Helping My Friend

My friend lives his life with a practicality that is at least a little strange, and, on the right day, alarming.  He will not drive past anything lying on the road.  Traffic must stop if he spies a bungee cord sprawled on the street—no matter that he has picked up two dozen already and has them stretched like shreds from a rainbow on the crude wooden rack he built for his truck.  And, yes, he did in fact salvage the lumber with which he constructed the rustic-looking rack.  He will stop for anything shiny on the highway, anything bigger than soccer ball, providing one good side remains.  My friend is not opposed to hauling worn tires from the dump, odd lengths of pipe, flags of plywood or particle board.

To my good friend, the dimensions of a thing might be all that matters.  A big set of fake breasts, for example.  Or a big room attached to his rather small and crummy trailer.  The fact the breasts were manufactured right alongside Barbie Dolls and handlebar grips means little or nothing.  To him, life is a softer version of territorial war.  The objective is to conquer without great expenditures and then occupy.  In the end, only his pragmatism remains. 

Early this morning, I drove over to give my friend a hand with framing his new addition.  Actually, applying the word new might be inappropriate.  And we might be better served by using the electrician’s term roughing-in instead of framing.  The dimensions of the addition to his trailer are twenty-five foot by twenty foot.  “I need the room,” he explained, as we nailed studs to a bottom plate for a framed exterior wall.

My friend spent more than a little time helping me when I framed my house.  I owe him the return favor.  No.  I am glad to help.  I enjoy most construction work.  Much can be learned.  I enjoy helping him.

Few new products will be used on the new addition.  A few bags of new nails.  A roll of sill seal.  A few sheets of gypsum board.  The dimension lumber (mostly twisted), the flooring, the sheathing, the roofing materials—nearly all of the structure was salvaged from the buildings of an abandoned mine someplace within the shadowed folds of the Elkhorn Mountains.  The idea is to add room, not to impress the people in the battered, two-tone trailer next door.

My friend gives ‘curb appeal’ no consideration.  He readily looks beyond the weather gray, the concrete spatters of a previous life, the warped faces of studs.  He sees only the utility at the end of construction, the added dimensions.  And, if by miscarried hammer-blow, you should bend a sixteen-penny sinker, claw it from the lumber and flick it to the floor, my friend will stoop over, retrieve the nail, remove most of the kinks with a few taps of his hammer, drive it in the lumber he is working with.  “Don’t want to waste a perfectly good nail,” he will say.  Actually, anyone else would be using an air-nailer, but he managed pick up almost enough sinkers to do this job from some other paying project.

By midafternoon we had a decent jump on the addition.  The best lengths of lumber held square the window and door openings.  The walls stood bright and upright against the valley below, the clouds above.  We walked out amidst piles of firewood and truck parts and rusting whatnots in his yard and admired our work from that angle.  “It’s something,” I said.

—Mitchell Hegman

NOTE: This is a journal entry from 9-14-1996