Filed under: Uncategorized
I worked at a prison today.
This shouldn’t be totally surprising. What I do for money in this carpentry game shouldn’t surprise anyone.
But I loaded up the rig and made the 20 mile ride to the local hoosgow. Unloaded every damn tool I own (and it should go without saying, I own a lot) to install a Control Room counter with a degree difficulty of, let’s say, a 7. I’ve done a 9 a few times, lot’s of 8’s. 7’s are a dime a dozen. There is no such thing as a 10, because that would imply impossibility, and I’ve never had one yet that was impossible.
The local pokey is being expanded and the same folks who build so lavishly in Baghdad are building here. Same contractor. They want me to go to Baghdad, in fact. “Make scads o’ money over there, someone with your ’sperience. It’s a carpenters dream!”
Naw, it ain’t. Living in a Baghdad backwater hotel, toeing every line and following every half-wit procedure that a project engineer (who would likely be sending me directions via e-mail from Bethesda or Houston or something) dictates? It just isn’t me. Much as the honchos over here would like to think I’d fit in, it could never happen.
See, I work in an aura of independence that would make Paul Revere proud. Walking in and doing a level 9 install on a complicated piece of millwork with no callbacks is just a day to day thing for me. But to have someone calling the shots on how to do it? And knowing that the best I’m going to do all day is when I hop a Humvee back to the hotel and attempt a shower/fried chickensteak dinner/rental DVD on a laptop as a capper?
No, and hell no. Keep the 125k a year.
For one thing, I need my rig.
It’s an extension of me, a cowboys horse with a miter saw for a tail and bungee cords for lariets. For those of you who’ve followed this drivel for a while – no, that is not the backwater driveway. It’s a year old picture and if I were to take one of the rig where it stands now, I’d have to tidy up the firewood in the background and rake the gravel drive. So don’t be getting all “Look, he’s got a concrete driveway and everything!”. It was taken in the ‘burbs, and I’m a long ways from there now.
For another thing, I wouldn’t go to Baghdad unarmed. I mean, the best I could do would be to hook up the framing gun to the big Rol-Aire compressor and yank the charging hook back, enabling me to fire off a 50 round clip of 3″ galvanized spikes in any direction. I don’t think I’d do Ahmad a whole lot of harm from that, unless he was to be posted in front of a sheet of plywood 10 feet away at the time in full desert sheet/turban regalia, or maybe if he threw his hip out laughing at me. And I just don’t need that kind of embarrassment.
Outlaw carpenters who happen to be long in the tooth are rare indeed. They tend to be well compensated and are the first ones consulted when the jobsite is in an uproar. But this one ain’t going to Iraq. No sir.
If I’m going to do prison work, it’s going to be right here in Gods country where I belong.
Plus, Ally said I couldn’t go.
But I had to have a whole ‘nother explanation for the Big Dog from KBR.
“Mommy Won’t Let Me” just wasn’t cutting it.
Filed under: Backwater Livin'
I had such a wonderful weekend.
I mean it truly was. Ally and I took in a nice meal with Beth the Eldest on Friday night and went to see Steely Dan. I’ll cover the Dan another time, because they are dear to me and I see them annually. The meal was fine and the company better.
Then I got to play tractor driver and lawn maintenance lad all day Saturday. I love my tractor, it is dear to me and I’ll cover this aother time. And Ally took me out again for dinner, a nice seafood place and afterward we bought groceries and got all domestic. And stuff.
Then come Sunday I puttered, and did backwater maintenance things and tipped head to the swamp breeze just because it was blowing the right way. Ally coereced me into more shopping and it wasn’t bad because she let me buy stuff too, and see, this is what makes a good weekend. When the worst thing you do turns out to be pretty much okay. I got to buy some new kitchen knives. Fellas, when you’ve been married more than 25 years and buying kitchen knives gets you excited? Well, you’ve arrived. It wouldn’t be a bad thing to know how to sharpen the knives you’ve already got, either. But new knives? Swank decadence, I tell ye.
I even got my wife to take me out for a third night in a row. Took her over to the swampland bar for the cheeseburger and fries special. And she liked it! I love that swampland bar, it is dear to me and . . .
Then, of course, reality. The reality of Monday and you’re thrust back to the head swaggling world of “Oh no, I don’t honestly have to do that in order to make a living, do I?”
I hate working for someone else. I don’t hate working at all, but doing it for someone else’s benefit makes me bereaved. It is ever so much not dear to me, but you can bet I will elaborate further. Oh yes. It too will be covered.
Ally has commented to me more than once – “Weekends seem so much longer to me since we’ve moved down here, I like it but I can’t figure out why.”
I can’t either but I’m determined to do so.
Making time stand still sounds like a pretty interesting hobby to pursue.
Filed under: Backwater Livin'
I called up a random post from about a year ago, when Ally and I were just beginning to get serious about moving down here to the swamp. I believe it was the first time I used the word “backwater” to refer to this place.
Retold below, and to take my mind off the fact that I just bid my daughter and grandson goodbye, he a blur from a carseat at 9 pm, and she a whiff of long hair and waifish arms in a driveway. And gone, and I felt something like a century older without being any wiser.
“““
It was a bit overcast this morning, and we went for a drive, the woman and I.
Sometime in the next few overcast days we might come into something, a bit of dirt south of here on the fringe of a very still river. The very dirt we went to see and kick feet through today. As dirt goes it was loose and full of things more often underground, for large machines have been here recently a’tilling and a tree lay in pieces at the back end of it all, and large tracks went all around the place.
There’ve been shekels exchanged and I have signed fluidly on many longish dull forms. The woman did too. And so we went, to see what all the shekels and dirt scratching might yield up.
I walked, and played idly with a long measuring tape, and exclaimed aloud that house would be here, shop over there, this should be smooth and the oak tree was healthy and look at the shade in the corner.
Ally leaned against the car and just inhaled, arms crossed and head just tilted awry, and may have had eyes closed behind sunglasses, I don’t know. Inhaled hope, and possibilities, long summer dinners under shade and freezing mornings and boots in the hallway, and roosters across the road. Children. Many children, and their hands on the leash of a young dog who pulls them in that pin wheeling way across grass, shrieking.
I admired the large shop in the distance, belonging to he who would be neighbor, and wondered where he must have purchased such a handsome thing. And neighbor, and the neighbor of the neighbor, gathered in the large doorway and wondering loudly “No, I don’t know who those people are.”
I had to grin, sometimes we don’t quite know who these people are either.
Maybe we’ll all be finding out soon enough. When the backwater calls, and when the dirt is stilled, and Ally puts the last curtain in the new window and turns the burner on under the soup.
Soon enough, and we’ll be down home.
Filed under: Backwater Livin'
So the concrete didn’t get poured yesterday for the Shop (and isn’t it cute the way Shop must absolutely be capitalized?). Reason? Mucho rain all weekend makes the backwater all the more watered. Being wet down here isn’t the opposite of being dry, it’s a state of degrees. “Boy, your backyard sure is soggy!” “Yeah, but last week the dog sank in up to his keister.” That sort of wet.
Somewhere in the middle of that shot is the homestead. All the green to the right, to the above, and somewhat to the below? Swamp. Oh sure, your odd farmer or two has carved out some high ground here and there. But it’s the swamp that surrounds and entertains, housing a few thousand snakes and enough biting flies to stave off a regiment of door to door salesmen.
On the day Ally and I bought this place, there happened to be a nor’easter a’blowin up the coast (and the coast is just a big frog jump off the right of that picture, by the way). We rode over from the Realtors office in a driving rainstorm on a series of country roads, and I can tell you this much. I put “Build a Boat” right up there on my list of things needin’ doin’.
When the water starts rising down here you don’t drive from A to B. It’s more navigating, more “Well this road’s flooded out but we can turn around and try that one, I hope” and “Charts! I need charts!”.
And yes, I still plan to build a boat. Just as soon as the Shop is built. Which will be shortly after the concrete is poured, which will be . . . I dunno. I suspect my concrete guy has no contingency plans for airlifting 14 yards of mix into the backyard. Just a hunch.
This really strikes at the heart of how things work down here. Two days of steady rain isn’t just a thing that washes off the street and makes your grass grow. You don’t roll out the next morning and fire up the mower, because the mower would sink. Quite likely, you’d sink right along with it. Down here, you learn to wait.
A long time resident at the end of my road has a term for it. “Ye need to let things settle, my friend.” He offered me this after an amusing afternoon of watching me plow and rake and maneuver fill dirt around the yard. And it took a while but I think I’ve figured out his thesis. It’s the land, it has to get wet and dry and heave and sink a few times. Settle.
Maybe then we can coat it with concrete. And build boats.
Filed under: Family
I’m going to spend too much time musing about it this week.
That much is sure. At one point some months ago, Maggie paused and watched her son gallop around the house with his Grandpa, and Grandpa was doing that Talk to the Giggling Baby thing! that I do. You know, “Howsa ’bout runnin’ up to the pizza joint and we’ll grab us a large to go, old man? Then you can take your nap, oh yes a lovely nap ’cause I can see you’re tired and that big yawn wasn’t out of boredom now was it?” or some such. And the little man screeched and laughed and clung all the tighter, small feet spurring me on as we romped around the house.
Maggie watched smiling, she and my wife get a huge kick out of the Grandpa and Gavin show. “Watcha think, buddy? Wanna go for a ride with Dad?”
I blushed and did a rueful retraction. “I mean Grandpa. Go for a ride with Grandpa?”, and this happens once in a while, my wife and I aren’t so far removed from handling infants of our own. Grandma becomes Mom in a moment of haste, and so forth. Wasn’t all that long ago that Maggie was his size, and did a bit of galloping around the house herself.
But Maggie was strangely calm. “It’s okay. You’ve been about the only father he really knows, Dad.”
She said it, and I heard it. I guess in the final gist of things it has some truth, dealing with 5 am feedings and diapers and teething begets a sort of duty, whether you want it or not, and his actual father had fled from it. Disappeared to a place where the needs of others wouldn’t be a bother. Took on a sort of cold removal from a scene he had so enthused about, but couldn’t deal with.
I suspect you can rationalize just about anything. But finding reason behind abandoning a little man and the woman who bore him is a thing that eludes me to this very moment. It takes the very last bit of dignity from a man and makes him into a . . .
I don’t have words for it. Truly I don’t.
So when Maggie and the small one came to live with Ally and I, there was an implicit trust that here was some safety, and things would be normal, and no one would be leaving in that cold way. We set up a House at Pooh Corner where no future was allowed. Where the light would come in through windows on any given morning and smiles were the rule, each day much like the one before. There were Tigger pajamas and milk in the saucer days, long feedings in the big recliner at all hours, a stuffed purple dragon for him to hold.
Doesn’t help matters that this is an exceptional child. Sure, he’s a Grandson, why wouldn’t he be? I mean he’s the baby you read about in the Mother magazines, the happy one who sleeps long and has a smile for everything. I’ve seen the rage in a baby, the turmoil in a child sitting two tables over in a restuarant and having a parent in knots from the crying, the dejection. I’ve seen the wild come out from a mother so sick of it all that she just ignores, and rejects.
That doesn’t happen here and we’re lucky. In a way that all children are different we take it in stride but there’s the thing – “This is a special one, and God grant me the wisdom to know and appreciate that.” It is what makes a House of Pooh glow like some sort of cottage on a dark road that you pass at night, and see the fire flickering and you want to go in and be close to that rocking chair and the hand that strokes a sleepy head.
I’ll spend much too much time thinking on this, and wondering.
“We’re getting back together Dad”, Maggie told me a few weeks ago. “He’s . . . better. He wants to be together . . . now. Move away and make a new start.” And the fingers clench ever so slightly, there is a moment when you want to just fold your children, your grandchildren into a knapsack and say the things on your mind. I don’t, all too often. I can’t hold them so tightly that they can’t breathe or make the choices. I can’t forever be a father to a child not my own. I find no understanding that the actual father is still not here with his woman, his son. Has a timetable of his own choosing for their departure and it approaches quickly.
I told my Ally, who after 27 years knows me as no other, that if she were living somewhere with my child that I would walk a month to be there for an hour and she knew. Knew what the hour was for, and why life is strange that way.
The little man doesn’t know, can’t know. At ten months there are things he knows very well. The first big bottle of the day, or the pile of toys abandoned for a run at Grandmas pots and pans. This he knows and lives for, a soundtrack of nursury rhymes and cymbals from the paws of a stuffed monkey clanging, the slam of the storm door when Grandpa comes home, when Grandma leashes a dog. He smiles at me all the same because he doesn’t know, can’t know.
I don’t know what will happen when the House at Pooh Corner is stilled and silenced. We take every hour as it comes, and look at the boy and his mother. Letting them go by degrees, and the hurt is pushed sideways to the small closet for now.
For a little while longer.
Filed under: Shop
It probably helps to know that I’ve been involved in architectural millwork for 99% of my working life. That’s a working life that started, formally, at age 15. Yeah, still in high school. They gave me a working card and turned me loose. I finished high school on schedule, even did some college but the work thing was always there.
Most laymen call it architectural woodworking. Or just woodworking, period. I dunno, woodworking as a term has always left me a little cold. Any accountant or systems analyst can stroll off to his garage after work and get in a little woodworking. There lies little birdhouses and wooden pens, or maybe a mantle clock. Nice stuff, and I’ve done plenty of it.
Millwork, on the other hand, involves scale. It suggests a large building where thousands of board feet of raw lumber is transformed. A boardroom table to seat two dozen is laid up in exotic veneer. Huge mahogany entrance frames with splayed sidelites and raised panel doors. And cabinets, by the hundreds, pumped out in a never ending stream from sophisticated CNC equipment or talented hands.
It is the commercial end of things. The occasional “woodworker” who gets pumped about making a redwood picnic table will walk into such a place and feel all sorts of inadequate. “Why, if I had all this room and equipment I could be doing this sort of stuff too!” Hmmm. Doubtful. There’s an entire lifetime of knowledge to soak up, for one thing. A competent millworker is one of the most rare tradesmen out there, able to calculate radius mouldings onto an intricate and darned expensive panel of sapele or burled maple and have it look perfectly natural. A millworker who can carry his shop built product out into the field and install it on the jobsite is even more rare.
But something shared by all of them, from woodworker to millwright to field carpenter is a sadistic desire to have the same facility available at home as they do during the work day.
I mean it’s a real disease we’re talking about here. Can you imagine a college professor wanting to have an actual working classroom installed at his house? An appliance salesgirl with a showroom full of Maytags off the back porch? Think they need such an environment to feel all comfy?
It’s part of what makes us a strange (and generally poor) breed.
Back in earlier times and a couple of houses ago I built a shop out in the backyard. Not too awful big, a 20 x 20 stickbuilt with 8 foot sidewalls. Did the whole thing myself (like there’s another way?) with the exception of running the power out to it. It was okay. Just okay because it never had the feel of what I needed. It didn’t have a hard floor, just two layers of plywood laid on some 4 x 6 sills with 2 x 4 sleepers. Those 8 foot sidewalls would come creeping in on me anytime I swung a long board around. And just a single entrance door. But hey, it was a place to hang my hat. I built stuff in it. My fishing poles had a rack of their own. The bigger tools had a rack to sleep in.
It just wasn’t . . . what’s the word? “Industrial” enough, I guess. A little too cutesy. Better for a woodworker. I don’t need cute, I make money at what I do and the place just didn’t look like a serious money making sort of joint.
Plus there was that whole thing about no refrigerator. That was a real downer. Just puts a crimp in the whole operation, don’t you know.
I’ve had attached garages at the last two houses and they were at best a compromise to serious millworking. They sure didn’t look very serious. Kinda hard to get productive when you’re banging a hip off your daughters bike or the wifes latest effort at cleaning out the closets.
So here we are in the Backwater. And I’ve had this urge to giggle for the last several months, waiting for winter to end and the building weather to arrive. Because this time it’s going to be done right. A serious building. Something industrial. I couldn’t get away with what I’m doing back in the city, they’d have me on somebodies community standards carpet in a thrice. But down here, industrial looking shops are the community standard. Everybody got one, as they say.
So we’re looking at foundations, here. Reasons to build. And once you get past all the reasoning and the haggling and the weather starts to cooperate? By all that is holy, it’s time.
Here we have your basic monolithic slab, a 12″ footer all around with twin runs of rebar, a poly vapor laid over top of a leveled sand bed and a layer of wire mesh. In the foreground there is a sloped apron area.
Come Monday we pour. 4″ of the finest concrete atop what is already called the most deluxe foundation in this part of the county. It will hold up a three story office building, I’m sure of it.
But really all it has to hold is a millwork shop. And a vast collection of idle days turned into things built the right way, an efficient and clean way.
I’m already thinking it ain’t big enough.
