters” we use are the Screw, Gear, and Lever.
The screw, gear, and lever together form a useful mechanism—or as Fulton might say, a poem—that can be great for raising or lowering something, or transitioning a clamp from being open to being locked.
Consider a farmer who wants to raise chickens, but he wants them to earn their keep by taking advantage of forage food to keep his feed costs down, fertilize his field, and keeping the insect population in check (cause the bugs have been dangerously healthy since discovering ol’ Daisy’s cowpies.)
The chickens scratch at the cow manure for insects, spreading the fertilizer around, feeding more of the vegetation and uncovering protein-rich grubs for chicken snacks.
But if the chickens are in once place for too long, the ground forage gets exhausted, the manure accumulates and provides habitat for potentially-pathogenic microbes, and the chickens that fed on the insects now become the prey of microbes.
So, the farmer periodically moves their coop to fresh spots throughout his field using a “chicken tractor,” then when it comes time to harvest, he contains them in the tractor. This is done with the clever workings of the Screw, Lever, and Gear. Check out the video to see it in real life, plus a few other examples.
Once one begins to recognize these simple machines, they begin to appear all around us.
A lot can be accomplished through teamwork, mutualism, companionship—whether it’s the Three Sisters of beans, squash, and corn; faith, hope, and charity; or screw, gear, and lever.
* Engeman, Richard H. The Oregon Companion, pg. 370. (2009.)
† Platt, A.E. Rev. Jason Lee’s Diary, The Oregon History Project [oregonhistoryproject.org] (2016.)
‡ Based on the many available articles on the “Three Sisters,” originally from indigenous oral tradition
§ [Agapē, ἀγάπη, G26 | usually translated “love,” but when used as a virtue, it is translated “charity.”]
** Hebrews 6:19 (KJV): … hope we have as an anchor …
†† 1 Corinthians 13:2 (KJV): … though I have all faith … and have not charity [agapē,] I am nothing.