When Rick tore the aluminum off the side of our house he discovered that the “tin men,” as he called them, had cut off many of the beam ends—the architectural signature of our small 1912 Craftsman cottage. So Rick got on the phone and started looking for 6” X 6” rough sawn beams.
“This is going to be a challenge,” announced Rick, who liked to declare his challenges ahead of time so that we might fully appreciate his brilliant solutions. He’d already built us a breakfast nook. Next he managed to find a moron willing to crawl on his stomach in the black widow infested crawl space under our house to jackhammer the dirt out so another, slightly smarter guy, could also crawl under and tack insulation under the floor.
Now we were starting the big project and under very frightening conditions—"time and materials."
Our consolation was that Rick, a perfectionist, would get it done right, if not on time. The small cottage had been wrapped in aluminum sometime in the sixties. This was probably in lieu of painting, for when we pulled the metal from the soffits, fascia and beams, three colors hung like pages from a book.
“Archeoarchitectural history,” said Rick. “First it was a gold and then a yellow. Finally, maybe in the fifties, they sprayed on the gray. Probably sprayed it on over the dust by the way it’s coming loose.”
The roof was shot—three layers of composition turning to grit. And on the small roof over the kitchen were piles of raccoon shit filled with cherry pits.
“They’re climbing up that cherry tree on the side of the house,” Rick told me. I got my crosscut saw and terminated the raccoon’s cherry tree ladder to the stars.
The view from the roof was magnificent. We looked directly down on the village where the tourists walked from restaurants to the plays. Across the valley, looming above Interstate 5, was Grizzly Peak, my favorite mountain. I could see Grizzly from inside the house and from the yard but from this perch the view was unobstructed by my neighbor’s roof. Rick pondered and thought and measured while I, his employer and loyal assistant, wrote down numbers. I had no skill in this line of work. Not that I hadn’t done some roofing. One summer during college I worked for the U.S. Forest Service and our crew re-roofed all the buildings in the compound. But I couldn’t remember how we did it. I was glad now that our cottage roof wasn’t so steep, as in the intervening years a vertigo had begun to affect me when I looked over the edge of things. My legs would weaken and my scrotum would tingle, an unnerving sensation.
I had agreed to be the clean up guy and would also hand Rick stuff. This was my both job description and job title. I was a “handrick.” I’d had better titles in my career like Major, Vice-President, General Manager and, even President. The thing I had learned in business was that titles really didn’t mean too much if you weren’t happy with what you were doing so I had tossed it all in, took an early retirement, and floated on my small parachute down to Ashland, Oregon, convincing my wife that we could simplify our lives and take a rest from a faster lane. She loved this small house with its Craftsman charm and had undertaken a study of the Craftsman Movement determined that we would restore it to its original state. She had her eye on one of those plaques which say “Historic Register”.
If Rick had lived in 1912 he would certainly have been building this kind of house, with its carefully planned spaces and natural materials. We had just under 1000 sq. ft but it was all usable unlike our recently sold 4000 sq. ft home which by comparison didn’t seem as big.
“We’re going to have to manufacture the ship lap ourselves,” Rick told me.
I wasn’t listening. I was somewhere up on Grizzly Peak, looking for morels.
“Ship lap,” was all I heard. “What do you need?” I asked thinking maybe he wanted me to get him something and that shiplap was some sort of derogatory term that craftsmen used to get the attention of handricks like myself. Rick was holding a rotted piece of tri-colored board.
“This is shiplap,” he told me holding it close to my face. I could smell the must of the dry rot and could poke my finger through the board.
“It’s 4 and 3/4 inches. No one’s going to be able to mill this in less than two weeks and we don’t need that much. Maybe 800 board feet. There’s a lot of water damage on the soffits. That’s where this piece came from.
So we went to the lumber yard and Rick culled through a new shipment of cedar boards which were twelve inches wide. Then, he got the guys at the yard to saw them—rip them was, I think, the proper terminology. I helped pull the boards off the end of the saw and tried to look like a carpenter. But those guys knew I was only a handrick because my leather gloves were brand new. The next step was to set up our own little saw mill and make the cedar into shiplap. But before we did that we met up with Big Dog and Roger.
Rick had an eye for detail and authenticity. He was concerned about those beam ends and went to some effort to find a source of beams which could be the final touch on the restoration project. He got a line on some beams which had been salvaged from an old sawmill. We took his old pickup and drove up toward White City to get the beams. Rick was excited. New beams, he told me would twist and crack. You couldn’t get good lumber anymore. The old lumber was all from old growth and they’d cut that all down except for the small patches that the environmentalists were fighting to save. It was hard to get good lumber. The new stuff was crap.
At White City we discovered that the beams weren’t even at a lumber yard. They were stacked in a lot next to a boat sales establishment. There were lots of beams in separate stacks and most were covered by a piece of tin to protect them from the weather. In the back of the yard was a little brown job shack—the office—which was about big enough for two people. There were two desks jammed together and they filled the space. No one was in the office so Rick said we should look around and see if we could find our beams. I followed him holding my gloves which I was ready to put on immediately if I had to touch something. Rick had his tape measure. Like all really good carpenters he could hold his tape out fifteen or twenty feet without it bending. I couldn’t do that. My tape would always bend in the middle. Rick pointed to a stack of beams and told me they were 6” X 8”s. The plan was we would buy the 6” X 8”s and rip them down to the 6” X 6”s we needed.
We started lifting up the beams and moving them around. We were, I guessed, looking for good ones. That’s when Roger walked up. I’d seen him driving a forklift at the other end of the lot. But now he was standing next to us in his torn white T shirt, ripped Levi’s and engineer’s boots.
“Can I be of any help to you fellows?” he wanted to know.
He has a nice customer service attitude, I thought to myself as Roger stood there smiling at us. He was a tall guy, slim with a bit of a gut and a very red face. He looked kind of blurry but I realized he hadn’t shaved and his whiskers were blond. I couldn’t guess his age. Maybe he was thirty-five. Maybe he was fifty. I couldn’t tell.
“I called about the 6” X 8”s”, said Rick. “I was told I could get some 6” X 8”s for $1.60 a foot.”
“Well, them’s the 6” X 8”s you got your foot on,” said Roger. “How many you want?”
“Can we get them for $1.60 a foot?”
“You’ll have to talk to the Big Dog about that,” replied Roger who said ‘Big Dog’ with such reverence that I thought he was talking about someone of great importance. “Big Dog’ll be back in a minute.” Roger turned as a new Ford pickup pulled into the yard. “That’s him now.”
The driver of the pickup got out and walked the short distance to where we were. He wasn’t that big, but he was very friendly and gracious and discussed with Rick what he had in inventory and what his prices were. They walked away to another stack of beams leaving me with Roger.
“What are you doing with the beams?” Roger wanted to know. I explained what had happen to our beam ends when the tin men had wrapped our house and how Rick wanted to find rough sawn lumber to match the rest of the beams and boards.
Roger turned his back to Rick and his boss and leaning his head close to mine he told me very confidentially, “I’ve got a little sandblasting business on the side.”
I thought I detected a whiff of alcoholic fragrance.
Roger continued in a whisper, “Big Dog don’t want me soliciting customers for my business but a guy has got to make a living. I can make anything look rough sawn. I just give a light blast of sand. Rough it up a bit.”
Roger’s breath was giving me more than a light blast and I was relieved that Rick and the owner were heading back our way. The owner told us to take all the time we wanted going through the beams. He said he was going to be gone for about a half and hour but Roger could help us load the truck. He walked to his truck and drove off. Roger stood there smiling at us. He looked like big kid. A big kid was what you would expect to find working in a place like this. It wasn’t exactly a career position. He was just another galoot who could run a forklift and work a saw and lift stuff.
“Fellows,” announced Roger. “It’s lunch time for me and I’ve got to walk down to the Ranch Market and get my lunch and get some peaches or nectarines for Big Dog. He’ll be back soon and I always like to get him some fruit to eat while we have our after lunch talk. We always have a talk after lunch. It’s very important. The Big Dog is like a second father to me.”
Rick and I didn’t know what to say about this rather long speech except, “See you when you get back.”
Roger walked out of the yard and out of sight. He seems like kind of a sweet guy was Rick’s observation.
Rick got busy culling beams. He was good at culling wood. This was a more difficult job than culling the cedar. The cedar had evidenced knots and splits which were easy to see but these beams had some mileage on them. Big Dog, we were calling him that now, had told Rick how he salvaged 4,000,000 feet of lumber from a sawmill in Northern California. The mill had been built in 1908 to cut old growth from the slopes of Mt. Shasta. What we saw was all that was left of that mill. It was theoretically possible that the wood in our house had come from the same old mill. It was with some seriousness then that Rick carefully selected beams. My job was to help him turn them over. That was my only job as Rick did all the selecting. The truth was I didn’t completely understand the concept of why were getting these beams. All I understood was that an eight foot long beam was going to cost about $10.00 and Rick had in about a half hours time set aside about $150 worth of beams which we were loading into the pickup.
We had the truck loaded by the time Roger came back. He was walking a bit sideways and eating a white bread sandwich which was made of baloney and grated cheese. Mayo oozed from the corners of his mouth. He tried to put one foot on the back bumper of the pickup. It took him two tries. He rested the elbow of his sandwich holding hand on his knee and took a large bite of the unappetizing lunch. Three or four shards of cheese fell and stuck on the flat bumper of the truck. Roger retrieved them with his unoccupied hand and put them in his mouth.
It was our lunch time too and we were loaded, wanting to head for home. Rick had spent an hour picking only the best looking beams and we had lifted, turned, stacked, restacked and lifted again to make sure we had the best ones. Rick wasn’t feeling too well. He had hurt himself trying to get the tailgate on the old pickup to lock. He had slammed it and slammed it again but it wouldn’t lock. Then he had kicked it. It hadn’t moved. Then he karate kicked it. It still wouldn’t lock. I had stepped forward and leaned over the gate to see if I could see what was holding it up. Actually, I had no idea what I was looking for. It was busy work on my part. Trying to help but not knowing what to do. Out of my element with things mechanical. I heard Rick grunt and looked to my right. It was a scene from a cartoon. Rick’s right foot kicked at the tailgate, his left foot—the push off foot—slipped, he kicked into the airspace above the tailgate. He levitated to a horizontal position, then dropped hard onto the gravel of the yard landing on his back. A thud; an exhalation of wind. He leaped to his feet in an almost bounce and walked briskly past me as if to convince me it really hadn’t happened. But it had. He had been momentarily airborne; in level flight.
He began the analysis. His left foot had slipped. The gravel. It was stupid. A mistake. He sat down feeling dizzy. I had him put his head between his knees. Rick gathered himself but by the time Roger showed up he was in no mood to deal with some dude who had drunk his lunch at the Ranch Market and was disappointed because Big Dog had missed their traditional noontime father and son chat. Rick was done culling and wanted to go back to my house where he’d left his lunch box.
Roger, however, was telling us about his sandblasting operation. He’d done a ‘68 Camaro the night before and was hoping the guy would come pick it up tonight and pay him off. He’d told the guy he’d be staying over at his girlfriend’s house and hoped he’d be able to find him with the money. Oh, the sandblasting business wasn’t that great but it was OK. Gave him some extra money above what Big Dog paid him for working in the salvage yard. He ought to quit and go at sandblasting full time but The Big Dog was real good to him. Like a father. The worst thing was they took his driver’s license.
“I got a DUI, you know. It was two years ago. I went to the classes and did all the stuff they told me but they won’t give it back. The sonsabitches.”
Rick got in the truck and drove it over to the job shack and parked. The back was weighted down with ten beams. I had the list on a piece of paper. There were eight 6” X 8”s, one 6” X 6” and a 3” X 8”. Rick had measured them and I had written them down.
“Life’s a bitch,” Roger told me as we walked to the office.
“I could sandblast something for you,” he said kind of sorrowfully. Rick was standing by the door of the pickup scowling. I felt sorry for Roger. He was a drunk, had a crummy job and no drivers license. He did have a girl friend but she was probably from the bottom of the barrel too. He seemed like a good soul. But he didn’t have much going for him. Just Big Dog and his sandblasting business. I felt the need to connect with him.
“Have you ever sandblasted a fireplace?” I asked him.
“Sure,” said Roger.
“I mean, someone painted out our river rock fireplace,” I told him by way of explanation. “Is that something you could do?”
Roger stood up a little straighter. “Sure,” he said. “That would be easy.”
“How would you protect the place?” I asked him.
“I’d just turn the pressure down low. Just give it a touch. You know; a kiss. I’d just blast it enough to knock that paint off of there.”
“But how would you protect the house?” I wanted to know. “How would you keep the sand from messing up the living room?”
Roger stepped back and took a deep breath and leaned against the fender of the pickup. I could see a half empty quart of beer just inside the office door.
“You mean the house is habitated?” he asked.
“Yes, of course it is,” I told him. “We live there.”
“I can’t do it if it’s habitated,” he said.
“We want to pay you and get on the road,” Rick said to Roger.
“The Big Dog will be back momentarily,” said Roger.
“Come on Roger,” I said to him. “You can handle it. There’s only ten beams. I’ve got them all written down. Just price them out and I’ll write you a check.”
“Oh no,” said Roger. “I’ll have to measure them. The last time I didn’t measure them and Big Dog got really upset with me. I’m going to go get my tape and a piece of paper.”
But instead of going directly for his tape he walked behind the 12” X 12”s and took a leak.
When he returned he couldn’t get his tape to stand up straight like a real carpenter. It kept bending and Roger cursed. After some effort he managed to measure and record on a dirty scrap of paper the results of our culling of the beams and we adjourned to the office to complete the transaction.
As I noted before, the office was furnished with two desks pushed side by side. Each desk had a chair. There was a phone, a plug-in calculator with a tape and a handheld calculator. Above the desks was a bulletin board with various scraps pinned to it—notes, business cards and phone numbers. On the right hand wall was a white board which had dimensions of lumber and prices. The office didn’t look like much but from my previous business experience I knew you often couldn’t read the book by it’s cover. A guy selling used beams doesn’t need to make a big impression. Big Dog salvaged 4,000,000 feet of lumber from that old mill. If he just averaged $.50 a foot he would gross $2,000,000. Depending on what he had paid for it, he could be a very big dog indeed. Observing businesses and how they operated was almost a hobby for me. There clearly wasn’t a training program going on here. It took Roger a long time to find the receipt book and get settled into Big Dog’s chair. I sat in Roger’s chair; where he sat while Big Dog ate those peaches and acted fatherly. Rick stood in the doorway first on one foot then on the other rubbing his back with both hands, cranky with hunger. I checked the board for prices and computed that I owed $134.80 for my ten beams.
Roger found a pen. He pulled the calculator over to him and squared up the receipt book. He unfolded the dirty piece of paper with the dimensions of our beams on it and laid it on the desk next to the receipt book. He began to transfer the information from the dirty paper to the receipt book one item at a time. Instead of lumping all the beams of similar dimensions, he wrote down each one separately, his face bent close to the desk. After writing down each dimension he would turn and look at the white board for a price. There were essentially two prices—$.90 for a 6” X 6” and $1.60 for a 6” X 8”. We had one 3” X 8” which was $.60.
It was a painful experience watching Roger trying to account for the ten beams, struggling to come up with the answer which would please the boss. Rick and I exchanged glances. I held up my paper showing him the $134.80 total. He nodded. Roger labored on. Then the Ford pickup rolled up to the office in a cloud of dust.
When Big Dog stepped into the office, Roger automatically got up to give him his seat and I relinquished my chair to Roger taking Rick’s spot on in the doorway. Rick went on outside to look at wood.
Big Dog wanted to know how it was going. I told him we’d found what we wanted. We had the ten beams in the truck.
“No. No!” Big Dog suddenly shouted at Roger in a loud clear voice. “Don’t do it that way. You’ve got that invoice all screwed up. Write all the 6” X 6”s on one line and the 6” X 8”s on another. How many 3” X 8”s do they have?”
Roger was turning to look at the white board again to get another price.
“God dammit Roger, there’s only three prices! Write ‘em down next to the entry here on the invoice and you won’t have to look every time.”
Roger was sort of protecting the invoice with his right hand trying to keep Big Dog away from it. He pulled the calculator over to him and began to tentatively punch some numbers. He couldn’t get the calculator to clear. Big Dog was unsettled by the inefficiency of his key employee and made a move to take the calculator away from Roger. But Roger made a keen ninety degree turning maneuver in his secretary’s chair, hunched his shoulders and deflected Big Dog’s grab move.
“Give me the goddamn thing,” demanded Big Dog.
“No,” said Roger, punching furiously on the calculator. “I’ll do it. I’m pissed off now.”
Big Dog was flustered but resilient. There were clearly some holes in his corporate training program and I sensed he was making a mental note for his next lunch time counseling session with Roger. Big Dog grabbed the electric calculator and turned it on. It wouldn’t fire up. I glanced at Roger’s invoice. He had already made a $60 dollar mistake on the 6” X 8”s and I suddenly was wrestling with a moral dilemma. Would I point out the error or let it ride; make it part of Roger’s career development program, so to speak. Then I noticed that Big Dog had his own invoice book out and was beginning to record the information on our purchase by looking over Roger’s shoulder. Roger gave him a look of disdain. A look which expressed his belief that Big Dog was cheating.
The battle of the invoices was on. Roger had the calculator, but Big Dog was a businessman. He could add up a series of numbers. Roger couldn’t concentrate. He kept looking at Big Dog’s progress. Big Dog’s invoice was filling up with numbers. Roger was defeated. He placed the calculator on the desk and got up and went outside. He didn’t say anything. Just left the office, teetering ever so slightly.
I paid the bill. Big Dog’s total was the same as mine. Big Dog thanked us for doing business with him. Told Rick to come back if he needed anything else. Roger was sort of hiding behind the job shack pretending to stack some wood.
We drove off toward the freeway with a full load of beams. Rick couldn’t decide if he wanted to eat first or go to the chiropractor. He didn’t think he’d be able to help me unload the beams. I told him I’d figure something out.
“I really feel sorry for Roger,” he said when we were almost home.
A week later Rick sent me back to get some pine 6” X 6”s which he’d noticed while the rest of us were working on invoices. He told me it’s what we should have got in the first place but Big Dog hadn’t told him about them. I had planned to get there before lunch but didn’t make it until mid-afternoon. When I pulled into the yard I could see Roger teetering near a stack of beams. Big Dog wasn’t in sight. I walked over to Roger who, if he recognized me, showed no evidence of it. It was a cool October day but Roger seemed comfortable in his white torn T shirt. His face was explosively red.
“Where’s the boss man?” I asked him.
“He’s here somewhere,” said Roger. “That’s his wife’s new car.” He nodded at a brand new Explorer. He walked quickly away.
Then I saw Big Dog and an attractive lady walking toward the office. When she left I asked about the pine. Big Dog wanted to know how many I needed.
“Only six ,” was what I told him. “I can’t let you cull through them because they’re on top of the stack,” was what he told me. That was okay. I didn't know how to cull anyway.
We left the office and he hollered at Roger.
“Get the forklift and your loppers.”
It was a crisp, clear command and Roger turned and walked away returning in a minute with the forklift. Big Dog told Roger to get out, which he promptly did. Big Dog drove the forklift up to a tall stack of beams.
“Get on the fork, Roger, god dammit,” he said, “and I’ll lift you up to those pine shoulders. Snap that metal band and pull six of them onto the fork.”
Roger stepped onto the left fork of the machine.
Oh my God I thought. Call OSHA. Roger is going to die. But, he didn’t die—this time anyway. He snapped the metal band and tossed the six beams onto the fork balancing twelve feet up in the air like a Walenda, a sad, six foot three inch, two hundred and ten pound working man with no driver’s license, a backbreaking job and a girlfriend who allegedly let him sleep over.
I liked the way Roger looked up there tiptoeing on the metal blade of the lift, silhouetted against the crisp October sky, tossing those beams around, displaying what was left of his agility. He could still do some stuff. He wasn’t dead yet. He had his sandblasting business. And, of course, he had Big Dog.
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