We arrived in camp just in time to catch the sawmill's unload. The driver climbed down from the big flatbed straight truck like Tarzan swinging out of a tree. We shook hands all around. He was a half an eyebrow taller than Emil, looked to be in his early forties, black haired with a face burned deep by generations of sun and wind. Like most of the working men up north he was angular from head to foot, hands tracked with corded veins. A pack of smokes came out of his shirt pocket, offered them around, "Mr. Schonnemann (don't know if I ever gave you Emil's last name) that's about as much pre-mix as there is on the Shore. Even had to have Silver Bay add twenty bags to their load so's we'd have enough. Where you want it?"
Took the three of us close to an hour to empty the load. Two hundred-thirty bags of pre-mixed concrete at eighty pounds each. Had we a few more rocks we could have gotten a good start on the Great Gunflint Wall. Also unloaded a mixer, four rolls of heavy duty steel mesh, ten of Emil's tamarack timbers, a large canvas tarp, bundle of planks, a couple of armfuls of angle iron, five gallons of pre-mixed gas and a small, gas powered generator. Not fun stuff but my uncle was sure excited. 'Specially about the gold colored generator. Said it could drive the mixer and a couple of power tools at the same time.
"She'll be a noisy daughter of a gun but'll save us hundreds of hours."
Ted, the driver, asked to check out what we were doing. "Looks like you boys have been diggin' for gold and not havin' much luck." Emil gave Ted a nutshell explanation of his plan.
"Should work. Don't see any reason why not. There's a whole lot of shacks in these woods way worse that what you're puttin' up and they've been standing for thirty years or more. But hand work? Uf-dah. My hat's off to you two and am more than happy it ain't me who's gonna mix and pour all that mud." Ted paused for a moment, "Hope you don't mind if I come up here once in a while and see how you're doin' and if maybe all this grunt work ain't killed you."
Being razzed like that put a smile on Emil's face. Emil'd told me a while back, "There's idiots and there's idiots. There's the one's who have their heads up their kiesters, who'er all talk and can't get even the most straight forward things done. Then there's the idiots who get ideas over on the edge of things and somehow manage to pull them off. Even turn them into things of beauty and use. No, not all the world's artists have paintings hanging in museums. Fact is, they're everywhere and you've never heard of most of them."
Again we shook hands all around. Ted first rolled then secured all his strapping before hoisting himself into the cab. "Almost forgot." Down came a pair of pails. "You'd have been hard pressed to move much water in coffee cups," then was off in a cloud of blue diesel.
"Good man. I do believe we'll see him again."
Seemed almost a waste of time we'd spent a week making holes and now intended to fill them. First things first. We began by hacksawing the steel mesh to length, rolled it like a four foot cigarette, wired together so the tube wouldn't open and then inserted the steel into the holes. Took us 'til suppertime to do all twenty. "Usually this screening is used to tie concrete slabs together but I could see no reason why we couldn't use it in the piers. Besides, it seemed like it'd be easier to work with than rebar. Could be in this case ignorance is bliss. Won't last forever but neither will I. So long as the cabin doesn't go kaput before I do, I'll be a happy camper."
I was beginning to wonder if we were ever going to do any serious fishing for pike and smallmouth bass. By now I'd gotten the hang of the stream, at least as far as fooling brook trout with a spinner was concerned. Emil had switched to his fly rod and still managed to stumble his way to more fish than me.
"I tell you Archie me lad, this is a whole different game than bass fishing in still water. Once you get the hang of accuracy and presentation being more important than distance, it's almost fun."
Could have fooled me. The way Emil was chuckling each time he hooked up, he sure sounded like he was having fun. Couple of minutes later his streamer was hung in a spreading bank aspen and Emil's tune had changed a few notes. As it was his last fly, I feared he was going up after it. He gave it a moment's stare. Slowly he turned and faced downstream to the pool I was ankle deep in. Crap! My fear now turned inward. A brief smile and a nod told me, unlike the aspen, I was off the hook. Simple economics whispered to him I was worth much more as a mud mixer than as a tree climber.
Since my stock as a serf was on the rise I brooked the subject of a canoe trip. Didn't want to have Emil think I was trying to get out of work. Hard as it was, I was having the best summer of my life. Turning brown as a berry - as they used to say. Nowadays I'd have been considered a prime candidate for melanoma - and able to labor from sunup to dinner. Tried to be tactful about going elsewhere. Stumbled around the idea for so long Emil caught my drift before I'd floated close to it.
"Yup, I've been considering a canoe trip myself. We've got a break coming up as soon as we finish the concrete work. Have to let it set for a few days to cure before we can start construction. So, say a week from now we load the gear, head down into Grand Marais for some supplies then hit the border water for three or four days. Sound like a plan to you?"
Wonderful. Wasn't like the big trips up in Manitoba or even our week long paddles along the border. But it was something to look forward to and trimmed a pound of effort off each shovelful of cement.
"Have to thank Greg's wife Bonnie for the idea of tamarack as pier posts. Has to be a sign I'm sprouting a brain that I'm willing to admit she knew more about trees that me. Was down visiting them on their little farm north of the cities. Greg was gone for the moment on one of those important missions he always seemed to be off on when the subject of posts came up. Your Uncle Emil's a real sweet talker when it comes to women. Always found timber as being best the way to a woman's heart. Long story short, tamarack's a survivor of the first order. Hard swamp wood. Didn't have any on my land but the mill had a stack of it just waiting to be cut to order. Not exactly wood from my land but at least it's native to the area."
Emil's idea was we'd shorten the timbers to five feet with the idea of having some wiggle room when it came to leveling them out. The idea being a floor deck sitting four feet off the ground.
"Uncle Emil, four feet seems a little high to me. We'd be working chest high when it came to stringing the joists. How about kitchen counter high?" I asked. Emil gave me a look like I was a dog that'd learned to talk.
He paused a second to mull the notion over, "Makes sense. It'd be much easier to work and I'd only be losing a foot of view."
Takes a while to saw twenty, ten by ten timbers and one a foot square for the center post. Scribe the lines, buzz all four sides with a circular saw and finish the job with a hand saw. Cramps the neck muscles something fierce. We took turns. Laid them in pairs across the saw horses and cranked them out. All the while my mind praised whoever came up with the idea of work gloves.
Next came the angle iron, this time hacksawed to three foot lengths. Two per timber. Good thing Emil had a box of blades. Broke a few and dulled a baker's dozen. Two lengths of iron were screwed to each timber on opposite corners, half the length up, the other half protruding below. Can't say it was exciting work but for once we were actually constructing.
Once the posts were ready we began the piers. Each was done the same. We began with the steel mesh centered in the hole and the bottom freshly splashed with a baptism of water. Emil said the water'd give a better grip to the concrete. Tough part was keeping the mesh centered as the concrete was shoveled in. A little wiggling usually worked.
The concrete was mixed two bags at a time. Eleven per hole. Each load took ten minutes or so. We'd drop a few wet rocks in after each mixer load. The post would be inserted and braced perpendicular when we were a load short of the top. All told, digging, mudding, posting and cutting each pier to level, took close to five hours per. Who'd have guessed?
Emil sweated bullets on the first hole, "Best laid plans and all that. Worked it over many times in my head but don't know for sure if it'd work. You'd think this would be the easy part as far as the planning goes but it's not. Each beginning step is hard. Once that works out the rest is child's play. Well, maybe not child's play. A child would be way too smart to get mixed up in a mess like this."
We did the four corners first. Emil constantly measured and remeasured the diagonals knowing so long as they were the same, we were square. And so long as they were the exact correct distance apart everything from this point on should fall into place as planned. Yup, those four corner posts were a big deal.
Late in the afternoon of the seventeenth day since we started we surveyed our little Stonehenge from all angles. A little piece of symmetry in the chaos of the northwoods. In celebration we worked our way through a chilled six pack of Grain Belt while cooking and eating dinner.
No comments:
Post a Comment