A list of things I knew how to make prior to September 4th:
-A bookcase
-Breakfast
-A mess
-Chicken breast & quinoa salad
-A fool of myself
So, when my dear friend C told me he had purchased a house in the bucolic Hartford, VT and had a plethora of home improvement projects he would like to construct, I naturally proffered, "Dude, I can make just about anything." And the two of us decided we would make a deck.
We spent the first half of the summer procrastinating. We built a fence, which was the first time either of us had ever really done, well, anything, and after that we kind of putzed around for a while. I ran, hurt myself running, and drank coffee, and he went to lab, cooked pasta, and got so high I'd find him hiding under the sink. We did that until the end of August, and then one night we realized time was running out, and we looked at each other, him looking up from under the sink and me drinking coffee, and we clasped a hand and we said, "Let's build the dang thing."
Here was our initial plan:
This is actually the drawing C submitted to the town for permitting. He received a phone call a few days later, in which a befuddled lady told him gently, "Erm, I'm just having a hard time interpreting, here." But the permit was approved.
And here's how we did it (with a few digressions):
_____
First, a digression, through which the framework of the narrative should be understood:
In fiction, conflict is essential. Conflict cuts to the heart of the human experience. Someone wants something. They can't have it. They sail across the ocean or go to wizard school or fight their dad or build a skyscraper to try to have it. Sometimes they get the thing at the end, but the real heart of the story is the conflict.
There are seven basic types of conflict into which we can neatly lump just about all work:
-Man vs. Man
-Man vs. Society
-Man vs. Nature
-Man vs. Technology
-Man vs. Supernatural
-Man vs. Fate
-Man vs. Self
(A digression within the digression: I've been pushing for the recognition of an eighth category: Man vs. Food. The literary intelligentsia has rejected me so far.) (Also, I recognize that these should be "Character" or "person" instead of just "man.")
As C and I set out on our deck-building odyssey, following (as life does) the patterns and idiosyncrasies of fiction, we didn't really struggle against each other, or against an anti-deck machine trying to slow our progress. Nature herself was not against us, nor did we feel we were fated to fail. Rather, it was a tell-tale example of man vs. self, the desire to build squaring up against the innate inability to build, the want of a deck staring into the eyes of our own general stupidity. And such is the framework for the tale of the deck.
_____
Day 2 we decided to pull out our ace in the hole -- my dad. (We spent day 1 trying to dig holes in the ground, which were supposed to be 4 feet deep, and we got about 2 and a half feet before it got, like, difficult? So we called it a day and hung out under the sink.)
My old man showed up at 9 am on September 5th with a Subaru Crosstrek full of power tools, a no-nonsense-shitkicker mindset and 120 years of construction experience under his belt. His car pulled into the driveway and the birds went quiet and the squirrels ran away.
"Alright, dumb and dumber," he said. "Time to work."
And work we did. We finished the holes faster than we could have imagined. He pulled siding and shingles and hung the ledger board -- the 40-foot length of 2x10 that is bolted against the house, which carries a large portion of the weight on that end of the construction. He oversaw our holes, which is where the posts go, and made sure we didn't hurt ourselves as we put in a little gravel, then placed in a Sonotube (a cardboard tube that concrete is poured into to make a footer for the post) and then set a bolt into the top of the concrete to hold the bracket and post.
A visual depiction of the layout
We broke for lunch (Mom sent food with him for us), and we sat at the table, me and him, and C had to run to lab. We ate the beef mom made and slumped in our chairs and each looked out a different window.
"Materials sure are expensive these days," he said.
"Oh yeah," I said.
And I think that was the deepest conversation we've ever had.
After lunch, back to work, and Dad showed me how to use the power tools. There was a miter saw and a reciprocating saw and a circular saw and a jigsaw. Those all are used, in various capacities, for sawing.
And there was a nail gun, which gets hooked up to an air compressor, and shoots nails out at 300 miles an hour with enough force to go through bones.
We had to nail the carrying beam together. The carrying beam matches the ledger, so to speak. It's 40 feet long and carries the weight on the opposite edge of the house. It goes eventually up on the posts, and it's made of a double layer of 2x10s, so we had to nail them together.
"Go ahead and nail them together," Dad said.
I picked up the nail gun. So heavy!
"That thing shoots nails 300 miles an hour," he said. "With enough force to go through bones."
I held it in one hand like a Nerf gun and held it against the ledger. I pushed to release the safety.
Masculinity is a tough thing to pin down. Is it good? Bad? Can you see it? Smell it?
All I know is, standing there blasting a whole shit-ton of crooked nails through the carrying beam, I felt a little like Rango the lizard from the animated movie Rango, and I felt a little bit of that old wonderdrug masculinity running through me, and I knew I was a changed man.
Before and after the a nail gun
Various saws, C digging holes with the auger
_____
Digression 1 (2?): The Vermontiest Vermonter
Along the way of being a man and building I also had to get a haircut, so I went to a little barbershop in White River Junction. It was just a one room shop, two chairs, one woman cutting hair, and as I stepped in I realized time had ceased to function. Everything in there moved so unbelievably slow.
I sat in the chair and the lady asked me what I wanted. One word every five seconds. "What..." the clock ticked, "are," tick, "we," tumbleweed, "doing," tick, "today?"
She started cutting my hair. Snip. Wait. Snip. Wait. An old-school knob radio played a song at 12 beats per minute. I thought I'd be her age by the time we were done. And sometimes, when things are that slow, I get a little antsy.
She made conversation the Vermont way -- emotionless. Asked what I was doing in White River, where I was from. I gave her the whole spiel -- grew up around here, 3 years in Boston, here for the summer, building a ⁓deck⁓, going ⁓backpacking⁓ soon. She just nodded, as slow as possible, and said "Yup." Snip.
I thought, This lady's a real Vermonter.
She told me she lived in Hartland, 20 minutes south. By a beautiful coincidence, I was on my way to Hartland after the haircut. I had planned to run and swim at a covered bridge there. I practically leaped out of my chair, so excited at our commonality!
"Ma'am!" I said. "Ma'am I'm going to Hartland! Right after this! Right when you're done cutting my hair! I'm going to go run there! We're the same, you and me! I'm a Vermonter, too! I'm actually going to go swim at the covered bridge in Hartland!"
Snip. Tick. Snip.
And then she hit me with one of the more memorable lines I've been told by someone cutting my hair.
"Pulled a body out from under the covered bridge a few years ago." Snip. "Suicide."
Wowza. Enjoy your swim.
I walked out of her shop and got in my car and looked at myself in the rearview. It was one of the best haircuts I'd ever gotten. I drove 100 miles an hour through the cornfields to Hartland and swam under the bridge and knew I'd be back to see that lady.
_
And so I went back. Two weeks later, deck almost done (we're jumping around in time, here), and I sat down in the chair, and time slowed to a crawl, and she asked me where I was from, and I gave her the same spiel -- grew up around here, 3 years in Boston, here for the summer, almost done building a ⁓deck⁓, going ⁓backpacking⁓ soon -- and I realized, She has no memory of who I am. I asked her where she was from, even though I knew, living out this small-town episode of the Twilight Zone.
"Hartland," she told me.
"Oh, I've been to Hartland." I stopped it there. I didn't want to hear about the body. "Nice town."
And then we talked about the fall, her "yup-yup"ing her way through a conversation, a few words, snip, another few, snip. I settled into the rhythm this go around. I asked what she'd do in the fall. And then said the most Vermont thing possible.
"I'm going moose hunting."
Moose hunting! That ain't ski-at-Killington, brew-tour, 60-dollar-flannel, leaf-peeping-for-the-weekend Vermont. That's Vermont Vermont.
"Could you tell me about it?" I asked.
She told her tale without changing pace, slow, emotionless, but a crazy, adventurous story by the content. She talked about her hunting trip a few years back, up north in the state, getting the permit from the lottery, tracking a moose through the woods, waiting so it wouldn't take off when shot, shooting, gutting it there in the sticks, having to locate and pull out the ovaries (it was a cow), loading the carcass, eating moose meat for a year, sharing with the neighbors. Female vs. Nature, and female won.
At one point pausing from cutting my hair, she looked at me and I looked at her in the big mirror of the shop. I was smiling from ear to ear, buzzing off what she was saying. She smiled, too, and launched back into the story with excitement.
She caught herself, of course, went back to stoic Vermonter, slowed the pace down, managed to tell me about shooting a 600-pound animal with only that one tiny slip of emotion.
That's Vermont.
_____
Back to the deck. I spent a day cutting the posts to length and then notching them out (they get notched so the carrying beam sits in them and distributes the weight). We got the posts onto the concrete footers, and then T, my buddy from home, came for a day, and after running and swimming and eating ice cream we recruited him and one other person from C's lab to help us lift the 40-foot carrying beam and place it, oh so carefully, into our notched posts.
Carrying beam on the posts
At that moment -- with the ledger in, the posts on the cement, and the carrying beam -- it really started to feel like we were doing the dang thing. Cracked a few Coronas to celebrate.
The routine became that C would go to the lab from 8 to 5, and I would wake up around 8 and start working. I'd drink coffee and put on my dad's tool belt. If I was an Irish poet I'd write about the tool belt, how it felt so heavy on my slim shoulders, or how my tool belt would be full of lessons I've learned and books I've read or something (here's a Seamus Heaney poem if that reference didn't land). But I'm not an Irish poet, and I mostly wore it because it is undeniably sexy:
But boy-o, did I work slow. Barbershop lady slow. I had no idea generally what I was doing, and I had to double-check everything on decks.com (which is a real, great website), and eventually I just ended up texting my dad every day. The texts generally followed the format of:
1) What do I do next here?
And then I'd try to do what he said, and do a not great job of it, and then send:
2) Will it be a problem if...
Just like that, the thing started moving along.
We nailed in the outside joists (running from the house to the carrying beam), and then we were ready to add the floor joists, which are set 16 inches apart on center and run the distance from the ledger, resting on top of the carrying beam. (The joists eventually support the floorboards.)
When the floor joists were in we added blocking between them to prevent them from rotating, C holding the blocks and me blasting them in with the Rango nail gun. Before we could put the flooring on I had to put in the posts for the railing, so I did that, and then we were ready to do floors.
I went to Home Depot to buy the floorboards, which are 5/4"x6" in 12-foot lengths. C and I switched cars so that I could load the Jeep, and I pulled all the 5/4"x6" 12-footers I could manage from the rack, and I wheeled the 37 boards over to the check-out lady, and then wheeled them to the car and started loading them in the back of the car.
There's this thing that happens to me at Home Depot: everyone offers to help me. Two guys offered to help me pull the 5/4"x6" boards from the rack, one guy offered to help me load the car, and another guy offered to hold the cart while I put all the wood in. And this happens, in some format, almost every time I go to Home Depot. I've been thinking hard on this, and I've come to the conclusion that, most likely, I look like I don't have a single clue what I'm doing. Maybe it's the baby blue Crocs and the wire-frame glasses. Maybe it's the limp from the ankle thing. I guess it's fair, since most of the time I really don't have a clue what I'm doing. But I'll never accept the help (I'm a man, dammit!) But then the last time I was at Home Depot (after finishing the build) I saw a guy loading a bathtub into his trunk, and I stopped and offered to help. He said no, like a man, but I realized that if you go to Home Depot enough you progress from being someone that is offered help to someone that offers to help. Huh.
So I drove the floorboards back and started lining them up. I had to use the jigsaw to cut around where the posts for the railings go, and that was kind of a pain, but I did it, somehow. C came back from lab and it went much faster with two people -- him chopping the boards with the miter saw and passing them up to me so I could blast 'em in like a sheriff lizard. We did that for two whole days, more or less, and at the end we had 420 square feet of floor that we could stand on, right off of the kitchen door.
"Dang," one of us said, drinking Budweisers and sitting on the deck. "We pretty much built a deck."
An ugly notch, floor joists, a nice corner, jigsaw work, flooring, and the loaded Jeep
______
Digression 2 (3?): Band Names
On one of the 300 trips to Home Depot I made over the last two weeks, I started thinking about band names. I got a big new manly tattoo and I know there's a burgeoning punk scene in Mexico City, and I figured if general construction or teaching don't work, I could fall back on being in a punk band. I think I'd have to smile less. Anyway, here are the names that I think could go big.
-Mick Stinko
-Breakfast sausage
- horny.
-Bioweapon
-Many watermelons
-Wet cement
-Japancakes
Ok, back to the deck.
_____
With the flooring done, all that was left was to slap a railing on and reattach the stairs that we saved from the little deck that was on the house before. I returned the power tools to my dad, and learned that, in the construction industry, gift-giving is a customary way to thank someone for lending tools. I got my old man another box of nails for the nail gun. He was right -- materials are expensive. I dropped the tools off and gave him the box of nails and it was the only time in my life I've ever seen him tear up. He likes nails.
Anyway, our next step was to plan the deck party, which would also function as my goodbye. We gave ourselves a week, set Saturday the 23rd as the date. My flight to Mexico City is Tuesday the 26th. C made a flyer and we invited everyone we knew. We hung the flyer outside of Home Depot. I invited the barber, showed up with flowers and a moose-themed card. She said no.
Party flyer
We stuck together a quick railing and got help from A with the stairs. And that was it. Deck done. We didn't really pause to reflect -- we just rolled right into party mode.
Feverishly we cleaned the house. We burned all the scrap wood. We raked and cut the lawn. Friends flew in from across the country. 2 pm, the first cars showed up.
And the bacchanalia began.
It was, as they say, a real ripper of a function. We had about 30 people, four racks of ribs, six dogs, and a keg of keystone light. All of it held -- with not even a wobble! -- on that dang deck. The day started early with beer die and sangria, progressed into Polish horseshoes (a frisbee-based game), the light went down, it started to rain, and we raged on. The energy was a mix of Greek harvest with Mayan human sacrifice. Babylonian, Dionysian. Something to make Donna Tartt proud. There were toasts and shots and a dank basement. Naked people, screaming children, the Grateful Dead. Many watermelons. Fire. Yelling. Toasts, cheers, shattered glass. So much yelling.
All based around a 42x10-foot deck on a house in the middle of the woods, made by two fellas with no real experience doing anything at all. Pretty neat.
_____
Today is Sunday. I woke up and said my goodbyes to the friends who spent the night. C and I cleaned the house and then napped for a while on the couch watching football. In the fever dream of learning to build a deck and building a deck and then partying on it, I never really stopped to think about the whole thing. But now the dishes are put away, the music's off. I can take a breath. I'm sitting in the office with a sour stomach and headache, trying to encapsulate what the summer has been to me.
One way in is to use this quote I read recently in a book of essays by Pam Houston. The essay talks about how Houston splits time at her ranch house in rural Colorado and at a teaching position at UC Davis. She talks about nature and animals and climate change, and she talks about how the people around her at Davis (the academic crowd) have adopted a sort of blasé, ironic approach to living in a dying world. A sort of shoulder-shrug, what-can-you-do, try-to-be-funny way of living life that uses irony, in Houston's view, as a defense mechanism. She writes:
Her argument, I think, is that there are difficult and wonderful things in the world, moments "when seeing the world's bright beauty is almost more than I can bear" and moments that are raw and painful. But we must deal with those moments honestly. Irony is an effective defense, a way of distancing ourselves from serious emotion, but it does us a disservice. The beautiful and challenging and real things deserve real honesty.
There are some things here in the Upper Valley that are like that. Things that are real and meaningful, and deserve truthful, straightforward recognition. I'd like to drop the aggrandized tone here and treat these things that way.
Firstly, I am so grateful for friendship. I am grateful to my friend C who welcomed me into his home and trusted me with its upkeep. I'm grateful for the meals we shared. I'm grateful for his ability to make me feel totally unjudged and for the way he enabled me to spend two months living freely, chasing things that brought me joy, feeling supported all along the way.
I am grateful to the people who welcomed me in the Upper Valley, specifically M + A. From the moment I got here, they treated me like lifelong friends, like a member of the group. Because of them, this summer was full of shared adventures and shared laughter. They are wonderful, wonderful people.
I am grateful to the friends who made an effort to come celebrate from far away. R, J, O, Allen Shiu, A. They made trips from Boston, Atlanta, Nashville. I am better for knowing them, and I'm lucky to have the kind of friendships where someone would make such an effort. I hope I can show them the same friendship.
I'm grateful to my dad, who talked to me twice a day for the past two weeks to coach me on how to do something I had no idea how to do. He was patient and available and generous with his time and tools, and he was supportive throughout the project.
_
Yesterday at the party, M asked me to come inside. She had bought a cake, the icing spelling out "It's a Deck!" We cut the cake and stood in a circle eating it with our hands in the kitchen, buzzed and getting drunk. In the circle, people took turns saying goodbyes and expressing their thoughts on the summer. Specifically, they toasted to me.
It is hard to be ironic about true friends. It's hard to be ironic about the way they can make you feel, about standing in a circle with chocolate on your hands and drinking champagne, surrounded by people who show you love. That's the way these things go, I think. You spend some time somewhere and get wrapped up in the day-to-day, planning runs and going to Home Depot and building things, and at the end you realize just how good it's been, and just how lucky you are.
The finished deck
What a feminist. - the only woman at the party