About Labor

March, 1995

I get an urgent call from Steve, an old client.  He's scheduled for a new roof tomorrow.  The "tear-out guy" just exposed some rotten sheathing and "for a bunch of stupid reasons" the roofing company couldn't repair it until next week.  Next week it's supposed to rain.

 

Chimney cricket

And Steve wants a cricket (which is sort of like a little gable, or saddle) installed next to the chimney, also recommended by the same roofer who is unable to do the work.

So I spend the day going up and down the ladder, 12 steps up, 12 steps down, schlepping wood, nailing.  Tough on the knees.  For the morning I'm alone.

Around noon, a delivery truck arrives.  A man with a walrus mustache climbs my ladder and starts cursing this rustic cabin and the narrow dirt driveway and the fact that he can't get a boom or a crane or a forklift "way out here in the asshole of nowhere," and so he'll have to carry a couple thousand pounds of roofing on his shoulder up my ladder.  Then, standing with his belly against the gutter, he smiles and turns chatty.  He says he used to be a commercial fisherman, so he knows hard work.  "Crabbing is good pay but nineteen-hour days of physical labor, it takes a price from you."

After a few minutes of smiles and chatting, he goes down the ladder and comes back up with a box of nails on his shoulder.  Smiling, belly against gutter, he says, "Hey, will ya just set this down for me?" 

I take the box from his extended hands — and of course it weighs 50 pounds.  He smiled me into a con.  My back gives a twinge as I set the box on some sheathing.  Sure, the job would take half the time if he could hand me all his bundles, but he's the one getting paid for it.  We serve different bosses.

"That's all," I say.  "Sorry, but I've got a back."

"I've got a back, too," he says.  But then he cheerfully carries the cedar shingles by himself, while telling me in installments with each trip up the ladder about his 74-year-old mom who's had 5 heart operations, 3 triple bypasses, plus she has diabetes and gets dialysis.  He thinks she's great.  I think of my tax dollars at work.

At the end of the day, the county building inspector shows up.  Fortunately I've just finished.  Cricket built, sheathing in place.  The roof is naked, skylights removed, 2 inch gaps like stripes between each board.  Fine furniture below, draped with sheets against dust.

I've dealt with this inspector for years.  He has white hair, a clear gaze, a soft spot for babies.  Standing in the mud, looking up, he says, "Tell me about it."

From the roof I say, "One by four sheathing, five and a half on center, two nails per rafter, eight penny galvanized."

"Good.  You pass."

The mustache guy calls down from the roof: "You don't want to look at it?"

The inspector waves his hand at the ladder.  "I'm sixty-eight years old," he says.

Mustache guy says, "Hey, man.  You could retire."

The inspector signs the job sheet, then hangs the clipboard on a nail by the chimney.  "When you retire," he says, "you die."

Mustache guy comes half way down the ladder, points to a roll of 30-pound felt paper at the feet of the inspector and says with a smile, "Would you mind handing that up to me?"

The inspector sighs and, hands in pockets, walks slowly back to his Jeep.  A few drops of rain are starting to fall. 

The sky is suddenly black.  Crap!  Somebody goofed at the weather center.  It's a downpour.  Hustling without a word of discussion — not my job, but not his either — mustache guy and myself unfold sheets of blue plastic tarp and anchor them with bundles of shingles.  Our feet slip on the wet plastic.  It's dangerous.  The inspector has climbed the ladder and is holding one corner. 

We get drenched.  A few grunts, but no bickering.  Because in the end, we all serve the same Boss. 

In the foggy cabs of our two trucks, one Jeep, heaters blasting, hair dripping, we drive home, our separate ways.

Plenty

November 1989 to January 1990

In the mail I receive a handwritten letter on lined paper, careful script, from a Mrs. Soo of Honolulu who I've never met.  I imagine a trim desk, elegant pen, a pot of tea.  She says, "You repaired a bathroom for my daughter in Portola Valley.  By her report, you do excellent work.  I own a condominium in Palo Alto which is rented by a nice young doctor who desires to make some changes.  Please do whatever he wishes and send me the bill."

I come to a meandering complex of condos on El Camino behind a gas station.  When I meet the "nice young doctor," he introduces himself as "Doctor Strimwick" and calls me by my first name.  He looks to be about 17 years old.  He wants to divide a room.

I ought to ask for an advance, but I don't.  The whole setup is so bizarre that it could only be honest.  Or at least, that's what I tell myself.

The day after Thanksgiving when I show up to begin the job, there is a note pinned to the steel security gate: "Get in as best you can."  The gate is six feet high.  I climb over.  As my feet touch the ground, a man's voice says "What the hell are you doing?"  I show him the note, which the kid has signed as "Doctor Strimwick."  Opening the gate from the inside, I start moving all my tools, two-by-fours, chop saw, drywall, and a bucket of mud down the long passageway, into an elevator, and down another hallway to Kid Doctor Strimwick's unit on the third floor.

He's an orthopedic surgeon.  Already having an MD, he's now taking classes at Stanford for an MBA.  He must be a hot property in the marriage marketplace.  While I'm working, six different women leave messages on his answering machine.  It's Friday.  He'll have a busy night.

When I return on Saturday, the kid is home.  I install two doors and trim while he rearranges all his belongings, which seem to consist mainly of shirts, medical texts, and a stack of Playboy magazines — "Anatomy manuals," he says with a boyish grin.  Watching as I drill holes and drive screws, he says, “I do the same thing in my job.”  He studies my chop saw.  "Brutal," he says, shaking his head.

A tenant from downstairs comes to complain about the noise but loses his nerve.  Maybe I'm intimidating, standing at the entry cradling a 22 ounce Vaughan Framing Hammer and a Makita 6 amp drill with a 2 ⅛ inch hole saw, plus probably a demeanor of taking-no-shit while my clothes are coated with gypsum dust.  Yeah, I've got attitude. 

The doors take hours longer than I expected, and the doorknob doesn’t fit.  Lugging all my tools back to the truck, I prop the gate open with a scrap of wood.  When I return, another tenant is waiting, holding the scrap.  "I removed it," he says.  "For security reasons."  He actually said "for security reasons" in normal conversation.  I find this abnormal.  The whole condo complex gives me the creeps.  Too tidy.  No children. 

I can't return for a few weeks, overbooked, making good money but missing time with my kids.  I like being so busy in December that I don't notice the short days, the goddamn darkness.  When I finally return on a Friday, December 22, day after solstice, I'm all alone.  More messages pile up on the answering machine, smiley voices — you can almost smell the perfume and feel the powder.  I install the doorknob, paint the walls and doors and trim which takes all day.  Painting is meditative, and I have a backlog of contemplation to catch up on. 

By evening, I'm mellow and the job is done.  All jobs are done.  As I pass the pond near my house, a young coyote runs across the headlight beam of my truck.  Home, parking, I step out under swaying trees.  There's the scent of rain, the chill of a storm approaching from Alaska as so many big ones do. 

Inside I write out a bill that is 50% over my estimate and lick the envelope addressed to Honolulu.  My father-in-law calls and advises me to incorporate.  He wants me to run the business like a business.  Two of my children are setting up Christmas decorations while the oldest, age 13, needs help hanging a hammock in his bedroom.  Relaxed, I help with the decorations and drill hooks into studs for the hammock.  Hot mulled cider is brewing.

Two weeks later, daylight now increasing, the quince already in bloom, there's a check from Hawaii.  A hand-written note on lined paper:  "Perfect.  Thank you."  Just that.  Which is plenty.

James Adams: Local Salvage

(Note:  I wrote this piece as an article for The La Honda Voice, my local newspaper, in hopes of bringing James a few new clients.  With small changes, the article fits the theme of 365 Jobs.  James' life has been somewhat less tidy than my own, but I am focusing on the good.  As a contractor I've subbed work to him and as a homeowner I've hired him.  We've been friends for 30 years.)

James Adams, cabinetmaker, has been accumulating trees for a while.  Not entire trees, exactly, but the rough-sawn lumber milled by woodcutters around La Honda.  From Con Law, there was a walnut tree.  From Orril Fluharty, a pine.  From Neil Young’s Broken Arrow Ranch, a cypress.  Here and there, a bay laurel, a black acacia.  Trees that were sick or in the way or felled by a landslide.  Some of the wood, such as the black acacia, was of questionable value.  The lumber was salvage, and local, and would need to dry out for a few years.  “It was pure speculation,” James said.  “I had no idea.”

One day James, needing a new guide for his table saw, grabbed a rough scrap of  black acacia.  First he sanded it.  What he saw made him sand more, then apply a coat of finish.  “It just popped,” he said.  “It looked like koa, only better.”  (Koa is a highly valued hardwood from Hawaii and is a member of the acacia genus.)

What began as speculation became fine furniture, such as a cabinet James made for Russ Haines, a La Honda resident.  In this detail, the top is claro walnut while the support is black acacia:

“I’m a big fan of James’ work,” Russ says.

In a recent project, James built the kitchen cabinets for Maggie Foard, the well-known goat farmer and cookbook author.  Maggie already knew she wanted to use salvage.  Architect Lori Hsu drew the layout.  James chose details of how to integrate.  

 

Some of the wood, such as the panels of these cabinets, came from an ancient fence on the Driscoll Ranch:

Befitting their origin at a working cattle ranch, the fence boards included a few bullet holes (apparently not employed in the cabinet panels).

Under the big kitchen sink, James placed posts on which he carved bun feet and fleur-de-lis:

Working on a smaller scale, James makes sets of coasters from hard and softwoods obtained locally.  From left to right, on top are walnut and bay laurel (with a few insect holes to assure authenticity); on the bottom are black acacia and pine:

For another project, James is gathering driftwood at San Gregorio Beach.  Speaking of his finds, he can joke or wax poetic:  “Many pieces have spalting, a network of black lace-like patterns randomly suffusing the grain, acquired as the fallen wood lay on the forest floor before having been washed to the sea.  There’s one piece of redwood with stunning reds and blacks like shaded fire and smoke, and harder than Chinese algebra.  I never knew redwood could be that hard.”

Like many craftsmen, James’ language belies the popular image of the uneducated woodworker.  His father taught English at Palo Alto High and College of San Mateo.  From a childhood in Menlo Park, James came to the Haight Ashbury.  He says, “I bummed around, did my hippy thing.”  One day, he pursued a job listing for a cabinetmaker’s helper, which turned out not as expected:  The cabinetmaker wanted somebody to paint his house.  Needing the money, James took the housepainting job and eventually eased his way into various cabinet shops.  From “bang bang” shops turning out a cabinet every fifteen minutes to classical mortise and tenon work, from the Hard Rock Cafe to roulette wheels for the East Palo Alto mafia, from the Atomic Energy Commission to NASA (he built a cabinet to display a moon rock), “I had kind of a history working for somebody six to twelve months, catching up on the technology, then moving on.”

Along the way, James moved to the relative peace and quiet of La Honda, where he has lived for three and a half decades.  For many of those years, he was the town’s long-running multi-league soccer coach.  With age, he says, “I’ve hung up my cleats.” 

James is an astronomy freak who owns a collection of telescopes, including a home-assembled refractor.  On occasional nights he has set up the eight foot long telescope in the school parking lot and shared it with anybody in town who wanted to drop by.  A lifetime enjoyment of science fiction has encouraged his viewing of planets and deep space nebulae.  He is also something of a raconteur, telling tales of riding a Vincent Black Lightning motorcycle or participating in psychedelic "research."

James lost his house in the recent financial meltdown.  Feeling snookered by his mortgage company, James became a picketer outside Chase Bank, much to the institution’s displeasure.  Partly disabled by arthritis, he is engaged in salvage of the most local sort: his own life.  Currently he lives in a trailer and engages in part-time cabinetry.

In spite of financial hardship, James says, “I love the fun of woodworking.  Things fun don’t pay as well.” 

These days, he seeks creative challenges.  Inspired by legendary craftsman George Nakashima (and Nakashima's book The Soul of a Tree), James seeks a natural style that gives an idea of what the original tree was like.

Right now, among James’ projects are a commission to build a trestle table without hardware but with a leaf.  He’s also  designing a steampunk guitar. 

Creative challenges, local salvage.  As James wrote:  “Discoveries.  In found pieces of trees, beauty in flotsam littering a beach, in the jetsam of discarded pieces of wood.  If only there was some way to apply this principle to our day-to-day experiences…”  Which of course, there is.

(The photos of the Foard kitchen are used by permission of Lori Hsu, architect, who retains all rights.)

Cold Out There

Monday, March 14, 1977

I knock on the door of a run-down little dump on the scruffy edge of Redwood City.  I drove forty-five minutes to get here.  She sounded dotty on the phone.

"Who are you?" she asks through the screen.  An older woman, unkempt.  A bit of drool at the corner of her lips.

I introduce myself.  Then I say, "You wanted to replace your kitchen counter."

"Did I?"

"On the phone.  You called me.  You told me to come at nine o'clock, and it's nine o'clock."

"I said that?  Nine o'clock in the morning?  So you're a carpenter?"

"Yes, ma'am."

"Do you cheat?"

"Cheat what?"

"I know all about that." She spits on the screen, accidentally (perhaps).  "My husband was a carpenter before he left and believe me, I know.  He wanted a younger redhead, but he ended up with a woman as old as I am, so I guess it’s colder than it looks out there."

"Would you like me to come in and take a look at the kitchen counter?"

"Not today."  She thinks a moment, chewing her lips.  "Not your fault."

"Good day, ma'am."

As I'm walking back to my truck, I hear a door slam.