Fixing A Hole

[kevin_standlee]

The access to the trailer here in Mehama is a dead-end gravel road that also serves the Mehama Community Church. (The church sits on land donated by Lisa's ancestors, and her father has at times sat on the church's governing board; he also donated to them a small parcel that now forms the church's back yard.) Although nominally a county road, it doesn't seem to ever get maintained. The potholes have been growing ever larger this winter.

Today I noticed that the church had a large pile of gravel delivered to the far corner of its gravel parking lot, presumably so they can use it to resurface the lot from time to time. I decided to take matters into my own hands, literally, and got the wheelbarrow, shovel, and rake, and sallied forth to tackle some of those potholes.

The largest of the holes was one that I'd taken to calling "the swimming pool" due to its size. Being an engineer, I like to measure things. I counted fifty shovels of gravel as the number needed to fill the wheelbarrow without making it too heavy to handle. It took five wheelbarrow-loads of gravel to fill the "swimming pool." I carted four more loads of gravel to fill smaller potholes before my wrist informed me that, brace or no, I was over-doing it. Ow.

I do hope that my freelance road-work doesn't bring the wrath of the church upon me for "stealing" their gravel. Lisa's cousin is still active in the church's governance, so the next time I see him, I'll tell him that I was doing the neighborly thing by patching the road. Besides, I've been saying that if someone would buy the materials, I'd provide the labor, and it appears that "my prayers were answered."

Work like this reminds me of how fortunate I am to have a computer job that pays well, rather than having to earn a living by hard manual labor. I think I only spent about 90 minutes shoveling and moving gravel, but I'm feeling all in nonetheless.

Update, 17:00: Lisa and I ran into her cousin at the hardware store today and I explained what I'd done. Not only did he endorse my actions, but he went and got his barrow and filled in the rest of the potholes while Lisa and I worked on putting up some metal sheeting on the old house to replace the temporary plastic covering the hole in the wall. Lisa rushed to secure the sheets as the rain began to fall again. Just as things started getting seriously wet, we managed to get back under cover.

Comments

[gridlore.livejournal.com]

OK, I had to laugh. You want to guess how many times in my career I've said "thank Halford I've got this blue-collar job instead of being stuck behind a desk all day"?

Takes all types to make the world work.

[nojay.livejournal.com]

Terry Pratchett quit school early to become a journalist, "indoor work with no heavy lifting" as he put it. Forty minutes after he started as an apprentice with a local newspaper he saw his first dead body, real on-the-job training.

[kevin-standlee.livejournal.com]

My grandfather was a heavy-equipment operator, and very good at what he did. (He was one of the workers who built New Bullard's Bar Dam in the Sierra Nevada and portions of I-5 through the Southern Cascades, among other projects.) It took me exactly one day sitting with him on his bulldozer on the not-particularly-taxing field-leveling duties he did in his later years to tell me that this was not my desired line of work and that I should stick to my studies and go to college. I also do not begrudge the workers their salaries the way some people who have never had to do the work do.