Mike,

Nothin’ like a new snow to let you in on the otherwise unseen goings on of one’s “wild” backyard — I’m guessing Felis silvestris catus from back right to front left, with an evidently time-other passage of Sciurus carolinensus middle left to front right.

Adam

My Globe hasn’t arrived yet, but I hope The Word takes on commas to give the NYT Online op-ed about the 2nd amendment a seconding motion “HOO-Rah!”.  Cuts right through a bunch of hooey nonsense that many in this country take for a convenient truth.

Adam

 

Here you will find a selection from my camera (some by Bill).

The captain stood there with his arms crossed looking upwards. “Doesn’t look safe. I wouldn’t do it.” His men silently nodded knowing assent; my confident explanations fell on deaf ears. We said a few more words, but I wasn’t inherently their problem — there was no fire, and slowly they drifted away, back to their waiting trucks, another alarm call resolved with no risk to life or limb. Not yet, anyway — and my stupidity wasn’t going to happen on their watch.

After they’d left, my clients all stared at me questioningly. “Are you sure about this? This isn’t worth anyone getting hurt. Maybe we should try something else … ““Nope,” I said, “I’m sure. Let’s see how this lighting’s going to work.” And rung by rung I started up.

Okay, I’m writing this, so I didn’t die, and no, I didn’t set off the beam detector again – I think we called the insurance company and got them to authorize us to shut if off for the duration of our mockup, I forget. But I did miscalculate a couple of things …

At that steep angle, and with my notable weight inducing the inevitable curve to the ladder, by about 30’ up it’s becoming tangent to the wall. Barely enough room to get my fingers around the rungs, and oh-so-little purchase for my toes. Standing tippy-toed in size 13’s, in other words. Oh, and it’s hot. Heat rises, and 40’ in the air I was into a whole other climate zone. So there I am having a high-dive moment, my clients now toy figures below me, dripping sweat, holding a 10’ pole with a small but not weightless light on it as steadily as I can while holding on with one hand to a ladder effectively applied to the wall. On tippy-toes. Shouting back and forth to people far below who want to evaluate the effect from multiple positions, having me aim at various locations, each change requiring lowering the pole, adjusting the light, raising it again ….

It worked, the lighting concept was a good idea, I survived. But the firefighters – duh – were right. Just not about the aspect they’d identified. Just in general, it wasn’t safe. But I was never afraid, exactly. Wearily anxious towards the end, maybe, but after all — and especially given where we were — we already knew the eyes of god were upon us.

Maybe because I’d worked there before and had a dim memory for a prompt, or maybe just from a lucidity I could have used a few minutes earlier as foresight, I knew instantly what we’d done. In very tall spaces such as this, smoke detection as part of a fire alarm system usually takes the form of what are called beam detectors, a transmitter and receiver placed at opposite ends of the space at a height determined by geometry and building code. Electric eyes, in essence. If the beam is interrupted, as by smoke, the alarm goes off, and unless a pigeon gets inside, 40’ off the ground nothing other than smoke is expected to interrupt it. But the wobbling tip of our giant ladder just had. We leaned the ladder on the side wall and went outside to await Boston’s finest.As a national historic landmark, The Church of the Covenant merited 3 response vehicles, which arrived in well under 5 minutes. The captain approached us with that unique blend of aloof intensity, prepared to save a treasured building and/or its occupants but naturally expecting the ubiquitous false alarm. We told him what we thought had happened, which the annunciator panel confirmed, and after some fossicing about looking for the shutoff, a gaggle of firefighters assembled at the scene of the incident, gazing thoughtfully up at our ladder, now in its intended place and awaiting my attention.“I wouldn’t send anybody up that,” said firefighter # 1. “It’s not safe”“Yeah, that angle’s too steep,” said # 2. “See that symbol on the side? That should be straight up and down, not leaning back. You start to go up that, it’ll come away from the wall. You could fall. It’s not safe.”Mind you, these are guys who live ladders that are going to very not safe places and know their craft. But I’ve been many a dicey place on a ladder myself, albeit in theaters; wobbling side-to-side a couple of feet (literally) while 40’ in the air on the Loeb Drama Center’s old, massive, center-extension A-frames; snaking up into parts of sets on extension ladders set vertically; or hanging out over a 3-story drop on the Agassiz’s bendy fiberglass shepherd’s crook extension ladder hooked over the rim of the ceiling electrical trough. Besides, one simple fact of geometry was in my favor, as I earnestly explained to the assembled group of dubious clients and firefighters. Though 4’ or 5’ out from the wall IS indisputably too close to set the base when you’ll be 40’ in the air, it’s still 4’ or 5’ of space that’s INSIDE the ladder’s feet. I am indisputably getting wider, but I’m nowhere near that wide. The ladder’s entire (and considerable) center of gravity is to the wall, and once I got 15 feet up or so, all of mine would be, too. No way I could fall backwards, even trying. With someone ballasting it on the inside for that first bit, I was totally confident. Which made one of us.

Many years ago I was privileged to work on relighting The Church of the Covenant on Newbury Street in Boston. It boasts some of Louis Comfort Tiffany’s finest windows, as well as a gorgeous and monumental chandelier, which — if I recall correctly – was his first light fixture. It hangs at the crux of the transept, beautifully transposed upon the archwork of the chancel and altar and is spectacular in its Art Deco details (the ancient, scanned-slide thumbnail above does not do it justice). While we added theatrical lighting for weddings, a good deal of architectural detail lighting to highlight features previously invisible, and designed lanterns for the side archways to greatly boost the light levels, the vast and lofty space remained, shall we say, “moody” …A year or more ago I was asked to come by and offer suggestions for further augmenting the light levels, as their aging congregation was finding the dim interior increasingly unworkable. From numerous suggestions made, we chose to mock up a scheme involving tiny, directional low-voltage spots mounted high on the sidewalls, partially camouflaged by column capitals and a ledge under the clerestory windows, and aimed in to the center of the space, where light was needed most.The church has a long extension ladder to get to the uplights we’d added years ago, which are on other column capitals perhaps 30’ in the air. These new positions would be almost 10’ higher, that ladder’s theoretical limit. Knowing I wouldn’t be able to get to the spot directly, I mounted the test light to a pole which I could hold aloft from the top of the ladder, and we began.The pews are securely bolted to the floor, the end of one making a better footing than any well-meaning human (albeit a bit closer to the wall than ideal). It took three of us to get the massive beast vertical, and with the base in place we began extending the upper section by pulling on the integral rope and pulley, the latches of the extension rattling off the rungs of the base section as it went up. A rung or two at a time. Slowly, carefully — heavy thing, wobbling but more or less in control. Almost there … Then came a really big noise. The fire alarm.

In which Adam runs afoul of Mike’s proclivity for intellectual bigotry

A landscape lighting project downtown acquired new dimensions when the building architects (not the landscape architects who got me involved in the first place) became interested in how one might light the building to enhance its features from afar. One of its salient details is the cruciform corner columns, which straddle the octagonal lobby volume, beginning as “plus signs” for three stories before merging with the upper square tower volume for the next 40 stories (effectively losing two sides into the façade). The building thus has four “innie” corners all the way to the roof, and we decide to uplight one of these as a test.

Even the narrowest-beam spotlight I could scrounge only carried a dozen floors or so – clear that we’d never reach the roofline from the ground, we decided to see what a similar spotlight at the roof would do aimed down (new contract with a new client). After a quick reconnoiter on a crackerjack Indian summer January evening, I came back on a less friendly night to actually test it out.

The views from the 42-floor mechanical penthouse parapet floor are spectacular – that I never brought my camera up there should be simply condemned up front then ignored … The night of the test, a front was coming in. Upriver along the Charles to the west was a spectacular band of peach being squeezed out of the sky by the descending grey, and chill wind buffeted us. The building supervisor assigned someone to assist and secure me — in deference to blog anonymity, I’ll call him MG (for “maintenance guy”), but his actual name evokes the adjectives “Mighty” and “Young” for anyone versed in 50’s science fiction.

30-something, short and stocky, MG’s got a pugnacious but friendly face, skewed by a notable growth on the bridge of his nose, and a pleasant, can-do attitude. We set off from the loading dock for the elevators with a cheerful, “Let’s get up there, brother!” Since I’d be hoisting a 20 lb. light out over 42 stories on a 10’ piece of Unistrut, both the gear and I needed to be tied off so neither could go over the edge (not very far over, anyway … ). Which involved MG coaching me into how to don an OSHA harness (“Let me show you this, then, brother”), me squeezing my above-average height and weight into a difficult-to-adjust rig set up for someone smaller and shorter, and then his tying me and the gear off to the window washing davits once in position (“Feels tight — you good, brother?”).

So I’m oddly trussed up, standing on a scaffold with the light in place, me and it roped to the roof, and we’re gazing out on the impressive city skyline view waiting for darkness to fall, and I’m wondering what MG and I can find to talk about — other than his fondness for the epithet, “Brother”, the lack of circulation in my legs, and my envy of his thermal coveralls … As far as I know, his life is all building maintenance – boilers and chillers, ducts and valves, probably brawling on weekends. I don’t want a Young Frankenstein, “What hump?” moment, so I’m not going to ask about his nose (but I do ponder his dating difficulties some … ), and I’m determined to avoid cars, assuming he’s a protectionist Ram pickup guy, me having driven there in a Toyota Matrix (Asian wagon).

But as topics come and go, I find myself explaining my job and lamp and fixture technology in more and more detail to a guy who knows more about electricity than me, musing on the state of Boston commercial real estate with someone who works in several major buildings and knows both some history and what’s “in the pipeline”, debating smart phones with much more of a power-user than I’ll ever be, and comparing kids to grandkids. Yes, he has a wife and children ….

Turns out he owns the Volvo I’m parked behind, and while beer figures in our chitchat for awhile, he’s a reader, and an avid watcher of nature channels – not the Crocodile Hunter (R.I.P.), but Nova, National Geographic, etc. – and we talk evolution, space travel, lunar colonization, LED lighting, nanotechnology, Homeland Security, urban flight, you name it. While the architects are tromping all over Boston seeking various vantage points to evaluate the effect (and while our core temperatures plummet), MG and I are finding easy conversation on all manner of topics. All liberally punctuated with “brother”, which has gone from dubiously ironic to an honorific I feel I don’t deserve.

We passed a fine evening, and once we were done he demonstrated equally unexpected tactful grace to go with his erudition. After helping me down from the scaffold, he said he’d set about untying things if I wanted to get out of the harness. Not thinking past the beckoning warmth of the open mechanical bay door, I slung the Unistrut with its hyper-secured light over my shoulder and headed for the lit doorway — when I was stopped dead in my tracks by an unseen force. The rope tied to the D-ring of my harness. One of the things he had to untie was me …

Never said a word about it.

For Michael.  From a story in today’s Boston Globe on the Carpenter Poets of Jamaica Plain – 18 men and one woman — and their weekly Thursday night gathering at Jame’s Gate Restaurant to share words on their craft over beers.

 

Too Slow for Demolition

by William Thibodeau

 
These days

I still do a bit of the demo work

Though I tell myself I’ve paid my dues

That I prefer construction to destruction –

Reminding myself that most of what I know

About putting things together

I learned by taking them apart.

Truth is …  I’m just too slow to make it pay.

And while I complain, saying:

Who needs all that plaster dust in the face …

The chaos …

The scramble to get it down and get it gone … ?

I still find myself wading into that mess.

Taking my time

I erase the work,

Of those who came before me –

All the detail and sweat

By nameless men –

With their crude tools

And materials I still can’t identify.

Men who’d be dumbstruck to see

The tools I’ll soon be setting up.

I see their spirit in the chalk-white dust

I feel their life force vibrating in each cut nail I pull –

And their hard learned lessons

And subtle chiding through the endless splinters

That come from that gnarly lath.

It all ends up in the truck.

And as if facing one of a pair of opposing mirrors

Looking at once ahead and behind me

Seeing an endless past and future stream –

No trick of light – no mere illusion

I can see them all on down the line

From the Colonial post and beam man

To the very one

Who’ll someday strip

My own work from this job.

Where will I be then … ?

Will I still be … then … ?

Or will I have become another half-heard voice

Murmuring between these rafters and studs?

It’s the movement of time

The skill of past carpenters

And the stories in voices that flow through a steam of generations:

(When heard by the pure of heart)

Voices that thunder like Brahman

Within and without these plastered walls and ceilings

That light my eyes and guide my hands.

No, I don’t make a very good demo man.

I’m just too slow.

I owe them that much.

Should you need a lite, trite Christmas post graphic, I offer the attached of our everted “tree”.

Adam

All our houses make certain noises uniquely theirs. Over time, we learn some of them; learn they do not herald axe-murderers entering through basement windows or dangerous new species (or ravenous prehistoric creatures) born spontaneously out of forgotten relics in the attic. The occasional branch bouncing off the roof or especially enthusiastic duct cooling may still bring me cold-sober-awake at 3 a.m. wondering WHAT the heck I’d just heard, but even some new noises can be glibly attributed – our new refrigerator has such a repertoire that any aspiring axe-murderer need only bring along a defunct concertina and ride in on a unicycle with a playing card in the spokes and we’ll just think, “Oh, that must be the frig … “.

But a noise I’m not sure I’d ever heard before I.D.’d itself with sudden and alarming clarity on the dusty gravel roads leading away from Enchanted Pond this year.

Enchanted Pond. En-chan-ted … If ever “too good to be true” were embodied in a Maine lake, this was it. We knew from topo maps and Google Earth that no roads led all the way to its shores. Which was part of the allure – like the trice-attempted Rainbow of yore, which finally took a float plane to reach, Enchanted’s remove (despite otherwise relative proximity), drew us to what we imagined to be well-earned isolation, quiet waters and dark skies. And it had a good name for our website. But all 3 of our crossed-fingers routes had ended in the dreaded impasses we’d imagined – the first petering out in a tangled clearcut; the second washed away in the miniscule trickles of a stream no canoe – nor even paper boat – could navigate; and this, the last, a road which skirted its southwestern boundaries, from which we hoped we might find a trail in.

Much about our abilities, common sense and judgment has been shown to be suspect, but we can read maps well. We’d read the fine print here enough to know there was scant hope of this dead-end road getting us near enough to our goal, but we’d traveled it to its end, parked, and gotten out with optimistic spirits. Split up into search parties and beat the bushes for that secret, unmarked, old-Indian-legend pathway of untrampled leaves that would take us to the glittering waters. But hopes waned after an hour or so of reconnoitering yielded nothing that got us down to the shore we sensed was tantalizingly nearby. Never mind easily enough to portage our kitchen sink … Nope. Zip.

Mark’s new GPS told us to within 21` of accuracy that we HAD read the map and followed the unmarked roads correctly and were right where we thought we were – somewhere close – but that’s about it. No secret old-Indian-legend paths hidden in its databases. So we did another thing at which we are adept – had lunch. Years of experience have taught us to pack the coolers (and the folding chairs) last so that they’d be easily accessible from the tailgate, and I set about preparing the repast we’d certainly earned in tilting enthusiastically after this landlocked windmill. Truth be told, it had been most of the day since leaving the passing strange porch of “The Ritz of the Carabasset” early that morning, and lunch was overdue.

With a bite or two tucked into his cheeks like a chipmunk, Mike did what he does best – wandered off again – and in between bites of our own, Mark and I agreed to one last sweep of the area for clues. But there were precious few, and it was growing late — we had to be somewhere by dusk, and this wouldn’t do. When Mike returned, we huddled around the hood of his truck to review on the map the Plans B & C I’d concocted back at home — and opted for an impromptu Plan D: Misery Pond, whose name seemed a more fitting fallback plan than the “safeties” I’d posited. We ruefully acknowledged defeat, made our peace with Plan D, and headed back up the road. A sad enough feeling at the end of a trip, but particularly wistful on Day One.

But about 5 miles into the 16 miles of return roads, I heard The Noise. We’d just turned off the loop road around Shutdown Mountain and were rejoining Upper Enchanted Road, an “intersection” marked by a little erosion gully we were crossing, when a clanking kind of ka-thunk sent my heart splashing down into my rising stomach. I KNEW what that sound was, however improbable the instant recognition. Though I wouldn’t let my mind paint the picture I knew my eyes would soon be relaying, I coasted to a stop, slid the truck into park, and named my terror. No way, said my passengers. We got out to see if I was right.

Yup. Left the tailgate open …

The next few minutes are pretty predictable. Kicking oneself in disbelief, guessing at what’s fallen out. Trying to remember how we forgot to close up. Trying not to assign blame. Trying not to imagine what it means that both coolers are gone … Dawdling in denial. Then the panic sets in; for me, anyway. I desperately needed to burn up the gravel and get back to clean up the traces of our lunatic idiocy lest anyone possessed of a functional cerebrum eyeball the incontrovertible evidence of our lack of a right to oxygen. And with the horseless barn belatedly closed up, spray gravel I did, all but four-wheel drifting around corners, racing an imaginary clock to beat some imagined-avoidable shame. As if this stain could be washed out …

A mile or so back we come to the first cooler. Amazingly, upright, but be not of good cheer – many of its contents lay scattered about nonetheless. Still, not the disaster it could have been. What would probably have been mighty tasty focaccia sandwiches have been liberally seasoned with chalky white gravel (Mike tries one anyway, deferential nod to the wasted efforts of an absent Ginger). And much ice is gone, but the rest, while dirty, is intact. We wipe it off and repack. Never mind finesse – more evidence awaits. With this errant burden back in the fold, we’re off again.

Round one curve I slow down and lean out the open driver door to scoop from the road polo-style a blaze orange hat. Then another mile, another cooler. This one on its side, a wet stain in the dust the only evidence there once was ice, most of a dozen eggs in oozing ruin, more scattered containers of condiments. Takes a little more time to corral, spoils kicked to the side of the road out of sight, and we’re off again, perhaps a little less hurried — the worst sights have been seen, and no one has seen us. We’re not even sure what else there might be; the chairs, at the least.

We stop maybe three more times, once for broken gallons of water, the last time yards from where we’d scouted for trails never found, where the chairs and a campfire grill lie almost within sight of each other. The first things went early. But then, amazingly, the other items hung on for a mile or more on the bouncy gravel roads before succumbing to the inevitable forces of inertia and gravity, finally yielding to ignominy. As we drove away the first time, nothing niggled at what passes for our minds; nothing troubled us but our failure to reach Enchanted. Until we heard that sound.

Ice and water is purchased in stores back at the main road, and we always have leftovers no matter how many courses we serve; the fallen won’t be missed. All was replaceable or irrelevant – save for our pride. At first we decided that What Happens at Misery Stays at Misery would be good policy, that none need know of our absent-minded gaffe. As if anyone would see it as mortifyingly as we did — alas, just some such moronic lapse is almost expected … No, in the end we go out there to look ourselves in the face in some small part, and stuffing this stupidity into a mental attic trunk would only leave us stupid. Better we ‘fess up, I think.

So there you have it. Large Life Lessons Learned is not the title of this tale, you’ll note, just a somewhat bashful confessional. Misery Pond, from roadside campsite to Guiness and pool while taking refuge from a gale, was the most anomalous of all our trips so far, and while it could be said to be along a discernible arc of a downward trajectory, and this debacle but punctuation in a run-on sentence describing dunces, I will always relish our ability to speak of such things, to walk up to an honest mirror and make of our reflection what we can. We can take it. Heck, at least we heard The Sound, and knew it for what it was. There are other sounds I recognize instantly, too, and one is good friends laughing. Usually at ourselves.

Now that your only begotten son has chastised you publicly, seems you might have to work up some creativity for the blog. I’ve little to offer but the below and the attached (more focus failures … ). Now that their kids are going away to college, our across-the-street neighbors have decided that their rather-bigger-than-our-house was too … any guesses? big for empty nesters? Nope — too small. They’re tearing down a perfectly good house and building a bigger one (though modest by today’s McMansion standards — about 3500 sq. ft.). A few days ago this squat powerhouse came to be parked in their yard, and you can see what it’s good at. Alas, it didn’t occur to me to take a true “before” picture, so I started after Day One, when it had mostly had its way with the back yard. I’ll keep a bit of a log as the house goes, the hole gets dug, etc.

Adam

I ran the Agassiz with Alan Symonds for some 15 years.  In June of this year, on the steps of the Agassiz, he died unexpectedly of a heart attack at 59, and on Monday the 13th (which should sound more ominous than Friday the 13th, if you think about it … ), Harvard held a memorial for Alan at the Agassiz Theatre.  400 people crowded into the 350-person house, with over 100 more watching on closed-circuit in the neighboring dance center.  For a bit on who Alan was, this “in-house” obit’s good; and this one is also pretty thorough (and took a full-page column…!).

I was asked to speak, along with Alan’s brother (who narrated a fabulous slideshow of Alan’s youth) and his old friend Joe Mobilia (who met Alan in highschool and was working on the Hasty Pudding renovation with him when he died).  Alan’s role at Harvard was borderline ineffable and immeasurable, and the legacy-worthiness of what I’d written (most of it just after he died, with no memorial in mind) kept me up at night.  And as I said to Michael a day or so before, I didn’t know if I was more terrified of losing it and being unable to speak, or going into a zone without getting emotional at all…

I got pretty choked up but nevertheless essentially sailed through and was told by many I done mighty good.  I sort of don’t remember my bit, really, standing in the spotlight only dimly able to sense the assembled multitude with whom I was attempting to project contact, doing what had been imagined for weeks, but with details and sensations that had somehow never been even vaguely imagined.  Pretty much an out-of-body experience.

The rest was better than good, tears mixing easily with gales of laughter, lots of talent pouring out of true devotion, the energy given back manyfold by a rapt audience of truest friends spanning over half a century.  So many familiar (and half-familiar) faces!  Lots of talk and hugs and catching up at the reception afterwards with people not seen for decades.  Hard to say something about an unexpected death could be perfect, but this was.

For those with time on their hands, here’s my bit (minus the ad-libs, alas).  Flights of angels Alan.  You da bomb!

Alan Intro

Alan Part II