Hammer Head: The Making of a Carpenter (10 page)

“And can you imagine breathing in plastic particles all day?” she said. “You’d hate it!” Mary teased me for my nerves around the stuff we breathed in, but it was comforting that she understood my fears.

“What don’t you like about working with it?”

She looked at me like I had a foot for a head. “Just—”

She didn’t finish the sentence, as though obviousness negated the need for words. Though Mary didn’t articulate it, I think she would’ve said that it’s like using margarine instead of butter—something chemical and false. Something that lacks soul, lacks an essence. “Wood alternative” has the same processed connotations as polyester and substitute sweeteners.

Real wood poses hassles: weather has its way with it, snow and rain and sun break it down. It rots. Mold and mildew grow and spread. Bugs make a meal of it. Slivers of it lodge themselves in the sole of your foot or the tender skin of your palm. Synthetic wood—a composite of plastics and wood product like sawdust and pulp—requires less maintenance than real wood. Though not impervious to the elements, synthetic wood need not be treated or stained or sanded. Wood chewers like termites don’t make it their meal. Synthetic wood does not give you splinters. It’s usually more expensive than real wood at the outset, but possibly less over time because you can ignore it. Try as the manufacturers might, in the laboratories and factories, they haven’t yet succeeded in making fake wood look real. Like a faux-fur coat with a leopard print, the grain in the synthetic wood is a close approximation of what exists in nature, but an approximation is all.

How connected can you feel to something developed in a lab? Is it possible to love something you don’t have to care about? The comforting thing about wood, with its swirling grains, its knots and imperfections, its splinters and its vulnerability, is that we know exactly where it comes from. First there was dirt, a seed, sunlight, and water. Then a tree! A product of nature, and from that tree now there is a wood plank hewn from its trunk. What is polyvinyl chloride or polyethylene or polypropylene? Some people can answer that. But all of us know what a tree is. I also understand they’re a dwindling resource, and I wonder if and when composite wood will come to replace what comes from forests.

In
Mythologies
, Roland Barthes laments the disappearance of wooden toys for ones made of “a graceless material” which “destroys all the pleasure, the sweetness, the humanity of touch.” Wood is “a familiar and poetic substance, which does not sever the child from close contact with the tree, the table, the floor.” He’s talking about kid things, but the argument is the same. A synthetic deck, though easy to maintain, severs our contact with the essential. Run your fingers over a piece of raw wood, a mixing spoon, a banister, and you can sense the vibration of the natural, the warmth of the known, a subtle hum that says
this is of the earth
. Lay your palm on a deck made of PVC; there is no murmuring there, no link to forest shade or pine sap.

To witness the decay of wood on a fence that lines a field, on a forest path’s fallen trunk; to see it changing color, from rich brown-red, paling to gray to green, darkening to black; to see it changing texture, from solid and strong to flaking, chewed by bugs, softened by water, dissolved by time and moisture to a pulpy mess—it comforts us somehow, echoes our own wasting, our own softening and weakening over time. There is no existential comfort to be found in artificial wood, unchanged by time, none of the melancholy that paves our understanding and embrace of time and dying. It’s not that it taunts us with comparative immortality. It speaks nothing.

T
he Brazilian walnut was speaking. As I chopped boards for the steps and the platform of the deck, it spoke. Of weight, of toughness, of time. I basked in the day and the work, the clear sky, and the strength in my arms from months of lifting saws and holding cabinets against walls and hammering. This is so good, I thought: to be outside, to be making this thing you could stand on. The smell of the wood, sweet and charry, reminded me of s’mores. It dusted the skin of my arm and the sleeve of my shirt and I could smell it there, too. In his
Natural History
, Pliny writes that each kind of tree is “immutably consecrated” to its own specific divinity: the myrtle to Aphrodite, the poplar to Hercules. Pliny says the beech was Zeus’s tree; other sources link him with the oak. This wood had the sacred about it, so dense it sinks.

In the midst of this reverie of trees, I moved a little too fast. The miter-saw blade was still spinning when I realized I’d sliced too much off our final full-length plank. It was the last long piece and would run horizontal across the front face of the deck just below the platform. Such a simple mistake—I didn’t take into account the three-quarters of an inch that the top stair had added to the length of the deck. Blood heated my face. I swore under my breath.
You’ve got to be fucking kidding me.

“Mary?”

“Don’t tell me.”

“I can—” but I didn’t know what I could do. Mary had told me once how they used to rib the young guys on the crew by telling them to go grab the board stretcher from the back of the truck. Where was the board stretcher now? I told her what happened.

Mary went to the van and got her pouch of tobacco. She rolled a cigarette and smoked it and looked at the deck. I stayed quiet, my mind blank while Mary’s cooked. In these moments I felt most helpless, shut out of Mary’s thinking, unable to solve—or even think of solving—the problem myself. I was becoming aware of how deeply I relied on Mary to solve problems, have answers, tell me what to do. It was comfortable, in some ways, not having to be responsible for the mental heavy lifting, for the planning or problem solving. It was like riding shotgun on a long drive with a driver you trust—all you have to do is look at the hills and trees at the side of the road while the other person finds the way, makes the right turns, looks out for potholes, avoids hitting squirrels or moose. At some point though, you want to take the wheel yourself, or at least offer to drive a couple miles.

Mary exhaled through the side of her mouth and the smoke drifted toward the window with the mobile inside. Her solution was simple and had taken about a minute to come up with. She picked up a scrap piece of the walnut and placed it vertically on the far left side of the deck. It ran from below the platform to the ground, and it would hide the three-quarter inch gap I’d created on the horizontal piece. Just one extra piece of trim, and the deck actually looked better for it. I should’ve been able to figure it out myself.

“So much of carpentry is figuring out how to deal with mistakes,” Mary said. She’d said it before and she’d say it many times again. Her problem-solving ability, the way she could locate solutions or alternative approaches or work-arounds impressed me over and over, and struck me as maybe the most valuable quality she possessed. It comes in part from a brain suited to puzzling out problems in the physical world. It comes mostly from experience. “Half the job is knowing what to do when something goes wrong.”

A
lot was going wrong. The learning curve had leveled off and the initial exhilaration of the new had given way to the slow climb toward competency with its setbacks and frustrations. More than a year and a half in, I could no longer claim unfamiliarity as an excuse. Some mistakes predate the job: time and moisture have slanted a floor; a previous countertop installer wasn’t so concerned with the concept of level; an overconfident homeowner has tried his hand at wiring; walls have bowed, plaster has swelled, tiles have cracked. But some mistakes are of your own making. Many, in my case.

Mary’s desire for bigger jobs had been answered a couple times over. We got a big kitchen renovation job on a third-floor condo in Jamaica Plain for folks on a short budget. The neighborhood, south of Boston, inspires deep loyalty in its residents. At the Arboretum, the trees are labeled, and it seems like everyone owns a dog. E. E. Cummings, Anne Sexton, and Eugene O’Neill are buried in a nearby cemetery. One store has over seven thousand hats to choose from, and City Feed & Supply has a general-store vibe, with fancy cheese from Vermont, good sandwiches, and a community-shared commitment to sustainability. It’s a sign of the times that the Lucy Parsons Center, a radical bookstore and community space that welcomes all lefty tendencies, moved from Cambridge to Jamaica Plain some years ago.

The condo was bright and airy, with dark and detailed woodwork, large windows, and lots of family photographs on shelves and walls. Nieces and nephews of the couple who owned the place, images from their own childhoods, a woman on a horse looking earnest and focused; another with three kids in snow pants on a sled. The back looked out over a low hill with a beautiful garden shared by the three houses on this tiny dead-end street. The new refrigerator had to be craned into the third floor over the deck at the front—there was no way to get it up the twisting flight of stairs. This was exciting, watching the giant box lifted from the ground, dangling three stories above the sidewalk.

The owners had bought IKEA cabinets, and the whole renovation was being done for about $25k. The job moved along in an orderly way: walls, floors, counters (lovely soapstone, black with streaks of green), and the assembly and installation of those IKEA cabs. It was ten in the morning, we’d been at it for a couple hours, slotting pegs into holes and jamming pieces of smooth laminate together to make cabinet boxes. It was neither boring nor exciting, just something that needed to get done. I moved on to work on a corner cab with a lazy Susan in it. I pieced it together using the wordless directions (sometimes a picture is
not
worth a thousand words; sometimes the right ten words would really, really help). I’d slotted dowels in the right places, secured the walls, top, and bottom, and was drilling to get the Susan to stay where it was supposed to.

But the screw wouldn’t spin itself into the material. It wasn’t wood, but some sort of plastic-laminate something, white and smooth and as resistant to my drilling as steel to a termite. One after another, the screws skidded off in ricochet, bouncing off the counter, onto the stove, down to the new tile floor with large cream-colored twelve-by-twelve tiles. The plick-plink of the metal screw bouncing down to the stovetop annoyed me at first, then infuriated me. Again and again I pressed the drill into the screw, pushed into the impenetrable composite material, and swore. I swore ferociously. Mary, nearby, looked up from attaching doors to lower cabs.

“Try drilling out for it first.”

I heard her but I didn’t
hear
her—the advice didn’t register, didn’t make sense. After all, I was
trying
to drill.

My face flushed. Another screw went bouncing down. I muttered to myself. My shins were sweating. Twenty-five minutes had passed. Not long in the course of the day, but too long to be wrestling with one stupid screw for one lazy Susan. The edges of the shiny screw head, round and flat, bore into the thumb and forefinger of my left hand as I placed it, again, to the drill-bit tip, as though I’d been gripping it there for days, leaving marks in my finger flesh like a too-tight sock leaves rings around your calf. The little screw shined. Light blinked off the metal, reflected the automatic flashlight function of the drill. It was a malevolent sparkle. These tiny enemies didn’t deserve such shine. My upper arm pressed against the inside of the cabinet as I wedged myself into position again. My skin adhered to the surface, so plastic-slick, so hard and artificial, with sweat and anger. Each time the screw twinkled off to the floor meant I had to reposition and peel myself off the cabinet surface, which made a shameful suction sound, another indignity. The rev of the drill, the screamy buzz—dentist office, bones and gums—echoed against the walls of the small chamber of the cabinet, where my whole head was enclosed. The thunk of the drill bit hitting the cabinet after the screw blasted off punctuated each effort like an insult. The smell was warehouse, dust and plastic, like Saran wrap, sanitized and dead, and the faint whisper of heated metal inside the warming drill. My breathing grew unsteady, quick shallow pants followed by deliberate slow inhales through the nose, eyes closed, the thudding in my chest a reminder that I was here right now and did not want to be. “The perversity of inanimate objects.” It was a phrase my father often said, quoting his grandmother, to describe lids that wouldn’t screw back on when you were in a hurry, screw heads too soft for screwdrivers, moments when the dumbness of things outdoes your ability to calmly deal with them. It surfaced on my mind here, the whole situation taking on the air of the perverse.

I put the drill down and reviewed the directions again, with the hope that some new clue would be revealed to me.

“Be smarter than the tools,” Mary said from behind a low bank of cabs on the floor. It was another of her refrains. She used it when the tools or the process or the materials were outsmarting us, weren’t cooperating the way they should, or we were moving too fast, not considering the best or most efficient way to get a thing done. A reminder that we have brains and the ability to reason and the screw is just a screw. A reminder to take a second and think it out. It was usually a helpful thing to hear. It wasn’t now.

I was drilling where the directions told me to drill. I was sure of it. The screw belongs here, I thought. This is what I’m supposed to be doing. What’s wrong with the Susan? What’s wrong with me? Why doesn’t this work? Fuck this screw. Fuck this drill. Fuck this Susan. Fuck IKEA. Fuck me.

Swearing ceased. I was accessing some pre-articulate part of my brain. Huffs, grunts.

“Breathe,” Mary said.

I shot her a dark look through the back of my skull. Breathe? I hated Mary and her advice. I hated the cabinet. I hated the tools. I hated the decision to quit my job where I clicked and tapped and got coffee with people I liked. I hated that I wasn’t smarter than the tools. That I hadn’t learned anything in a year and a half. That my life now involved peeling my sweaty arm flesh off a surface with a vaguely sexual sound. And I hated cheap Scandinavian design.