The coiling door

The corrugated curtain climbs in a single motion that is not actually single: eleven interlocking horizontal slats, each riveted to its neighbor, fold up and over the drum at the header in a rhythm that quickens near the top and stutters near the bottom, where the counterbalance spring has the least mechanical advantage and the operator has the most patience left. Full ascent takes between four and nine seconds, depending on unit size, humidity, and the accumulated grit in the guide tracks, which nobody oils on any known schedule. Closing is faster, gravity doing work the spring only pretends to resist, and it ends in a report, metal on concrete, audible three units down. The slats themselves are galvanized steel pressed into a shallow U, stacked so each one shields the seam beneath it from weather that, indoors, rarely arrives. A slotted hasp at the bottom bar takes the lock once the door is down, the only moment the door and the lock cooperate; the door's own hardware is otherwise ceremonial. Paint wears first at hand height, in a horizontal band the width of a palm, on both faces, from a motion repeated by hundreds of hands that never met each other and produced, all the same, an identical map of use. The track bolts loosen roughly once a year. Someone tightens them. The door goes on rising at whatever speed it has always risen.

R. Quist