In the spirit of continuity, I’m opting for yet another tale of mud and woe describing the constant battle against this unforeseen mistake of Creation which has comprised probably 40% of my landscaping career.
But this post takes a more philosophical slant, which I feel is in order before I describe yet another unfairly vicious attack of the Mud Monster – tales of which I have many, many. I herein hope to provide us all with the various caveats which place us in life’s ultimately “most miserable moments at work”, but which become secondary in a completely illogical and weird twist on human perceptions. If this turns out to not be believable, I cannot blame anyone for that assumption. All I have is what I own.
Note: A Picture of Portland’s Waterfront Park, below, which does not at all resemble the terrain which it consisted of at first.
Good Lord, ha ha, far, far from it:
A Spiritual Aside
Let me insert at this time something which has gone unspoken. As much as I have detested rainy days which stretched for months – and who would not? – and as grueling as some of those work days were, there remains an optimism in someone who works with dirt and landscape planning and installation which tends to factor in at a spiritual level. Sure, you’ll hear men complaining endlessly about it all. And certainly it motivates many of them towards other employment. This is inarguable as it can be.
But, as a very qualified expert on these matters, I can assure anyone that the fruits and pleasures as the goals become increasingly apparent are resplendent with the sense of accomplishment. I can think of very few trades or practices outside of waging war where so much is arrayed against so few. Is this “over the top”? – I honestly don’t think so. Believe me, the “felt experience” at the working end of a shovel – the constancy of donning rain gear and the extreme interest in the technological improvements in such apparatii – the grimness of those early, sometimes pre-Sunrise hour mornings when the temperature is barely above freezing – when one faces 8 hours of climbing dreadful inclines in torrential or semi-torrential, all day rain, packing rocks, plants or sod – these things are the litany ofdrear. One’s heart can sink as he opens his house door, prepared for work, and the rain cascades down, drenching one as he negotiates the walk from his house to his truck.
What, in all this, can be remotely considered good?
The only answer I have is the stubborn insistence that, aside from becoming fully invested in a career which produces such regular disappointing climatic events and which apparently allows so few alternatives, we have the Final Product as goal and the penultimate reward. That we labor for someone else is nearly secondary, but even that relationship has a promise which is pretty ‘off the charts’ as well, in terms of pure respect and the appreciation of what, indeed, gets accomplished.
But Wait! It Gets Worse! ;-)
Each rainy, miserable and simply awful day is counteracted by the amazing relief of actually seeing it all the way through. We plod home, drenched and sore, our muscles aching from the typically hard landscaping tasks which were exponentially made worse by a persistent rainfall. As we sweated inside our modern, up-to-date rain gear, we had the completely dreadful realization, 3 hours into the work, that we were getting as wet as we would have gotten has we eschewed the rain protection!
This is true: I had guys working for me in Vancouver who would walk to the job without rain protection and who worked entire days without even bothering with it. As ‘The Dude’ from The Big Lebowski might say: “Moisture abides”.
OK – Enough Already……..Then there is this
In North America, where we have abundant rain, we so often also feature milder Winter temperatures. In one of the worst-ever Winters for rain in Vancouver, BC, I recall not missing a single day of work. Not a one. There was also very close to 100% attendance at work for those of us on those crews.
Where we have abundant rain, we also feature incredibly productive plantings. It is our onus – implementing the plans proscribed by designers – to present them in the best possible foregrounds and backdrops. One learns, in short, to use the rain as an asset. We can indeed attain this, ironically, for purposes of, say, compaction under hard surfaces which require a 12% moisture level for the ultimate in compaction. Needless to say, pretty much the last thing we face worrying about is to remember to “water the new plants”. The assurances of planting success are beneficial in a strictly business sense as well. In Reno, many landscapers were regular “re-visitors” to nurseries, bringing in plants which were obviously under-watered and who had croaked as a result. I can honestly say I have gone for years without returning one dead plant. I’ve had nursery owners who were actually relieved I showed up with one and I’m being serious. “I thought we’d never see you again! Heck, I know all about (so-and-so’s) family after all his visits returning dead trees!”
“Let’s get lunch!”
Where we have abundant rain, the air is so ozone- and oxygen-rich it cannot be described accurately. One can go to work sick and come home well, with air this pure, and I am not exaggerating. Our endorphins, always a factor for those who work outdoors, ramp upwards, creating pleasure where – supposedly – none should exist. The truly grimmest moments in climatic disgust can produce nearly ineffable moments of clarity and repose. One feels a rare pleasure in his existence at incredibly unlikely times. I am being completely serious here: The Mystery of Life merely deepens as we assess with our conscious mind any remote intelligence which could inform us as to why on Earth we are not totally and irrevocably miserable.
I admit working for a living can perform all these spiritual tasks for anyone. Anyone at all. Working, for Americans, provides imminent self-worth – a prize for anyone – and rightfully so.
But I can aver right now that the physical rewards of maintaining strength, using it, contributing in an open atmosphere about solving problems, acting proactively in doing just that are but a few of the incredibly strange rewards one can grab while landscaping “where no man dares to trod”.
Next, I describe the effects of approaching a hole in the ground, 50 feet by 30 feet in circumference, a full 20 feet deep – completely filled with long-sitting and somewhat rancid water – and hearing a man advise us that he needs a brick pavement structure on top of this area by the end of the week.
Once again, I have to speak to the fact that “Mud moves me”.
Mud, in fact, has been such an outrageous truism of my work, the actual process involved in installing landscapes required an entirely new adaptive vocabulary.
We now speak of “Spackling” an area with the back sides of shovels on those areas which are too soft to actually walk on without leaving 6 inch deep mud prints – or worse, losing a boot. Spackling means beating the mud into the condition of smoothness that can eventually receive the back mulch or the turf/sod to be put on top of it. It is a completely necessary step.
We also sometimes grab plywood or pallets and walk on them en route to various duties, finding our overall terrain “spackled” simply by weight and a flat surface.
(Teufel Nursery’s “Mud Buggy”. LOL, high tech meets the mud.)
“Percolation” refers to water leaving the mud – obviously downwards. Where it will not “percolate” – where some natural or man-made structure prohibits draining – there we will see piping and methods of collection and disbursement. We would, for example, “spackle” an area of loose, rutted, slimy mud, walking backwards and working our way out, so that over time, it will “percolate” away and be quite solid after a short period of time.
Here is an excellent rendition of using plywood for grading and support at the same time.
The down side of this is that we seldom have any of that precious commodity – Time. Thus, we are beset with yet deeper problems, having to work on top of this stuff and finish the project within the always-ticking periodic framework agreed to. The picture below is an innocent enough look at a project which was one of my 10 most incredible mud events.
Looked at above, it seems straightforward enough. This picture is taken about 7 years after the actual installation and said installation was absurdly hard, made more so by an uncooperative supervisor – which happens.
The entire courtyard was completed except for the grassy area and walkways, at the time it became more problematic than normal. We had installed the big Catalpa Tree and all the plantings surrounding this courtyard quite successfully, adding terrific topsoil and plantings. What we were faced with was sodding. Following sod, we would then be able to install the borders for the limestone pathways and install the paths themselves.
Christmas was approaching. As the rain increased, daily – it was a hugely wet Winter – and the Holidays closed in, even acquiring the sod itself was facing problems. Meanwhile, the contractor was finishing everywhere except for where all “the dam mud” was. We decided we had to make a move, ordered up the sod from an initially reluctant but eventually quite happy supplier (income can be hard to come by just before Christmas).
The day began by receiving 16 pallets of sod – 8,000 square feet, more or less. Of course, even finding a place to stash all the sod was difficult because the outlying streets were narrow. Offloading the sod became as much a chore itself as the laying would prove to be as we found ourselves directing traffic and even dealing with police who fielded complaints.
Then it began snowing.
I am reminded of a quote I once read by William Glasser and its relevance to our theme today redounds mightily in my little head, much as it did that day, when everything seemed so impossible and so ineffably hopeless: “It is almost impossible for anyone, even the most ineffective among us, to continue to choose misery after becoming aware that it is a choice.”
My point? It will show up soon.
We had raided the local Juvenile Detention Facility – a minimum security place – of kids 16 or so who the powers there were looking to keep busy, preferably with hard work. Well, we had that. :-)
They had asked if we could pay whatever minimal figure it was they wanted these boys to have – as I recall it was about $1.75 or so, lol. There was no way we were going to pay that. In private, with these go-getters, we secretly mentioned we’d be paying them 5 times that but we needed them to work in impossible conditions and work real hard. I felt like Charlie Sheen – WINNING!!! It was hilarious watching their eyes light up in this muddy conspiracy, which got even more out of control when we mentioned we’d be buying lunch as well from McDonalds. Man, some folks are just easy.
So there we were……….16 – 2 ton pallets of wet sod, heavier than a car with 4 of us and our 5 – 16 year old 135 pound kids, already wetter than hell in 34 degree weather. Intermittent rain and snow finally gave way to pure snow with flakes the size of Texas as the self-made tunes broke out like Christmas caroling in Hell. As I recall, I began the music part of the festival with some strictly Elvis Christmas work, and the boys sang with me at first, eventually bursting out into more serious tuneage as we slugged and mugged our way through the worst weather I have ever encountered during a landscape project.
Making Matters Worse!! Thank You! Thank You! ;-)
Oh – I nearly forgot one small, teensy, weensy item. As we entered the site that morning, I stepped into what appeared to be a disturbed soil area and sank 3 feet in near-water. It was stunning – I was totally shocked at the appearance of “quicksand” in such an urban environment, and that’s a pretty monstrous understatement. When I asked the supervisor what was up, he mentioned he had forgotten about running conduit and wiring for the electrically-fed lamp posts around the courtyard and that he had completed that process the prior day (we weren’t there) with a backhoe and some grumpy electricians.
What it did, of course, was make a circle – 2 feet wide and 3 feet deep – around the entire interior of the courtyard of the most thin mud imaginable. Stepping into it was to simply disappear, lol. What a day! Lordy, I got madder than I’d been in recent years – it was an incredible mistake on his part and what he was doing was asking me to work on, in spite of the ‘quicksand’. Of course, he was also asking me to bail him out, was the truth of the matter. When we realized this, it made the entire episode somehow more tolerable, so we, ahem………get this………..”Held our mud”. Ha!
Off we go, sod in hand, a slurry of kids reeling under the weight of even just one clay-packed roll of sod, weighing in at least 40-50 pounds apiece and walking a moving bridge I supplied with strategically-placed plywood and, then, later, using the pallets we acquired as we exhausted the sod stacked on each. The famous Gene Kelly tune “Singing In The Rain” made an appearance, once the snow briefly stopped and the rain intensified, lol. It was total anarchy. Lunch consisted of wet people staying wet and shivering, then returning to the chore as fast as possible, simply to stay warm.
Finally the snow began coming in such an amazing heavy fall, and with these huge flakes, the place quieted down and it became almost cathedral-like in the silence and awesome weird sensuality amid the apparent impossibility of our quest. Our camaraderie was off the charts as we all – to a man, or boy – fought against currents devised to destroy motivation and energy. But we got even. We got better. As our relentlessness persisted, we began seeing green behind us, adapting ‘in situ” to the evolving problems of mud seeping through the spaces in pallets by moving them more often. The green behind us began expanding and that gorgeous space alone became a motivator of fabulous property.
Late in the day – and, yes, it was dark now – we finished. Our ten hours of effort paid off and we looked back on our accomplishment with a shared pride so rare I am not sure I’ve ever felt the likes again. My debt to the kids who joined us as well as to my normal crew showed me the depths of a gratitude that only a team working in such impossible conditions could provide. It felt like some sort of Medal Ceremony was in order.
And, by the way, it looked beautiful.
We finished the day and we finished the sod and by the time we were done, we saw 3 full inches of snow on the ground behind us with a covering settling in which would make that look small. We paid the kids their cash, had some good laughs and arranged for them to be back the next day for a huge clean-up and for some more work. Mario and I adored the guys – they were funner than fun.
The next day, the project supervisor who very purposefully missed the prior day showed up and his reaction was a total classic. To call it shocked would be a complete understatement. The soil supplier and the sod supplier both showed up as well as we had the kids undertake the “dreadful task” – ha ha! I’m a liar! – of cleaning the streets off with fire hoses from a hydrant.
“Steve, Good Lord, man, it’s a miracle! I can’t believe you did that!” Of course, this was the same guy who the day before said, “Shut up and get the dam job done.”
I’ve taken a break recently from blogging here. This blog is always a labor of love and has of course changed in many ways as my circumstances have altered. To be frank, the break has been good for me. I have always cringed at – yet accepted the rules and time constraints of toil as a normal diet of maturity. I think we all have.
I have been fortunate enough in my landscaping career to have encountered the tickling sensations of accomplishment, for which I am eternally grateful. It takes us nearer to an immortality as we devise what we suspect are permanent systems of substance for the pleasure of those to whom we labor. Both parties gain immeasurably – the client from his living aid – the contractor/designer from his gift to the world and his labors. His crew experience their own brushes with Righteousness as the projects close.
Work itself, as we all know, offers redemption as well as accomplishment. As Eric Hoffer says:
“No matter what our achievements might be, we think well of ourselves only in rare moments. We need people to bear witness against our inner judge, who keeps book on our shortcomings and transgressions. We need people to convince us that we are not as bad as we think we are.”
I agree. This is exactly why you need a waterfall!!! (Made by me!!)
Back to work…………and the reality of My Work:
On the negative end (at work) the injuries, the occasional dust-ups with anger from all sides, the incredibly helplessness in the face of a mean-spirited Weather God, bereft of humor save for Irony – all form an alternative Universe which seems to descend inexorably on us all.
What to make of all this? All these Opposites!
Recently, in the space of a month, the faces of the remote and oddly-disconnected Love and Death settled in, affecting my heart and soul to degrees I am scrambling to catch up with. Fate decided to present me with the exquisite pleasure of finally meeting someone who means as much to me as nearly anyone I’ve ever known. A reunion of souls occurred which had its origins here – on a computer. My virtual “family” became one in fact as an indescribably lovely series of events scrolled across my human life and perceptions like an Early Christmas for the Soul. I felt rich beyond measure as we conversed, face to face – as if I had done something very Right.
Subsequently, a dear Soul mate and member of my extended family passed away, God bless her. She loved me and my family extremely dearly, did Katie Short. Without resorting to the maudlin, I will just say it reminded me of something more obviously substantial as time goes on: that life compresses with age. Events actually gather momentum and stream helplessly as the Eternity imagined from Youth becomes less of that. The pain is real, much as was the Love I have gained from the former event.
On a lesser – but incredibly evocative and meaningful level – I also watched myself literally “lose” 2 living friends, as emotional events created another graveyard – this one mired in vanity, loss and misperception. It made me wonder if somehow I had not been paying attention to the parallel Universe where persons and events smack together like loose Protons and Quarks, as we continue sightlessly forward, immeasurably confused about the human motives and all of our human frailties. Our tiny egos march ahead like lions as our suspected courage makes us less than we once were, robbing us of our destinies and presenting us with problems we must actually wait for others to decide on. The absolute, complete absurdity of life never stops………. and all we seem to be able to do is endure it. This is inarguable for us all. I have therefore finally learned something – “It is”, as they say, “what it is”.
Not much of a prize, is it?
Heavy thoughts on this Saturday morning.
It’s been a Summer of stunning emotional variety and not all of it good whatsoever. Challenged by these events, I feel somehow chastened – as if I am realizing truths and factoids which exist in the amazingly huge gaps between the human atoms.
I arrived to my 60′s like March does – with a roar and a massive red hot club, playing the crap out of softball, embracing an evolving life like a vain 18 year old. A couple years into it, I have gotten myself beat to crap, lol.
As I often quote Mike Hammer: “It was like the kiss at the end of a hot, wet fist.” ;-)
Here’s an irony: I admit I do still feel pretty darn good. I now wonder if this blanket, unthinking optimism is some style of curse, leering at me like The Last Temptation. I know – I am waving my weenie at Fate Itself in this unusually sophomoric fantasy which recognizes pretty much my feelings as some sort of bottom line. In a sense, even a beaver or maybe even that tin can over there can see the futility of that.
Right now, I don’t think so. For better or for worse, I feel my connections to real folks and they warm me. When I analyze my wide-ranging and numerous life mistakes, they Tazer me back with massive, clinging regret and they cool me back down. My regrets are Huge. Massive. The tale of them forms a line of shame. These ‘faux pas’ could destroy anyone. I smile and nod and hug others, and I feel unworthy as hell sometimes. How does one live with his guilt, I often ponder?
I now realize this is life itself. Our mistakes are a field of accounting which never realizes Black Ink. Nor can we “take them back”.
I have come to believe we need to begin each and every day with a clean slate. I know – it’s a perfect dodge, lol. But I confess this aphorism has more merit the more I entertain its relevance to this planet of ours:
“Sufficient unto the day is the evil thereof”Matthew 6:34
As if anyone wondered……..rocks are some incredibly hard stuff.
Particularly rocks such as granite, marble and the various basalts landscapers encounter on a regular basis. Concrete products are obviously much the same – hard, unyielding and perfectly suited for their roles in pavements and building construction.
During the processes of landscaping, we are often asked to make products we use conform to our weird ideas and plans no matter how seemingly impractical on the face of it. In terms of your basic rock impediments, we can encounter huge boulders right where no one guessed they would be. Take it from one who knows – as is illustrated further down – this happens.
So we learn ways of dealing with all aspects – boulder impediments, shaping stuff for practical and aesthetic purposes, slicing bricks to help us make a curving effect, cutting rocks up to clear room or to actually use. We learn about cutting brick pavers and wall systems; we learn about the tolerable gaps which maintain the security while allowing us to provide a curving element to the landscape.
(enlarge any picture by left-clicking – some, twice, to get real detail)
What happens in the length of a landscaping career for the luckier – (or is that “Unluckier?” I forget!) is that we run into these great persons with great tools, who can direct our energies to rectifying our little problems. Being willing to learn and listen comes in very handy when dealing with some of these smart fella’s who specialize in things we never even heard of.
As a perfect example, I was taught by an elderly Italian guy how to cut granite into increasingly small sizes. Here’s the formula:
Seems simple, eh? These little items go by various names – we called them “Pins and Feathers”, although I have also seen them as “Plugs and Feathers”.
But wait. The addition of a small sledge hammer and a masonry power drill complete the picture. Generally, as can be seen, the process does not involve dramatically pneumatic or gas-powered machinery. Nor does it involve psychic power to discern “weak spots” or advantageous lines for the work. The nature of these stones are somewhat uniformly crystalline – with some exceptions being breakage in handling – so one can literally create the line one desires to establish.
When all are engaged, it looks something like this piece of marble prepped for sectioning – prior to gentle taps which serve to break the stone:
To relate all this to my existence, a small story:
We encountered a project in Deep Cove, British Columbia (a gorgeous suburb of Vancouver, hard by the Burrard Inlet) on a chunk of land which was something like 30′ wide by about 200′ long – one of those chopped-up residential sections specially-inserted to allow more people to savor the salt air and shoreline. The property was shoreline property with a severe slope to the rear and a long boat pier extending outwards in to bay. Our client was interested in our somehow providing some specific landscaping wants – walls for perennial beds, the irrigated lawn, a paver walkway and landscaped stairs to conduct folks down easier to the pier and his boat (s). Needless to say, it was an architectural feast for an innovative home designer and I was the chosen fool to implement the outdoor plan. The house itself was marvelously eccentric – as was the owner, lol.
Well we ran into “issues” right off the bat. Needless to say, the sloping nature of the hillside was the geological result of rock behaving very much like rock – in this case, the common granite which composes so much of the area’s geology. To make matters worse, the home was a replacement and “improvement” over what had once been there – all landscaped and apparently full of great pockets of soil.
Here, thanks to the Deep Cove Yacht Club (link provided) is a look at the small burg and it’s lovely setting. The home referred to in this post is on the left back, about a mile from the harbor park, one of the piers jutting out into the bay. It’s pretty easy to see why someone would want to live there.
All that aside, we return to how great the landscaping looked to deal with and how simple this was going to be. ;-)
Au Contraire. Not really. I was kidding and so was Fate.
“Hey, Steve! This crap is all rock!”
As we stuck one of our first stabs of our ubiquitous shovels into what we figured was a great lush dollop of dirt, we heard the clang of all clangs and, as we explored more, we realized we were plain on top of good old rock. Lots of rock. Tons of rock. Uh oh.
“There”, thought I, “goes a perfectly good plan.”
We had a wall designed to be out front and, to be honest, we had not really investigated very thoroughly, seeing as how it was a long ride out through traffic to assess the place and it was in the midst of a rainy season. But – the saving grace: the “Price was Right” – we had something of a license to make it all work. It was an interesting moment.
Fortunately for me, I had been watching another construction project down the street that very first morning. Indeed, my attention was ostensibly focused on how they arranged parking (my original impetus) on the narrow little street. (One learns as a contractor – real early – to grease the wheels of all trades in a neighborhood, including those on separate projects! This is called “Survival”, for those wondering.).
That then led to more than one handy discovery, as I illustrate below. I also advised them that we had deliveries of fairly large stuff scheduled which might block access at a future point – always a landscaping dilemma.
As we conversed about logistics and what we could do for them to trade favors during the course of both projects, I could not help but notice the masons who were constructing the entire face of this other cool home with a Granite facing. I watched, fascinated, as an older gent ran his rock drill into a large slab of native granite, piecing off chunks of the stuff for the guys inserting these “chunks” into cement, and into what was an absolutely gorgeous finish.
He was amazing. He’d drill holes along this line of his devices – usually no more than 3 holes – and then add some grease to his “Pins and Feathers”, then insert them into the holes, wedges facing out. He tapped on the “pins”, just firmly, not terrifically hard, very patiently, running from one to the other in sequence. As he did this, suddenly you’d hear this cracking sound and the entire rock would split, exactly where he wanted . It would just fall right off into the pile of other pieces.
Here is a Youtube vid of a guy doing much the same thing. He is unidentifiable and therefore unattributable for credit by any means I can find, but his lesson is perfect and the video aptly describes the process to a ‘Tee’. The virtue of this video is in how it deals with a general stone – one which could be used as either an example of creating shapes or in removing obstacles. Both are the same, in the end.
Remember to wear your ear muffs as you watch this drilling festival – it ends soon enough, lol:
Indeed, cutting huge slabs of granite into increasingly smaller pieces turns out to be somewhat simple. It hurts, “giving away the store” like this – I mean, it seems so specialized – but this is one highly satisfying chore, in the end. It always seemed so “Lilliputian”! ;-)
Anyway, as we discovered our rock hard impasse, I returned to the guy and asked if he’d give me some advice on how to deal with things. He was kind enough to wander up with me to assess my situation.
He was a virtual fount of information. I showed him the parameters of the dilemma and he had a very ready answer: “No problem! Just cut that granite out and use it for the wall!”
I blinked and asked if he’d help us out. We could wait for him to finish down the street seeing as how we had major work first, out back. He then informed me he was booked for 2 years, lol. My heart sank.
He smiled at me, seeing my obvious disappointment. “Tell you what,” he said. “You stay around after work and I’ll teach you how to do it. You’ll learn this in about 20 minutes.” I was dubious, but I was young and dumb and this guy was one interesting as heck guy. I gladly complied.
He came up and I delivered the promised beer – (a detail I omitted). In the end, it turned out he was right. Within 30 minutes, I had cut through two big portions of the impeding granite rock. I could barely contain myself, I was so crazy happy. He saw my wonder at the result and he well knew he’d “hooked me” into the whole “rock-shaping” world – a place where no one can be unaffected. I guess it’s short of “orgasmic” or “Cathartic” – but I wonder.
All of you “Closet Rock Fans” should thoroughly enjoy this next video!
True Rock Fans will endure this next one as well – especially inasmuch as it displays authentic and melodic Music. It’s a party. You also have to love the safety boots.
The project was an unmitigated success in the end – except for the raccoons - but that’s another tale.
