STILL MORE CONCRETE WORK

It was sometime in early March that Wesley began to realize I wasn't going to have all of the framing for the house completed by the middle of April.   Ever since late fall I had been aware that my initial expectations of how much I could complete on this trip were wildly optimistic, but Wesley and I had not talked about this explicitly.  When I left California the previous September, my "kitchen pass" had given me leave to go to Little Cayman until April 15, and the expectation was that I would return on that date with the house fully framed.  Even though I had been giving her daily updates on my progress via email and even though we talked on the air every weekend, she didn't fully understand how far short of that rosy scenario my progress had been.  In early March, though, she began to understand.  That led to one of the few periods of genuine tension we have had in our marriage.  It was now nearly six months since I had left her alone in California and the separation was beginning to wear on her.  It was wearing on me, too.  When I first came to Little Cayman the previous October, I weighed 205 pounds; by this time, I was under 160 pounds and still shrinking.   I had been working 12-hour days, 7 days a week, for 6 months.  I was tired and getting lonely.  So was she.  But I was very much in the middle of things on Little Cayman and couldn't walk away from the project just then.  If I did, all of the remaining cementous products would be ruined by the time I returned and I would likely suffer "material shrinkage".   Wesley and I had long discussions of what to do next, and she finally agreed to "an extra month or two".  I then formulated a detailed development schedule for the rest of my trip in order to try to convince her (and me) that I could get to a reasonable termination point within that time window.  I still haven't decided if it was a good idea or a bad idea to have put myself on such an unforgiving schedule, but with all the tension in my conversations with the one person in the world who really mattered to me it seemed that it was cruciall to make certain the plans for the future were crystal clear.

The deal we made was that I would be home by our wedding anniversary, June 17.   By that time, I would get the platform framing completed so that I had a completely enclosed garage in which to store the expensive "stuff" I had there on Little Cayman.   Under this plan, the next step when I returned the following year would be to begin raising the walls.  To support this plan (proposal?), my development schedule was in the same format I had demanded of engineers working for me in my previous existence as a software development manager; it allowed no "wriggle room" whatsoever.  There were tangible "completion milestones" every few days, and the reporting mechanism I devised admitted only binary reporting.  Thereafter, I became a slave to that schedule.  No longer was I able to go over to the shack and play on the radio until 7 or 8 in the morning before beginning work;   I started work the minute the sun rose.  No longer could I go back to the apartment for lunch and browse the internet for an hour; I took lunch with me to the job site and declared "lunch break" to be a maximum of 30 minutes.  Most of the fun went out of the project with these changes.  I was now in a race with the calendar, and the only goal was to get that platform completed by the middle of June.  Somehow, it felt no different than in my first years out of graduate school, where the only way I knew how to live was to put my head down and ignore everything else in life but THE GOAL, twenty-four hours a day.  Whether she read it or not, Wesley got a progress report against that original schedule every few days until I returned home.

The first thing that had to be done after the cistern was to put in the 12 concrete pilings that would support the eastern half of the house.  I had tried to negotiate a deal for this work with the Jamaican crew I had stucco the cistern earlier, but they wanted what I considered to be an outrageous amount of money.  I really did not want to have to do this myself, but I simply wasn't willing to pay what they asked.   When those negotiations collapsed, I had no choice but to go to work on the pilings.

The first step was to dig holes for the footings.   There were twelve of those pilings, and I wanted the footings for each one to be at least 5' below grade.  That meant I had to dig 12 holes in the ground, each one a minimum of 30"' x 30" by 5' deep.    I started off on the first hole by trying to use an ordinary shovel, but that didn't work very well.   The ground is not sand and it is not dirt.  It is rock and ancient coral heads,all cemented firmly in place by sand and powdered coral.  Some of the rocks were over 3' wide, so getting them out was not a trivial exercise.  The primary tools turned out to be a sledge hammer and a long pry bar.  Still, after getting the big rocks out I had to scoop out the loose sand before proceeding to the next layer of rocks below it.   My long-handled shovel was useless for this, but then I remembered I had seen an official U.S. Marine Corps backhoe in my landlord's toolbox. He let me borrow it, and then I found myself swinging an entrenching tool, just like I had 30 years before. 

This was eerie.  I had been a master foxhole digger in Viet-Nam, which is partly why I'm still around to tell about it, and now I was doing precisely the same thing.  The idea was to keep the opening at the top of the hole just large enough to hold me in a crouch position and to maintain the walls as near-vertical as possible.    The week I dug those holes there was not a cloud in the tropical sky, nor was there a hint of a breeze.  It was gorgeous weather--if you were a tourist sipping pi�a coladas by the pool at Pirate's Point Resort.  For me, it was pure hell.  There wasn't a bit of shade and the sun was absolutely brutal.  Still, I kept my schedule and got all six holes dug one day ahead of schedule.

We measured each tube individually by using a water level (a long piece of clear plastic tubing with water inside).  Not knowing any better, I tried to be accurate to within about 1/16", so this took us many hours.   I didn't want to leave the tubes in place, because I knew I wouldn't be able to pour the pilings until after returning from the trip to New York.   To leave those tubes out in the opening for a couple of weeks would be to invite disaster, should the weather change and we receive some much-needed rain.

The trip to New York was welcome relief.   It was the first time I had been off the island since I had arrived the previous October (excepting, of course, my trips over to Cayman Brac to deal with the government people).  To go in one day from Little Cayman's grass runway straight to the chaos of LaGuardia felt like moving through a time warp.  But then what a party we had after I got there!  The wedding reception was held at the Harvard Club in midtown Manhattan, and that was probably the most sumptuous feast I have ever seen.  For months I had been existing off that 50 pound bag of dried pinto beans I took to Little Cayman from Tampa, supplemented by occasional chicken and rice or maybe a can of stewed tomatoes.   Had it not been for the watchful eyes of my better-mannered spouse during the wedding reception, I probably would have stuffed the pockets of the suit hanging loosely over my gaunt frame with everything they could carry.

Alas, the party couldn't last forever, and at week's end it was time for Wesley and I to go our separate ways:  she back to California, and I back to Little Cayman.  It was a sad parting, as always, but now with a week's worth of good food in me I was ready to sprint for the finish line in June.

The first chore after returning was to set up the twelve sonotube forms we had cut and brace them.  I built a virtual cobweb of 2"x4" lumber to hold all the forms in line and went off to recruit helpers for the job of putting concrete in the forms.  Anywhere else in the world this would be an easy job.  You use a concrete pumper that pumps the concrete through a large rubber hose, and you can place the end of the hose wherever you want to place the concrete.   With no pumper, though, things are a little different on Little Cayman.  You dump the concrete from the truck into a wheelbarrow and then move the barrow over to the form to be poured.  There, you take 5 gallon buckets and scoop up the concrete in the barrow, then pour the bucket down the tube.  I figured I needed at least three helpers, and I was willing to pay whatever it took to get them.  I would have one person operate the wheelbarrow.  The second person would stand on the ground and fill one bucket after another from the wheelbarrow and then set the buckets up on scaffolding by the form being filled.  The third person would be standing on the scaffolding and pour the buckets down the tube.  Meanwhile, I would be running around behind these three people supervising and then beating on the forms as they were filled in order to work the air bubbles out of the concrete.  I could also maintain a constant check on the forms to ensure they remained vertical.

Despite my best efforts, I was only able to recruit two people.  I even offered a big "finder's fee" to try to get the guys I had enlisted to try to talk friends into joining the party.  I figured it would take a maximum of 2 hours work, and for that I was offering $125 per person.   Still...I only got two takers.  When the day of the pour arrived (April 19), neither helper nor truck was around at the appointed hour.  I went off in search of my helpers and finally found one of them, then went looking for the other one.  He had changed his mind...he simply didn't feel like working that day.  Fortunately, the concrete delivery was postponed until 1 p.m., so that gave the remaining two of us a chance to scour the island one last time in search of help.  But none was to be found.  Finally my one helper took off go join a friend for lunch, and all I could do was sit and worry. 

At 1:00 p.m. the concrete truck did arrive on schedule, but by now there was only me there by my lonesome.  I begged the truck driver to stand by for a few minutes, and I went off in search of my helper.  I did find him, but he was by then nearing the bottom of that case of beer they had decided to have for lunch.  I dragged him back with me anyway, because I figured one slightly inebriated helper was better than nothing at all.  Hah!  I think I'll skip the rest of this story, because it was one of those days in my life I really want to forget.  I'll say simply that we did get all the concrete poured.  My helper managed the wheelbarrow, and every so often he managed to get one to me without dumping the concrete along the way.  I stood on the platform and dumped all the buckets down the tubes.  It took almost three hours to complete this job, and by the time we poured that last pillar the concrete was nearly ruined from having added so much water to it to keep it from setting.  

After laying the blocks, it was back to filling cores again.  Ugh!  This was just like the cistern:  3 buckets of concrete per core, each weighing about 80 pounds.  At least this time I knew what it took and had budgeted accordingly.  I had even left just the right amount of sifted sand behind to be able to make the concrete.  When all was said and done, I had 14 bags of cement left over.  There were 131 at the start of the whole project and none of it had been wasted.  That meant I had estimated the cement requirement about as accurately as I could ever have hoped--10% excess.  I sold those 14 bags to somebody else on the island, since they would have spoiled in a few months if I had tried to keep them.  So, I'm proud to say, this was one phase of the project where things went right.  If everything could go as well as that garage wall did, I would be pleased indeed.

And with that, the masonry work was over for the season.  What a relief!  At long last, I could contemplate working with wood instead of concrete.  It's hard to believe, but it was the 14th of May before I ever drove the first nail which was to be a part of the finished house.   I had been working constantly for 7 months, and yet not a single nail had been driven by that time which was to be a part of the house.  The picture below was taken to commemorate that grand event.  It shows the finished garage wall, and on top of it are the first two boards which went into the house.  These are 2"x12" timbers, and it represents the start of laminating the main support beams for the house.

Just as an aside, you might take a look at the shadows in this picture.  For all practical purposes, there are none.   The sun passed directly overhead at 12:26 p.m. on May 29, and this picture was taken only 15 days before that.  I have always thought I have high heat tolerance, and in fact my wife accuses me of being part lizard because of my tendency to seek out the brightest sun and then soak it up.  On Little Cayman, though, I discovered my limits for this behavior.  The sun and the heat were becoming my greatest enemy in trying to make decent progress on the house.  Yes, there was a good reason I had planned to return to California on April 15!

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Copyright�1999 Bruce B. Sawyer