If I had been a pier guy, I wouldn’t be typing this. I wouldn’t have slept well last night. I would have been up, awake, tossing and turning as the rain worked against my window, my mind wondering if the lake could get all that much higher. It could, I’d suppose, but I’d be worried less about the water height and more about its clarity. If you think it’s easy to drop 300 pound horses into slippery wooden cribs in 12 feet of rain stained water, I’d tell you that it’s far easier to type on a keyboard and file TPS reports. You talk to customers and send emails all day? Big deal. I captain a wooden barge from shore to shore and when I’m not driving I’m lifting pier boards, scanning the deck for bolts, hoisting shore stations from land and placing them in the sea, and all the while I curse the wind and I curse the rain, but mostly I curse those piers.
The money is good, not great, but I’m not in this for the money. Why am I in it? I’m not entirely sure. The winters are long. The summers are short. The spring is shorter and the fall is too. Everything is short except winter, but in winter I have time to chop up great hunks of doug fir and drill holes in certain parts of them, and then I use a router to carve 1S into the horse or 3W into the stringer. I could, I suppose, use a permanent marker, but have you ever put the 3W stringer where the 2E stringer was supposed to go? I did, and I have, because permanent marker isn’t all that permanent. So I cut and I build and when my shop has your stringer done I’ll carve the location into it and I’ll never, ever have to worry about tracing over a fading marker signal again.
I do other things in the winter too, but mostly I work in this shop and listen to country music. At the end of the day I sweep the floors, pound the lid shut tightly on the paint can, and turn off the radio and the lights. I try to bill for the pier boards in January, when they’re done, but no one ever seems to pay me until May, when they walk on the pier after it has been installed for the season. That’s a good time, but it’s a bad time too. I walk with owners on their pier while they scan for new wood, for the wood that I drilled and routed and then painted in my shop several months ago, and sometimes they can’t find the new wood. It’s there, I know it is, and even when I show them where it is and I run my hand over the fresh router marks, they sometimes still don’t believe me.
My knees hurt, but my back hurts more, so I think mostly about the back and ignore the knees. Kneeling on a wooden barge reaching out to bolt the 5S stringer into place isn’t good on my knees, but it’s worse on my back. I’d complain to my crew if I thought they wouldn’t make fun of me, call me old, or make fun of me while calling me old. They’re good enough guys, tough kids. We work like the fishermen in Alaska or the lobstermen in Maine; intensely and without pause for two months in the spring and two months in the fall, and the rest of the time we fix what we broke and we find things to do to pay some bills that never got paid. It’s a lonely life, I suppose, one without much praise because when a pier is installed it looks just the way it was when it was installed last year. There’s no “doing a better job” on a pier. There’s a way to put them in and a way to take them out, and rarely can I exceed someone’s expectations. Unless I stack the pier extra neatly, which I rarely do because why would I if you’re not going to tell me how good it looks?
It rains a lot in the spring, and it’s cold too. We try to find the lee side of a point to work each day, out of the wind and out of the waves, but wind and waves are nothing if not tricky. A south wind can blow south hard, while another wind pushes east just enough to move the barge from where I positioned it to drop in horse after horse, stringer after stringer, until each board looks the same and each pier too. There are no days off for me right now. None for my crew either. If two of my guys hadn’t quit last week when I ran them hard in the rain for three days straight, I’d have finished the south shore piers by now. But now I’m two men down and the new kid can’t tell a stringer from a canopy support, and if he doesn’t know his East from his West it isn’t going to matter all that much if I routed that label in the new board or I wrote it softly in pencil. He can’t tell the difference and I can’t tell him to get lost, because I need him far more than he needs me. Eleven dollars an hour isn’t much, and it’s even less when it rains for days straight and the wind finds us no matter how hard we try to hide from it.
We’ll be done soon enough. The piers will be in, and I’ll be tired. My back will hurt on that day in late, late May more than it does today, and I’ll welcome the thought of returning to my shop to build those two benches that pier 302 wanted built and to measure and cut for the swim raft that pier 581 wanted to replace the one he says I damaged last month when I let the new kid drive the barge for just a moment. He probably won’t pay me for the new one, but I’ll build it anyway. There won’t be much to do from then until October, anyway.