25. Lot Clearing

Work, Men, Muscle, Labor: A Memoir of Building Houses

The clearing of a building lot was always a hiatus from normal work—and as such, our efforts had an amateur quality, which was its own kind of pleasure. We’d work, but it was just a matter of keeping all the bodies moving. At most, we’d have to do it twice a year at the start of two houses, and it always, oddly, felt a bit like demolition. When we were done, everything that had given charm to a particular patch of ground was entirely scraped away. We saved what trees we could, usually not very many, and for the duration of construction, our work was conducted on that bare dirt moonscape. The clearing of a lot exposed every wrinkle of ground, every section steeper than the rest. Depending on its incline, passage from one area to another could be trivial or hazardous, and frequently, steps were cut into the dirt. The stumps that fell inside the perimeter of the foundation were covered with concrete to prevent sprouting, but after a few months, the strange white tendrils of plant life, deprived of sunlight, would appear anyway in the dark underpinning beneath the new construction. Years would pass before the ground cover surrounding a house made a recovery—because the profile of the new house cast everything into shadow. Wherever we worked in Montclair, we could usually see across the canyon, and identify the houses we had built that stood out from the forest all around, and I would always feel a sense of mystery and curiosity about those more uninhabited places, where I knew birds were still flitting through the canopy. But, for us, discovering the secrets of a plot of land was always synonymous with stripping it bare.

The crew of five or six would line up along the bottom of the lot, and begin chopping and stepping uphill, letting what they chopped roll down behind them. The labor felt like rolling up a carpet. Since we were side-by-side, and the work not particularly taxing, some kind of banter went on all day. Often, Jeff the builder took a spot in the line. Among us, we divided an assortment of shovels, mattocks, hoes, hatchets, axes, and machetes. Everyone chose the implement of his preference and then traded it off as the work proceeded. Most everyone could identify poison oak and steered clear—I got so I could identify it by its roots only. Recklessly hacking at poison oak could give you the worst case of your life. Some men claimed to be not affected, and in a week, we’d discover the truth of their boasts, usually wrong. We used a poison oak removal specialist in Montclair called “Poison Oak Joe” and I once stupidly asked him what his secret was—and he looked at me like I was a fool, and said bluntly: “I get poison Oak!” The carpenters would usually attend to the smaller trees, although they were hardly expert. We knew the basics of felling trees and bucking logs, and that was about it. Sometimes we’d have a lot of trees to buck and stack, and it was not uncommon to see one of the least expert of us with a chainsaw kerf in the sole of his shoe, or a shiny spot on his steel toe protector. A chainsaw was like a small mean dog, snarling and loud. Complacency invited an attack. A tree that was a couple feet in diameter was too big for our minimal skills. So, that particular summer, we hired on a friend of mine, Tadd, as a carpenter’s “helper” who had the expertise we needed. The lot we were clearing had a one hundred foot tall Eucalyptus that had to be climbed and taken down in pieces.

A house “start” is the nomenclature you hear that refers to the intense, often weather-dependent labor of getting a new project off the ground. Until a foundation was built, and the framing begun, the timeline for completion of a house was uncertain. First, the lot was cleared. Then the layout strings were set up and pulled. Then the caisson holes for the foundation were drilled and poured with concrete. Lastly, the wood forms of the foundation would be built and poured with concrete on top of the concrete piers. It was this elaborate and expensive foundation, often extending twenty feet into the earth, that kept a house from sliding down the hillside. Clearing was usually the first day of a project that the entire crew was together, and it often felt like a reunion, since weeks or months may have passed since their last project. Everyone was excited to be starting a new job, another six months of work—an expanse of time if you were accustomed to hopping from side job to side job. Six months of not worrying about the bills. However, everyone also knew that once the lot was cleared, it would be followed by several more down days while the foreman set up the string lines, and worked with the driller. In fact, some members of the crew, who were still finishing up side jobs, might not even show up for the clearing, especially if it was only a few days of work. But once the foreman got the lot drilled, it was all hands on deck to pour the concrete for the piers of the foundation, and from that day on, labor would continue unabated, weather permitting.

The first and only time I went to pick up Tadd at his frat house, he had just graduated, and most of his fraternity brothers were already gone for the summer. Both doors of the double entry were ripped off their hinges, and propped against the opening on either side. The hallway floor was sticky with beer, some of it in fragrant puddles, and the door to Tadd’s room had what appeared to be a huge diagonal chainsaw cut. Later, in the 91 Firestorm, Tadd would become famous for making a solitary but successful stand against the fire raging up toward the ridge—and he was credited with single-handedly saving a half dozen of his neighbor’s houses, including his own. After a summer on the jobsite with us, he would go on to Hastings Law School in the city, and then five years in construction law—a job he hated so much, he finally quit altogether, and applied to be a firefighter in Seattle, eventually making captain. When Tadd opened the door, I could see his Husqvarna with a 36 inch bar was lying on the floor next to the bed. Tadd was blonde and sunny, and guilelessly laughed at everything that came out of my mouth. I don’t attribute this to my sense of humor as much as to his way of taking things in stride. I might have been technically a better climber than Tadd, but when one of our rock climbing adventures went south, Tadd’s grit saved our butt multiple times. He had been an ambulance driver, had worked SAR a couple years, and had been the instructor of a rock climbing course that I had taken. Somehow we had gone on to be climbing partners. Tadd was plenty smart but did not have the neatness of mind of a good carpenter. I remember being up on the scaffold, and annoyed because we’d left the 8d nails back on the ground, and Tadd showed me the pouch of his toolbelt which was stuffed with ten different kinds of nails. This mess he had acquired in only two weeks on the job. “What do you need?” he asked sheepishly, knowing I probably wouldn’t approve of his toolbelt’s organization. But it was impossible to be upset with Tadd.

The eucalyptus tree we had to take down was at the bottom of the lot, about three feet in diameter at the base, and easily a hundred feet tall. With spikes and chaps and a climbing leash, Tadd climbed the tree, following up each of the three or four forks. When he got near the top of one of the forks, he’d set up for a cut. Each section of tree was anchored off of a nearby branch, and then the rope came down to me. I belayed the section with the rope around my back for friction, and I took the precaution of carefully coiling the rest of the rope at my feet, just in case. When Tadd made the cut, I would stop the fall of the section of the tree with the rope—usually it would fall a third of the way, and I would lower it to the ground. Then the process would repeat, with Tadd carefully climbing from one fork of the tree to another. Climbing the tree was painstaking and slow, but things were going pretty well. He was high above me—we had to shout to make ourselves heard. He was a tiny figure way up in the canopy of the eucalyptus. When he finally started working on the tallest fork, he called down to me, “This piece is a little bigger than the others.” “Ok” I said, “No problem.” He started up the saw, made the cut and as the piece was falling toward the ground, I remember thinking that it did look bigger than the others.

When the weight of the falling tree section came onto the rope I had the rope around my back and in both hands, an old-school climber’s belay. Everything happened at once. As I tried to stop the fall, just as I had done with the other sections, the rope began to smoke and burn through my hands and back, and then, the friction of the rope on my body caused my body to be pulled up into the air about five feet. I was trying to let go, but the rope was like a thing alive and wouldn’t let go of me. Much larger than the others, this section of the tree fell all the way to the ground, pulling the rope through my hands. Then, I finally managed to let go of the rope and fell to the ground. I could smell my flesh burning. The coil of the rope had, at least, kept me from getting snagged and hung in the air by my foot or my neck. Tadd shouted, “Are you ok?” I was laughing hysterically, and when I looked at my hands, there was a quarter-inch deep groove from between my thumb and forefinger all across my palms, still smoking from the heat the rope had generated as it flew through my hands. Where the rope had been around my back I could feel a groove there too. That’s a scar I still have. It had all happened so fast I had no time to be afraid, and for some reason, the crazy smoking grooves across my hands, and the feeling of being hoisted up into the air had struck me as funny more than anything else. I don’t think Tadd quite realized what had happened until he climbed down the tree later in the afternoon. He untied, took one look at my hands, and said, “Shit.”

I don’t live far from where I spent most of my life building houses. The landscape of the California chaparral, with its tall grass turning in May from green to gold, with its manzanita, oaks and eucalyptus, is the same landscape where I worked each day for thirty years. When I hike up into the hills from my doorstep, it feels like a return to a place I used to live. Lizards wiggle at my feet, and the shadows of hawks cross my path as they circle under the sun. Years ago, when I lived in Albany, it was often my habit to take a scenic alternative to the crosstown commute. I would drive straight up Marin Avenue, and turn right on Grizzly Peak, which would then begin winding southwards, following the ridge line of the hills to Montclair. The canopy of eucalyptus trees dripped with morning dew, and the entire commute had a continuous view of the San Francisco bay, sometimes dazzling with golden light, and sometimes glowing with a leaden sheen. In summer, the tule fog would snake up gullies to pass like a moving river arching over the ridge. I would get up early just so I could stop on the way to work to read a book or try to write or think about the day for a few minutes. Being up there was a good part of what made the job worthwhile. The other part was a sort of naive belief in the goodness of building. It certainly felt that way at the end of the day, even if we knew that we were just building houses for rich people. Keen to the ironies of my trade, it wasn’t lost on me that we were always destroying something old in order to build something new. And I began to wonder if the irony itself was the illusion, that building and destroying were simply halves of a single process. But now that doesn’t seem right either. These days I’m always revising, not just sentences, but the ideas that the sentences are meant to carry. And not infrequently, I throw my hands in the air and resolve that this particular mystery is something I’m not likely to understand anytime soon.

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