April 25, 2010

• Son of a carpenter

  When I was very young, my family moved from the mountain city of Pasto, Colombia, to the jungle town of Puerto Asís. Dad bought a couple of lots. On one he built a little chapel and a schoolhouse. On the other, he built our two-story house.

  Both places were built of cinderblocks. Dad had a machine for making them, one by one. The process involved dumping concrete into a mold and then two guys pulling down on long levers with all their weight to squeeze the block into shape. The block was set on banana leaves to dry. At some point, the machine was stolen, and Dad had to buy blocks to finish the projects. (Story of his life.) You can see from the top of the picture that it was taken in early 1964. The house wasn’t done yet. (The shelter out front was temporary.)

   

  There are details I notice now about the house that I never paid attention to before, like the poured columns in the first floor walls, which are important surviving earthquakes. Later on, a big rainwater tank sat in the corner by the kitchen, to catch rainwater channeled by the valley in the roof. In the morning I had to carry my chamberpot (very carefully) to the outhouse to empty it, then around to the water tank to scrub it under the spigot with a brush and Cresopinol.

  While construction was going on, there was a workbench in what became the living room. Dad had a cool eggbeater-style hand-crank drill. I tried it one time (without asking) and broke the bit in the workbench. I felt terrible about it, but Dad was understanding.

  Mom and Dad gave me a little toolbox with a hammer, saw, and square. I had unlimited access to the scrap lumber box and the can of bent nails, which I could tap out straight on the concrete steps (with a little patience and occasional bruising). I don’t remember what I made, but I do recall straightening nails and cutting boards.

  The house had no electricity or plumbing. We used candles (many of our old books have wax stains). My sister Martha once set her mosquito net on fire reading in bed. Our living room light was a Coleman lantern that hung from a hook in the ceiling. Once it caught on fire, and left a big black circle up there.

  We had a red Willys Jeep in the early days, susceptible to flats, getting stuck, and mechanical trouble. You can see it on the right edge of the photo. The eight of us traveled the unpaved jungle and mountain roads in it, packed like sardines. Tires had inner tubes, and Dad often had to dismount them by hand, hot-patch the tubes, remount them, and pump them back up. I still remember that smell of the smoldering Vulcan patches.

  We moved to the city (Medellín) in 1967. At that point our vehicle was an Austin, and Dad also had a Vespa-type scooter. These were shortly replaced by a long Land Rover.

  Dad set up his tools in the back corner of the house, behind the laundry patio. I don’t know what projects he did while we lived in that house, but I recall straightening nails there, so I must have done stuff. When our water heater was replaced, Dad let me tear the old one apart. That was fun but frustrating because there isn’t that much to a water heater. You can’t get into the tank itself. But I went as far as I could go.

  This is the front porch of our Medellín house in about 1968. It was a very nice place, with an extraordinary view. Pretty obvious which one’s me.

  

  Here’s a pic from a couple of years later (note absence of cat-eye glasses on the girls). This one shows the view from the house.

  

  I changed my first tire when I was 10. We were in Rionegro, a small town high above Medellín, where Dad was leading a university student retreat. Mom took a bunch of us somewhere in the Land Rover. When the tire went flat, I discovered that I knew more about changing it than the other males present, so I was in charge. Mom could probably have handled it herself; she was extraordinarily strong and competent back then.

  We spent 1970-1971 in the US. During this furlough, Dad bought a big radial arm saw. It could rip, cross-cut, mitre, route, and drill, depending on how you set it up, and greatly increased his ability to create cabinets and furniture and picture frames. (I have that saw now, but the motor burned out years ago and I haven’t found a replacement.) We returned to Medellín with quite an assortment of tools. They were temporarily set up in the garage of a big rental flat where we lived while we looked for a place to buy up in the mountains.

  I think it was the evening of Dad’s birthday in January 1972 that he burst in from the garage, hands dripping with blood. “Call an ambulance!” he shouted, and grabbed the telephone, leaving it coated with red. He had cut off the tip of his little finger in the saw.

  Mom came groggily out of their room, then had to return for her glasses (most of us have severe myopia). She suggested getting a taxi. (We had no car at the time.)

  Across the street was a police academy, where I often hung out with the sergeant and the guards (which seems pretty weird in retrospect). So I ran over there and asked if one of their drivers could take Dad to the hospital. Within a minute, there was a Nissan jeep at our front door, and Dad was whisked away.

  Nowadays, they would probably wrap the finger in a big gauze bandage and let the tip regenerate, but back then the doctor stitched the wound shut across the end. So once it healed, Dad had a shorter finger with a vestigial nail growing right out of the middle of it. He used to waggle it at people, especially my oldest sister Christine, who found it disturbing. (I was delighted at Dad’s funeral to see that they had thoughtfully positioned that hand over the other, leaving the stump visible.)

  Two months later, we moved to a huge country house in San Cristóbal, three miles above the edge of the city. It had thick adobe walls and wooden window bars in the oldest part. Dad had nearly all of it remodeled and added a second floor, a project that went on for years. I showed pictures of the place in a post last year. Here is a family photo by the front porch just a few months after we moved in. (I just noticed that both this and the first family pic above have an onlooker in the background.)

  

  Here Dad had room for a proper workshop. He made kitchen cabinets, bookcases for his and Mom’s studies, cabinets and bookcases for the upstairs hall, a lovely stereo cabinet, and the mantel for the fireplace. I spent many, many hours helping push plywood through the saw and sanding and staining it for use in wainscoting.

  We had also bought a car: a green 1953 Mercury Monterey. It could barely accommodate us, and wasn’t geared low enough to climb the hill to our house. Dad used to drop off most of us at the bottom of the steepest hill, and we had to walk up. Sometimes he would go up in reverse; it seemed to be geared a little lower than first.

  When the Mercury had a flat one morning before school, my brother Dan and I changed it before Dad was even ready to leave. He had taught us well.

  Dad sold the Mercury and bought a 1971 Dodge pickup, which came without a bed. While an enclosed bed was being made for it, we used to cram as many as seven people into the cab to get to church, school, or wherever we needed to go. I helped Dad change the brake master cylinder some years later, and learned how to bleed the brakes. I still do my own brakes, even though I don’t much care for mechanical work.

  The Dodge three-on-the-tree gearshift had a tendency to jam, so occasionally I had to jump out, pop the hood, and wiggle the linkages around until they were back in place. My parents and one of my sisters knew how to do this, too. Sometimes it happened in the middle of a busy intersection.
  
  My brother and I went away for high school. We boarded at the Wycliffe Bible Translators base in the eastern plains of Colombia. (I posted about Lomalinda last year.) Seniors at Lomalinda High School didn’t have afternoon classes. Instead we got vocational training credit for working. I maintained the telephone system three afternoons a week, and worked on appliances the other two. They were wonderful jobs. I made about 25 cents an hour (minimum wage in Colombia at the time), so by the time vacation rolled around, I usually had enough money to buy a couple of albums.

  In college, my skills served me from time to time. My roommate once kicked in our dorm door when we accidentally got locked out. I stained and varnished the replacement door that the university kindly installed. I also built a new narrower top for the altar at the Lutheran church my roommates and I attended.

  I spent the summer of 1981 in Aspen, on an InterVarsity Christian Fellowship evangelism project. I wasn’t very good at evangelism, but I really enjoyed working for a carpenter named Rock Mason. The house he was building was very energy efficient, with a small greenhouse to collect solar heat. Warm air was blown into the crawlspace, which was insulated on the outside so its concrete walls helped store the heat. At night the air was released into the house. There was also a woodstove and radiant flooring.

  I lived at home in Medellín during the fall of 1983, ostensibly working on my thesis project. During that time, I learned to maintain the pump Dad had set up down by the front gate, so we could have potable water from the purification plant across the street instead of unpurified water from a creek up the mountain. The pump had to be primed after the power went off, and occasionally the diaphragm had to be cleaned or replaced. I also installed a medicine cupboard and bathroom light. (The wires had been sticking out of the wall ever since the upstairs was built ten years earlier, with a mirror hanging from them.)

  A few years later Rebecca and I bought a trailer, and I built a carport for it. We had a house built in Costa Rica, and did lots of work on it. We sold it to my in-laws and returned to Dallas, where we bought a house, completely gutted it, and changed it from a 3-bedroom 2-bath to a 6-bedroom 3-bath place.

  You already know about the handyman business I started after our divorce.

  Since 2003, I’ve taken the kids up to see Dad and Jan twice a year. Dad and I built shelves in his shop for tools. It was funny to have our roles reversed: I was now the one who knew what to do, and Dad mostly did what I told him. In between my visits, he installed a nice wainscoting in the dining room by himself. We tiled the kitchen backsplash, and built a big shelf system for the garage. Last fall I built a wheelchair ramp in the garage after Jan fell and broke her arm and leg. Dad was recovering from heart surgery, so he didn’t participate.

  I wish I could have built Dad’s casket; it would have been a fitting conclusion to our relationship. But I’ll continue to visit Jan regularly and take care of whatever needs fixing on the property, and when I do I’ll think about all the things I learned from working with Dad.

  • 4:53 pm
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