A Place of My Own (16 page)

“Cake.”

Joe’s monosyllabic shrug masked strong feelings, and immediately I could see that this construction project was not going to escape the edginess that traditionally crops up between architects and builders, a complicated set of tensions rooted in real differences of outlook and interest and, inevitably, social class. On building sites all over the world, architects are figures of ridicule, their designs derided for their oddness or impracticality and their construction drawings, which on a job site are supposed to have the force of law, dismissed as cartoons or “funny papers.” What remained to be seen on this particular site, however, was exactly where I fit into this drama, since I was both client (traditionally an ally of the architect) and builder. The fact that I would be working on this project, and not just paying for it, changed everything. I was the patron of Charlie’s fancy ideas, but I also faced the practical problem of making them work, something I probably couldn’t manage without Joe’s help. Among other things, Joe was poking around to see whose authority I was placing first.

And I wasn’t sure. Joe had shifted the ground on me a bit, which is why I hoped to table for the time being the issue of how our fir posts would meet their rock feet. I’d always regarded Charlie as a realist among architects, somebody with his own feet planted firmly in the world, and an authority on practical questions. His footing detail may have gotten a little baroque, but that was only because its romance of the ground had been tempered by what seemed like some hardheaded realism about it—hence the four feet of concrete and the steel rods. What could possibly be more down-to-earth than that footing drawing?

But if Joe was right, he had spotted what appeared to be the Achilles’ heel of Charlie’s footing detail. It wasn’t a problem we had to solve right away—whatever we did about it, the concrete piers first had to be poured, the boulders drilled and pinned. Touchy though he might be at times, I felt relieved to know Joe would be along on what promised to be a treacherous voyage to the material underworld. I’d found my prickly Virgil.

A few weeks later I paid a visit to Bill Jenks, the local building inspector. Though Charlie hadn’t quite finished the construction drawings, with his rough sketches and the footing plan I could apply for the building permit I would need before Joe and I could pour the footings. On any construction project, the building inspector is a slightly intimidating figure, since he wields the power to order expensive changes in a design or force a builder to redo any work that isn’t “up to code.” He is the final authority—the building trade’s judge, superego, and reality principle rolled into one—and he holds the power to condemn any building that doesn’t meet his approval. I once asked a contractor whom he appealed to when there was a difference of opinion with the building inspector. The fellow squinted at me for the longest time, trying to determine if I could possibly be serious. He’d never heard of anyone questioning a ruling from the building inspector. But surely there must be
some
court of appeal, I insisted. What about due process? The Fourteenth Amendment? “I suppose you could appeal to the governor,” he offered after long reflection. “Weicker
might
be able to overrule Jenks.”

“Code” consists of a few thousand rules, most of them commonsensical (the minimum dimension of a doorway, for example: 2?4?) but many others obscure and seemingly picayune (the maximum number of gallons of water in a toilet tank: 1.6). The house that satisfies every jot and tittle of the building code probably hasn’t been built yet, which is why a building inspector is given wide latitude in the exercise of his judgments. He has the authority to sign off on minor transgressions. Or he can go strictly by the book. Most of the contractors I’ve met live in constant low-grade terror of the building inspector.

You might think that, since the building inspector’s mission in life is to look out for the interests of the consumer, who on this particular job happened to be me, Jenks could in this instance be expected to go fairly easy. In the days before my interview with him, the approach of which instilled in me a moderate but unshakable level of dread, I’d taken no small comfort in this theory. But when I tried it out on Joe, the night before my meeting, he said I could forget it. The building inspector is paid to take a very, very long view, Joe explained. He’s thinking about hundred-year storms (the worst storm to hit a region in a century, a conventional standard for structural strength) and about the persons yet unborn who will own and occupy my hut in the next century.

My first impression of Jenks did little to relieve my anxiety. Actually, it wasn’t an impression of Jenks himself, but of his boots, which stood rigidly at attention outside the door to his office. They were knee-high black riding boots, easily a size thirteen, that had been arrayed with military precision and buffed to a parade-ground sheen. The boots said two things to me, neither of them reassuring. First, any man who would wear them was without a doubt drunk with power, very possibly a closet sadist or a collector of Nazi paraphernalia. Second, such a person had a serious fetish for meticulousness: You could shave in the shine on these boots, they butted the wall at ninety degrees dead on, and the space between them appeared to have been microcalibrated.

These were the boots of the man who would be judging my craftsmanship each step of the way.

Fortunately, the man himself wasn’t quite as intimidating as his footwear, though he certainly took his sweet time looking over the drawings I spread out across his drafting table. Jenks was slender and tall, perhaps six foot two, though his posture made him seem considerably taller: The man was plumb. Picture a two-by-four with a handlebar mustache. For a long time Jenks said nothing, just stood there smoothing down the ends of his great black handlebars as he walked his eyes over every inch of Charlie’s drawings.

“Looks to be sturdy enough,” he announced at last. I took this as a compliment, until I realized he was making fun of the beefy four-by fir timbers Charlie had spec’d for the frame, which were substantially more substantial than a one-story outbuilding required. “See a lot of tornadoes out your way?” I laughed, largely, and it seemed as though everything was going to be all right. Which it was, until he got to the footing detail and stopped. He began tapping the drawing with his pencil eraser, lightly at first, then much harder and faster. “Nope. I won’t approve this as drawn. Any framing within eight inches of the ground must be pressure-treated, and that includes the posts sitting on these rocks.” Joe had been right; the footing was indeed my hut’s Achilles’ heel.

But Jenks was willing to give me the building permit anyway, provided I signed a piece of paper promising to make the changes he specified. He instructed me to call for a field inspection as soon as we’d poured the footing, then again when the framing was complete. I left his office feeling buoyant, official, launched at last. When I got home I walked out to the site and nailed the bright yellow cardboard building permit to a tree. The following morning, we would pour.

Concrete is peculiar stuff, so accommodating one moment, so adamant the next. Not that it’s the least bit mercurial—few things in this world are as reliable as concrete. Wet, it can be counted on to do almost anything you want; it’s as happy taking its formal cues from a mold as it is acceding to gravity. Vertical, horizontal, square or curved, ovoid or triangular, concrete can be made to do it all, no complaints. Once cured, however, the stuff’s incorrigible, as stubborn and implacable as rock. What was feckless is now transcendently determined, and all but immortal. In the case of concrete, there’s no turning back, no melting it down to try again, as plastic or metal permits, no cutting it to fit, like wood. Here in a handful of cold gray glop is the irreversible arrow of time, history’s objective correlative. A fresh batch of concrete can pass into the future along an almost infinite number of paths—as road, bridge, pier, sculpture, building, or bench—but once a path is taken, it is as one-way and fixed as fate. Right here is where the two meanings of the word “concrete”—the thing and the quality—intersect: for what else in the world is more
particular
?

These are the kinds of thoughts working with concrete inspires, on a suitably gray and chilly November afternoon. Although one or two steps in the process are critical, for the most part mixing and pouring concrete doesn’t fully engage the intellect, leaving plenty of room for daydream or reflection. Mainly it’s your back that’s engaged, hauling the eighty-pound sacks of ready-mix to the site, pouring them into a wheelbarrow along with twelve quarts of water per bag, and then mixing the stiff, bulky batter with a rake until it’s entirely free of lumps. The stuff is very much like a cake mix, in fact, except that each batch weighs more than three hundred pounds (three bags plus nine gallons of water) and licking the fork is not a temptation. You can make concrete from scratch too, mixing the gravel, sand, and Portland cement (a powder fine as flour) according to the standard recipe (roughly, 3:2:1 for a foundation), but for a job this size Joe had recommended ready-mix, the Betty Crocker of concrete.

Pliny wrote somewhere that apples were the heaviest of all things. I don’t know about that. It’s my impression that eighty pounds of concrete weighs a good deal more than eighty pounds of almost anything else, apples included. Apples at least show some inclination toward movement—they will roll, given half a chance—whereas a bag of concrete lying on the ground very much wants to stay there. Add water, and the resultant mud is so thick and heavy—so stubbornly inert—that dragging a tool through it even once is a project. I would plunge my rake head down into the mire and then pull at it with all the strength I could summon, which yielded maybe six or seven inches of movement, copious grunts, and an almost exquisite frustration at the sheer indifference of matter at rest. Hats off, I thought, to the Mafia capo who first perceived the unique possibilities for horror in sinking a man’s feet in cement. For Joe the stuff behaved a good deal more like cake batter, however, and whenever my stirring grew so lugubrious that the concrete threatened to set, he would take the rake from me and, throwing his powerful back and shoulders into the work, whip the concrete smooth as if with a wire whisk.

For forms we were using sonotubes, which are nothing more than thick cardboard cylinders—stiffened, oversize toilet paper rolls sunk into the earth. Whenever Joe judged a batch of concrete “good to go,” the two of us would shoulder the wheelbarrow into position, tip it down toward the lip of the sonotube and then, with a shovel, herd the cold gray slurry into the cylinder. It would land four feet down at the bottom of the shaft with a sequence of satisfying plops. The sonotubes were cavernous—fourteen inches in diameter, broad enough to give our boulders a nice, comfortable seat—and it took almost two barrow loads to fill each one. But by the end of the day all six had been filled—more than a ton of concrete mixed and poured by hand. Then with a hacksaw we cut lengths of threaded steel rod and inserted them in the center of each concrete cylinder. We bent the submerged end of each rod to improve its purchase on the concrete and then left about eight inches exposed above the top of the pier; to this pin we would bolt our boulders.

By now the two of us matched the color of the dimming, overcast sky, each cloaked in a fine gray powder that had infiltrated every layer of our clothing, even our skin. I don’t think my hands have ever been more dry; the insides of my nose and sinuses felt like they were on fire. (Joe said that the limestone in the Portland cement sucked the moisture out of tissue.) I was also exhausted, stiff, and chilled to the bone, wet concrete being not only heavier than any known substance, but colder too. Some part of me that didn’t appreciate these sensations inquired sarcastically if the experience had been sufficiently real. Joe counseled a hot shower, ibuprofen, and a tube of Ben-Gay.

By the next morning the concrete had cured enough that I could stand on the piers. To do so was to acquire a whole new appreciation of the concept of stability. Maybe it was just the hardness of the concrete, or the width of the piers, which were as big around as the seat of a chair, but I had a powerful sense that I stood upon reliable ground, beyond the reach of frost heaves or flood, beyond, in fact, the reach of almost any vicissitude I could think of. Suddenly I understood the prestige and authority of foundations. Whatever happens to the building erected on top of it, bound as it is to bend under the pressures of weather and time and taste, the foundation below will endure. The woods all around here are littered with them, ancient cellar holes lined in fieldstone. Though the frame houses they once supported have vanished without trace, the foundations remain, crusted with lichens but otherwise unperturbed.

I could see why so many writers and philosophers would be drawn to the authority of foundations for their metaphors of permanence and transcendence. The classic example is
Walden
, which is at bottom (to borrow one of the book’s most well-worn metaphors) an extended search for a good foundation—for the ground on which to build a better, truer life. Thoreau’s goal, he tells us in “Where I Lived, and What I Lived For,” is to reach down “below freshet and frost and fire [to] a place where you might found a wall or a state, or set a lamppost safely, or perhaps a gauge, not a Nilometer, but a Realometer, that future ages might know how deep a freshet of shams and appearances had gathered from time to time.” Truth is to be found below the frost line.

Western philosophers have always been attracted to such images of the reliable ground, along with the various other architectural metaphors that arise from it. Descartes depicted philosophy as the building of a structure on a well-grounded foundation; in similar language, Kant described metaphysics as an “edifice” of thought raised up on secure “foundations” that in turn must be placed on stable “ground.” Heidegger, a critic of this tradition (who nevertheless likened thinking to building), defined metaphysics as a search for “that upon which everything rests”—a search for a reliable foundation. By borrowing these kinds of metaphors, philosophers have sought to grant some of the firmness, logic, and objectivity of buildings to systems of thought that might otherwise seem a good deal less manifest or authoritative. Architectural metaphors can also lend an air of immortality to a philosophical idea, perhaps because there are buildings standing in Europe that are older than philosophy itself.