A Pillared House, a Time Capsule

  We never know when moments from our past will return as if they’d happened yesterday. They can stop us in our tracks when we least expect it, sometimes simply by turning a corner.

  It happened to me on a walk through what I thought was an unfamiliar neighborhood. The winding route took me past some homes at the foot of a hill, around a bend and up the street that led to the top of the hill. I walked a block up the street – and there it was.

  It was older, but clearly the same house – red brick, two stories, white pillars on the front porch. The neighborhood had grown up and grown old – there were still vacant lots the last time I was there – and the yard’s trees and bushes, then newly planted, had also grown old, giving the place an overgrown look.

  But there was no doubt that it was the same house, the one where as a teenager I’d  spent some of the longest, hottest workdays of my life, doing the hardest job I ever had. 

  No, that’s not quite right, actually. The hardest job was working on a Union Pacific Railroad section gang, but that’s another story.

  Working as a ditch digger was a close second. I was 13, maybe 14. Old enough, in my father’s way of looking at it, to go to work for the sprinkler-system company that he and one of my uncles had started a few years earlier.

  I learned enough about installing sprinkler systems during the four summers I worked for them to install my owner sprinkler system at the house where I lived now, Learning was secondary to doing hard, manual labor, however, most of it on the end of a shovel.

  There on that street, staring at the brick house with the white pillars, it was as if hardly any time had passed. I was a kid again, working with the company’s hard-bitten old timers who had done that kind of work all their lives, all of them long since passed.

  There was Uncle Wayne, my father’s partner and foreman of the installation crews. He had once been a foreman of a mine in Peru, a job I thought impossibly exotic. He knew a lot about hard work in hot weather and was generous with his advice.

  “You’re working too hard,” he told me one afternoon. “Don’t use your muscles to dig. Use your weight. Otherwise you’ll be worn out by noon.”

  Another time:  “Don’t drink so much water from the garden hose  when you need to cool off. Run the cold water over your wrists instead.”

  Uncle Wayne was but one of the ghosts to surface while I stood transfixed in the Court of Memory. There was burly, grumpy Paul, the  crew boss who rarely had anything good to say to anyone, particularly me. And Lew Steinborn, a red-haired bear of a man who took me under his wing and brought camaraderie and laughter to the the long, hot days of those Idaho summers.

  It was Lew who taught me the mechanics of the job. He showed me how to tie in to the main water line, how to install valves for the sprinkler lines, how to  install the sprinklers themselves. And despite a difference of some 30 years in our ages, we became friends.

  By about my third summer, he decided I was old enough to accompany him to his favorite watering hole, a tavern on Fairview Avenue. The bartender had to have suspected that I was underage, but Lew vouched for me, which apparently was enough. He was a regular whose business would have been missed had the bartender offended him by asking for my ID. And it wasn’t as if we drank to excess, just a cold beer or two after a hard day’s work. 

  We went to Lew’s house a time or two to sample his homemade dandelion wine. It was awful, but I pretended otherwise. It wouldn’t do to offend the crew boss who mentored me and became my friend.

  Our most colorful co-worker was a man named Bill, last name long forgotten. Bill was probably in his 60s then. He was a man who had done hard manual labor all his life and looked it. His hands were gnarled and scarred, his face wrinkled and leathery from years of working outdoors in the summer sun and winter cold. He was given to colorful speech.

  “How hot will it be today, Bill?” we’d ask him.

  “Hottern’ the hubs of hell.”

  “How cold do you think it’s going to be today, Bill?”

  “Colder’n a well digger’s ass in the Klondike.”

  Those colorful characters from so long ago came back to me as I stood in the street in front of the pillared house. I remembered their faces, their voices. I remembered the black, workman’s lunchbox my mother packed each morning with a sandwich, a hard-boiled egg and Thermos filled with soup. I could almost taste it.

  If someone had told that boy on the end of the shovel that he would come back there one day in his twilight years and it would seem like hardly any time had passed at all, he wouldn’t have believed it. He’d have had trouble believing he’d ever be old.

  Time passes so quickly. It doesn’t seem like it when it’s happening. It only seems that way after it’s gone. We’re young, and then, in what doesn’t seem like much time at all, we aren’t. 

  Time is something we shouldn’t take for granted. It’s so precious. In a way, it’s all we have.

Tim Woodward’s column appears every other Sunday in The Idaho Press and is posted soon woodwardblog.com the following Mondays. Contact him at woodwardcolumn@gmail.com.