Making Peace with a Brute

My son, Robert, and I have started a project that is either going to make us stronger or kill us. I think it is making a man out of him and an old man out of me.

We’re building a shed on the side of our house. It’s an open sided shed with a saltbox roof (I’m showing off new vocabulary). Yesterday, we rented a jack hammer, cleared away some asphalt and dug down into hard clay to prepare the shed’s foundation.

We’re working against weather (winter rains start shortly) and other work (Robert starts a new part-time job today and I have my writing and other responsibilities). Yesterday the weather was perfect – it only rained a couple minutes when the sun came out. Otherwise it was mostly cloudy and a high around 80.

With any new equipment there is always a learning curve. Such was the case with this jack hammer. It sounds intimidating right from the start.

When we were living in Xi’an, I watched for a whole week outside my office window as a worker stood on narrow columns with his jack hammer – three stories up. He was on the concrete columns he was tearing down, each column about the width of his own body. Day by day he worked his way down to the ground below, drilling the columns one small chunk at a time.

I’ve never liked the sound of a jack hammer. I remember living in Taichung, Taiwan, in a row house. Our next door neighbors went at the place for a week, demolishing everything but the load bearing walls and roof . Kim finally left during the day and took the boys (then toddlers) off to who knows where while I sat at my desk dreaming I was inside the mouth of a dental patient while the dentist was drilling a molar.

So it was with some anxiety on my part that we brought the rented power tool home – all 60 pounds of it. Lugging it around is like hauling a man stone drunk across the ground (not that I do that very often).

As far as power equipment goes, this jack hammer is pretty simple. Plug it in, hold down the button on the handle and let ‘er hammer down. Soon my eyes were swimming and Robert’s breakfast milk had “turned to butter”. But as the day wore on, we made peace with this “Brute” (as it is called) and found that it made a day’s job out of a week’s worth of work. I wouldn’t say the work is any easier, but it sure makes it go faster.

I was thinking that other more experienced hands would call this child’s play until we returned the tool to the rental center. As we were leaving, the clerk told us, “Take the rest of the day off – you deserve it.” And so we did.