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After umpty-ump columns for the good
reverend's paper, I’m running a hair scant on material.
That old dog thinks I can just scratch this stuff out of
the dirt every month! He thinks I've got a juicy stash of
bones cached away. Shoot, I haven't had a fresh idea in
a decade, eat dreary tuna sandwiches for lunch every
day, tell the same stories over and over again like a
recorded phone message. Besides that, it's spring time,
the sun's coming out, and I've got other cattle to brand.
Since I'm pretty much stumped, I thought maybe I'd
give a few observations on the building trades for lack
of a better topic.
In the twenty-plus years I've been sawing and
pounding, significant changes have occurred in the
typical building process. Wood, our primary regional
material, has undergone substantial degradation. Fine,
straight, vertical grain fir, once the standard
dimensional lumber, has virtually vanished from
lumberyards in this country. Current Green Douglas
Fir, Grades 1 and 2, "Standard and Better," bears scant
resemblance to the sound, lightweight, tensile strong
boards o f two decades ago. When a unit o f 2x4's shows
up at a job site, the sticks of wood are a sorry mockery
o f the boards I knew as a young man. Green as Ireland,
swollen with water like a Safeway ham, barked on both
sides o f a 3 1/2 inch board, two growth rings to the inch,
a fellow needs to be a Sumo wrestler to lift one o f the
brutes. In a pile of lumber, roughly half the boards will
be waned, warped, checked, scabrous things, scarcely fit
for kindling wood.
My working partner, Mike Capper, and I laugh about
the turn things have taken. As the years pass by, we get
slightly more feeble and shrink in stature. The houses
seem to get bigger and bigger and the boards heavier
and heavier.
Most clients want structures with few interior walls,
enormous open spaces, huge banks o f windows, nine-
foot ceilings, vaulted areas, massive decks. The current
changes in seismic and wind-shear calculations translate
into beefier timbers, monstrous beams and laminated
members, exponentially more grunt work for the
carpenter.
Last week a kid stopped me in the coffee shop. He'd
been watching us frame up a big new residence, two
green troglodytes huddled in a driving southwest rain
squall.
"Man" he told me, "I've been watching you guys.
You're animals!"
"Yeah," I said. "We're animals all right. Besides,
between us we've got 112 years of experience!"
The English poet William Blake wrote of "fearful
symmetry ." In the construction o f single family
residences in recent decades, I've noticed a creeping
trend toward homogeneity in design and assembly of
structures. We all use essentially the same materials
and techniques. The most common question posed by
prospective clients is "How much will it cost to build
this house per square foot?"
To remain competitive, contractors necessarily pare
construction time and material costs to a minimum. A
handful of corporate interests drive the market:
Weyerhauser, Trus Joist MacMillan, Delta, Louisana
Pacific, Simpson Strong Tie Co., Anderson Window
Corporation, Milgard, Stanley, Pabco, Schlage, Velux,
Formica, Dow-Coming.
In the past five years, for example, virtually every
house we've framed used engineered wood/glue
composite joisting, sheeting, and sub-flooring produced
by Weyerhauser Co., in association with Trus Joist
MacMillan. In simpler terms, the entire skeletal
structure o f these expensive homes is formed o f bark
chips and glue! I daresay, most new homes built in the
Northwest this past decade used the same material. A
small shudder travels through me when I recall the
failure o f Louisana Pacific's bevelled siding in the late
90's. If that glue binding the wood fibers ever went
South on us, an unlikely prospect admittedly, then all
the houses we built in the last two years would be
nothing more than piles o f goo and Bark-O-Mulch!
Our current project has 18 foot walls studded with
4x6 timbers. In order to erect the walls, we hired a
crane to lift the tons o f assembled framing. In the past,
two average blokes, using conventional tools, could
build a house. Now cranes, fork lifts and other heavy
machinery increasingly appear on construction job sites.
Monday morning the roof trusses arrive. Mike and I
will be scrambling around like two aged Rhesus
monkeys twenty-five feet off the ground, my heart
beating like a rabbit. It just don't seem to get easier. I
guess I should have stayed in school.
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Victoria Stoppiello
Not so optimistic
A friend asked a provocative question
the other day: Would the human race get it
together and solve some of the big problems
facing us, such as global warming, water
pollution, overpopulation and the descent into
poverty that is happening in so many places? I’ve
tended to believe that once the discomfort is great
enough, and once natural resources are scarce
enough, a combination of pain and money-to-be-
made will generate innovation and solutions.
Although I want to be optimistic, I'm
also reminded of a story I heard about ten years
ago while camping in central Nevada. A few
miles from US 50, the site had been a mining
camp and was strewn with relics from the mining
operation. The treeless landscape swept down to
an ancient sea bed lying between north-south
running mountains, the kind of place that could
be hot as Hades in the summer and bitter cold in
winter. The attraction was a set of hot springs
that flowed into several tubs set among
sagebrush and behind tailing piles for a bit of
privacy.
There were two other couples camping
there, one with a four year old daughter. One man
taught at the University of Utah, the other at the
University of California in Berkeley. Both were
engineers. Long-time friends, the two families
had picked this remote spot as a mid-point
rendezvous for a weekend get-together.
The little girl’s family had camped at a
spot with a tiny stream the night before and she
had loved it, didn't want to leave, and was
grumpy about this spot. She didn't seem to be
able to get comfortable. I commented that
perhaps it was something about camping at an
old mining site, and described the odd feeling of
dislocation I felt when we camped in the National
Forest near Morenci, Arizona, where a huge open
pit mine was just down the road.
The engineering professor from Cal, in
all seriousness, said ’’Oh, that’s because the earth
has been wounded there, and you can hear her
screams." He talked about the insensitivity that
seems to go along with mining and oil
exploration. Then he went on to tell a story.
He had worked for a major oil company
for a number of years, and had developed a
technique for containing underground oil spills,
recovering the oil and reducing the potential
pollution of ground water. The technique would
save the company a lot of money and be better
for the environment too—but the company
wouldn’t adopt his new method. That's when he
quit the corporate life and became a college
professor.
I asked, "Why would the company not
do something that would make them more
money and be good for the environment at the
same time?"
The engineer said, "They just wanted to
keep doing what they were used to doing, even
though it wasn't in their own financial interest."
He went on to say he understood why the public
suspects oil companies engage in price fixing.
He believes they do. The world of big oil is in
fact small, run by a handful of men who could
literally get on the phone and call each other at
home: "Hey Louie, what do you say we charge
XYZ?" and "Louie" in turn would call Hank, and
"Hank" would call "Tom" and the small circle
would be complete.
There are a few uneasy lessons in the
engineer's story. One is that we humans are
reluctant to change our ways—not only when it's
in our invisible long-term interest, but
sometimes even when it's to our immediate short
term advantage. Another lesson is that in a world
addicted to oil, there is no limit on the price the
pusher-man can charge, and therefore no incentive
for efficiency or innovation. When oil runs out
in about 2050, those guys on the phone will all
be dead, and the consequences of their actions in
the late 20th century, whether global warming or
water pollution, won't matter—to them.
It's a sad commentary that sometimes
knowledge, science, even potential profit, just
aren't enough. As long as we're reasonably
comfortable and can accommodate gradual change
in our circumstances, we don’t take action. We're
the proverbial frog in the slowly heating water,
coming to a boil. A crisis, such as World War II,
might spring us into action, recycling all our
aluminum and planting Victory Gardens. But a
slowly emerging problem like global warming
and clima(e change just doesn't seem to be
dramatic enough to break through our inertia.
Victoria Stoppiello is a writer living in
Ilwaco, at the lower left comer o f Washington
State.
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