Kneeding Comfort
When my kids were younger they fell into two categories. Carolyn and Thomas were forever rambunctiously scraping their knees and existing in a somewhat constant state of scabbed kneecaps from their falling. Roger, on the other knee, was s different sort of child. He was the child that at the age of one crawled to edge of the blanket on the lawn, touched the wet grass and recoiled back to the safety of the center of the blanket. He was instinctively physically cautious. In fact, I have often said that I cannot ever remember him having scraped a knee as a child.
I do not know for certain which of the two categories of child I was in my youth, but I always thought I las like Carolyn and Thomas and that I thought nothing of scraping up my knees in the pursuit of whatever happiness required sacrifice of the skin on my knees. But now I am not so sure I am right in that assumption. You see, Several weeks ago when I fell uphill on my back forty, I scraped by left knee and was acutely aware of its seemingly slow healing process. It remained sore for quite awhile (I attribute that more to the contusions on the shin rather than the bloodletting on the knee proper. As for the scab on the knee, that went the normal course of scabs and grew smaller with time and the occasional picking at which I could not seem to avoid. It went through an itchy stage as well, which made me wonder if I perhaps should be picking at it even more. Who among us is so disciplined as to allow a wound to heal by itself to the point where a scab just naturally disappears?
Well, just when I had thought I was past the worst of my minor knee injury, I decided to put both knees to task. Kim has been bugging me that my back hill pathways, covered in packed decomposed granite, are too steep in spots. There are two stretches in particular which suffer from this configuration. I have never told her that when friends Steve and Leslie visited, I watched Leslie slide and fall on her ass down one of them. I was sure that would not help my cause of just leaving these paths be. I had gone up and down them all summer and found them to be reasonably navigable. But as Mitch McConnell famously said of Nancy Pelosi, still she persisted and I decided that I “kneeded” to do something to rectify the situation.
The first idea was to put handrails along those two stretches of path. I wanted them to be in keeping with the themes of the hillside, so I found some large driftwood posts and railings on Etsy and decided to find a way to fashion them into a railing system. The first challenge was how to set the posts. I know enough about these things to know that just digging a hole would lead to a wobbly post. I also knew that putting a wooden post into concrete would lead to fairly rapid rotting of the post and then an even uglier mess with which to contend down the road. So, I found some metal post stakes that go down into the ground 30” or so and grab the post at the base to keep it out of the damp earth for maximum longevity. My sense of physics told me they went deep enough to be stable anchoring systems, so I ordered four to go along with my four posts, which were on their way to me. I also found some old-looking metal brackets that looked like a good way to attach the railing to the two posts.
I was all set, but time and patience are never my friends. I started imagining that the posts would be wobblier than I had hoped. That’s also when Kim started to suggest that steps into the hillside paths would be nice. I decided to do what I rarely do, which is put a belt and suspenders on the problem. I went out and bought pressure-treated 4”x6” lumber cut into two-foot lengths. That’s narrow for steps normally, but that was my compromise. The paths would still look like paths that had small steps built into them if one needed them to feel more secure. And there would be a railing if you needed extra comfort. I drilled the pieces at both ends and even sprayed on copper-based stain on th cut ends to seal them from the elements (the suggestion of the lumberman at Home Depot).
Then I got out my hand pick and sledge hammer and went to work digging in the first piece at the top of the first of the two slopes (I attacked the steeper slope first). The existing DG picked out easily and I was able to fairly easily dig in a shelf for the wood block. Unlike Handy Brad who would have had a level and probably a chalk string on everything, I just used my good eyeballs to approximate the right positioning of the wood. My thought is that this was intended as a rough stair and there was no need for that degree of precision since this was wood in dirt and things would move a bit during execution if not during use. Once in place, I put in the J-hooked rebar I had purchased and hammered them into the ground on both sides until the step was secure. I packed in the extra dirt around the stair and voila! As I repeated the process, I slid the foam knee pad I was using down the slope and suddenly started slipping downhill.
I have been climbing up and down these sloped paths all summer and fall and been doing so in Crocs, Birkenstock clogs, boots, and shoes and have never slipped on the DG. But today, as I was putting in these palliative steps for Kim I found myself having a hard time clinging to the hillside and gravity kept pushing me lower down the slope and my Crocs kept slipping our from under me as I tried to get up to get the next piece of wood. It was crazy. Once I had declared the slope unmanageable, it became unmanageable to me for some odd reason. I struggles to use the knee pad and found myself occasionally missing the pad as I tried to keep my balance on the slope while I worked.
Then I noticed the knees of my pants. The left one was starting to bleed a bit through the Firehose Flex material and the right one was starting to hurt as well. I stayed calm and carried on as the British war message says to, but when I finished the last of the eight steps I was glad to be done. My knees hurt and my forearm was getting crampy from using the hand pick and sledge repeatedly from the weird angles I was forced to take to keep myself from sliding down the slope. In a word I was a mess from this little handyman exercise.
The next day, in addition to a sore right forearm, I noticed that my gluteus muscles were very sore from using my rear core strength to keep my place on that slope while I worked away. I also noted in the hot tub that both knees now sport new scabs. I am letting all of that heal before tackling the next eight-step slope which I have laid out. I also have 200 pounds of fresh DG to lay down around the steps to restore the look of the path. I think I will wait a few more days before tackling all that as at the moment I am kneeding comfort for my scabby knees.