Mammas, don’t let your babies grow up to pour concrete,
Don’t let ‘em run backhoes and and drive them old trucks,
Let ‘em be doctors and lawyers and such.

With apologies to Willie Nelson and Waylon Jennings!

You never know what you’re gonna find when you dig.  Since excavation, began we constantly remind our Chief Excavator, Jackson H. Pitney, to be careful.  Our soil is riddled with broken glass, smashed rusty cans and other gnarly crap waiting to slash little fingers. 

We’re building on a trash heap.  They say archaeologists, excavating indigenous sites, often learn most about our forebears by examining piles of stuff thrown out the back door of pre-historic kitchens. We do want to learn much more about the Warm Springs, Wasco and Paiute people who, by many centuries, preceded us here.  I doubt we’ll find any of their buried wisdom on this site, but who knows?  Beside dangerous shards of glass and rusty bean cans, we’ve found bones, pot lids, a substantial crow bar and these old glass bottles I’ve been collecting for the 3-year-old.  This ancient jar of Vaseline was a curious find too!  Could this spot of ground be a source of healing?  Could our home be?  We have to wonder.

The greatest discovery in digging, though, goes far deeper than a few old bottles and some ancient salve.  The treasure is the people who do the work.   You might know that a suburban piece of land officially becomes a worksite on the arrival of the port-a-potty!  But the Loo only signals the coming of those who, with their sweat and sore backs, their smarts, hearts and humor will shape a home according to blueprint, from excavation to solar panels. 

Juan’s team came first, with the excavator.  When the lot was blessed and the machine properly christened with faux champagne, Juan’s first act was inviting a small boy, who loves yellow and black scoopers, to climb in the cab with him and put his small hands on the levers, moving a Juniper tree to clear the lot for the foundation.  In Juan’s mentoring, ours became a place of invitation, a summons to apprentice those whose hands will soon be on the controls of the Planet’s future.  This was Jackson’s baptism into the world of power tools and the work of many hands.

Then came Jeremy’s crew.  As they set foot on the site, something magical happened.  Before they started their job, building forms for the concrete footings and stem wall, before setting out tools and off-loading materials, they turned on the radio and cranked up the volume!  Only then did work begin.  Throughout their time with us, their labor was perfected in the rhythm of tunes and lyrics from the box.  From “Bad Moon Rising” to “Achy Breaky Heart” they were like the Gatlin Brothers in 4-part harmony doing their rendition of “The Midnight Choir!”

Will they have Mogen David in heaven?
Dear Lord, we all want to know.
Will they have Mogen David in heaven, sweet Jesus?
If they don’t, who the hell wants to go?                                                      

Midnight Choir – Larry Gatlin & The Gatlin Brothers

As a kid on the farm, I grew up around working people with skills and wisdom few people have today.  Our blacksmith, Peter Skovbo, would work the bellows and fan the flame to heat the broken and bent steel of our aging machinery to red hot, then pound and weld it back together better than when we drug it into his shop.  Grampa Jensen made all the cabinets of our farm house in his shop across the road.  Mother and dairywomen like her, milked cows in dairy barns across our county with a wisdom and precision unknowable to most.  Dad could haul anything in a wheelbarrow! He designed and built most of the buildings on our place and knew how to grow good crops on marginal land.  And I grew up idolizing anyone who could perfectly stack hay bales six high on the truck bed and those who could drive that truck out of the rutted field and back to the barn without losing the load!

So when the workers went to work on our lot, I could’ve watched them for hours upon hours, and I did!  I marveled at Juan’s genius with his blade, able to plane the whole footprint within an inch of level mostly by eyeball.  When the Gatlin Brothers showed up to start the flatwork, the first thing I noticed after the serenade was the t-shirt reading:

NO, YOU’RE RIGHT.
LET’S DO IT THE DUMBEST WAY POSSIBLE
BECAUSE IT’S EASIER FOR YOU!

Doing it the right way isn’t just the ability to read blueprints.  It’s a culture born of learning the hard way and discovering how to avoid the dumb.  As they built the forms for footings, I noticed the florets of straps they use to keep the forms from bulging when filled with “mud.”  I’ve always been amazed with trowel work and indeed they did not disappoint, smoothing their medium to make the best foundation to support the next layer and receive the required hand prints of a child.   And who knows?  Those very prints may be the petroglyphs discovered in a dig 1,000 years hence after our culture has dumbed its way out of existence.   So many small things matter here.  Like, these guys learned by experience that the threads on the ends of the bolts set in the top of the wall to fasten future stud walls to the foundation get all crusted with cement and take hours to clean if you don’t protect them.  The solution? Cover the threads with a small piece of foil.  Then when it comes time to fasten the floor to the wall plates you can tighten those nuts with your fingers.

Real everyday genius often shows up when stuff happens beyond our control and we have to think on our feet.  Like when the pouring of the slab floor is delayed because plumbing goes before concrete and the plumber gets COVID! Then the ground freezes and you’ve learned the hard way not to mess with Mother Nature and cement in the high desert winter!  Well the head guy had just bought a 40X100 greenhouse frame for his wife’s garden so they decided to set it up on the spot. 

When we first saw it, we thought maybe someone had changed the architecture of our house to Early Byzantine Quonset, but there they were inside, using torches to thaw the ground and heaters to bring the temperature up to cozy.  First they super-insulated the floor to Passive House standards, fitting 9 inches of the pink foam board to lay beneath the slab while insulating both sides of the stem wall.  Then, with the indoor temp pushing 60 degrees, the mud arrived and the fun began!

If you’ve never been around a pour, it’s hard to describe with words.  In the realm of human activity it’s one part break dance and one part panic attack with a measure of Michelangelo.  The cement truck is going to show up when it shows up and everything has to be in place ready-or-not, because when the big guy with the hose starts spewing mud, it’s gonna be constant motion until the forms are full and the sculpture complete.  I’ve always been impressed with the teamwork it commands.  Everyone has their job and the boss is in the middle of the mess with all the others, working the pour while taking phone calls from other job sites.  And even before the forms are full, the sculpting begins.

Since I was a kid I’ve been amazed at the work of trowels.  Troweling is an art form and the trowelers bring a quantifiable skill to their craft, working on a relentless deadline determined by the science of cement.  First comes the “Fresno.”  I don’t know why they call it that, but it might be related to the Fresno Scraper, used to dig the first irrigation canals in the San Joaquin, pulled by teams of horses.  It does the big sweeps at the end of a long pole.  Then comes the oscillating machine of spinning trowels, leveling the surface to a sheen of concentric brushstrokes, an automated tool which must’ve revolutionized cementing when invented and liberated a generation of trowelers.   Then the finishing begins as strong arms and tough backs work the floor till it finally lays smooth as glass, nearly soft as a baby’s butt cheek.

I share this work scene with you because physical work matters.  And I want us to celebrate that work and those who do it, whenever we can.  In case you haven’t noticed we are sorely divided by the work we do and how our particular work is valued.  I grew up on a farm, learning to love the labor of my body, the feel of strength in my arms, the skill of what I could accomplish daily and the joy of teamwork with our family and community.  But even though our farm had been in the family five generations, our parents never spoke to my sisters and me about sticking around to take over the work of that land.  They raised us to go to college and find more gentile vocations free of calloused hands and unpaid bills, to use our intellect, teach or administer the work of others.  We were raised by our family and society to be “doctors and lawyers and such.” I became a preacher.  Last year we sold the farm.

As I watched Jeremy’s crew perfect our foundation, I felt some sadness.  I don’t know how these guys voted in the last Presidential election or who they think is the actual Commander-In-Chief today.  I’m sad and angry when those with wealth and power fan the flames of racism, white supremacy and the suspicions we have of each other based on how many years of higher education we have and whether we work with our hands or our brains.  One of the guys posted a small U.S. flag on our site every morning.  Seeing that, we assumed we knew exactly who they are and what they believe!   Yes. ’Tis so.   And Holy shit.  This is what we’ve come to.  In the wake of another racially motivated mass murder in Buffalo and another part per million of greenhouse emissions we must reach across the divide because the evil ones want us at each other’s throats!  And make no mistake they f__king laugh at us all the way to the Bank, all the way to their shareholder meetings, on their way to bust another labor union.

It was a privilege in the short time we had, to share a little humanity with our genius flat workers.  As they took the forms off the stem wall, we were approaching Thanksgiving.  One of the guys usually cooks the turkey for his clan, but this year he made the Ambrosia salad.  Seeing their sweat flowing in the sauna-like tent, we bought them an assortment of root beers and creme sodas for the afternoon.  Just so you know, “Dad’s Root Beer” was the clear favorite!  On a break, the boss shared his story.  Raised by a single mother he grew up not knowing his Dad.  Just about to finish his junior year of high school, his mother deserted him.  She just took off and all of a sudden he had no where to live.  After a summer of working and living in his car, he was able to move in with an aunt and uncle in another town and finally began his senior year. Then they divorced and kicked him out.  But he was determined to graduate.  He’d been taking apart computers since he was 5 years old and, by this time, could build, fix and program almost anything.  He did graduate and got accepted to the University, but couldn’t afford to go.  He got hired by a computer guy and soon advanced to where he could’ve gone back to school and made computers his career, or…?  Long story short, he’s working concrete.  He and his wife are successfully running their own business in Bend. 

My sadness disappeared as we sat by the slab sharing out lives.  In a blinding flash of the obvious I saw how we don’t have to be divided as we are.  In some ways, I suppose, we couldn’t be more different than these whose wisdom is witnessed in what they build with their hands.  But here we are, collaborating on a building whose design portends a better world.  There’s a new day dawning in our nation and around the world that won’t be denied by bigotry, greed or distrust.  We are creating wind and solar generation, electrifying transportation and healthy housing.  We are determined to fashion a world in equity, beyond wildfire, flood and the genocide born of melted glaciers, desiccated farmland and famine.  We are making what we hope will be a tiny glimpse of a world of God’s dreams where every family will “sit under their own vine and fig tree with no one to make them afraid.” (Micah 4:4)  In spite of the divisive propaganda, force-feeding us to believe in hate, convincing us we can never work side by side anymore, we are doing it together.  Maybe the COVID has forced us to reconsider what work is essential, but nothing much will change until those who harvest our crops, pack our meat, clean our motel toilets and wipe our parent’s butts at the home make a living wage.  Our lives will truly improve only when those who care for our children, make our steel, work assembly lines, guard our prisoners, clerk our sales, serve the COVID wards, haul our garbage, install solar panels and trowel our living room floors benefit equitably from tax law, financial and real estate policy, housing standards, voting rights, the right to organize and the moral codes that demonstrate that we actually have their backs!  This must be the foundation of a kinder more just world for our grandchildren.

I am full of gratitude for those who do the work.  Our lives are not lines in parallel, divergent or skew, never meeting, ending in lonely oblivion.  We are rather like the never-ending, outward spiraling, ever intersecting lines in troweled cement, leading us to each other in the joy of shared work.  Mammas please help your babies grow up to do whatever the hell they’re good at and what brings them joy!  Thanks you guys, for the JOY!