Bird Karma

Not a bad day for a Thursday, although I woke up on the couch, either having crashed there before I could make it to bed, or having been exiled for another bout of snoring in the middle of the night, I have no idea which. Either way it’s not so bad, it’s comfortable enough. But it means that I have to wake up when the wife gets going, instead of an hour later when Matt Lauer shows up to tell me what to worry about today. 

We’re both quiet in the morning (The wife and I, not Matt Lauer. That guy will not shut up), so there’s not much conversation, just the shuffle of feet and the burbling of the coffee pot. On a good day, I get a cup down my gullet before I head out the door, but on most days I choke it down on the way to pick up my business partner for the day’s work. Which means at least a couple of swallows wind up in my lap as I slalom around the morons and school buses that contrive to make me late. Hot coffee in the lap is actually more effective at waking me up than drinking it, but I think the Surgeon General would frown upon that use.

Today we headed deep into the backwoods for a siding job. We live in a smallish town, but the place we’re headed to makes it seem like a bustling metropolis. It’s about a thirty minute drive down a country road that rolls along the McKenzie River, running parallel to the railroad track through increasingly rugged terrain. In the Midwest, they might call these mountains, but here in Oregon they’re just hills. The outlying edges of the Cascade mountain range that bisects the State into east and west. The further we go, the more sparse the houses become and the larger the plots of land delineated behind skeins of barbed wire become. The traffic is mostly log trucks, freighted with bundles of Cedar and Douglas Firs for the local mills. These guys are paid by the load, which means they drive like madmen so I always yield the right of way.

After we pass through the so-called town of Jasper, really just a wide-spot with a gas station and general store, it’s on to the turnoff for the town of Fall Creek. Population 120. As we depart the alluvial flood plain of the river and head into the foothills, the trees begin to tower over us creating a verdant canopy over the road. From the air, the furrowed draws, arroyos, and saddles look like folds in rough green cloth. The buildings are older back here, where homesteaders started driving stakes into their claims a hundred and fifty years ago.

There are random smatterings of outhouses and barns. Cows, horses, sheep, and the odd herd of alpaca populate the softly rolling hills. One of the barns, which we refer to as Wavy Gravy, is so old and decrepit that it’s begun to implode on itself. The ramshackle leaning and sagging of its roof and walls has bent the shingles into long squiggles that make it seem that a wave is moving down the length of the barn. That means it’s time to make the turn up the rutted gravel driveway that leads to today’s jobsite. It’s helpful to have memorable landmarks like that, since there are a thousand little ruts, paths and roads that disappear back into the trees never to emerge again. 

The house we’re re-siding is a rental, and it shows. It hasn’t seen a lick of maintenance in ten years, if it’s been a day. The old cedar shingles are just dated as hell, and there’s a patina of algae over every smooth surface. The landlord is trying to get the place refinanced so we’re throwing a facelift onto the old beast, using a stack of siding that he’s cobbled together over the last year or so to do it. It’s a mix and match jigsaw puzzle of primer colors and grain textures, which pretty much equates to a white-trash camouflage in these parts. The siding is covered in mud and footprints from laying around under drippy eaves on various pieces of property that he owns for the past who-knows-how-many months. Years, even. It kind of hurts my heart to be involved in this kind of haphazard project, thrown together in such slapdash fashion. I think it’s against my religion or something. But the landlord pays cash on the spot, which covers a multitude of sins in any religion. Especially mine.

The renters are all quite amiable, although I can’t believe how many of them are shoehorned into the little cracker box.  A couple of times, we hear one of the couples screaming things at each other, followed by a spray of gravel being thrown from the tires of a car leaving angrily. That’s one of the strange parts about working in and around other people’s homes; you’re pretty much living with them, so manners wear thin pretty quickly. They have a legion of dogs, Labs all. Seems like I see a new one every day, and never the same one twice. The tenants come out a couple of times a day for smokes, and always make conversation with us. They’ll be painting the siding when we’re done to earn credit toward their rent, so they have a vested interest in us finishing in a timely fashion, since the good weather is supposedly coming. No sign of it so far. The rain has been pretty much relentless.

It’s never much fun working in the rain, although in Oregon there’s pretty much no other choice. If you wind up doing this kind of work for any length of time, you have to invest in some quality rain gear. The first year I tried a variety of cheap stuff, shying away from the daunting sticker shock of the higher-end wear. But you either end up rain-soaked from the poor quality, or sweating to death inside the hermetically sealed envelope, and then you’re soaked anyway. Eventually you realize that this is your life, and spending one third of it in wet misery is ridiculous. Either get busy getting an indoor job, or get serious about being outdoors and pony up the four hundred bucks for the good gear.

My business partner and I set a decent pace, but tend toward the methodical rather than the expeditious, especially in this kind of weather. He’s a couple of years older than me, and we’ve known each other forever. In fifteen years, I can still count on one hand the number of times I’ve seen him in a bad mood. I’m pretty level headed, but next to him I’m a moody hot-head. I’m the planner and the cut man, while he installs the product and finds all the things I lose in my absent minded ways. Seriously, he once found a metal cog from a tool that I dropped in someone’s garden. It was a disc the size of a dime, and brown in color. The tool was useless without it, and I looked for almost an hour. He found it in the brown dirt in less than five minutes.  I refer to him as the “work wife," and he and my actual wife have an alarming number of traits in common. They even drive me crazy for the exact same reasons. I can actually finish my own sentences from time to time, although neither of them seems to think so. Nonetheless, we get along well and he keeps my coffee cup full when we’re on the road.

The rain has pretty much turned this whole place into a mud pit. And I'm talking country mud here, not like the slippery stuff in your average suburban garden. This is the ancient, glacial flow mud that the wheels of civilization sink into and grind to a halt. It splatters onto everything and just walking back and forth from the cut table to the work area throws up enough muddy blowback to paint me brown from the knees down. The viscous quagmire also conducts electricity, a fact which I was reminded of today when an extension cord fell down into the mud soup at my feet, and proceeded to light me up with inducted voltage. It was like my exposed skin had been plunged into an anthill. Not really painful, but disconcerting and uncomfortable until I figured out what the cause was. As if spinning blades, pneumatic nail guns, and heights weren’t enough. Now even the mud and random electrons are turning on me. Aces.

We’re working to finish up the siding project that the landlord and some of his motley collection of friends and weekend warriors began. Which means we pretty much have to pick a point to start making things right again, and find a way to blend out their amateurish efforts.  If DIY TV could really teach you to do it, guys like me wouldn’t have a job. Or as they say on jobsites the world over, “That’s why girls don’t play the game, coach.” It’s hard to tell sometimes where it’s their screw ups and where it’s just some rather serious imperfections in the structure itself. It’s undergone some significant remodels and additions during the course of what appears to have been a very rough life. I almost think that this shanty began its life as a chicken coop back when my grandpa was still a gleam in his own daddy’s eye. I’ve run into stranger things on the job before.

Once, we gutted a house to the studs after a fire and found that literally only seven studs in the house were single piece from floor to ceiling. The whole rest of the structure was made of random parts and pieces scabbed together to cobble up a Frankenhouse. It’s like that out here in the country, where they ain’t got no fancy Home Depot. Sometimes things really are made entirely of bailing wire and duct tape. 

Conversely, I’ve opened up some walls to find delights, historical curiosities, and numinous talismans: newspapers from the McKinley era, circa 1896; Bible verses and Satanic prayers scribbled in crayon or laboriously carved inside wall cavities; glyphs and arcane symbols scrawled in attics, basements, and dead spaces. Like our houses are really just time capsules, waiting to be opened. Secret historical archives being curated unbeknownst by homeowners, until some disaster or change of plans breaks open these veiled vaults, exposing the curious tidbits of their antiquity.

Lots of things are different about working this far out into the middle of nowhere. Running to the store is not really an option, and there’s no bathroom. Unless you’re a dude. Then the world is your urinal. Around the same time everyday, sometime in the two o’clock hour, a jackass brays for about a minute. Not my business partner, mind you. An actual jackass. No idea why. The horses all get it in their head to take off running any time the rain quits for more than twenty minutes, which it does for some stretches in the mid-morning and again in the afternoon. I guess they’re trying to shake off the wet and cold? I have no actual idea how things work out here. I was raised in LA, so this is as alien to me as any sci-fi landscape.

It’s kind of nice out here though, all things considered. Mud and jackasses aside, the ground and hillsides are covered in thickets of blackberries, ferns, and honeysuckle that make the air smell like you could eat it. The half dozen or so cars that roll out and then back in during the weekday are all populated by amiable people. Without exception, every single person that comes by smiles and waves. It’s confusing at first, this senseless friendliness. Do I know these people? What the hell are they smiling about? Still, I could get used to it. On one of the adjacent properties there’s a couple of farmgirls that come out every day to feed the horses and work on a tractor that never seems to go anywhere. It makes me think of that great line from the John Denver song, “Grandma’s Feather Bed." It goes something like: “I guess it ought to be said, that I’d trade ‘em all plus the gal down the road for Grandma’s feather bed… Well, maybe I ought to reconsider about the gal down the road…”

I can see why. 

And while I wouldn't want to live out here, it might be nice if I could take a little piece of it home with me. Some essence of this pastoral stillness, to borrow just a bit of the bucolic serenity that is banished by the insectile hum of our ceaseless toiling in the city. These country folk have their little totems and monuments at every corner. Their lives here seem to be mementos of some imaginary bygone day with none of our modern existential decay. I know it ain't so, but everything about this place says that it is.

I’m sure we seem equally strange to them. My iPod blares a pretty wide variety of music all day long. When in a customer’s house I have a playlist of safe, folksy-classic rock-blues-pop songs that contain no rap, cursing or shredding guitars, and it plays below conversational levels. But out here in the boondocks, it’s pretty much a free for all. I’ll walk away from the cut table and N.W.A is menacing my white ass, but when I come back Joe Bonamassa is wailing about the Black Lung Heartache. Maybe that’s what that Jackass is going on about, who knows? He wouldn’t be the first one to give me crap about my music. Over the last fifteen years of remodels and construction I’ve learned that only Country and Classic Rock are safe choices, and to never, ever let anyone know that I love Oingo Boingo and The Cure. But now I own the company, so they can all suck it.

That was actually a hard choice to make, deciding to go out on my own. I’d been laid off enough times to know that I wasn’t coming back from the latest round of cutbacks. And since the economy was taking an epic, years-long dump, it’s not like there were that many options. Most days I feel pretty good about the decision. It’s alright. You know, aside from dealing with the inane bureaucracy of government and the ineptitude of all the faceless corporations we have to curry favor with to stay in business. On the bright side, we take as many coffee breaks as we want, and deciding on our own level of OCD perfection, which has its charms. Of course, some days I wish I was still punching in an out on someone else’s dime, when any problems are their problems at the end of my day. I especially feel that way in the morning on the way to the job. But once the music is going, and the hammers are swinging it gets better.

Today was an especially challenging day, work-wise. It was chock-full of technically difficult angles and cuts to figure, the kind that separate the craftsmen from the hackers. Every time it goes well, I spare a grateful nod to Downtown Gary Brown, my high school Geometry teacher from Long Beach Poly. It was one of the few classes where I didn’t bitch about how I was never going to use the lessons in real life. And now I do. At least I don’t have to eat any crow along with my daily avalanche of sawdust. Words like acute, complementary, and obtuse come to mind, and I still remember what they mean. This is where that knowledge and my exacting nature work together. 

When a seat cut, two different rake cuts, and a notch all have to be scribed onto the same board—based on only two reference measurements—that's when the money talks and the bullshit walks. When we were done, I realized that none of the guys that trained me over the years could have pulled off what I did. They would have to choose between speed (their default setting) and just caulking the huge gaps that “you can’t see from the ground anyway." Or else spend half a day getting it right, while burning through piece after piece the very limited supply of reclaimed siding materials at our disposal. Realizing that you’ve surpassed your Sensei only feels good for a minute. It’s a nice minute, but it ends when you realize that you’re on your own now. No one to look up to or fall back on.
 

When we started siding that particular gable after lunch, I spent a little time prepping the area and fixing some loose boards. At that point I noticed several holes in the plywood substrate, one of which a little bird kept trying to fly into. I tried keeping him away, knowing that it was about to become a crappy piece of real estate for him to own. He did make it past me once, but I scared him out of there with some sharp raps of my hammer, and then got it covered up before he could make it past me again. But as the hour went on, he persisted. I started to feel bad, since I knew I’d evicted him and it was raining cats and dogs out. He would fly out in a wide arc and land on a branch across the road and stare at me for maybe thirty seconds, and then make another attempt to get past me. Like he was thinking, “Man, I could’ve sworn this was the place.”

We kept working of course, wondering at his strange behavior, and remarking aloud to each other when he would seem particularly aggressive, which is not really in character for a Nuthatch. Of course he was only one of the nuisances to deal with, since the place was overrun with Yellowjacket nests and really huge spiders everywhere. But things got a little more serious after the first hour became two and he came back with reinforcements. They took turns dive-bombing us for the next half hour. Three Nuthatches, all working in tandem like a squadron. As annoying as it was, it was also kind of cool. They’d take off from their branch across the road, barreling up for altitude and then drop out of the sky, wings laid out flat like an incoming P-51 on a strafing run. If we turned to face them, they’d break off early. But if our backs were turned, the little assassins would buzz the tower pretty hard. These little bundles of pins and feathers blazed past our ears by inches, and the furious beating of their wings was always a little startling. 

 Finally, it dawned on me why they were being so tenacious.

I went around the corner from the gable and climbed a ladder up into the eves, where I could finally hear the cacophony of little chirps over my job-site radio. Of course their babies were in there. It was the only explanation. Even the Yellowjackets weren’t that vindictive when we dispossessed them. The babies were trapped now, essentially buried alive. 

There were only two choices: make a hole for the parents to get to them, or let the babies die. I learned the hard way years ago that you can’t touch a bird’s babies or nest. They will instantly disown them and allow them to starve to death. There was no way to get the babies out of the attic, so the choice was to undo hours of work or let evolution punish the birdies for a poor choice of homes. After eight years of working for my previous sensei, I know exactly what he would have done. We wouldn’t even be having this conversation. “Oh, well” he’d say, shrugging in his hapless, apathetic way.

This is actually one of the times that it’s nice to own the business and get to make the call myself. And when it feels pretty good to know that I have surpassed my old mentor in more than just craftsmanship. After a little pondering, I found a place to let the Mommy and Daddy get back into their aerie and to their babies without damaging my work. It was technically a no-no to drill into the attic through the blocking designed to keep critters out, but it’s far from the worst problem that old dump has working against it. So much for conducting business with lead pipe cruelty. I must be getting soft in my old age. Or maybe I'm just becoming more conscious that I need all the Karma I can get my hands on. 

When I got home, I found that the dryer had conked out on me. A belt that had been threatening to go out for months finally did, and I had to jury-rig a clothes line on the outside of the house to hang dry the sheets and our unmentionables. I feel a little claustrophobic as the weight of yet another bill lands on my shoulders. But it’s alright, tomorrow is another day, and when the hammers start swinging I'm sure I'll feel better. For today, like my friends the Nuthatch Family, I've got somewhere to lay my head and that's all that matters. Thanks to the makeshift clothesline, my pillow smells like outside, so it looks like I got to bring some of that country living home with me after all. 

Maybe that Karma will kick in tomorrow. You never know.