John Henry Has Left The Building

Year One vs. Year Twenty-Five

A year ago today, I hit the reset button on my life and started Act II. What follows is the love-letter and breakup note I wrote to my old life on my way out the door.

So today marks the end of an era. After over twenty years in the game, I’m hanging up these heavy ol’ bags and taking a public-sector job coordinating projects for the University of Oregon. Like most big transitions in life, it was both a bittersweet decision and a much-needed change that’s been a long time coming. By now it goes without saying that I’m a sanguine soul, given to reflection and pontification upon life’s vicissitudes, and never more so than at times of momentous change.

I still remember donning my first set of borrowed leather nail aprons in February of 1994, and going to work for my then-girlfriend’s hard-ass father, Doug Parmenter, installing cedar siding on a second story scaffold of dubious structural integrity. I had an innate fear of heights and power tools, I got shocked by faulty extension cords a bunch of times, and was soaked to the skin for over eight hours on day one. After just that one shift, I was convinced I could never bring myself to return; it was not only physically taxing and painful, but terrifying as well. But my fear of death was no match for my loathing for the taste of Ramen noodles, Gub’ment cheese, and poverty. So return I did.

Throughout the nineties I held a variety of short-term construction gigs, from cleaning up job-sites to digging ditches, demolishing structures, pouring concrete, and driving forklifts. I worked for peanuts, risking life and limb for hardcases, assholes, and felons that stiffed me money, and who eventually died by gunfire. I drifted along, letting life happen to me while I had no particular plans; days became weeks that floated by until I was hemorrhaging entire years as though I’d live forever. Then one day I woke up in the 21st century and realized that I was a carpenter. I wasn’t in school or any form of training for other occupational pursuits, and I had no plans to do so. I figured I’d either better get busy making other plans, or start being what I was about. So I decided to embrace the path I was on, and bloom right where I was planted.

First set of trusses I ever rolled. A terrifying experience.

Since that time, I’ve broken most of my fingers, several of my toes, and lost all of my fingernails multiple times over. But I’ve kept all my digits, which is no mean feat, believe me. I did destroy both my knees in the process, but saw them inexplicably regenerate after nine years of wearing braces full time. I bore witness to one other miracle I can’t explain, but that saved my life. My hands, arms, and legs are a network of scars whose lividity on cold mornings is like a topographical map of all the glancing blows, near-misses, and narrow escapes that the Almighty has, in His good humor, seen fit to grant me. I’m told He has a soft-spot for carpenters for some reason. 

I’ve pulled embedded nails out of my own hand with pliers clenched in the other, closed up wounds with superglue and electrical tape in lieu of stitches, and seen a man crippled before my eyes. I’ve spent entire summers living out of town in crappy motel rooms, worked months on-end in the claustrophobic confines under houses filled with dead cats, rats, and live possums, and doubled down on fifty-hour work-weeks with side jobs for family, friends, and total strangers. I’ve ridden three companies into the ground, then started my own, which took me from the height of success, making more money than I’ve ever made in my life, to the depths of poverty where we almost lost the house. 

It’s been a brutal couple of decades, but not entirely without its charms. I’ve built thirty-four houses, five of them beginning with the foundation itself and ending at the ridge-cap on top, including every board, nail, and drop of paint in between. I’ve demolished whole buildings by hand, resurrected over forty homes and businesses from the unspeakable devastation of fire, and even built a dog house and a couple of chicken coops, to boot. 

I’ve worked countless weekends—many of them for free—to make things right for my boss or our clients, and once went seventy-one days straight without a day off. I’ve met some of the most intelligent, talented, hardworking, and generous people on Earth by working in the trades, been mentored by the finest gunslingers and scalawags, and taken more than a few greenhorn apprentices by the scruff and gruffly passed on the industrial wisdom and roughneck grace given to me in love. 

I’ve ridden second story ladders all the way to the ground, fallen off two roofs, walked third story catwalks with no safety gear, and even worked a thirty-eight-hour nonstop shift once. I’ve thrown the ball for countless clients’ dogs, answered a billion questions from their kids, and been rewarded with bottles of the finest hooch—even a Takamine guitar once—as a bonus for a job well done. People have entrusted their homes, their businesses, and their very lives to my craftsmanship, and I’ve lost sleep over those responsibilities many times. But I’ve also earned the best nights of sleep in my life for those exact same reasons. 

It’s been a helluva ride. It’s been a life. In those twenty-some-odd years, I’ve never met even one carpenter—three-hundred pound Marines included—that could pick up my bags without exclaiming how heavy they are. I guess I got used to that weight, because I'm finding it hard to put them down now. The pride I take with me from my hard-earned membership into the fraternity of men and women that build the world is not something that can be bought for love or money, and not something I’d trade for anything in this world, or the next. But I’ll take that office and pension now, please and thank you.

Onward.