Stepping It Up
Today was a nice sunny day, but a bit on the cool side. I am starting to teach my course tonight, so I plan to leave my afternoon pretty open to get my game face on and do a few course administrative chores. I have been waiting for clear weather for a few days so that I could get some things done in advance of Joventino’s arrival tomorrow. I have bought 600 pounds of bagged and stabilized DG to replenish some of my pathways that have been hit by some rain-driven erosion. I have that sitting in my power wheelbarrow and have been undecided about whether I would position the bags down below for Joventino or if I would just leave the cart up top and let him stage it from there with a smaller wheelbarrow, as is his preference generally. On Sunday I bought some pressure treated lumber for adding steps and then yesterday, in the covered protection of the garage, I cut it to length and drilled the ends to accommodate the rebar stakes I bought along with the lumber. My ability to go further was a function of the weather and it was clear enough today to eliminate any excuse I could imagine, so I set about laying out the new wooden steps on the pathways. I had cut a dozen steps of lengths ranging from 30-36 inches in length. Some of the 4×4 lumber was light and some was sodden and heavy as though infused with added preservative.
Originally, I planned to take all of them down along with my tools with the power cart, but I always run into the problem that driving that damn cart over the pea gravel of the garden and the garden step stones is a tricky affair. It is tricky with an empty cart and it is near impossible with a fully loaded cart, which 600 pounds of DG made this into. I really should keep some track boards on hand to make that transit easier since its the only way to get the cart down the left back hillside. I can get it down the right back hillside with ease and I can take it down the driveway with no trouble, but this side of the hill, going through the garden is always a problem…one which I should know better by now. Sure enough, I got stuck mid-garden, which is one notch better than having the cart tip and spill my load over some poor unsuspecting citrus tree, but getting stuck is no fun either. When that happens, the cart mechanism seems to have a breaker switch to keep it from overheating, and sure enough, I managed to trip it and my cart was now dead in the water. I suppose I could have gone underneath it to flip the breaker switch, but I decided to leave the cart and DG where it lay and let Joventino hand carry it down the hill from there.
That meant that I had to make three trips down the hill and back up to take the wood, the rebar and the tools down to the site. I do these things at my own pace so that I don’t wear myself out prematurely, but regardless, I get the exercise component in to full effect. I then spent the next few hours trenching the pathway at equidistant spots and setting the wooden steps in to both make the walk downhill a bit easier and less prone to slipping, as well as to keep the DG as much on the path and not as susceptible to erosion. I actually find this sort of work to be particularly enjoyable because I have the right digging tools and it is a real “chainsaw carpentry” type of project where precision is not so necessary and nothing about it is particularly hard. Nevertheless, you get to see the results pretty quickly and it all makes me feel very productive. I had bought the local Lowe’s out of 2’ ¼” rebar stakes, which meant that I only had 16 where I needed 24. I did have another eight 2’ ⅜” rebar stakes, but had forgotten to drill bigger holes in four of the steps. I have more stakes coming in the mail from Amazon, but that would not help me today. I really wanted to get all 12 of these steps in so that Joventino could put down all the DG, so I had a choice. I could go find a ⅜” drill bit and ream out the holes on the four steps or I could set the steps in place and plan to add the rebar stakes when they arrived from Amazon. I had had a drill jam yesterday on my last step (actually the very last hole as luck would have it), so I was not anxious to get out the drill again and try the reaming approach. It had nothing to do with the aesthetics of a different size pin and everything to do with my being lazy (a governing principal in many tasks I undertake).
When I started to hammer in the first rebar stakes in the first step I set in place, I began to wonder whether a 2’ stake would encounter rock barriers in that sort of distance. I chose to ignore the concern and had the satisfaction of most of the stakes going in the full 2’ with no problem. The added length made them feel particularly secure in a way that I’m sure a 1’ stake would not feel. There were three stakes which stopped with about 6” to go. I couldn’t feel solid rock as I hit them, but I am pretty sure they would not go much further. I was wailing on them pretty good with that handheld sledge hammer. I left them as they were and figured that I would take the circular grinder to them in the morning and clip off the extra rebar. No problem. That will also probably make me feel like bringing the drill down to ream those four steps out anyway, so I think it will all work out fine.
As I headed back up the hill to have lunch and wash up for my teaching duties later on, I had the satisfaction of seeing all twelve steps in place and more or less looking like they were permanently set in place. Like I said, they don’t look so very finished, but I don’t really want my back hillside to look like a formal English garden. I want it to look more like rough hiking trails, which is what it does look like now. I hadn’t done so much hillside labor for several months and it felt good to be stepping up my activity level on the hillside now that Spring seems right around the corner. The native wildflowers are blooming already from all the rain lately and all the succulents look like they have somewhere between plenty and too much water at this point. There is very little for me to do on the hillside other than projects like this step project, at least at the moment.
I then went in for a nice hot shower and tossed all my dirty garden clothes into the hamper. It feels good to get clothes dirty again, I mean really dirty from working in the dirt. Kim, who does the laundry, may not appreciate this aspect of my seasonal changes, but I suspect she’s OK with it since she has never mentioned anything. As I sat on the sofa next to Kim and caught up on the national news on MSNBC, I went to work on my class roster, making a spreadsheet for grading for the semester. While doing it I felt my right forearm start to cramp up. It was the kind of cramp that forces your hand into a claw of sorts. It was clearly a response to all the sledge hammer work I had just done. It was nature’s way of reminding me that stepping it up does have a cost and that I should remember to pace myself out on the hillside.