I’ve never been an early riser. Midnight has often been the most valuable time of the day for me, a time full of silences and opportunities. The early bird catches the worm, they say, but consider it from the worm’s perspective. I bet it’s not such a light-hearted expression in wormworld. “Remember the early worm,” they’ll whisper to each other as they slither past.
Not that worms whisper, of course ... at least I haven’t heard them... but maybe I just haven’t been listening ... Are worms actually capable of making any sound? If a worm on-looker noticed two worms speeding towards an icy intersection from opposite directions, and was convinced they would crash head on if they weren’t warned of the danger, would it simply watch on in aloof silence? Perhaps there is no other role for the worm to take than mute witness. Perhaps such questions are interminably - though silently - debated in worm ethics classes, yet remain obstinately unresolved. Of course, if the worm had a video camera - and we engaged in a little (h)armless anthropomorphism - the appropriate, socially-sanctioned course of action becomes clear - get it on tape! What is the value of two worms’ lives when compared to the priceless panacea of Funniest Home Tragedies? Maybe worms are cleverer than us. Maybe silence is golden. Or maybe silence just means not getting a mouthful of dirt.
But now the night held no promises. It was just darkness. A lonely vacuum of silence, emptiness, with too many hours to fill. It was to be endured until the first rays of sunshine brought not hope, but a sense of accomplishment. I had survived another day, another night, and surely each day must get easier ...
The days were slightly better. At least I still had the house to build. I still had something to do. At times I could even imagine nothing had changed. As long as I focused on the physical work, not thinking beyond the next nail, the next piece of the timber puzzle, I could believe, for a minute, that I was still moving forward. That there was still a goal I wanted to reach, a point at which life would somehow make sense. But at the end of each day, as I stood in front of the shed surveying my day’s work, the jumble of patchwork squares which would one day be a house - my house - seemed to offer more pain than hope. Its emptiness an almost physical burden, weighing me down. And it offered no protection from the encroaching night.
Marion came around to pick up her belongings. Anything she wanted, she could have. I didn’t care. Nothing meant anything anymore. They were just things cluttering up my life. Replaceable things. Things which would wear out one day, so what was the point of treasuring them? She’d moved into a house in Ettrick and wanted to make it ‘homey’. Fine, this house would never be a home, so why not?
We tried to settle things amicably. I would keep enough money to pay outstanding bills, she would take the rest. It was fair. It was reasonable. But I hated the fairness of it, the reasonableness. I envied her sudden freedom. Her bewildering choices. She could leave in any direction, go anywhere, do anything. I was trapped, and I felt I had been trapped ... by her! She had wanted to live here, despite my reservations. She had wanted kittens, despite my protests. Now she was leaving, while I had to go on building, go on living here, by myself. The house was valueless until it was a house, but I could no longer expect to finish now that I had no finances.
So we parted. Soon she had found someone to replace me, someone to stave off the loneliness. She wanted to escape, but she couldn’t do it alone. Though we still saw each other occasionally, an unbearable distance had opened between us. We were two strangers suddenly introduced at a party by a well-meaning host who thought we had so much in common. But we had too much in common, and there was only an awkward silence. My building tales were painful reminders of the life she had abandoned. Her half-hearted tales of her new life were unbearably sad. So, gradually, we stopped seeing each other, and eventually she left to Dunedin.
Meanwhile, there was still a house to be built. I’d come too far to abandon it just yet. Once it was closed in, I could reconsider my options. Not that I could name any option at that moment, but I was sure they would eventually present themselves. After all, I had had a life before Marion. A good life. We had only been together five years, and the last couple hadn’t been wonderful ones, so there was no reason to expect my future to be any less rosy than my past (especially my immediate past). No reason at all ... except for the all-pervading feeling that half of me had wilted and died.
We’d thought we were destined to be together - forever. After all, an entire world had lain between us, and yet Fate, masquerading as free choice, had somehow, magically, contrived to bring us both to a small village in Ireland at the same time. Not that we’d ever believed in happy endings or Hollywood fairytales, but the sheer improbability of our meeting - the million paths foregone, the untold obstacles overcome, the bewildering kaleidoscope of choices ignored to create that moment - had always made us feel it had been pre-ordained. That it was simply meant to be.
What could I believe now? Could the building blocks of destiny be assembled in an infinite number of patterns, or was it a cosmic jigsaw where every piece had its allotted place? Was Fate truly fickle, allowing us a single opportunity to grasp our true destiny, or was opportunity’s twin always waiting around the next corner? Were we all riding the rails aboard our own karma train, throwing random switches at every junction until we reached the end of the line, or was chance waiting patiently at every station?
If our meeting had been pre-ordained, then this must also have been pre-ordained. But I couldn’t believe this was somehow meant to be. That there was some greater purpose to all this misery. That eventually I’d come to realise it had all been a valuable ‘learning experience’. What value was experiencing emptiness? What value was learning what happens once your tears have run dry? How could this make me a better person, when I hardly believed I’d ever be more than half a person again?
No, this wasn’t Fate, this was Life catching us unaware. This was us making mistakes, taking each other for granted, taking the future for granted. So sure we were supposed to be together, that we’d ignored every sign that it was all coming apart. We were two pieces cut from the same fabric then sewn together to form a single, seamless garment - no longer you and me, but a mystical, eternal WE. Who could blame us for believing all those loose threads were simply frayed edges - entirely normal wear and tear?
So when had it all started to unravel?
Raene and I had been travelling together for a year when we decided to celebrate our anniversary by splitting up for a few months. Ireland seemed like the perfect place for a holiday apart. It was a relatively easy hitching country (often more a case of waiting for a car to come than waiting for one to stop, and no long walks to the beginning of some motorway... though such walks can be quite educational, offering rare insights in the worst a city has to offer), and apart from having to listen to the private troubles of male drivers, a relatively safe country for women to hitch alone.
Raene quickly found a job as a nanny with the Dingle doctor’s family Dingle being the name of a small fishing village north of Killarney, not some peculiar Irish affliction or a Celtic witch doctor. But even though I’m a Pisces, working in the local fish factory held no appeal whatsoever, so I headed north.
In summer, Ireland is full of Americans rediscovering their lost heritage, all dressed in green with feet tapping in clumsy pursuit of the local rhythm. In winter, when the world has scurried back to its warm cities, the countryside is deathly quiet, with only the grey bowron sea and the tin-whistle wind marking time with my passing as I hugged the coast. It was slow progress, and despite my usual aversion to walking, I often found myself enjoyably ambling along stone-walled lanes, urged on by slit-eyed sheep.
Walking while hitching is like accepting lifts while tramping - you still get to where you’re going, but it’s missing the point. Hitching is all about hitching. It’s about putting your destiny in the slim hands of chance and playing the odds. There are no definites, no guarantees, no timetables, only the certainty that you’re going to get somewhere ... eventually. Sometimes even that can begin to look shaky.
After three days hitching beneath the midnight sun, high up in the Arctic Circle where cars are scarcer than red-nosed reindeer, having managed to travel less than thirty kilometres, most of it through sparse, golden tundra, before coming to an ignominious, and seemingly permanent, fullstop in a patch of forest just across the Finnish border, we could have been forgiven had we opted to trade-in our thumbs for bus tickets, especially since two days earlier we’d left the sanctity of the highway to enjoy a brief respite from the unrelenting glare at the precise moment the elderly German couple we’d accompanied for three days through Norway decided to pass by heading south.
But although hitching relies on the unfaithful marriage between luck and perseverance, you can improve the odds through technique (though being a woman is often all the technique you need). Motorists can be divided into three categories - those who always stop (about 1%); those who occasionally stop depending on the situation, their mood, or the hitcher’s appearance (about 9%); and those who never stop (an overwhelming 90%).
So, at the most, you’ve only got a 1-in-10 chance that the driver of the next car is even open to consider your proposal. There’s nothing you can do to entice the nevers to stop, and the always will stop even if you’ve fallen asleep on the side of the road. But there’s an entire encyclopedia of reasons why an occasional doesn’t stop ... this time.
It’s a question of neutralising as many as possible.
By wearing bright/light clothes. Black is a sinister colour for many, often indicating a dark or gloomy character; and army camouflage gear indicates no character at all.
By looking clean and tidy. Even the suspicion they might be spending the next two hours in a cramped cabin with one of the great unwashed is enough to deter even the most regular of occasionals.
By looking friendly. Most occasionals pick up hitchers for the conversation, not for an argument.
By resisting displays of aggression or anger. Smiling and waving - even while cursing them with pain and pestilence under your breath - is a more productive strategy than hurling stones or abuse simply because of the guilt and/or goodwill it may engender. It has been known to cause guilt-ridden drivers to return, or to influence the decision of approaching drivers to stop, and it may predispose drivers to stop next time, or even for the next hitcher ... which may not be a comfort at that moment, but it may influence the overall odds.
By standing in a convenient spot. Ideally on a flat, straight stretch of road, where traffic has to slow down, with enough space for a car to pull off the road without rolling down an embankment or parking illegally. Police in most countries seem to consider hitchers a traffic hazard, but because it is seldom illegal, they often take out their frustrations on any driver foolish enough to infringe minor traffic regulations while stopping.
And by ensuring you’re clearly visible. Giving the drivers ample time to assess your adherence to the above standards, and to peruse their excuse portfolio. An occasional likes to have an excuse for not picking you up - even when that excuse is simply that they don’t feel like stopping - and there’s a bewildering array of signals they use to ensure you understand the particular excuse they’ve selected. There’s the lateral “I’m-taking-the-next-turn-off” wave. The over-the-shoulder “We’re-full-and-the-children-bite-and-the-dog-is-carsick” thumb jerk. The furtive “My-husband/wife/mother/father-doesn’t-let-me-pick-up-strangers” finger-point. And the slow “I-can’t-think-of-a-single-reason-why-I’m-not-stopping-but-I’m-not” shrug.
Some nevers use false signals in a misguided attempt to seem like occasionals, but these are rarely successful as they are usually wildly inappropriate to the situation - such as signalling a turn-off when the only exit possible is via submarine; impossible to accurately interpret - such as the grinning “I’m-so-happy-I’ve-got-a-car / What-a-clown-for-thinking-I-might-stop” head nod; or just plain stupid - such as the exuberant “Good-on-you-for-trying-something-so-futile” raised thumb.
I’ve never found walking much use when hitch-hiking, so I long ago dropped the hiking part. Not only doesn’t it get you to your destination any faster (unless your destination is less than a day’s walk away), but under normal circumstances, it tends to seriously undermine your liftability. Because the only car in an hour invariably appears after you’re past that long, clear straight and just as the road starts dodging between shadow-encrusted curves - so there’s not enough time for the occasionals to size you up. If it does miraculously appear on the straight, it’s usually the first passing opportunity they’ve had after three hours stuck behind seven lorries, two tractors and a gypsy caravan, so unless there’s a perfect place to make a pit stop, there’s no way any driver’s going to risk losing pole position. So it’s usually better to find the most ideal location available, and wait. And often the best place is, coincidentally, within metres of where your last lift dropped you.
But Ireland was different. Traffic was sparse (and the few cars passing by were never going far), the scenery was breathtaking, and because I had no destination in mind, I was always within walking distance of where I wanted to go. The longest trips were usually no further than the next village (often perched on coughing tractors or squeezed between bales of hay), with many journeys prolonged by rambling detours and generous Guinness sojourns. And it was on one such detour that I ended up in Doolin.
Saturday, February 26, 2011
Friday, February 25, 2011
Right Angles and Fallen Angels IV
We arranged a consultation with the Marriage Guidance counsellor in Alexandra. We were both willing to try anything to save our marriage. Within minutes we both realised this case was beyond the range of the counsellor’s experience. For her, every relationship problem was caused by the couple not talking to each other, by a simple lack of communication. It’s a philosophy which has the odds stacked well and truly on its side, but this was the rare exception. Marion and I did nothing but communicate. Our entire relationship had always been based on talking about everything, and that hadn’t changed. We’d discussed causes for our current difficulties until we were out of oxygen. We’d considered remedies and solutions until there were no words in the dictionary we hadn’t used. Nothing had helped.
Neither, as it turned out, did the counsellor. She suggested causes for our problem - which we unanimously dismissed. She delved deeply into her bag of trusty metaphors - but none of them seemed to fit. She questioned our feelings, our emotions - but we’d already hung them out for all the world to see. She probed and queried until there was nothing but a blank wall and an uncomfortable silence. So we paid and left.
Our options were quickly running out. The previous few months had left me feeling helpless and drained. I couldn’t understand what was happening, and there were no clues to its cause. Everything had simply turned to shit in my hands. We were both desperately unhappy about our situation, yet powerless to change it. All I knew was that I wanted to work things out and was willing to do anything necessary, and that, at least, gave me hope.
Marion didn’t even have hope, because she didn’t know if she even wanted to work things out. So she decided to visit a private counsellor to try and find out why she was unable to feel happy here, with me. Why she was unable to be happy about anything. Even the thought of running away held no great appeal.
The counsellor diagnosed depression and suggested we spend some time apart. With a huge sigh of relief, I agreed. This was, at least, something. Finally a starting point from which to begin the long journey towards rediscovering our happiness together. The worst was over. Marion was advised not to make any major decisions. To forget the future for a while and simply live from day to day. So she moved into a cabin on the Millers Flat Motor Camp, and continued to pick apples to keep her mind occupied.
A few days later I went to visit her. She had, after all, made a decision. She no longer wanted time apart, she wanted a separation.
It was the end.
And it was permanent.
Neither, as it turned out, did the counsellor. She suggested causes for our problem - which we unanimously dismissed. She delved deeply into her bag of trusty metaphors - but none of them seemed to fit. She questioned our feelings, our emotions - but we’d already hung them out for all the world to see. She probed and queried until there was nothing but a blank wall and an uncomfortable silence. So we paid and left.
Our options were quickly running out. The previous few months had left me feeling helpless and drained. I couldn’t understand what was happening, and there were no clues to its cause. Everything had simply turned to shit in my hands. We were both desperately unhappy about our situation, yet powerless to change it. All I knew was that I wanted to work things out and was willing to do anything necessary, and that, at least, gave me hope.
Marion didn’t even have hope, because she didn’t know if she even wanted to work things out. So she decided to visit a private counsellor to try and find out why she was unable to feel happy here, with me. Why she was unable to be happy about anything. Even the thought of running away held no great appeal.
The counsellor diagnosed depression and suggested we spend some time apart. With a huge sigh of relief, I agreed. This was, at least, something. Finally a starting point from which to begin the long journey towards rediscovering our happiness together. The worst was over. Marion was advised not to make any major decisions. To forget the future for a while and simply live from day to day. So she moved into a cabin on the Millers Flat Motor Camp, and continued to pick apples to keep her mind occupied.
A few days later I went to visit her. She had, after all, made a decision. She no longer wanted time apart, she wanted a separation.
It was the end.
And it was permanent.
Friday, February 18, 2011
Right Angles and Fallen Angels III
By now the concrete had well and truly cured, and the building inspector had undertaken a casual inspection of the foundations. The frames were also finished. The only problem now, was how to get them down to the site and erect ...
Each frame consisted of between 100 and 150 metres of timber. Depending on the wetness of the timber, I can usually manage to comfortably carry between 15 and 20 metres on my own. But there was also the balancing issue to be considered, which meant that 10 two-metre lengths was easier to carry than 4 five-metre lengths. I don’t know whether this theory has any basis in fact, but that was the way it seemed to me. Also, because of the nature of framing (with more spaces than timber), I believed a person should be able to lift even more than that, because each would be supporting the other’s efforts.
So, I calculated, all we really needed was another three people (coincidentally all the help we could realistically expect to get anyway), and we arranged for John and Alan, as well as David (a friend of Tania and Gerardo’s who had come to pick apples that year), to come on the next dry weekend and help us carry the skeleton of our house to its final resting place.
David had worked together with Gerardo in Christchurch selling environmental guilt door-to-door, but he was never entirely comfortable thrusting himself arrogantly into other people’s lives, offering absolution for their transgressions in return for a meagre donation. So he’d opted to pick apples, while Gerardo continued his steady climb through the hierarchy.
Gerardo had no qualms about the work. After all, the organisation needed fuel for its cause, oil for its machinations ... and money for their noble hoards of professional collectors. It only took a minute and was entirely painless. If everyone would just give a few valuable moments of their time to listen to our well-rehearsed cries of injustice; if they’d give a few worthy dollars to allow their voice to be added to the organisation’s lone voice of reason; if they just accepted that important work needed to be done, and that the organisation was the legitimate - the only - honourable voice; if they just wrote out that cheque, then they could continue with their worthwhile lives secure in the knowledge that they’d done everything humanly possible to help avert catastrophe. Give us money, they said, and you can sleep easy at night in your coal-fired home. Support us and you can drive to work tomorrow in your oil-guzzling car with a smile on your face. Sign your name on the dotted line and you can continue to fill your home with trinkets made in prison factories from the skins of endangered species.
The organisation had long ago abandoned the suburbs in favour of the more necessary and romantic duties of jousting with oiltankers, swimming with whalers and sunning themselves beneath the tropical mushroom sun. That was where the money was needed. That was where the important work needed to be done. That was where their shiny fleet of helicopters and ships were most needed. Think globally and act locally was the all-too-familiar soundbite, but what was the point of the local when the global was in its death throes? And so on ...
After that, picking apples was a breeze.
The next Saturday morning was overcast but dry, and our volunteers arrived keen to get the job over with. So we stepped up to the frame pile and each took one side of the smallest frame - the bathroom wall. Bending our backs, we tensed, then lifted, and ... nothing. The frame simply refused to budge. Surely there was something wrong. We tried again. But no matter how much we lifted the edges, the centre of the frame remained unlifted. With a rueful, disbelieving shake of the head, I had to admit there was absolutely no chance of us moving a single frame ... anywhere. It was time to call the cavalry.
So Marion and David went to the cookshop to round up as many eager volunteers as they could find, luring them with promises of beer and lunch. Half an hour later they returned, and suddenly we had a rowdy team of fifteen workers ready to go.
We gathered around the unrepentant frame with vigilante enthusiasm, a noose of eager hands thrown around each bone of the timber skeleton, slowly tightening. And like some cheap carnival trick, the frame became suddenly weightless, lifting, almost floating over the ground before gently coming to rest on the back of the bathroom block. We hoisted it upright, and with another quick lift, slid it over the bolts embedded in the concrete. It wobbled once, then was still ... standing. A few pounds of the hammer and one end of a bracing beam was lodged in the hill behind the bathroom, with the other end wedged beneath the top plate, holding the wall steady. We had our first wall in place!
The east wall was heavier, but with so many hands groping it, it didn’t stand a chance. The north and west walls followed the same procedure, slotting perfectly into each other and the walls already erected. Finally, (astonishly) the south wall fitted into the allotted space. The box was complete. Suddenly the outline of the house took shape.
There was much celebrating after that, and most of the day was taken up with the festivities. It was a joyous moment.
A few days of clambering up over the framework like a monkey on a jungle gym, and I’d firmly attached all the walls to each other and the foundations. Admittedly it wasn’t entirely square, but it was within a few degrees, and despite a minor bulge in the centre, it was horizontal. And most importantly, it was solid.
But our new box was still missing a lid.
Putting a lid on a box is normally quite an easy thing to do, even when the box is eleven metres by five metres and made of timber. It becomes a slightly more complicated procedure when the top of the lid is more than five metres off the ground, you don’t have very good balance, and there’s just no room for a safety net.
For as long as I can remember, my sense of balance has been a disappointment. While Raene and Michael Gooding spent their afternoons fence-walking, back and forward, turning and spinning in mid-flight, over and over like circus performers, I could only sit and watch with feigned disinterest (or, in less altruistic moments, try to distract them and watch them topple). I envied their casual disregard for the narrowness of their path, their unhesitating progress, their sureness of footing. No matter how much I tried, the furthest I ever got was two steps before I’d overbalance and fall. It’s not as though I was afraid of falling, either, because that went equally for walking along gutters, logs or anything else less than a metre wide I tried to negotiate. (So I seriously doubt I was ever a pirate in any past life, though perhaps it was the trauma of walking the plank in some previous piratic incarnation which created my ‘affliction’ in the first place...)
Even now, after thousands of miles of cycle touring, I still can’t cycle with no hands, and as soon as I’m faced with any gap narrower than a driveway, my grip tightens with fear. I’m just not well-balanced, I suppose. Or perhaps my weight just isn’t distributed evenly across my body. Years of physical labour have left their deposits of muscle and sinew, but much of it has been added to my right side, leaving it discernibly larger than my left.
I’m still no Incredible Hulk, but neither am I a Stan Laurel, yet everyone still claims I’m skinny. I keep assuring them it’s all an optical illusion - I’m tall and have had a slightly concave chest all my life - but even my father continues to buy me ‘M’ T-shirts for Xmas, when I’ve been at least an ‘L’ for many years.
Good living and age have also made substantial contributions, though ‘middle-age spread’ has tended to mean my personal space is spreading more than my body. I need much more room for myself and my life than I used to, especially in bed. Marion and I comfortably slept in her single bed for the first six months of our relationship, but such ‘intimacy’ is only a memory now that a single fold in the sheet results in a sleepless night, and a hair resting crookedly causes me to burrow into the pillow well into the morning’s wee hours. I hesitate to even imagine the discomfort a pea under the mattress would cause.
Or maybe the problem is that I actually lean. Marion always insisted I was leaning on the tandem (she couldn’t help but notice, since her head was less than a foot away from my lopsided rear). So it was only natural she constantly tried to compensate by leaning in the opposite direction.
Far from correcting a perceived imbalance, it had the effect of overbalancing the entire bike, making the steering difficult under normal circumstances, and almost suicidal when swerving to avoid a pedestrian while speeding down a hill. The leaning issue caused regular friction. Marion insisting I was leaning when I knew that was impossible. Until a friend told us we were both right - I was leaning, but it was the normal lean of a male cyclist. It’s impossible for a man to sit straight in the saddle, so we’re all either lefties or righties. And because I automatically compensated for the lean, in effect I wasn’t leaning. (PHEW!)
The secret, as well as the major stumbling block of successful tandem touring is that the person in the back has absolutely no control - no brakes, and although the steering can be influenced, no steering either - so must trust the person in the front, who has total control, implicitly. We tried putting a foghorn in the back so Marion could issue warnings and give a friendly toot to passers-by, but after she’d caused a few old ladies to leap into the bushes in fear - though it served themselves right for walking on a cycle path - we gave up that idea.
In the end, her sole responsibilities revolved around looking back to see if the road was clear, and to wave. It’s amazing how much of a fulltime job this is on a tandem! Wherever we went we seemed to cause a stir, though it became somewhat of a cliche after the thousandth person yelled out “she’s not pedalling”, when the simple fact is we have to pedal together because our pedals are connected by a chain. If we’re not in perfect alignment and coordination - or when we’ve had an argument - the bike wobbles uncontrollably. So, although either of us sometimes pedals less, it’s discernible to the other person.
By the way, the reason Marion was in the back wasn’t because of any gender discrimination, rather that the tandem has a larger frame in the front, and a smaller one at the rear, making it exceedingly uncomfortable, if not impossible, for either of us to swap. The rationale being that the front person must also be the stronger of the two, otherwise steering becomes unmanageable.
Though my sense of balance is atrocious, I’ve always had a good head for heights. So the thought of clambering over the framework five metres above ground held no real fears. As long as I somehow made sure my footing was secure at every stage, erecting the rafters should be a reasonably safe proposition. The logical next step was, therefore, to erect the mezzanine floors in order to establish a safe platform for working on the rafters. And the first stage of this process was to lift the two supporting beams into place.
Each beam measured 200 x 100 and was four metres long - in other words, a serious piece of timber - and had to be lifted two metres high so that one end rested on the framing, and the other rested on a post secured to the foundations. With a few helping hands, it would have taken a matter of minutes, but I only had two hands - both mine. I could have waited until the weekend and sought help, but I’m not an instinctively patient person.
Besides, it was beginning to be a question of pride as well. The more people queried my ability to complete the project alone, the more determined I was to tackle it single-handedly. Offers of assistance were treated as insults and duly spurned. Did I need assistance to complete the foundations? No! Did I need assistance to build the frames? No, I’d done it all by myself. I hadn’t wanted to build the house alone, but now that I was, I was going to finish it ... alone. I needed to finish it alone ... it was the only thing keeping me going.
A little improvisation was called for.
Luckily both beams were substantially longer than the four metre lengths required. So I was able to heave one end up and slide it through the allotted slot, letting it rest on the frame while I lifted the other end onto the top of the pole. Once it was in position even with the pole’s edge and firmly attached, I could simply saw off the excess protruding through the framing. Simple, really.
Once I'd attached the upper floor joists, I had a solid second floor from where I could effectively launch my assault on the rafters - all eighteen of them! The ‘problem’ with a grass roof is that it’s extremely heavy, especially when wet. Nobody knew exactly how heavy, but Wallace had played it safe by designing a roof solid enough to support the Three Tenors and a full Symphony Orchestra... soaking wet. Each rafter consisted of two beams bolted together at the apex, and further strengthened by attaching collar ties to prevent the rafters from ‘doing the splits’. Each north-facing rafter (and half the south-facing ones too) was going to be a little over three-and-a-half metres long, while those over the bathroom in the south would be just over six metres long.
By now I had actually calculated the pitch of the roof (38 degrees, which was a number of degrees above the suggested maximum for a grass roof, but that’s just how it worked out), and although I still didn’t have an angle-thingee, I did still have my old school protractor, so I wasn’t going to be entirely in the dark when cutting all those angles at the apex of the roof.
To make things more difficult, the rafters weren’t going to be simply bolted together, each apex end was first going to be cut lengthways in half. Which not only meant more angles and precision cutting, but a lot of additional handsawing. If my power-saw cuts are somewhat crooked, my handsaw cuts are nothing short of epileptic.
To further complicate matters, another angled notch had to be cut out of each rafter so that it sat squarely on the framing. A grand total of 63 notches (and not one of them a buenos noches).
The only way I could imagine accurately determining the position and angle of each notch was to lay a rafter in position and mark it at the appropriate points. But first I needed to put the upper load-bearing beam in place. This was achieved by roughly repeating the procedure for installing the first beam, except this time I did get help, mainly because I was now an extra two metres above ground, and there was no floor across the central three metre space. So Cameron and Gerardo came along to give me a hand, and together we managed to hoist the beam up in three parts and attach them to each other, to the posts, and to the frames.
The problem with cutting notches is that by the very act of cutting out the notch, you alter the angle the rafter will follow as well as the level, which in turn alters the required position of the notch. I don’t know how builders work it out. My only successful method has been trial and error. Once I’d managed to get one rafter sitting comfortably and accurately across each notched point, I was able to use it as my prototype and cut out the rest of the notches accordingly.
Of course this assumed everything else was equal and consistent, thereby breaking The Builder’s Ninth Maxim - never assume anything is equal. A few millimetres here or there certainly don’t make a difference, but a few millimetres every metre across a length of eleven metres does. Once you allow for slight variations in angles and timber thicknesses, you can easily exceed even the most generous margin of error. But considering I had to carry 36 rafter halves almost sixty metres to the house, hoist one end up onto the top plate, clamber up the framing while dragging it behind, then crawl along a 100mm wide beam suspended more than four metres in the air to slide it into place, I wasn’t about to repeat the entire procedure twice just for the sake of accuracy! Somehow, my notches would have to do.
Once all the rafters were notched, the rest was relatively simple though tiring. Using the framing as a ladder, I hoisted each rafter half into position opposite its corresponding half, then bolted the halves together so that I had nine complete rafters at each end of the house. By dragging first one side across the framing as far as it could go, then climbing onto the beam and sliding the apex along, then down to the opposite frame to move that end as far as it could go, then repeating the procedure over and over, I ‘walked’ the rafters, one-by-one, into position. Fortunately, apart from a few minor adjustments, the rafters sat reasonably comfortably in their allotted position, and were then nailed onto the beam and z-nailed onto the frame.
Lastly, I had to attach the collar-ties, which again meant climbing onto that narrow beam. A braver man, an experienced construction worker, or even my sister might have calmly walked along the beam giving scant regard to the fact they were six metres off the ground in places. But I was too concerned for my personal safety to release my grip on it for more than a few seconds at a time - just enough to drill a hole or tighten a bolt.
Working alone certainly heightens your sense of vulnerability. In the back of my mind there was always the knowledge that if I fell or injured myself in some way, I’d have to somehow manage to get to my neighbour’s house in order to get any assistance. Either that or wait until someone came to visit. So I was always extra cautious whenever I had to work in precarious situations, and even when I was using powertools ... though this has less to do with any sense of vulnerability than with my lifelong fear - perhaps wariness is a better word - of electricity.
I can’t pinpoint exactly when it started, but I began to get my first whiff of it in Grade 2 when a classmate’s brother was electrocuted when a heater fell into his bath. The image troubled me for months afterwards. Later my father re-wired the range socket, mistakenly turning the switch upside-down in the process. For him it was a simple case of ON was now OFF, and he could never understand my mother’s unease with the new arrangement. But she never felt comfortable with it, and “Off-off-off-off, On’s-Off On’s-Off” became her pre-departure mantra, repeated over and over until my father’s second impatient beep of the horn dragged her reluctantly away. Though this ritual never ceased to irritate him, he never reversed the plug, and she never left her unease at home.
No matter where this wariness comes from, it’s effect is that I always make sure any plug is kept off the ground (especially wet ground), I never turn off a socket with moist hands (though just the thought of turning off a socket can make my hands instantly moist, which complicates matters) and my extension cords are never knotted or kinked. Yet, despite such anal precautions, I still managed to saw through my powersaw’s cord.
I generally avoid handling anything with sharp blades whenever possible. I can never use any blade without imagining what would happen if it suddenly sliced off my hand ... or worse. I think I must have watched too many cheap horror movies when I was younger. But I also can’t stand in precarious places without imagining falling - especially places like Pulpit Rock in Norway which has a sheer 600 metre drop straight down, and there’s not a fence or barrier within twenty miles - though this probably gets back to my poor balance ...
Yet despite it all - my poor balance, my wariness of electricity and blades, my inexperience with angles - we now had a solid, free-standing skeleton. I was jubilant.
But Marion was far from happy. To her the framework seemed more like a prison, and it was taking all her willpower simply not to flee. We needed to talk to someone before it was too late.
Each frame consisted of between 100 and 150 metres of timber. Depending on the wetness of the timber, I can usually manage to comfortably carry between 15 and 20 metres on my own. But there was also the balancing issue to be considered, which meant that 10 two-metre lengths was easier to carry than 4 five-metre lengths. I don’t know whether this theory has any basis in fact, but that was the way it seemed to me. Also, because of the nature of framing (with more spaces than timber), I believed a person should be able to lift even more than that, because each would be supporting the other’s efforts.
So, I calculated, all we really needed was another three people (coincidentally all the help we could realistically expect to get anyway), and we arranged for John and Alan, as well as David (a friend of Tania and Gerardo’s who had come to pick apples that year), to come on the next dry weekend and help us carry the skeleton of our house to its final resting place.
David had worked together with Gerardo in Christchurch selling environmental guilt door-to-door, but he was never entirely comfortable thrusting himself arrogantly into other people’s lives, offering absolution for their transgressions in return for a meagre donation. So he’d opted to pick apples, while Gerardo continued his steady climb through the hierarchy.
Gerardo had no qualms about the work. After all, the organisation needed fuel for its cause, oil for its machinations ... and money for their noble hoards of professional collectors. It only took a minute and was entirely painless. If everyone would just give a few valuable moments of their time to listen to our well-rehearsed cries of injustice; if they’d give a few worthy dollars to allow their voice to be added to the organisation’s lone voice of reason; if they just accepted that important work needed to be done, and that the organisation was the legitimate - the only - honourable voice; if they just wrote out that cheque, then they could continue with their worthwhile lives secure in the knowledge that they’d done everything humanly possible to help avert catastrophe. Give us money, they said, and you can sleep easy at night in your coal-fired home. Support us and you can drive to work tomorrow in your oil-guzzling car with a smile on your face. Sign your name on the dotted line and you can continue to fill your home with trinkets made in prison factories from the skins of endangered species.
The organisation had long ago abandoned the suburbs in favour of the more necessary and romantic duties of jousting with oiltankers, swimming with whalers and sunning themselves beneath the tropical mushroom sun. That was where the money was needed. That was where the important work needed to be done. That was where their shiny fleet of helicopters and ships were most needed. Think globally and act locally was the all-too-familiar soundbite, but what was the point of the local when the global was in its death throes? And so on ...
After that, picking apples was a breeze.
The next Saturday morning was overcast but dry, and our volunteers arrived keen to get the job over with. So we stepped up to the frame pile and each took one side of the smallest frame - the bathroom wall. Bending our backs, we tensed, then lifted, and ... nothing. The frame simply refused to budge. Surely there was something wrong. We tried again. But no matter how much we lifted the edges, the centre of the frame remained unlifted. With a rueful, disbelieving shake of the head, I had to admit there was absolutely no chance of us moving a single frame ... anywhere. It was time to call the cavalry.
So Marion and David went to the cookshop to round up as many eager volunteers as they could find, luring them with promises of beer and lunch. Half an hour later they returned, and suddenly we had a rowdy team of fifteen workers ready to go.
We gathered around the unrepentant frame with vigilante enthusiasm, a noose of eager hands thrown around each bone of the timber skeleton, slowly tightening. And like some cheap carnival trick, the frame became suddenly weightless, lifting, almost floating over the ground before gently coming to rest on the back of the bathroom block. We hoisted it upright, and with another quick lift, slid it over the bolts embedded in the concrete. It wobbled once, then was still ... standing. A few pounds of the hammer and one end of a bracing beam was lodged in the hill behind the bathroom, with the other end wedged beneath the top plate, holding the wall steady. We had our first wall in place!
The east wall was heavier, but with so many hands groping it, it didn’t stand a chance. The north and west walls followed the same procedure, slotting perfectly into each other and the walls already erected. Finally, (astonishly) the south wall fitted into the allotted space. The box was complete. Suddenly the outline of the house took shape.
There was much celebrating after that, and most of the day was taken up with the festivities. It was a joyous moment.
A few days of clambering up over the framework like a monkey on a jungle gym, and I’d firmly attached all the walls to each other and the foundations. Admittedly it wasn’t entirely square, but it was within a few degrees, and despite a minor bulge in the centre, it was horizontal. And most importantly, it was solid.
But our new box was still missing a lid.
Putting a lid on a box is normally quite an easy thing to do, even when the box is eleven metres by five metres and made of timber. It becomes a slightly more complicated procedure when the top of the lid is more than five metres off the ground, you don’t have very good balance, and there’s just no room for a safety net.
For as long as I can remember, my sense of balance has been a disappointment. While Raene and Michael Gooding spent their afternoons fence-walking, back and forward, turning and spinning in mid-flight, over and over like circus performers, I could only sit and watch with feigned disinterest (or, in less altruistic moments, try to distract them and watch them topple). I envied their casual disregard for the narrowness of their path, their unhesitating progress, their sureness of footing. No matter how much I tried, the furthest I ever got was two steps before I’d overbalance and fall. It’s not as though I was afraid of falling, either, because that went equally for walking along gutters, logs or anything else less than a metre wide I tried to negotiate. (So I seriously doubt I was ever a pirate in any past life, though perhaps it was the trauma of walking the plank in some previous piratic incarnation which created my ‘affliction’ in the first place...)
Even now, after thousands of miles of cycle touring, I still can’t cycle with no hands, and as soon as I’m faced with any gap narrower than a driveway, my grip tightens with fear. I’m just not well-balanced, I suppose. Or perhaps my weight just isn’t distributed evenly across my body. Years of physical labour have left their deposits of muscle and sinew, but much of it has been added to my right side, leaving it discernibly larger than my left.
I’m still no Incredible Hulk, but neither am I a Stan Laurel, yet everyone still claims I’m skinny. I keep assuring them it’s all an optical illusion - I’m tall and have had a slightly concave chest all my life - but even my father continues to buy me ‘M’ T-shirts for Xmas, when I’ve been at least an ‘L’ for many years.
Good living and age have also made substantial contributions, though ‘middle-age spread’ has tended to mean my personal space is spreading more than my body. I need much more room for myself and my life than I used to, especially in bed. Marion and I comfortably slept in her single bed for the first six months of our relationship, but such ‘intimacy’ is only a memory now that a single fold in the sheet results in a sleepless night, and a hair resting crookedly causes me to burrow into the pillow well into the morning’s wee hours. I hesitate to even imagine the discomfort a pea under the mattress would cause.
Or maybe the problem is that I actually lean. Marion always insisted I was leaning on the tandem (she couldn’t help but notice, since her head was less than a foot away from my lopsided rear). So it was only natural she constantly tried to compensate by leaning in the opposite direction.
Far from correcting a perceived imbalance, it had the effect of overbalancing the entire bike, making the steering difficult under normal circumstances, and almost suicidal when swerving to avoid a pedestrian while speeding down a hill. The leaning issue caused regular friction. Marion insisting I was leaning when I knew that was impossible. Until a friend told us we were both right - I was leaning, but it was the normal lean of a male cyclist. It’s impossible for a man to sit straight in the saddle, so we’re all either lefties or righties. And because I automatically compensated for the lean, in effect I wasn’t leaning. (PHEW!)
The secret, as well as the major stumbling block of successful tandem touring is that the person in the back has absolutely no control - no brakes, and although the steering can be influenced, no steering either - so must trust the person in the front, who has total control, implicitly. We tried putting a foghorn in the back so Marion could issue warnings and give a friendly toot to passers-by, but after she’d caused a few old ladies to leap into the bushes in fear - though it served themselves right for walking on a cycle path - we gave up that idea.
In the end, her sole responsibilities revolved around looking back to see if the road was clear, and to wave. It’s amazing how much of a fulltime job this is on a tandem! Wherever we went we seemed to cause a stir, though it became somewhat of a cliche after the thousandth person yelled out “she’s not pedalling”, when the simple fact is we have to pedal together because our pedals are connected by a chain. If we’re not in perfect alignment and coordination - or when we’ve had an argument - the bike wobbles uncontrollably. So, although either of us sometimes pedals less, it’s discernible to the other person.
By the way, the reason Marion was in the back wasn’t because of any gender discrimination, rather that the tandem has a larger frame in the front, and a smaller one at the rear, making it exceedingly uncomfortable, if not impossible, for either of us to swap. The rationale being that the front person must also be the stronger of the two, otherwise steering becomes unmanageable.
Though my sense of balance is atrocious, I’ve always had a good head for heights. So the thought of clambering over the framework five metres above ground held no real fears. As long as I somehow made sure my footing was secure at every stage, erecting the rafters should be a reasonably safe proposition. The logical next step was, therefore, to erect the mezzanine floors in order to establish a safe platform for working on the rafters. And the first stage of this process was to lift the two supporting beams into place.
Each beam measured 200 x 100 and was four metres long - in other words, a serious piece of timber - and had to be lifted two metres high so that one end rested on the framing, and the other rested on a post secured to the foundations. With a few helping hands, it would have taken a matter of minutes, but I only had two hands - both mine. I could have waited until the weekend and sought help, but I’m not an instinctively patient person.
Besides, it was beginning to be a question of pride as well. The more people queried my ability to complete the project alone, the more determined I was to tackle it single-handedly. Offers of assistance were treated as insults and duly spurned. Did I need assistance to complete the foundations? No! Did I need assistance to build the frames? No, I’d done it all by myself. I hadn’t wanted to build the house alone, but now that I was, I was going to finish it ... alone. I needed to finish it alone ... it was the only thing keeping me going.
A little improvisation was called for.
Luckily both beams were substantially longer than the four metre lengths required. So I was able to heave one end up and slide it through the allotted slot, letting it rest on the frame while I lifted the other end onto the top of the pole. Once it was in position even with the pole’s edge and firmly attached, I could simply saw off the excess protruding through the framing. Simple, really.
Once I'd attached the upper floor joists, I had a solid second floor from where I could effectively launch my assault on the rafters - all eighteen of them! The ‘problem’ with a grass roof is that it’s extremely heavy, especially when wet. Nobody knew exactly how heavy, but Wallace had played it safe by designing a roof solid enough to support the Three Tenors and a full Symphony Orchestra... soaking wet. Each rafter consisted of two beams bolted together at the apex, and further strengthened by attaching collar ties to prevent the rafters from ‘doing the splits’. Each north-facing rafter (and half the south-facing ones too) was going to be a little over three-and-a-half metres long, while those over the bathroom in the south would be just over six metres long.
By now I had actually calculated the pitch of the roof (38 degrees, which was a number of degrees above the suggested maximum for a grass roof, but that’s just how it worked out), and although I still didn’t have an angle-thingee, I did still have my old school protractor, so I wasn’t going to be entirely in the dark when cutting all those angles at the apex of the roof.
To make things more difficult, the rafters weren’t going to be simply bolted together, each apex end was first going to be cut lengthways in half. Which not only meant more angles and precision cutting, but a lot of additional handsawing. If my power-saw cuts are somewhat crooked, my handsaw cuts are nothing short of epileptic.
To further complicate matters, another angled notch had to be cut out of each rafter so that it sat squarely on the framing. A grand total of 63 notches (and not one of them a buenos noches).
The only way I could imagine accurately determining the position and angle of each notch was to lay a rafter in position and mark it at the appropriate points. But first I needed to put the upper load-bearing beam in place. This was achieved by roughly repeating the procedure for installing the first beam, except this time I did get help, mainly because I was now an extra two metres above ground, and there was no floor across the central three metre space. So Cameron and Gerardo came along to give me a hand, and together we managed to hoist the beam up in three parts and attach them to each other, to the posts, and to the frames.
The problem with cutting notches is that by the very act of cutting out the notch, you alter the angle the rafter will follow as well as the level, which in turn alters the required position of the notch. I don’t know how builders work it out. My only successful method has been trial and error. Once I’d managed to get one rafter sitting comfortably and accurately across each notched point, I was able to use it as my prototype and cut out the rest of the notches accordingly.
Of course this assumed everything else was equal and consistent, thereby breaking The Builder’s Ninth Maxim - never assume anything is equal. A few millimetres here or there certainly don’t make a difference, but a few millimetres every metre across a length of eleven metres does. Once you allow for slight variations in angles and timber thicknesses, you can easily exceed even the most generous margin of error. But considering I had to carry 36 rafter halves almost sixty metres to the house, hoist one end up onto the top plate, clamber up the framing while dragging it behind, then crawl along a 100mm wide beam suspended more than four metres in the air to slide it into place, I wasn’t about to repeat the entire procedure twice just for the sake of accuracy! Somehow, my notches would have to do.
Once all the rafters were notched, the rest was relatively simple though tiring. Using the framing as a ladder, I hoisted each rafter half into position opposite its corresponding half, then bolted the halves together so that I had nine complete rafters at each end of the house. By dragging first one side across the framing as far as it could go, then climbing onto the beam and sliding the apex along, then down to the opposite frame to move that end as far as it could go, then repeating the procedure over and over, I ‘walked’ the rafters, one-by-one, into position. Fortunately, apart from a few minor adjustments, the rafters sat reasonably comfortably in their allotted position, and were then nailed onto the beam and z-nailed onto the frame.
Lastly, I had to attach the collar-ties, which again meant climbing onto that narrow beam. A braver man, an experienced construction worker, or even my sister might have calmly walked along the beam giving scant regard to the fact they were six metres off the ground in places. But I was too concerned for my personal safety to release my grip on it for more than a few seconds at a time - just enough to drill a hole or tighten a bolt.
Working alone certainly heightens your sense of vulnerability. In the back of my mind there was always the knowledge that if I fell or injured myself in some way, I’d have to somehow manage to get to my neighbour’s house in order to get any assistance. Either that or wait until someone came to visit. So I was always extra cautious whenever I had to work in precarious situations, and even when I was using powertools ... though this has less to do with any sense of vulnerability than with my lifelong fear - perhaps wariness is a better word - of electricity.
I can’t pinpoint exactly when it started, but I began to get my first whiff of it in Grade 2 when a classmate’s brother was electrocuted when a heater fell into his bath. The image troubled me for months afterwards. Later my father re-wired the range socket, mistakenly turning the switch upside-down in the process. For him it was a simple case of ON was now OFF, and he could never understand my mother’s unease with the new arrangement. But she never felt comfortable with it, and “Off-off-off-off, On’s-Off On’s-Off” became her pre-departure mantra, repeated over and over until my father’s second impatient beep of the horn dragged her reluctantly away. Though this ritual never ceased to irritate him, he never reversed the plug, and she never left her unease at home.
No matter where this wariness comes from, it’s effect is that I always make sure any plug is kept off the ground (especially wet ground), I never turn off a socket with moist hands (though just the thought of turning off a socket can make my hands instantly moist, which complicates matters) and my extension cords are never knotted or kinked. Yet, despite such anal precautions, I still managed to saw through my powersaw’s cord.
I generally avoid handling anything with sharp blades whenever possible. I can never use any blade without imagining what would happen if it suddenly sliced off my hand ... or worse. I think I must have watched too many cheap horror movies when I was younger. But I also can’t stand in precarious places without imagining falling - especially places like Pulpit Rock in Norway which has a sheer 600 metre drop straight down, and there’s not a fence or barrier within twenty miles - though this probably gets back to my poor balance ...
Yet despite it all - my poor balance, my wariness of electricity and blades, my inexperience with angles - we now had a solid, free-standing skeleton. I was jubilant.
But Marion was far from happy. To her the framework seemed more like a prison, and it was taking all her willpower simply not to flee. We needed to talk to someone before it was too late.
Friday, February 11, 2011
Right Angles and Fallen Angels II
My sister Raene and her boyfriend Mark (whom everyone called Crowy) had been working on an orchard/market garden in Earnscleugh, near Alexandra, for the previous few months. After five years of travelling and working together, they’d finally found a place they wanted to stay. They had work they enjoyed, a house they wanted to buy, and if everything went according to plan, they’d soon get married and start a family. But things didn’t go according to plan.
One day, Crowy collapsed and was rushed to Dunedin hospital where it was discovered his heart, already impaired by childhood disease, had been seriously damaged by an infection he’d picked up from a secateurs cut. The only course of action was an eventual heart transplant - the sooner the better. Once he was fit enough to travel, it was recommended they head to Australia (or even home to England), where the chances of finding a suitable donor were much greater.
He never did get fit. Instead, he died a week later, aged 31.
Raene was devastated by his death. Life seemed suddenly meaningless and just downright mean. Her grief wrenched every fibre of my being until it was almost a physical pain.
Crowy’s death I could handle. It was a tragedy. It was totally unfair. Although there would always be an empty space where he had been, and a thread of memories woven through the fabric of my life, it was only a space, only a small part of my life which had been lost. We had been friends when we were together, but we’d been seldom together. Life would go on virtually unchanged, except now our paths would never again cross ... and it was the loss of those myriad future possibilities which weighed most heavily.
Raene’s suffering was unbearable. We have always been close. We spent much of our childhood playing together - driving matchbox cars through cities in the sand; constructing complex forts for our plastic menagerie and cereal box cowboys, before reducing them to rubble with showers of Lego bombs; endless games of Truth or Dare, though nobody dared Truth; and long afternoons discussing what we could do, when sitting in the shade was no longer enough.
She was my baby sister, and I was always there to comfort her, to protect her, to tell her about ants and bees, and to console her when she was tormented by the birds and bees. I was her big brother, and she was always there to listen to me, to believe me (enough to ignore her teacher’s gentle persuasion and insist queen ants fought queen bees, simply because she believed that was what I had told her), to relieve some of my anger at always being last in line with two brothers before me, and an only sister behind.
Later we’d huddled together in the dark listening to the muffled pounding of words against our parents’ bedroom wall, as their anger gradually congealed into hatred. We’d taken turns to grasp first our mother, then our father, as they’d threatened to storm off into the night. Together, alone, we struggled to keep our family from shattering apart. When it was all over, we only had each other to cling to.
So it was only natural that we’d left Australia together. We hitched around Europe for a year, travelling, meeting people, working, growing together, growing apart ... just growing, until love intervened to finally separate us. I stayed with Marion. Raene went alone to Turkey, Israel and, eventually, Crowy. We’d always stayed in touch, and our paths had frequently crossed. They were at the airport in Melbourne when we finally arrived in Australia. We were here in New Zealand when they came looking for a different life.
But there was nothing I could do this time. I couldn’t share her pain, and I couldn’t relieve it. The nights were the worst, when the darkness became an almost physical burden on her shoulders, spilling over us all, weighing us down. I could only be there to gently squeeze the sobs into submission, to hold her so she wasn’t alone in the darkness.
My father was still in the country when he heard the news, so he rushed back to spend a few days with us - Raene, my brother Cameron (who had come to Ettrick for the apple picking season), Marion and I. It was our most complete family reunion since Brisbane, but there was little enthusiasm for reminiscing.
It was good to have someone else to shoulder the burden of mourning. Raene was seeking reassurance, justification, and my father consoled her with words I just didn’t have. He spoke of a benevolent God and Paradise, of a greater purpose and everlasting life, of reunification and guardian angels, of all the ancient tales she wanted to believe, a thousand stumbling words she suddenly needed to believe. He spoke of his own doubt, his inability to truly believe, but at least he allowed comforting hope and the possibility of a higher truth.
I couldn’t lie. I spoke of the eternal cycles of life, the recycling of life, of universal compost and the ghostly souls of memory, of the absence of meaning and inevitable nothingness, and the blankness of despair filled her eyes anew.
It was good to have someone else to shoulder the burden of memory. Raene was seeking deification of Crowy’s glittering soul, and Cameron consoled her with glowing perceptions I just never possessed. He spoke of a perfect life beyond reproach, of a shining example of humanity, and he polished his memories until they shone with a brilliant unreality, bathing them both in sudden shared warmth.
I couldn’t exaggerate. He was human, after all. He could be kind and funny and generous and positive and loving, sometimes more, sometimes less, sometimes all of them, but sometimes none of them at all. I agreed he was a good person, all in all. And I agreed I would miss him, at times. It was meagre consolation, I knew, but she would have to dredge in someone else’s memory stream to find more than rare glints of gold.
OK, so I’m not the best person to have at a funeral. But death happens too quickly for me to so easily distance it from life. A fine veil may have been drawn between them, but the image remains clear, and though it fades with time - gradually becoming a foggy connect-the-memory-dots outline or condensing into a Reader’s Digest life - the essence remains unchanged. Yesterday’s perceptions aren’t simply crushed beneath today’s heavy reality.
Sometimes, especially at funerals, it would be a relief to be able to wrap myself in religious warmth, but I’ve never found a spiritual blanket which wasn’t moth-eaten and riddled with holes. Religion often seems like a church - impressive and inviting from the outside, but the deeper you delve into it, the darker and more unwelcoming it becomes. A grand edifice containing mostly nothing - hollow and cold, and there’s so much space to be filled by blind faith. Yet I have nothing against religions. Any religion, when reduced to its essence, usually makes sense - unless its essence happens to be “give all thy worldly goods to me” - and I sometimes envy the security of faith.
My problem is always in the details. If the bible had only been five pages long - or just Ten Commandments - maybe I could believe it was the word of a God. All that fineprint makes me nervous. Thou shalt not kill is simple, straightforward, and nobody could object to the general sentiment. Thou shalt not kill ... unless it’s for a good cause, however, is mind-boggling in its hypocrisy. And Thou shalt not kill ... anything, at all, ever, under any circumstance, is patently ludicrous when simply clapping our hands results in untold unseen deaths.
Brevity is never a messiah’s strong point. Neither, it seems, is trust. Perhaps humanity just can’t be trusted to act humanely or interpret fundamental principles in a humane way. Maybe we’re all just too addicted to finding loopholes in every contract to be allowed too much leeway. Or could it be that we’re allowed too little leeway, and each detail, every line of fineprint, is just another bar on our cage, keeping us from wandering off into the wilderness and discovering our own enlightenment?
The only family member missing was my brother David. He’s the relative black sheep of the family, being the only sibling to have held a steady job ever since leaving high school. Apart from the traditional one year OE (spent mostly on Contiki Tours and in the London pub scene) and annual holiday jaunts to tropical island resorts, he’s a rather sedentary character. So sedentary, in fact, he once spent an entire month camped on our sofa in Offenbach, rising only to satisfy bodily demands for food, sleep and relief. But that's a story for another time.
Of course, my mother was also missing, but my parents haven’t been in the same room since their divorce, so it felt entirely natural not to have her there. In fact, she’s been largely absent from our lives since she made the decision to leave so many years ago. She was only sixteen when they married, and within six years they’d had four children, so there was little time for them to grow as individuals or as a couple.
The family consumed her life and her youth. She was always there with warm pikelets piled high with jam and cream after school; fresh, butter-dripping scones on wet Sunday afternoons; drooling hamburger towers on soccer-filled Saturdays; and her famous chocolate rough cake for end-of-year school break-ups.
Her chocolate rough cake was always a hit, and I’d carry the empty Tupperware container home filled with filial pride ... except in Grade 6 when she opted not to make it, and all the way home my bag was heavy with stodgy despair and the remains of her experimental sponge offering. )Years later Marion tried to reproduce it from my childhood reminiscences, but it was an abysmal failure. The chocolate was right, and the coconut was right, but it just wasn’t chocolate rough cake. Of course it may have had something to do with the fact I’d forgotten to mention it wasn’t actually a cake, but was more a slice ...)
She was always there with band-aids, tweezers, hot bread poultices and magical words to soothe a thousand childhood cuts and grazes and burns and splinters. She was cool hands on a fevered forehead; vegemite toast and black tea brought to a sick child’s bed; a spit-moistened hanky wiping away the traces of her lipstick kiss.
But the empty spaces in her day began to gradually widen. At first she filled them with Artex party-plans, later with part-time jobs in ice cream parlours and hot bread kitchens, finally selling Avon door-to-door. Until one day she discovered a door she thought would lead her to freedom. She walked through it and didn’t look back, travelling the length and breadth of Queensland looking for a new home, a better home, a meaning for her life. Instead of freedom, she only found other kinds of imprisonment with jailers less gentle than my father. By the time she discovered there were worse places to be than home, worse things to be than wife and mother, there was no longer any room for her in my father’s life. He had closed his heart and demolished his feelings, incinerating the past in a bonfire of photos and smiling happy times.
So now, even with David and my mother missing, it felt like our complete family was there supporting Raene in her grief. It was impossible to grieve all day. So my father and I continued cutting framing timber, simply to keep busy. My family was brought up to be helpful, though that’s a deceptive word because it doesn’t always mean full of help. A better word would be the German equivalent hilfsbereit - help ready. My family is always ready to help, but when it actually comes to helping, they’re not exactly overflowing with helpfulness. If my brother offers to help carry timber, he won’t just scoop up a heap, stretching his capacity and taking his help to the limit. No, it’s more like - “How much timber should I carry at one time?” “As much as you can.” “How much are you carrying?” “Six or seven boards.” And so the extent, the parameters, of his help are established, after which he’ll carry six or seven boards at a time until all the boards are carried, or he gets a splinter - whichever comes first. A helpful person would test out that 6-7 boards and maybe push it a little to see whether it can be stretched any further. Maybe it’s possible to take it to 8or 9. The fact I quickly realise how meagre my initial estimate was and start moving up to the 10-12 category, doesn’t matter. The helpfulness contract has been signed and cannot be altered by a dozen solicitors.
Slowly everything returned to relative normality. My father returned to Australia, Raene accompanied Crowy’s body back to Liverpool, and Cameron returned to apple-picking. Marion also decided to go back picking another season, her third. It was a decision that was set to rock the very foundations of my life.
One day, Crowy collapsed and was rushed to Dunedin hospital where it was discovered his heart, already impaired by childhood disease, had been seriously damaged by an infection he’d picked up from a secateurs cut. The only course of action was an eventual heart transplant - the sooner the better. Once he was fit enough to travel, it was recommended they head to Australia (or even home to England), where the chances of finding a suitable donor were much greater.
He never did get fit. Instead, he died a week later, aged 31.
Raene was devastated by his death. Life seemed suddenly meaningless and just downright mean. Her grief wrenched every fibre of my being until it was almost a physical pain.
Crowy’s death I could handle. It was a tragedy. It was totally unfair. Although there would always be an empty space where he had been, and a thread of memories woven through the fabric of my life, it was only a space, only a small part of my life which had been lost. We had been friends when we were together, but we’d been seldom together. Life would go on virtually unchanged, except now our paths would never again cross ... and it was the loss of those myriad future possibilities which weighed most heavily.
Raene’s suffering was unbearable. We have always been close. We spent much of our childhood playing together - driving matchbox cars through cities in the sand; constructing complex forts for our plastic menagerie and cereal box cowboys, before reducing them to rubble with showers of Lego bombs; endless games of Truth or Dare, though nobody dared Truth; and long afternoons discussing what we could do, when sitting in the shade was no longer enough.
She was my baby sister, and I was always there to comfort her, to protect her, to tell her about ants and bees, and to console her when she was tormented by the birds and bees. I was her big brother, and she was always there to listen to me, to believe me (enough to ignore her teacher’s gentle persuasion and insist queen ants fought queen bees, simply because she believed that was what I had told her), to relieve some of my anger at always being last in line with two brothers before me, and an only sister behind.
Later we’d huddled together in the dark listening to the muffled pounding of words against our parents’ bedroom wall, as their anger gradually congealed into hatred. We’d taken turns to grasp first our mother, then our father, as they’d threatened to storm off into the night. Together, alone, we struggled to keep our family from shattering apart. When it was all over, we only had each other to cling to.
So it was only natural that we’d left Australia together. We hitched around Europe for a year, travelling, meeting people, working, growing together, growing apart ... just growing, until love intervened to finally separate us. I stayed with Marion. Raene went alone to Turkey, Israel and, eventually, Crowy. We’d always stayed in touch, and our paths had frequently crossed. They were at the airport in Melbourne when we finally arrived in Australia. We were here in New Zealand when they came looking for a different life.
But there was nothing I could do this time. I couldn’t share her pain, and I couldn’t relieve it. The nights were the worst, when the darkness became an almost physical burden on her shoulders, spilling over us all, weighing us down. I could only be there to gently squeeze the sobs into submission, to hold her so she wasn’t alone in the darkness.
My father was still in the country when he heard the news, so he rushed back to spend a few days with us - Raene, my brother Cameron (who had come to Ettrick for the apple picking season), Marion and I. It was our most complete family reunion since Brisbane, but there was little enthusiasm for reminiscing.
It was good to have someone else to shoulder the burden of mourning. Raene was seeking reassurance, justification, and my father consoled her with words I just didn’t have. He spoke of a benevolent God and Paradise, of a greater purpose and everlasting life, of reunification and guardian angels, of all the ancient tales she wanted to believe, a thousand stumbling words she suddenly needed to believe. He spoke of his own doubt, his inability to truly believe, but at least he allowed comforting hope and the possibility of a higher truth.
I couldn’t lie. I spoke of the eternal cycles of life, the recycling of life, of universal compost and the ghostly souls of memory, of the absence of meaning and inevitable nothingness, and the blankness of despair filled her eyes anew.
It was good to have someone else to shoulder the burden of memory. Raene was seeking deification of Crowy’s glittering soul, and Cameron consoled her with glowing perceptions I just never possessed. He spoke of a perfect life beyond reproach, of a shining example of humanity, and he polished his memories until they shone with a brilliant unreality, bathing them both in sudden shared warmth.
I couldn’t exaggerate. He was human, after all. He could be kind and funny and generous and positive and loving, sometimes more, sometimes less, sometimes all of them, but sometimes none of them at all. I agreed he was a good person, all in all. And I agreed I would miss him, at times. It was meagre consolation, I knew, but she would have to dredge in someone else’s memory stream to find more than rare glints of gold.
OK, so I’m not the best person to have at a funeral. But death happens too quickly for me to so easily distance it from life. A fine veil may have been drawn between them, but the image remains clear, and though it fades with time - gradually becoming a foggy connect-the-memory-dots outline or condensing into a Reader’s Digest life - the essence remains unchanged. Yesterday’s perceptions aren’t simply crushed beneath today’s heavy reality.
Sometimes, especially at funerals, it would be a relief to be able to wrap myself in religious warmth, but I’ve never found a spiritual blanket which wasn’t moth-eaten and riddled with holes. Religion often seems like a church - impressive and inviting from the outside, but the deeper you delve into it, the darker and more unwelcoming it becomes. A grand edifice containing mostly nothing - hollow and cold, and there’s so much space to be filled by blind faith. Yet I have nothing against religions. Any religion, when reduced to its essence, usually makes sense - unless its essence happens to be “give all thy worldly goods to me” - and I sometimes envy the security of faith.
My problem is always in the details. If the bible had only been five pages long - or just Ten Commandments - maybe I could believe it was the word of a God. All that fineprint makes me nervous. Thou shalt not kill is simple, straightforward, and nobody could object to the general sentiment. Thou shalt not kill ... unless it’s for a good cause, however, is mind-boggling in its hypocrisy. And Thou shalt not kill ... anything, at all, ever, under any circumstance, is patently ludicrous when simply clapping our hands results in untold unseen deaths.
Brevity is never a messiah’s strong point. Neither, it seems, is trust. Perhaps humanity just can’t be trusted to act humanely or interpret fundamental principles in a humane way. Maybe we’re all just too addicted to finding loopholes in every contract to be allowed too much leeway. Or could it be that we’re allowed too little leeway, and each detail, every line of fineprint, is just another bar on our cage, keeping us from wandering off into the wilderness and discovering our own enlightenment?
The only family member missing was my brother David. He’s the relative black sheep of the family, being the only sibling to have held a steady job ever since leaving high school. Apart from the traditional one year OE (spent mostly on Contiki Tours and in the London pub scene) and annual holiday jaunts to tropical island resorts, he’s a rather sedentary character. So sedentary, in fact, he once spent an entire month camped on our sofa in Offenbach, rising only to satisfy bodily demands for food, sleep and relief. But that's a story for another time.
Of course, my mother was also missing, but my parents haven’t been in the same room since their divorce, so it felt entirely natural not to have her there. In fact, she’s been largely absent from our lives since she made the decision to leave so many years ago. She was only sixteen when they married, and within six years they’d had four children, so there was little time for them to grow as individuals or as a couple.
The family consumed her life and her youth. She was always there with warm pikelets piled high with jam and cream after school; fresh, butter-dripping scones on wet Sunday afternoons; drooling hamburger towers on soccer-filled Saturdays; and her famous chocolate rough cake for end-of-year school break-ups.
Her chocolate rough cake was always a hit, and I’d carry the empty Tupperware container home filled with filial pride ... except in Grade 6 when she opted not to make it, and all the way home my bag was heavy with stodgy despair and the remains of her experimental sponge offering. )Years later Marion tried to reproduce it from my childhood reminiscences, but it was an abysmal failure. The chocolate was right, and the coconut was right, but it just wasn’t chocolate rough cake. Of course it may have had something to do with the fact I’d forgotten to mention it wasn’t actually a cake, but was more a slice ...)
She was always there with band-aids, tweezers, hot bread poultices and magical words to soothe a thousand childhood cuts and grazes and burns and splinters. She was cool hands on a fevered forehead; vegemite toast and black tea brought to a sick child’s bed; a spit-moistened hanky wiping away the traces of her lipstick kiss.
But the empty spaces in her day began to gradually widen. At first she filled them with Artex party-plans, later with part-time jobs in ice cream parlours and hot bread kitchens, finally selling Avon door-to-door. Until one day she discovered a door she thought would lead her to freedom. She walked through it and didn’t look back, travelling the length and breadth of Queensland looking for a new home, a better home, a meaning for her life. Instead of freedom, she only found other kinds of imprisonment with jailers less gentle than my father. By the time she discovered there were worse places to be than home, worse things to be than wife and mother, there was no longer any room for her in my father’s life. He had closed his heart and demolished his feelings, incinerating the past in a bonfire of photos and smiling happy times.
So now, even with David and my mother missing, it felt like our complete family was there supporting Raene in her grief. It was impossible to grieve all day. So my father and I continued cutting framing timber, simply to keep busy. My family was brought up to be helpful, though that’s a deceptive word because it doesn’t always mean full of help. A better word would be the German equivalent hilfsbereit - help ready. My family is always ready to help, but when it actually comes to helping, they’re not exactly overflowing with helpfulness. If my brother offers to help carry timber, he won’t just scoop up a heap, stretching his capacity and taking his help to the limit. No, it’s more like - “How much timber should I carry at one time?” “As much as you can.” “How much are you carrying?” “Six or seven boards.” And so the extent, the parameters, of his help are established, after which he’ll carry six or seven boards at a time until all the boards are carried, or he gets a splinter - whichever comes first. A helpful person would test out that 6-7 boards and maybe push it a little to see whether it can be stretched any further. Maybe it’s possible to take it to 8or 9. The fact I quickly realise how meagre my initial estimate was and start moving up to the 10-12 category, doesn’t matter. The helpfulness contract has been signed and cannot be altered by a dozen solicitors.
Slowly everything returned to relative normality. My father returned to Australia, Raene accompanied Crowy’s body back to Liverpool, and Cameron returned to apple-picking. Marion also decided to go back picking another season, her third. It was a decision that was set to rock the very foundations of my life.
Saturday, February 5, 2011
Chapter Five - Right Angles and Fallen Angels
The foundations were finished and, what’s more, within a few millimetres of square and level. Instead of the anticipated trauma and sleepless nights, things had gone very much according to plan. If only life was so easy ...
I was rightly proud of my achievements. But, as yet, I knew I still hadn’t done any real building. I had cut some timber and hammered some nails, but there hadn’t been any serious measuring involved, and it didn’t really matter if I’d cut straight or not. Of course the levels had been important (and I’d spent a fair amount of time adjusting and propping and wedging everything into alignment), but there had been plenty of leeway. Accuracy wasn’t important where nobody would see it, and most of the time I’d been able to first nail the board into position and then cut off the overhang. There was little skill in that.
Now things would be different. Building the framing would not only require precise measurement and straight cutting, but would also involve dreaded angles ... and I still didn’t have an angle thingee.
I’ve always had an ethical problem with straightness. It’s always seemed so unnatural, so uncompromising. A line was either straight, or it wasn’t. There was no middle-ground with straightness, no use insisting it was almost straight. It seemed to belong to an alien flat-earth mentality, and I just couldn’t believe in it, let alone relate to it. How can any line really be straight when the earth is round?
I certainly can’t find its inspiration anywhere around me - the Minzion doesn’t strive to reach the Clutha in record time, and the poplars lining its banks have no desire to be mistaken for barber poles. There are lines everywhere, but no straight ones. Just lines ambling casually between two points, influenced more by the contours of the land and the vagaries of the weather than by any urgent efficiency. The quickest route between any two points may be a straight line, but it’s rarely the most interesting one.
I’ve got just as many problems with straightness’ dark twin - precision. Where did it come from, this uncompromising idea of precision?
Framing is little more than an accumulation of precise, straight lines. So I knew I was in trouble.
But, of course, I not only had my expensive power tools, but my expensive hi-tech workbench. Surely, together, we could cut straight. And I’m sure if I let my powersaw alone, it would continue cutting on its precise way straight into eternity. But I can’t leave it alone. I’m building this damn house, not some pretentious powertool. I just can’t bear to let a machine have all the pleasure. I can’t resist giving it that extra shove as it gnaws its way through the timber. I just want to guide it through, but like an unbroken stallion, it baulks at my touch, leaving me with my now trademark crooked ends.
As for precise measuring ... what’s a few millimetres between friends? It’s not that I consciously don’t try to be precise. I usually measure everything three times - first to get a general idea of the length required, then again to make sure it was a 120 I saw and not a 220, and finally to make sure the number I’m repeating over and over in my head hasn’t somehow been confused by my sister’s phone number or the number of angels who can dance on the head of a four inch nail. But everything fails - often spectacularly (though my determination to reduce waste means every piece of timber, cut correctly or not, will eventually find the right place for it).
So, once I’ve got the piece cut (invariably further handicapped by an unstraight end), it never seems like the right piece. I may have read the wrong side of the tape (cutting inches instead of millimetres, though why tape manufacturers persist in including inches anyway, remains a mystery), or the tape may have been wound around the cat (and no board was cut without first being sniffingly inspected by Momo and Spindle). It’s just never quite the piece I wanted, or expected.
Of course I’d argue this is mainly due to the inherent weaknesses of the equipment. Why does a saw blade need so much space anyway? How am I expected to calculate a distance when the width of the blade has to be counted as well? And by the time I’ve allowed for the blade’s width, I’ve forgotten whether I’m supposed to cut on the line, or beside the line ... and then which side?
But that’s where The Builder’s Seventh Maxim comes in - near enough is good enough. It really doesn’t matter whether or not the framing is precise or your lines are perfectly straight. What really matters is that it’s all roughly accurate. Because wood is such a flexible and forgiving material to work with. It’s always open to compromise and cajoling, and will never hold past transgressions against you. It never demands precision (though it loves to rise to a precise occasion), allowing imperfections to magically embrace and meld together to form an imprecisely precise whole.
The concrete hadn’t yet adequately cured, so I decided to build the frames horizontally in seven easy-to-handle, easy-to-install pieces. With the help of Wallace’s framing guide, it was going to be a piece of cake ...
Because it was going to be so easy, I decided I’d create my own assembly line. I’d cut all the timber I needed for each frame, and then simply hammer it all together. So I cut my bottom plates and my top plates, then all the vertical framing (called studs - building is a very masculine job) allowing double studs at each end and beside each window or door opening. Then there were the literally hundreds of in-between horizontal pieces (normally spaced every 600mm) called dwangs, and above each opening were two vertical dwangs nailed together, but now they were called lintels.
Once it was all cut, hammering it together was a rather straightforward procedure... except for a minor detail - the 100 x 50 No.1 Framing was not (as the name would suggest) 100 x 50. It was, in fact, 95½ x 45½. It used to be 100 x 50, but it had been planed and the corners rounded, reducing its all-round size by a few millimetres. Why nobody bothered to mention that, is beyond me (and if that’s No. 1, I’d hate to see what came second). But such are the vagaries of timber, and The Builder’s Eighth Maxim - no two boards are equal. A single stack of 100 x 50 RS timber will contain various gauges of timber ranging from 97 x 47 through to 103 x 53. The degree of variation also seems to have some correlation to the price of the timber. (As with cheap tools, cheap timber is often radically unreliable.)
But it really didn’t matter too much. Any piece cut within a few millimetres would do (and if I couldn’t even cut that accurately, maybe I shouldn’t be trying to build a house anyway). If it was too long, a few hefty swings of the hammer were often enough to persuade it to fit. If it was too short, I was using 100mm nails (and the framing was only 50mm wide) so there was plenty of support left to close the gap. There was also a strip of steel angle bracing nailed diagonally across the frame to hold it all in place, and once it was covered by weatherboards, or in this case boards and battens, it would be as strong as any precise job. (At least I hoped it was!)
Of course, all of the above is only relevant to straight pieces. Once angles appear, then it’s every person for themself. Right angles aren’t such a problem. If you cut every piece reasonably accurately, once they’re nailed together they can’t be very wrong. And there’s always a square to determine if they’re worth worrying about.
But as for all those other strange angles ...
I never bothered working out the true angle of my roof. Wallace had calculated the length of the angled piece on each end frame, so I cut a piece that length. (If you can’t trust an architect to be accurate, who can you trust?) Once I’d nailed it onto the top of my framing, only then would I cut off the end, thereby creating an angle. An angle I hoped was the right angle, though by no means a right angle ... if you know what I mean.
After two or three weeks of solid work, I had all the frames piled one on top of the other on the old concrete block beside the gate. (The big compensation for not being accurate was that I became fast. Cutting a straight line requires patience, because you have to let the saw cut at it’s own speed, plus you have to ensure each piece is laying firmly and squarely on your cutting surface. But I was willing to compromise accuracy for speed, and nobody was going to criticise any imperfections in my work. Besides, I was going for the rustic look, so there was no such thing as imperfections, only ‘character’.) I’d had a few days assistance from my father, as well, which certainly sped up the process. It’s handy to have an assistant, even if only to pass each new piece across, or to hold the other end of the tape measure (they have a nasty tendency to shoot off, otherwise, and it’s amazing how fast a sharp, steel tape can travel when it wants to...), or collect all the cut pieces together, or a hundred other odd-jobs.
Not that my father had intended to spend his holidays helping me build my house. In fact, his ‘girlfriend’ had only allowed half an hour in her busy travel schedule for such untouristic visits.
(I refuse to use the word ‘stepmother’, despite the appropriate Cinderella overtones. It’s not simply because she’s only a de facto stepmother, anyway, but because the word ‘mother’ seems ludicrous, obscene even, in her presence. ‘Mother’ - even with a step in front of it - invokes a modicum of warmth, but she is an entirely cold-blooded creature. After levering my mother out of an admittedly troubled marriage with inspirational tales of the joys of single life, she’d squeezed herself into our family within six months. Once at the centre of her new web, she’d slowly, and with ruthless efficiency, set about ejecting all dissenting voices to her reign. And I’d been the first to go ...)
But my father wanted to see the building site, and even her sorcery wasn’t powerful enough to deter him. Her most potent incantations, including “If that's what you think, maybe I’m in the wrong house” and “I’ve got a splitting headache”, are highly effective in dispute resolution and chore avoidance, but obviously not as powerful as the lure of sawdust to a life-long home handyman.
So, unable to restrain him, she’d accompanied him on his pilgrimage. She even managed to maintain her veneer of false enthusiasm during the hurried inspection of the site. But once we’d adjourned to the relative comfort of the shed to discuss our plans and catch up on family gossip, she began to reassert her control. My father managed to ignore her restless wandering and evade the regular Oh well’s tossed into the conversation between us for half an hour, but his will was draining as fast as his tea. And by the time his cup was empty, she was sitting in the car with the engine running, bidding her unwelcome farewells from glass-enclosed safety as my father shuffled away.
That was going to be the last we saw of them ... until their travel plans were unexpectedly interrupted.
I was rightly proud of my achievements. But, as yet, I knew I still hadn’t done any real building. I had cut some timber and hammered some nails, but there hadn’t been any serious measuring involved, and it didn’t really matter if I’d cut straight or not. Of course the levels had been important (and I’d spent a fair amount of time adjusting and propping and wedging everything into alignment), but there had been plenty of leeway. Accuracy wasn’t important where nobody would see it, and most of the time I’d been able to first nail the board into position and then cut off the overhang. There was little skill in that.
Now things would be different. Building the framing would not only require precise measurement and straight cutting, but would also involve dreaded angles ... and I still didn’t have an angle thingee.
I’ve always had an ethical problem with straightness. It’s always seemed so unnatural, so uncompromising. A line was either straight, or it wasn’t. There was no middle-ground with straightness, no use insisting it was almost straight. It seemed to belong to an alien flat-earth mentality, and I just couldn’t believe in it, let alone relate to it. How can any line really be straight when the earth is round?
I certainly can’t find its inspiration anywhere around me - the Minzion doesn’t strive to reach the Clutha in record time, and the poplars lining its banks have no desire to be mistaken for barber poles. There are lines everywhere, but no straight ones. Just lines ambling casually between two points, influenced more by the contours of the land and the vagaries of the weather than by any urgent efficiency. The quickest route between any two points may be a straight line, but it’s rarely the most interesting one.
I’ve got just as many problems with straightness’ dark twin - precision. Where did it come from, this uncompromising idea of precision?
Framing is little more than an accumulation of precise, straight lines. So I knew I was in trouble.
But, of course, I not only had my expensive power tools, but my expensive hi-tech workbench. Surely, together, we could cut straight. And I’m sure if I let my powersaw alone, it would continue cutting on its precise way straight into eternity. But I can’t leave it alone. I’m building this damn house, not some pretentious powertool. I just can’t bear to let a machine have all the pleasure. I can’t resist giving it that extra shove as it gnaws its way through the timber. I just want to guide it through, but like an unbroken stallion, it baulks at my touch, leaving me with my now trademark crooked ends.
As for precise measuring ... what’s a few millimetres between friends? It’s not that I consciously don’t try to be precise. I usually measure everything three times - first to get a general idea of the length required, then again to make sure it was a 120 I saw and not a 220, and finally to make sure the number I’m repeating over and over in my head hasn’t somehow been confused by my sister’s phone number or the number of angels who can dance on the head of a four inch nail. But everything fails - often spectacularly (though my determination to reduce waste means every piece of timber, cut correctly or not, will eventually find the right place for it).
So, once I’ve got the piece cut (invariably further handicapped by an unstraight end), it never seems like the right piece. I may have read the wrong side of the tape (cutting inches instead of millimetres, though why tape manufacturers persist in including inches anyway, remains a mystery), or the tape may have been wound around the cat (and no board was cut without first being sniffingly inspected by Momo and Spindle). It’s just never quite the piece I wanted, or expected.
Of course I’d argue this is mainly due to the inherent weaknesses of the equipment. Why does a saw blade need so much space anyway? How am I expected to calculate a distance when the width of the blade has to be counted as well? And by the time I’ve allowed for the blade’s width, I’ve forgotten whether I’m supposed to cut on the line, or beside the line ... and then which side?
But that’s where The Builder’s Seventh Maxim comes in - near enough is good enough. It really doesn’t matter whether or not the framing is precise or your lines are perfectly straight. What really matters is that it’s all roughly accurate. Because wood is such a flexible and forgiving material to work with. It’s always open to compromise and cajoling, and will never hold past transgressions against you. It never demands precision (though it loves to rise to a precise occasion), allowing imperfections to magically embrace and meld together to form an imprecisely precise whole.
The concrete hadn’t yet adequately cured, so I decided to build the frames horizontally in seven easy-to-handle, easy-to-install pieces. With the help of Wallace’s framing guide, it was going to be a piece of cake ...
Because it was going to be so easy, I decided I’d create my own assembly line. I’d cut all the timber I needed for each frame, and then simply hammer it all together. So I cut my bottom plates and my top plates, then all the vertical framing (called studs - building is a very masculine job) allowing double studs at each end and beside each window or door opening. Then there were the literally hundreds of in-between horizontal pieces (normally spaced every 600mm) called dwangs, and above each opening were two vertical dwangs nailed together, but now they were called lintels.
Once it was all cut, hammering it together was a rather straightforward procedure... except for a minor detail - the 100 x 50 No.1 Framing was not (as the name would suggest) 100 x 50. It was, in fact, 95½ x 45½. It used to be 100 x 50, but it had been planed and the corners rounded, reducing its all-round size by a few millimetres. Why nobody bothered to mention that, is beyond me (and if that’s No. 1, I’d hate to see what came second). But such are the vagaries of timber, and The Builder’s Eighth Maxim - no two boards are equal. A single stack of 100 x 50 RS timber will contain various gauges of timber ranging from 97 x 47 through to 103 x 53. The degree of variation also seems to have some correlation to the price of the timber. (As with cheap tools, cheap timber is often radically unreliable.)
But it really didn’t matter too much. Any piece cut within a few millimetres would do (and if I couldn’t even cut that accurately, maybe I shouldn’t be trying to build a house anyway). If it was too long, a few hefty swings of the hammer were often enough to persuade it to fit. If it was too short, I was using 100mm nails (and the framing was only 50mm wide) so there was plenty of support left to close the gap. There was also a strip of steel angle bracing nailed diagonally across the frame to hold it all in place, and once it was covered by weatherboards, or in this case boards and battens, it would be as strong as any precise job. (At least I hoped it was!)
Of course, all of the above is only relevant to straight pieces. Once angles appear, then it’s every person for themself. Right angles aren’t such a problem. If you cut every piece reasonably accurately, once they’re nailed together they can’t be very wrong. And there’s always a square to determine if they’re worth worrying about.
But as for all those other strange angles ...
I never bothered working out the true angle of my roof. Wallace had calculated the length of the angled piece on each end frame, so I cut a piece that length. (If you can’t trust an architect to be accurate, who can you trust?) Once I’d nailed it onto the top of my framing, only then would I cut off the end, thereby creating an angle. An angle I hoped was the right angle, though by no means a right angle ... if you know what I mean.
After two or three weeks of solid work, I had all the frames piled one on top of the other on the old concrete block beside the gate. (The big compensation for not being accurate was that I became fast. Cutting a straight line requires patience, because you have to let the saw cut at it’s own speed, plus you have to ensure each piece is laying firmly and squarely on your cutting surface. But I was willing to compromise accuracy for speed, and nobody was going to criticise any imperfections in my work. Besides, I was going for the rustic look, so there was no such thing as imperfections, only ‘character’.) I’d had a few days assistance from my father, as well, which certainly sped up the process. It’s handy to have an assistant, even if only to pass each new piece across, or to hold the other end of the tape measure (they have a nasty tendency to shoot off, otherwise, and it’s amazing how fast a sharp, steel tape can travel when it wants to...), or collect all the cut pieces together, or a hundred other odd-jobs.
Not that my father had intended to spend his holidays helping me build my house. In fact, his ‘girlfriend’ had only allowed half an hour in her busy travel schedule for such untouristic visits.
(I refuse to use the word ‘stepmother’, despite the appropriate Cinderella overtones. It’s not simply because she’s only a de facto stepmother, anyway, but because the word ‘mother’ seems ludicrous, obscene even, in her presence. ‘Mother’ - even with a step in front of it - invokes a modicum of warmth, but she is an entirely cold-blooded creature. After levering my mother out of an admittedly troubled marriage with inspirational tales of the joys of single life, she’d squeezed herself into our family within six months. Once at the centre of her new web, she’d slowly, and with ruthless efficiency, set about ejecting all dissenting voices to her reign. And I’d been the first to go ...)
But my father wanted to see the building site, and even her sorcery wasn’t powerful enough to deter him. Her most potent incantations, including “If that's what you think, maybe I’m in the wrong house” and “I’ve got a splitting headache”, are highly effective in dispute resolution and chore avoidance, but obviously not as powerful as the lure of sawdust to a life-long home handyman.
So, unable to restrain him, she’d accompanied him on his pilgrimage. She even managed to maintain her veneer of false enthusiasm during the hurried inspection of the site. But once we’d adjourned to the relative comfort of the shed to discuss our plans and catch up on family gossip, she began to reassert her control. My father managed to ignore her restless wandering and evade the regular Oh well’s tossed into the conversation between us for half an hour, but his will was draining as fast as his tea. And by the time his cup was empty, she was sitting in the car with the engine running, bidding her unwelcome farewells from glass-enclosed safety as my father shuffled away.
That was going to be the last we saw of them ... until their travel plans were unexpectedly interrupted.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)