For some, however, it is the ultimate adventure .

  You walk into a large room. There are no bells in  it. There are only ropes, long, thick ropes with about a yard of  wool woven into them part-way up their length. Somewhere  over your head you know that there is a set of bells, weighing  between 600 and 3500  pounds. Your task is to  learn to control one of  them with pinpoint  accuracy solely by  working with the rope,  and then to ring intricate  patterns with other ringers  ringing other bells.  Studying the mechanism  won’t help you much.  You have to get a feel for  what’s going on through  the rope; it is your main  source of information.  For learners at Washington’s National Cathedral, it can be  a daunting prospect. How can you get any information from a  rope? How can you pull on the rope so as to exert any real  control over an object that may weigh many times what you do?  Luckily, they are not left to figure this out on their own. Every  learner always has an instructor standing right there. You will  never (I hope) come across a book called “Teach Yourself  Tower Bell Ringing  For Dummies.” 

 Here’s what the  instructor will do  first: she will “ring  the bell up” by  pulling on the rope so  that the bell swings  gradually higher  and higher, until  eventually she gets  it to the balanced position, mouth up, with the help of some  pieces of wood. Because the rope is not attached to the wheel  in the middle (where it would not give any leverage) but at one  side, there are two ways in which the bell can be balanced, one  with the rope wrapped around most of the wheel and one with it  dropping down straight from the point of connection. 

 What this looks like in the  ringing chamber is (a) a  shorter rope, with the end  coming somewhere over the  ringer’s head, and (b) a longer  rope, which if left to itself  would touch the floor of the  chamber. In position (a) the  wool part, the sally, may have  gone entirely or partly  through the rope-hole into the  bell chamber. In position (b)  the sally is somewhere around  eye level. The instructor will  place the bell in position (a)  so that she can see where the  learner should hold it. The ideal is to grasp the rope so that the  ringer’s arms are at full stretch when the bell is in the balanced  or “set” position. 

Once the instructor has determined where that is, she will  set the bell at position (b) and ask the learner to hold the rope  end at the point determined, with both hands, touching each  other but not overlapping, and usually for right-handed people  with the left hand farther down towards the end of the rope.  The learner’s hands should be pointed to the floor, as if she  were grasping a golf  club or a broom.  Then the instructor  will “pull off” the  bell by grasping and  pulling on the sally.  The learner’s job is  simply to follow the  rope up as the bell  goes in a complete  circle, and then to  lead the rope down  as the bell returns.  The main objective is to AVOID SLACK ROPE. Keeping the  rope taut gives information about what the bell is doing, and  makes it possible to impart more pull if needed. It’s a bit like  working a giant yo-yo in the dark, except that the yo-yo is  spinning above your head.     

We recently asked some of our newest recruits what learning  to ring has been like for them. Our learners are Carleton  MacDonald, who is in his mid-fifties and has been ringing for  about nine months; Calley Ordoyne, in her early twenties, a  ringer for about six months; and Kathleen Barker, a student at  the National Cathedral School for Girls (NCS), who has been  ringing for over a year. Both Carleton and Calley are still at the  “rounds” stage, ringing down the scale and learning to place  their bells among the others. They are working on consistent  control. Kathleen is learning basic methods (patterns in which  the bells ring in different orders each time the ringers pull on  them). The following is a summary of what they had to say.  Comments in italics are by the authors.  Our learners came to ringing in different ways: Carleton did  the Tower Tour during the Cathedral Flower Mart, and signed  up for a ringing course when he was intrigued by what he saw  going on up there. There is also usually an Open House in the  fall. Calley was brought along by her handbell choir director,  also a tower-bell ringer, who thought she might enjoy a visit.  Kathleen joined the Whitechapel Guild, the NCS bellringing  club, after hearing a presentation about it and thinking that it  sounded like fun.  All agree that it is one of the most difficult things that they  have ever done. Carleton said that only learning to fly a plane  was harder; Kathleen mentioned English essay writing; and  Calley compared it to riding a horse, with the same sense of  being expected to control something much larger than yourself  that seems to have a mind of its own. She also compared it to  playing the drums and to solving a puzzle. It is the challenge  and the unusual nature of the activity that keeps them coming  back. There is always something new to learn. Mary and Ann  have been ringing for a combined total of something like 80  years, and they are still learning new things all the time.  Because of this, the learners stress that you must not feel bad  about messing up all the time and being completely inept at the  outset.  Calley says that you feel completely out of control but come to  realize that you could have control within a narrow set of  parameters.