Steps

A few months ago the people down the street rebuilt the concrete steps that lead to the walkway in front of their house. Cut into the side of a little hill, the workers first dug out the area with an excavator. They worked at the pathway itself, too—wanting to do a thorough job of it. Over the course of a month or more they would return, two men taking precise measurements, using string and wooden forms to get the steps and walkway right. I would pass by, watching as the forms were built, then seeing the large cement truck arrive with a load of concrete to finish off the steps. The job unfolded slowly, but with great care and attention to the details that would make the work last.

This past Saturday I awoke early for my morning work. There was noise outside, as if from a large truck or service vehicle. Peering through the blinds, I saw some flashing lights from the beacon atop a tow truck. It was a few houses down the street. I got in my car and drove into the pre-dawn night, slowing as I passed the house with the new steps. On the front lawn were the outlines of automobile parts—large pieces that had recently belonged to a working car, the occupants careening wildly along the residential street, their merriment perhaps helped along by an open container of Budweiser, with several empties strewn about the floor—or tossed out of open windows on the chilly night. Deafening music blasted the interior of the car maybe, making it a screaming whistle, a cacophonous bullet blasting through the sleeping night. The occupants were unaware of anything—of themselves, the silent neighborhood, didn’t know even what strange combination of events made up their lives. They were having fun. Their car squarely clipped the new stonework, the brand-new steps that the skilled tradesmen had labored over with string and wooden forms cut to precise measurements. It then continued on, its extreme speed stopped by a phone pole, which was then severed with the impact. The utility pole hung there, suspended by the wires that it was supposed to be supporting. Its base was a jagged sawtooth of splinters---a gigantic toothpick. The steps were ruined.

This evening I drove around looking at people’s front steps. Many of the houses in this area are identical to mine—or at least very similar. I wanted to see how the wooden stairs would look out front. Many of the steps were made of brick and poured concrete, and one example was treated with a mosaic of broken tiles. Very colorful. There were many wooden stairs, however, and for the most part they tied into a railing that surrounded the porch. Some thought went into making the steps work with the rest of the house’s façade. I looked at these wooden steps and thought about how they would work with the front of the project house. I finally came upon a house that was almost identical, down to the brittle shingles that covered the exterior. They’d erected wooden steps out front, and they seemed to work ok—the effect was not at all visually jarring or incongruous. Since it is a question of building only three steps to reach the porch, the whole business will hopefully be understated. They will be rather wide, however—at least five feet, I think.

Around noon I set about working on the porch again, keeping at it for a few hours in an unusual show of perseverance. The left side—as you face the house—is finished. It required much cutting and trimming of the house shingles and the new wooden flooring to make it fit correctly, but the overall effect is good. Tomorrow I will have to do more cutting and fitting on the right side to make the last two or three boards go into place. This process takes me an exceedingly long time, as I ponder interminably each cut and measurement. At least my measurements are coming out ok, as having to do it over would take even longer. I don’t think I could bear it.

While I am doing this mostly cosmetic work, other projects loom. I’ll have to start putting the bathroom together sooner or later. I can’t postpone it indefinitely. Likewise the kitchen, which shares a wall—now demolished—with the bathroom. Last night a show came on the television about the making of different things. The last thing they highlighted was the manufacturing of toilets. It is fairly involved, as these things are baked in huge kilns that make the clay mixture hard like glass. A lot of running around is involved; in fact, one tee-shirted man had the job of running around a huge room full of drying clay toilets, trying like crazy not to let them dry out too fast. If they did this, they would develop cracks. Small cracks could be fixed by wiping down the clay with a wet rag or sponge. Larger cracks would make the new, green toilet—still in its formative stage—worthless. After the toilet is fired once in the kiln, it gets its glaze of white—much like a coffee mug or breakfast bowl would be glazed by an artisan wanting to decorate it with a colorful glass-like coating. The whole business again goes into the kiln and gets fired to melt the glaze and make it adhere to the new toilet. Once the new units are considered more or less ready for the public, some of them are tested to see how well they flush. They put all kinds of things down there, things that you would never imagine a toilet could handle. These toilets did just fine; they made it look easy.

In the interest of belaboring the topic of steps, here is some verse about them.

Out of the night they came
Days off
While the men
Measured and toiled

Their creation was this:
Crushed and half-bubbly
Beer cans
Broken glass and spit

The men bent over
Not hearing it coming
Brows furrowed
Their hands shaped their work

Those others, strangers
To right angles
Careening, roller-coaster style
Their senses muffled, muted

Came at the men
After they’d done
What they’d come
To do

They were days off
Belching in rhythm
To screaming and crackled
Loudspeakers

The men wiped their hands
Their worn gloves encrusted
With dirt, concrete, the
Stuff that life is made of

Those others paused,
Into a quick-stop
Their food turning slowly
On a metallic spinner

Mealtime done
Their wake of colored wrappers
Pristine wiener cartons
Make a hyper-display of autumn

One glance back
Looking at their work
The even steps
The smooth pathway

You could put a marble
There
And it would not roll
One way or the other

But these others rolled
Wildly, their cause
Known only to them
Or maybe not

In a small blink of time
They wiped it out
What the men
Had spent days on

They would laugh about it
Belch
Then laugh some more
Then maybe belch again
Only louder

January 17, 2008

Snow today. By the time I got started, around noon, light snow was falling steadily. I cleared away the other side of the porch, where I still needed to put down a few more boards. I moved my workbench and materials over to the finished side, but then realized my one hand was cold. I got it warmed up a little, put my heavy work gloves back on, then started cutting away some edges to make way for the new wood. This was enough for one day. My hand was getting cold again, and now it was snowing harder. Besides, I would have to deal with the shingles, something that requires a good deal of protection from the dust and a means to clean up any residue. I didn’t want to get into all of that today.

With a few inches on the ground, the traffic on the road was creeping by. I decided to head out. The little two-seater would be of little use in the deep snow, so I got the truck started and cleared it off. I drove it over to where my car was parked, then picked up the little station wagon, which did just fine in the snow. I took a circuitous route back home, driving the back roads near Ellicott City, and getting stuck behind a cautious driver. This was on a snowy two-laner, the plows not yet having made a pass down the country road. But the car ahead was not going too slow, not really slow enough to warrant passing it in the deep and slippery snow. There was a time when I would just go ahead and do it, not mindful of the risks, but things have changed. Finally the slow car made the decision easy for me: Up ahead, about the length of a football field—or maybe a little farther—a tow truck’s lights and some commotion were visible. It was way up there, where the road ended at another road, and a stop sign halted traffic at the top of a small hill. Not knowing what to do, the car in front of me stopped there in the road. Confused thoughts made the driver halt, thoughts of snow and tow-trucks and the terrible unknown that lurked up there by the stop sign, and just what the hell was going on way up there, anyway? Impossible to tell. I got my car easily around the stopped car, drove ahead to the intersection, and turned right onto the other road. Back there, behind the stopped car, others were starting to gather, stopping too—the confusion apparently contagious. I love the snow.

Back home I pulled the car into the wide driveway next door. I ate a bacon cheeseburger I’d taken away from the carryout up the street, and started over to my new storage shed. There I exited my beloved snow-blower. This thing is a treasure in the winter snows, making a snow shovel and its backbreaking work mostly obsolete. Now there was a good accumulation, maybe four inches or more, and the little machine fired right up. I cleared away first the half of the driveway belonging to the project house, then started on the other half—the one belonging to the half-wit and her husband. I did this not out of any particular goodwill or kindness of spirit; rather, I simply loved seeing the machine churn out great spouts of snow, throwing it way over into the yard. It shoots it miracle distances, the gushers of white arcing gracefully through the winter air. It’s practically effortless. You have to love snow to understand—otherwise this doesn’t make any sense. If I could, I would take the machine to bed with me, but in a friendly, non-sexual way. I have way too much respect for it to take advantage of it in that coarse, base fashion. As for the snow, I feel that we are partners in joy, the white fluff allowing me to get it once again into the air, to see it fall anew—a delightful replay of its initial coming.

I then turned the machine on my own driveway, which is not so fun to clear off. It is extremely steep and rough, with bricks making up most of the pavement. And there is stuff growing between the bricks, so that weeds and dirt and greenery are spewed from the chute along with the pristine snow. I don’t like that very much. So I cleared the little area behind the snowbound convertible and called it a day.

With the outdoors becoming wet and nasty for the foreseeable future, I’ll have to turn my attentions to the inside of the house. There is some bug-damaged wood in the wall that once separated the bathroom and kitchen. I’ll replace these supports with new lumber, and also string some new wiring through them. The kitchen is the one room in the house that benefits from multiple electrical outlets. All of the other rooms are lucky to have even one outlet to plug things into—and the stairs leading up to the second floor are dark; no one saw fit to install a light at any time to make the passage a little safer. I plan to correct that.

A note about this blog: I don’t know that anyone actually reads it, but I DO tell people about it from time to time. It is mostly an exercise in writing for me, and—hey—if the material is interesting to a broader audience—so much the better. But that is just an aside; the main thing I wanted to point out is that I’ve just figured out—more or less—how the photos work in this forum. When I post a photo along with an entry, which I may not always do, I also add one that appears as a duplicate, but VERY LARGE version. I only recently figured out where this duplicate appears: It appears if you scroll down through ALL of the blog entries, just keep scrolling, and at the end will appear all of the duplicate photos—only very large, so that you can actually see them.