My front deck got busted last week. It was called "in poor condition". My poor deck. I feel sorry for it and I feel sorry for myself. I\'ve worked endlessly for the past decade and my deck has worked day and night for much longer than that. This entire millennium has been a continuous struggle, perhaps I should say challenge, for me. From the dot com bust that caught me with the right skills in the wrong millennium to the financial collapse of the century that again caught me in the wrong business, I\'ve been on the run.
My deck doesn\'t get to go on the run but it does have to work 24 hours a day, rain or shine, light or dark. It stands outside in the elements trying to clutch onto the front of the house, something like a railroad bum clinging to the ladder of a boxcar. Its posts are riddled with termites, its beams are rotted through to the point that several of them have literally fallen to the ground below. Its final embarrassment came the other day in a letter from my home owners insurance proclaiming it to be "in poor condition". It could have done without such a condemning judgment but there are spies in this forest that sneak into my yard when no one is here and photograph my deck\'s most compromising moments as if it was caught doing something naughty.
Aside from the official notice written in "the home owner shall" kind of language, in all upper case printed on a form letter that looks like something from the IRS, I\'ve been aware of the problem for the past few months. It really is a hazard and my wife dutifully put yellow caution tape around it. People shouldn\'t walk on it and that even includes those spies that I never invited and other thoughtless people that may think my house is just an abandoned shack and that they have a self-given right to poke around. I\'ve been proactive with my responsibility to keep even those unwelcome people safe and now I\'m going to be proactive with my carpentry skills.
"It might be nice if the new deck is moved this way and that way," my wife observes and she is quite right as usual. She is quite right and if the new deck had legs and some obedience training it would be no problem to get it to move to a somewhat more useful place in front of the house. For example, perhaps I can just get it to crouch down about two feet so it is at the same level as the living room floor. It\'s hard to imagine but the deck is actually above the level of the floor. It\'s convenient for the cat or raccoons to just stand there and look in the window. This is either a sunken living room or an uppity deck.
"Sit, deck," I command. No luck. Either it doesn\'t understand me or is unruly. This deck needs more obedience training?
Okay. Its not even funny anymore. That letter that the deck gestapo sent included the threat that I would be canceled and not renewed. That made me bristle but I don\'t need any homeowners obedience training to know that I\'m going to obey.
I\'m going to strap on my tool belt that hangs on me like a new suit of sails on a ghost ship, measure and plan and maybe make engineering drawings on the computer just to waste some time, and then start lifting and hauling and buying new deck wood that is heavy and poisonous to people and everything else living and just create a brand new deck from the sheer dint of determination.
A couple of days and a lot of swearing later (rough carpentry has a very limited vocabulary) the new posts and beams are standing proud and stiff like newly minted Marines. Not only that, the officious looking drawings off the computer indicate the possibility of a real floor below and a frame for walls that could be the beginnings of a new and sorely needed storage area under the house. The bureaucratic powers are going to get their deck fix job but I\'m going to get a new storage area. The new deck project is working out for everyone.
"I thought the new deck was going to be low enough that we can replace the living room windows with a wall of French doors," she said sniffing around the the pungent new wood.
I sigh and lean back on the frame that will make an airtight, clean and dry storage area some day . Maybe it will have a little heat, too, so all our old IRS papers won\'t get soggy. I gaze up at the dull gloss of double-plated bolts and metal plates, the edges of precision cut lumber and even the new diagonal bracing that the old deck never had.
Maybe the new deck is better trained than the old one so I try again. "Sit, deck."
