Gunnar Works Construction

1,688 words

Over the last few months, I’ve been working as an unskilled construction helper for a local contractor who specializes in backyard decks among all sorts of other things. I ended up working for him by happenstance. I’m surprised he even hired me, given that I have no experience. I didn’t own any steel-toed safety footwear or even a tape measure until recently. Despite his gruff exterior and near constant micromanaging of whatever I’m doing, along with some notable political and philosophical differences, he’s a good man.

I am not handy at all. I’ll concede that point straight away. I didn’t know how to read a measuring tape properly until a month or two ago, and even now it takes me awhile to figure things out. I have virtually no tools of my own aside from a few screwdrivers, a hammer, a long-lost drill complete with convenient drill bit case, and some other miscellaneous implements that live in the basement.

I would be lying if I told you I hadn’t been admonished daily for my mistakes. Here are a few examples: “You’re hittin’ it like a girl.” “You can carry more than one at a time.” “Have you ever swept before?” “Let’s go to the dump.” “It shouldn’t take you that long to put in a screw.” “Today’s good for me.” “You’re not listening. I already told you that five times.”

My August was spent toiling outside amidst a sweltering heatwave. My mesh trucker hat absorbed the sweat from my brow when I helped carry long 6×6 wood beams into a client’s backyard.

At one point, sitting on a plastic lawn chair in the shade of the backyard while my boss was off to Home Depot for yet another blade or some more building material, I thought to myself that here I sit, in the shining sun of life: I am the appropriated clearing that Martin Heidegger talked about. I can’t claim to understand that concept very well, but I felt oddly content to know that my worker-like toil was being illuminated by the light of existence. I was in the clearing cluttered with tools and pressurized lumber; it was my sweaty, dirty, dehydrated self that made the phenomena of the world present to a human knower, me. I was the unskilled laborer that was in fact the clearing of the Heideggerian system. It may have just been my heat stroke talking, but I felt good about things for a little while as I drank my Canada Dry ginger ale in the peace of that backyard as cicadas buzzed in the crackling swelter.

While Canada can be oddly hot in the summer in many places, the fall this year was less an autumn and more of an early winter. My gruff yet heroic boss decided that building a composite backyard deck for another client in October would be a good job to take on.

The first step in the project was to demolish the old deck, a decades old rotting platform that was long past its prime. That involved using a pry bar, hammers, and a Sawzall. The waste wood we piled up and then hauled off to one of the city’s waste disposal areas (aka dumps). Throwing waste wood into big piles and watching them smash was quite cathartic, but stepping in murky puddles was annoying.

After learning that the original cement posts were buried and unusable, my boss decided that the only other option was to drill twelve new holes to set new cement posts to serve as the base for our beams before we could begin framing. That turned out to be easier said than done. We had to use a 295 pound contraption called the HD99 Hydraulic Earthdrill manufactured by a company called Ground Hog, to drill the twelve holes for the cement posts. My overseer referred to the machine simply as “the augur”. The company’s website states, in part, that

[t]he HD99 is the most powerful earthdrill in the Ground Hog line. With it’s 9hp Honda or Subaru engine, the HD99 can easily dig with any Ground Hog auger up to 18 inches in diameter. The use of hydraulics allows the HD99 to have variable auger speed and reverse which is very useful if the auger gets stuck.

Well, we did get the mechanical beast horribly stuck. The variable auger speed and reverse capability of the monstrosity were no help as it became encased by the viscous cloying clay of the backyard. Much of the region here is characterized by thick clay. You see, unbeknownst to me, the trick is to drill a bit, clean the resultant hole with a clam shovel (my job), and then drill some more. If you push the augur too far, trying to hurry the job along, there’s the risk of getting things hopelessly stuck like a Napoleonic supply wagon in the quagmire morass of wintertime Russia. Or as the German commander of the 121st Infantry Division during the Second World War described the mud and mire of the Eastern Front’s Volkov theatre: Hier beginnt der Arsch der Welt! or in other words “the world’s asshole begins here.”[1] I’m only exaggerating slightly, of course.

So, there we were, stuck. No amount of pushing, pulling, reversing or accelerating would dislodge the beast. After several hours of futility, we abandoned work for the rest of the afternoon. The next day, my boss brought a “farm jack” with him to see if we could get it out of the abyssal muck. These types of jacks are used to lift heavy vehicles or large objects. He was confident that it would do the trick. We positioned it underneath the frame near the handle and boss man began cranking the handle. Amid the clanking and groaning metal, the augur moved an infinitesimal amount before one of the pins on the jack gave way with an audible “ping!” and my boss flew stumbling across the yard. The augur remained stuck and the farm jack needed some repair. Shortly thereafter, I went to have my lunch while my boss went to procure another farm jack.

After consuming a fortifying lunch, which undoubtedly contained dangerous levels of microplastics, I returned to work. My grumpy boss, alas, could not rent and was forced to buy a second farm jack from the local Home Depot. He shoved the manual in my hands: “Here, you read a lot, read this!”. After some arguing and vituperative language, we managed to get the second farm jack positioned alongside the other jack and used both alternatively to pry that blasphemous groundhog augur beast from the cloying viscous earth. That was one of the most infuriating and painful days at work that I’ve ever had in my life. And that’s saying something as I had a stint in Canada’s soul-sucking public service for a time.

After solving the augur problem, we could finally mix cement and pour the posts. One day a pallet full of cement bags arrived on the front lawn, one of which had burst asunder. Needless to say, it was my job to clean up the scattered cement particulates before they killed the grass. I then had to help carry numerous cement bags to the backyard. “Hard work isn’t it, Gunnar?” my boss said. “Yeah, it sucks,” I replied.

Halfway through the work, after we had fastened half of the deck’s composite boards using a deck clip system and lots of cursing, my boss declared that he had been called away to rescue his brother-in-law who had broken a couple of ribs during a vacation misadventure in Prince Edward Island (PEI) of Anne of Green Gables fame. So that sojourn delayed completion of the deck to November. Then it started to snow. And while it snowed for a week or so, I hadn’t heard anything from my supervisor for unbeknownst to me, he had pinched a nerve in his neck during the drive back from PEI. I told him that he should give up on construction, don a cape, and drive around Canada in his truck solving mysteries. “You’re a funny guy, Gunnar,” is all he said.

When we finally got back to it, snow had accumulated and the temperature plummeted to below zero as winter arrived early. I took a few photos of the miter saw (complete with miter saw stand) in the snow along with the portable table saw and composite wood and pressurized lumber buried in white. “The only people working on a deck in Canada right now are us two dummies,” my boss said.

We were close to completion but had to finish the deck’s skirting. The skirting is comprised of composite pieces that need to be installed with stainless steel screws around the deck’s base to provide an aesthetically pleasing look. It was below freezing with the temperatures reaching minus 10 degrees Celsius with the windchill when I was kneeling in amongst an evergreen hedge drilling in composite boards and swearing. I was thankfully grateful when that frigid day was over. Luckily, it only took a few more hours to complete the seemingly endless project. We were finally done.

My sojourn as a construction labourer was painful albeit edifying. I knew then that construction of whatever kind isn’t my calling. I learned quite a bit, but I’m still not hireable, in my opinion. Heck, even I would have fired me. I also asked myself a few questions like: what happens if skilled people are no longer around? Who will fix all things that need fixing? If skilled white people, even those glued to state-run media like the Canadian Broadcast Corporation (CBC), who don’t realize they’re being replaced, are gone, what will hold up our civilization? Newly arrived immigrants can’t do it. They’ve happened upon a ready-made country that plies them with benefits and incentives. My boss and I didn’t agree on much over the course of our sometimes-heated discussions about politics, surprise surprise, but I have more in common with him than I do with people sent here to replace us.

Notes

[1] Jeff Rutherford, Combat and Genocide on the Eastern Front: The German Infantry’s War, 1941-1944 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014), 247.