When I was a kid I liked to dig holes. Seemed a lot of my friends shared my love of moving dirt. Making nothing out of something. For us a shovel and a vacant lot was better than a trip to Disneyland. Had to be since Disneyland wasn't in the cards for me or anyone I knew. No doubt our fascination was Freudian as all get out - I'll leave that to your imagination - but, had we been told our psychological motivation by a passing motorist on his way home from conducting therapy sessions, I doubt any of us would have much cared. Might even have been excited by the sexual connotations.
When little we dug holes in sandboxes with sticks and driveways with garden implements. About the time girls were beginning to appeal we were into tunnels. Literally. Usually the tunnels were considerate enough to collapse before anyone got hurt. Gnawing away into a hillside usually filled my head with visions of the Lost Dutchman's Mine down in Arizona or the Oak Island Money Pit up north of Maine. Yeah, we knew about those treasures even back then thanks to the magazine rack in Ole's Barber Shop. Guess most of my life's pleasures were egged on in that shop. Field and Stream, Sports Afield, Argosy. Scantily clad damsels in danger of being devoured by monstrous lake trout sure got my juices flowing. A lot of dreams to be had right there between the covers. Came free with the half buck hair removal.
We rose on the fourth morning under overcast with a hint of cold rain in the air. Misted on and off 'til we went to bed. Emil called it perfect working weather. 'Course Emil'd call anything less than a tornado perfect working weather. The man liked to work, simple as that. Liked it enough that his sunshine attitude warmed me just fine. Threw on a sweatshirt and a jacket anyhow.
Morning's like this were hard for me to get my motor started. Made we want to sit on a stump, sip coffee and contemplate more stump sitting. Fortunately, Emil was all fired up and had breakfast in the pan.
My uncle paused, ran his eyes side to side like he was reading a line from a play and said, "I'm digging the idea that we're digging today. Couldn't pass that up even if it was near the bottom of the pun barrel. What's on the agenda for the morning is the single most important part of building the cabin, drawing the rectangle with stake and string. Can't dig twenty holes 'til we know where to dig them. Remember the three laws of construction, square, plumb and level. Today we'll work out the square. Measure, re-measure and re-measure again. Might take us the whole morning just to get the lines right. Won't sink a shovel blade before we get the rectangle perfect."
I got the drift of what he meant in general and figured the particulars would come as we worked. Good thing Emil knew how we'd go about it 'cause I sure didn't.
Dishes done we headed to the woodshed. There, Emil loaded an armload of pointed, two foot stakes on me, slipped a steel tape measure in a pocket of his blue-striped bib overalls and grabbed a framing hammer. After dropping the stakes in the middle of the clearing we marched down to the stream.
"I figure the crest of the bank as the high water point. Law says we can't build within two hundred feet of it. The law's the law and I respect it. Also figure this is a pretty stream with water near as clean as it ever was. Lord knows I don't want to mess it up in any way. Besides, I'm just selfish enough to want the trout to grow up fat and sassy. Be fun to catch and good to see."
Emil handed me the business end of the tape and set off uphill unrolling as he went. Ran out of tape at a hundred feet and toed a rock on the spot.
"Follow me up and stop at this rock." At two hundred feet he slid another stone. Then paced off an additional ten feet. There he drove a stake. "No sense being a foot short should the inspector be a tad on the German side or the inevitable flood be one in a century. We'll build here. When the holes are marked we'll head down to Grand Marais, grab a lunch and put in an order for some concrete and plywood. My guess is we won't need any cement for a week or more."
The next few hours were spent driving stakes and stringing lines with an eye to stream view.
"Been thinking of this layout since Lena died. One of those 'things I might do someday but probably won't.' Finally last summer I drew up the plan in detail, footprint and elevations, down to the framing. Know the lumber needed down to the stud. An old friend told me, once I knew how much lumber was needed, add ten percent. Seemed a waste to me. Greg then asked ' 'Emil, I've known you for a long time and never, ever seen you make a mistake. Yup, you're the one man in the whole, wide world who probably doesn't need the ten percent. But do one thing for me and get just one extra two by four so you can hit yourself over the head when you run short. Okay?' Good thing my supply list was in pencil."
"Next smart thing I did was havin' Greg come up here to go fishing and do some timber estimating. Greg'd been a jack of all trades most of his life. Even came close to mastering a few. He knew his way around the woods and could calculate the board feet of standing timber. One afternoon we took a break from scaring the trout and did us a walkabout, pencil and notebook in hand. Good thing was we shared a feeling for the nature of the woods. Greg didn't like the idea of clear cutting. His idea was to harvest with an eye to the future. Tree here, tree there. Take what you need and leave the land looking unchanged, maybe even healthier when you're done. Not as easy as scalping a couple of acres. By the time we sat down to dinner he'd taped off all the trees I'd need, both hard and softwood."
"Archie me lad, while we're stringing line, what I'm seeing is the view I'll have from the second floor. In my mind the cabin's already there. All we have to do is fill in the blank spots."
I'll bet we moved some of the stakes a half dozen times. Emil'd whack the last one down, we'd runs the lines, then measure on the diagonals from corner to opposite corner.
"Tarnation! Three quarters off again!" Then Emil would pull his hat, scratch his head and stare off into the treetops for half a minute. Finally, we were as dead on as we could get.
"Eighth of an inch, corner to corner, triple measured. Hot damn, good enough for government work!" Would've high-fived had we known what one was. Measuring, aligning and driving the remaining ten stakes between the four corners was child's play. Finally, each post stake driven, the lines came down and it was break time.
Half hour later we caught the tiger by the toe in the rear left-hand corner. Over the years kid's rhymes have caught a lot of different things by the toe. Back in '65 so did ours. Emil caught his and I caught mine. We caught what we'd been taught. Simple as that. Didn't mean anything by the words we chose. Well, maybe. Seems to help when there's someone to look down on, make fun of so long as there's no one around to pummel you for your idiocy. However, neither was as foolish a choice as a tiger. Trying to tame a large carnivore by pinching a single digit was a risky thing and we knew it. Given the choice we'd have gone for something smaller without pointy teeth, like a rabbit, cottontail not a jack. Anyhow, I hope you get my drift and the tiger's toe was where we started digging.
Twenty holes didn't seem like a lot of work to me. Emil had the new pair of shovels, a pick, couple of post hole diggers - he called them PHD's - and our trusty digging bars. I guessed we were set for most any problem but both of us were smart enough to not say that out loud. Not that we believed in jinxes, just that we didn't want to jinx ourselves. Emil'd be the first to say life is full of contradictions and irony. The nonsensical is simply God's sense of humor at work and a body'd be a fool to cross anything that's all-powerful.
We'd've started by spitting on our hands before grasping a shovel. Since Emil had been foresightful enough to buy a dozen pairs of leather work gloves, we just started digging.
"Our goal is five feet or bedrock. Whatever comes first. Personally I'm rooting for the latter as a five foot hole seems like way too much work."
Pulled the toe stake and set to it. My first shot at a shovelful didn't do much more than make my fillings cringe (yeah, us baby-boomers have more silver in our mouths than the Comstock Lode). Once through four inches of duff and dirt it was nothing but gravel, rock and clay with a dusting of sand. Our scrapings were thrown to the side with intentions of eventually leveling the length of the driveway. Once we broke through the crust she wasn't all that bad. Two feet of sand 'til we hit another hard pan. Loosened the barrier with digging stakes. By now we were into PHD and back abuse territory.
"Take her down 'til the hole's handle deep on the digger then we'll make sure she's a solid twenty inches wide. I'll get started on the next one."
Just short of four feet I hit solid rock. Boulder or bedrock? Couldn't tell. Didn't matter. We weren't going an inch deeper. In retrospect, I recall the job as being easy. Slow, grinding, brain numbing but somehow kind of fun. I measured the hole as twenty-two inches wide. Emil had his figure but the PHD's handle spread said twenty-two. So twenty-two it was. All except the very center hole. That one we made a full two feet. Emil said it was bigger to carry most of the weight of the second floor.
I'd like to get poetic about the job but I'd have to go way deeper than four feet to unearth the joy of those lines. Maybe I needed a Walt Whitman's excitement to go along with my eighteen year old body to pump out the adverbs and adjectives necessary. As it was, we simply dug. Threw sand and gravel in one direction, rocks bigger than baseballs in another. Nothing going to waste. Driveway fill and stone for the mortar. Two hours, more or less, per hole. Twenty holes. Wheelbarrowing in-between. No matter how you cut it that's near a week's worth of excavating. And sweating regardless of weather. All of it hand work. Some in sun, some in rain. Long sleeves, t-shirts. And dirty. Who'd have guessed a body could get dirty just digging in the earth?
Through it all Emil worked right alongside me. Shovel for shovel, grunt for grunt. Every so often he'd straighten up and stretch, "Lordy, lordy, I'm a cripple. Next time around I'm coming back as a mule. Won't work any harder and someone else'll do the cooking."
That week we went to bed about the time the sun went down and slept like the dead. Fished a little, ate a lot, drank an ocean of well water. Turned out the rock I'd hit in the first hole had friends.
"Could've guessed that'd be the case. The Andersen's had to reset the drill a couple of times like they were searching for a gap. My guess is there's a field of stone beneath us the glaciers shucked off on their way to Hudson Bay. Not bedrock but seein' as how they've been down there for a hundred centuries we'll glue the cabin onto them and trust they'll hold their contentment a few more decades."
Headed into town late in the morning after the last PHDful was drawn out and we'd bathed at the pump. First stop was the saw mill to order materials. Once in Grand Marais Emil got us a motel room. Then hit the Hub Cafe to do some damage to their food stocks. When the waitress asked what we wanted Emil said, "How much you got?"
Spent the night under clean sheets. For fun we hit the beach in the afternoon. Agate hunted and gathered stone. "Got close to two yards of rock back in camp. Another half wouldn't hurt. The springs on the truck will tell us how much."
Before heading back to camp we raided the drive-in for ice cream. Both of us were up for some, no doubt about it. Emil was a purist. Chocolate shake. Ice cream and syrup, whipped and eaten with a spoon. No cherry, no whipped cream (and this was back when they used real whipped cream).
"Year's ago I used to order a malt whenever I had the urge for ice cream. Liked 'em in an 'okay' kind of way. Took a few before I realized it was the malt that was foulin' up the mix. So, one day I asked for a malt without the malt, thinkin' I was inventing something new. The soda jerk says, 'oh, you want a shake.' Struck me as odd that no sooner did I create something no one in the whole world had ever thought of than they already had a name for it. Only in America Archie me lad, home of the freeze, land of the brazen."
Personally, I liked a strawberry-banana shake. Biggest they had. That combination of fruit is deadly good but only if done right. Eaten separately the flavor of a strawberry is much more distinctive than a banana. Sharper, juicier, fruitier. A banana is subtle, mellow, soft. But put them together and banana dominates. Don't know why. Don't care. That's just the way it is. Downed a few before I learned to say, "Heavy on the strawberries please." Not earth shaking by any means. At least I don't think it is. Who knows, maybe the course of history is hinged on one, well made shake. If it is, the one I had in Grand Marais may have paved the way for world peace.
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