Column by Hal Walter
Mountain life – October 2003 – Colorado Central Magazine
I’VE HEARD IT SAID that in today’s economy one must diversify. The assumption, of course, is that there is an economy in the first place. The trouble is, when one has spent 20-odd years writing and editing for a living, and lives in scenic Custer County, the options seem rather limited. And I don’t have a stock portfolio like some of my neighbors.
Other than spending money that I have made by exporting words to places like New Jersey, Phoenix and Pueblo, I really haven’t participated in the other side of the local economy much since … well, since I moved to Custer County 18 years ago.
Everyone should know how to earn an honest living, and now is as good a time to start as any. At an age when many people have a “mid-life crisis” I began to survey the options. Since the key word here is “honest,” I quickly ruled out things like running for office or selling real estate. Instead I looked for a way to use my hands and clear my mind, preferably outdoors.
My friend Harry is building a house for a customer southwest of Westcliffe. One day he called and asked if I might help him out. His usual sidekick, Kevin, who commutes from Salida, was going to be out of town for a few days and he needed someone to hand up tools and materials when he was on the roof, and to hold boards while he cut them or fastened them into place.
Well, I took shop class in high school and I can operate a few power and hand tools. I possess good math skills. I also know how to construct both simple and complex sentences of English words, so constructing things of wood should be no problem.
Harry is a German cowboy who literally rode into Custer County on a horse several years ago. He never left. After working as a wrangler and guide for a local outfitting business, he took up construction and is now building his second house. It’s an octagon-shaped structure going up on the Wet Mountain Valley floor.
We agreed that I would work “part-time, whenever.” This meant when I could fit it in with my other “real” work. So one afternoon after a morning of writing and editing some marketing copy, I drove on over to the “job site.” It was easy to find, being the only yurt on steroids growing out of the plain to the southwest of the Clusterplex.
Harry seemed happy to see me, and minutes later I was hard at work bucking 4×8-foot “OSB” siding up to him on the roof. I would heave the board up over my head, then scramble up a ladder to hold it in place while Harry screwed the thing down with a drill. Harry doesn’t believe in nails. The heaving was easy, but holding the board in place while bracing my body against the walls and trying to keep the slippery ladder under my feet was difficult. I’m not so much afraid of heights as I am of losing my footing.
HARRY IS A PERFECTIONIST, so the fact of the matter is I never touched a tool while he was there other than to hand it to him. I was mostly lifting, fetching, and holding things, and also enjoying the physical labor outdoors even though it paid less than half what I normally make at the computer — work which by the way was falling by the wayside.
And so it went for two afternoons. Then we got rained out and Harry had to get ready for his own vacation the following week. But Kevin would be back Monday. Could I help him out?
So the following week I met Kevin at the job site. The first day I noticed that Kevin and I were a little off on our communication planes, and later wondered if we were both more accustomed to working with Harry. Everything smoothed out by the next day and we quickly had the sub-roofing headed toward completion. Also, without the supervision of a certain European perfectionist, I had started to actually use the tools. This speeded things up a bit, as I could cut smaller boards and hand them to Kevin while he operated the drill.
With the octagon’s sub-roofing nearly complete, we moved on to build a beam and rafters for the connected mudroom, a rectangular structure that butted up against one of the octagon’s walls. Everything was going quite well until we started to put the OSB on the mudroom roof. The square end was no problem, but as we approached the intersection of the sloping square roof to the slant of the sloping octagonal triangle, I could feel pangs of miscommunication starting to arise again.
Kevin was envisioning smaller pieces, squares and triangles, that would fill the remaining space as we approached the angle. He even put one piece of OSB up at an angle. This was the most conservative approach and it would have worked just fine. It would be covered by metal roofing anyway.
However, I could see in my mind single sheets of OSB with the appropriate angle cut to fit flush with the slope of the octagon roof. When I mentioned this to Kevin he said that whenever he and Harry tried to do things like that it just never seemed to work.
I climbed up on the ladder and looked at the situation. The mudroom roof angled down one way. The octagon roof angled another. And the place they would meet would be on yet another plane. My head was spinning and it wasn’t from standing on a high ladder.
I lied about the math skills earlier. I can’t even balance my own checkbook. What I should have said instead of “math” was “geometry.” Here I really shine, thanks to Mrs. France, my geometry teacher.
I paid close attention to Mrs. France, as did most of the other adolescent boys in the class. She was widely rumored to be a former Playboy Playmate and one classmate even bragged that he had the actual magazine, although this evidence was never produced. Years later, I have serious doubts that either of those claims were true, but somehow the mystery made the subject of geometry more interesting.
IN PARTICULAR, the subject of triangles stuck in my mind. Mrs. France had somehow impressed upon me that if one of the three angles was set, and the lengths of two sides were also determined, then you could easily determine the length of the third side and the other two angles. Or something like that.
I thought about all of this while Kevin and I made some measurements. Then I went down to cut the OSB. I held my breath as I handed the first quadrangle up to Kevin, and waited for the cussing. But instead of cursing I could have sworn I heard head-scratching, followed by the sound of the drill. The sheet fit. I quickly cut two more sheets using the scrap from the first one as a template for the angle.
When they were all up, Kevin came down from the ladder and we walked away from the house and admired our handiwork from a distance. It looked like something actual professionals had done. We laughed.
Later that day, as I cleaned up the scraps in the mudroom, I saw a strange, longish insect darting quickly across the floor. I knelt down to get a closer look and my suspicions were confirmed — it was a small praying mantis. In all my years in Custer County I have never seen one of these bugs here. Fearing the insect would be crushed in the construction bustle, I carefully place my hands to form a wall around the mantis, and was able to get it to climb up on one of my fingers.
I placed the praying mantis in an empty windowsill of the mudroom and felt it was an omen. I have been writing since I was 8 years old, and since it’s the easiest way I know to make money I’ll probably never quit. But carpentry may be another honest money-making option. For now I’m hoping Harry and Kevin want to keep me on “part-time, whenever.”
Hal Walter writes from a house not of his own construction in the Wet Mountains.
