The Mystery of Well-Being
In November of 2020, as we were all hunkered down with our first winter of COVID and we were glad to be out of NYC and on our hilltop, I walked outside onto our deck after a particularly hard rain the day before and I suddenly found myself hip deep in my deck. I had most suddenly fallen through my deck just steps outside my Kitchen door. It was amazing that I didn’t hurt myself because it surely had the potential to do some damage to me on one part of my body or another. What it did do was open my eyes to the age-old problems of assessing physical and structural damage and then determining the proper corrective path. If I knew then what I know now about what lay beneath the veneers of that deck at the time, I would have taken a very different approach to getting it fixed. None of this was for lack of involving experts of all kinds. Everyone who came over to survey the damage, which I further exposed with the help of Handy Brad, told me the same thing. They said that this was a simple repair job with little need to concern myself with a more major replacement project. In the ensuing four months I learned a great deal about how this house was built, the difficulties of repairing anything on the downhill side of this magnificent structure, how to go about acting as a general contractor when you don’t know enough to do the job properly and yet no one else is a prepared to take on the task, and, most importantly, the limits of expertise.
It was actually a general lesson I should have understood better, having spent almost six years trying to build a $650 million, 630 foot giant observation wheel on New York Harbor. In that case I had the most world class experts available and they too came up against problem after problem that they could not solve. Ultimately, while it might have cost me a fortune, I was able to complete my deck, but I was not able to complete the giant observation wheel, despite having poured $450 million into the ground, leaving a 1,000 car garage, a large terminal building and a foundation with four hundred-ton steel footers in place ready to hold what became an imaginary wheel. The biggest difference between the two projects was that the deck existed when I started and the wheel didn’t. In both cases, there was a need to create a design that would hold opposing forces in place, something that defines most structures. What I leaned in the wheel construction process was that almost all of the structural gravitas was there to allow for the relatively unnatural act of putting the pieces together and that much of that structure was unnecessary once the wheel was up. Strangely enough, there was a simple truth about materials that equally applied to the deck as to the wheel. Once materials are in place, the integrity of materials takes hold and that wins the day for a lot longer than most people realize. The concept of the integrity of materials was explained to my by my brother-in-law and architect for 50 years, Bennett.
When you are peeling back the layers of some structure like the deck that I was trying to fix and then ultimately replace, I kept asking the question, “how could this have stood up so long and held so well with all these flaws?” Well, once one thing went, in this case caused by my putting my foot through the tile surface of the deck, then it was a cascade of one issue after another that became flawed and unfixable. I liken it to taking the keystone out of an arch. Without it, the the arch cannot stand almost no matter what you do to substitute for it, it is never strong enough to withstand the slightest of forces. But once that keystone is in place, you can beat it with a stick and it won’t budge. This is one of the concepts that allows economical and even delicate structures to exist for a long time, the forces that work in synchronicity with one other to create something stronger than the individual parts.
I relate this integrity of materials concept to my personal well-being as well. I will start by explaining that when I was eight years old, a doctor told me I was built like a twelve year-old. Then, when I started playing JV tennis in prep school at age 13, the school doctor said I had the body weight of a 20-year-old and the individual structural parts of a thirteen-year-old. This was his explanation of why I was having pains in my ankles, shins and calves at night when I tried to sleep. He said that I was pounding my lower extremities on the hard tennis courts with so much weight that I was abusing them enough so that they could not recover overnight. That ended my tennis career. During college I strained my Achilles tendon playing volleyball and I sense that was part of the same problem. But then, as I reached adulthood, my body parts seemed to catch up with the rest of me and everything kinda worked. That, despite the fact that I went into college weighing 310 pounds (I was 6’3 at the time and still growing). By the time I hit my maximum height of 6’5”, I weighed 330 pounds and was pretty active. I used to run about 2 miles most days. I skied in the winter and was back to playing tennis and lots of golf. Fortunately for me, I never succumbed to the temptation to play contact sports, because whatever nature was isometrically inclined to allow me, I’m sure external stresses would have put various body parts at risk.
In my early working career (more or less age 35), while engaging in all these activities, I managed to traumatize my left ACL knee tendon. It happened at a corporate outing while I was trying to mount a donkey (don’t ask). It was low enough to seem doable and just high enough to not be. I saw red flashes and the pain was excruciating. I iced it and babied it until I could go see an orthopedic surgeon in Toronto, which is where I was living at the time. He told me the ACL was severed and that I should have it replaced with Kevlar. I balked and decided to let it heal by itself (something he told me ligaments do not do). I got a brace to ski with and I made a point of not running for any buses, but was otherwise fine. Five years later I took an unexpected three foot step onto a granite block on my left leg and saw those red lights all over again. This time I saw a top orthopedic surgeon in NYC and he wanted to go in arthroscopically and fiddle around. We had a disagreement about a anesthesia, so I opted for an open MRI image instead. As he showed me the MRI he pointed out the half inch of scarring on the left ACL (who knew? Apparently not the Toronto orthopedist) and said it was a good thing I hadn’t put in Kevlar since it was mostly being taken out these days. Once again, I left the knee alone to heal itself and it was….fine.
Over the years I have other aches and pains like anyone. Sometimes they are in my hips, sometimes my shoulders and sometimes my lower back. Every time I have talked to someone about them, I have opted for some light PT rehab and the pains have gone away. I am 70 years old now, have lived for over 50 years over 300 pounds (I dipped to 270 once in college) and, as I like to say, I am working off all original equipment. And everything works. I go back to the integrity of materials. Mother Nature has built me to hold up my bulk. My ankles are big. My knees are big. My thighs are big. Its all scaled to carry my weight and I have been fortunate enough to not traumatize it too badly and have had the wisdom to not fall prey to the surgeon’s knife. The lesson I take from my modest construction experience is that if I can just keep it all in place and not try to change anything, it should all continue to hold me up a bit longer. It’s a mystery of well-being, but if you have to have a mystery in life, that;s the sort to have.