We were gearing up to pour concrete and my boss Dave was looking for an extra set of hands. This was not the largest pour but at that time, I was a mid-level apprentice carpenter without a whole lot of experience with concrete. Dave was quite experienced and was careful to explain to me that he wasn’t concerned about our ability to complete the concrete pour ourselves; he just wanted another set of hands just in case. Concrete is tricky. The mud, as we call it, has to be ordered and mixed with the correct amount of water and the proper mix of sand, aggregate, and lime for the application needed. Even then, drive time from the plant, weather conditions, and complexity of the pour can all have major effects on how quickly that mud begins to harden. There is also a very specific order and process to a pour; certain tools that are specific only to concrete finishing have to be used at specific times that are dictated by the indicators given off by the mud as it begins to cure. Even in perfect conditions a concrete pour requires hard work and constant skilled attention. In poor conditions, everything is sped up and made much more difficult as the finishing crew frantically works to avoid having their mistakes literally set in stone. You get one chance, and once chance only to make it work. If Dave said we could do it, I trusted him, but if he said he wanted another set of hands, preferably an experienced finisher, it certainly wasn’t going to offend me.
But as the day for the pour approached, Dave was having trouble finding a finisher to come help us. The job was off the beaten path; 20 minutes into the foothills followed by another 15 minutes of dirt road and three creek crossings to get to the site and the pour was small. The pros wanted real money because even that small of a pour would cost them a whole day as it could not be done in tandem with another small project. In the end, Dave found himself just looking for an able-bodied set of hands to fetch things, pick things up, and clean things as we needed; it would be up to us to do the finishing. But even unskilled laborers were hard to find, and as that pour day came relentlessly nearer, Dave still had no helper for us. Finally, now somewhat nervous myself about our prospects for the pour (accentuated by the constant worrying from Dave about all the difficulties he was having finding labor), with only two days to go, I suggested maybe my 12 year old little brother Pat might be able to help us out. At 12, Pat was still more skinny little boy than strong young man, but he was smart, he listened well, and was not afraid of hard work. Most importantly, he was available. Dave’s options were exhausted, so Pat was hired to be our third set of hands.
We arrived early on pour day to give ourselves plenty of time to set up. The mud wasn’t coming till 8AM, but we needed to clear a few debris piles to ease our movement around the work areas, and Dave wanted to train Pat on the names of the tools we would be needing and give him a brief rundown on the process of the pour. The day was beautiful. The weather was cool but clear, and as the sun crested the canyon wall to the East, casting rays through the oak tress and revealing the dew left on every leaf and blade of grass with glittering golden reflections, we were reminded how absolutely beautiful those backwoods properties can be in the early spring. We were ahead of schedule and in high spirits as we set up our finishing tools and began clearing the debris piles to give plenty of elbow room for the work to come.
Dave brought over a wheelbarrow, and he and I reached down to team lift an old water heater into it and clear it out of the way. That water heater had been running on back country well water for the ten years prior to our removing it the week before, and had built up a large, heavy mass of minerals and sediment in the bottom of the tank which made it somewhat awkward to lift. But I was young and strong, so I took the heavy bottom end and we muscled it up and over to the wheelbarrow. But as we were squaring ourselves to set it down evenly, the sediment sloshed and shifted, changing the center of gravity on the tank causing it to want to roll. The sudden shifting weight and rolling motion caused both of us to lose our grip, and the water heater went crashing into the wheelbarrow. Somehow, my ungloved thumb got smashed violently between bottom of the tank, bearing the full weight of its load of sediments, and the unyielding metal wall of the commercial grade wheelbarrow.
I felt the impact like a hammer blow, and Dave immediately dashed over to my end of the wheelbarrow and helped me free my mangled thumb, apologizing and swearing the whole time. I wasn’t in a ton of pain, but looked down to find the sharp, angle metal foot of the water heater had bisected my thumbnail with a deep, ragged cut that was just beginning to seep dark arterial blood. The top half of the nail was gone; completely sheared off leaving the glistening pinkish red of the raw nailbed. The bottom half of the nail was pointed in a wonky angle, only attached to my thumb by the tiniest thread of skin at the cuticle. “Oh no, oh no!” Dave was clearly distressed on my behalf. Indeed, the wound looked terrible and incredibly painful, but by some strange blessing, a few months prior to this accident, I had suffered a deep cut at the base of my thumb that had severed or damaged the nerves that fed the back of my thumb, and they were still in the long slow process of repairing themselves. I felt a little bit of pain from the deep parts of the cut, but what should have been the really painful stuff – the raw and exposed nailbed had absolutely no feeling. Instead, I was fascinated with an almost third-party interest, and had to resist the urge to poke at the wound to see what I could feel and what I couldn’t.
But after a moment of gawking, practical matters set in. This was a pretty serious injury, and needed attention from a medical professional. So Dave and I hastily improvised a temporary bandage and Dave recruited the owner of the property to give me a ride into town and drop me off at the ER. As I fumbled clumsily with my seatbelt, trying not to bang around my bandaged thumb, I heard the property owner sigh. I looked up just in time to see, as we pulled out of their long driveway and onto the dirt road, the concrete truck pass us on its way up the driveway to go deliver the mud to Dave and his new finisher, the 12 year old Pat.
Several hours and six stitches later (three of them right through that raw nail bed), the owner and I pulled back up to the house to find a very tired Dave and Pat rinsing shovels and wheelbarrows. I was afraid of what I would find; after all, Dave had been worrying for weeks about needing an extra set of skilled hands. Then, moments before the show started, he found himself solo with several yards of concrete and a 12 year old helper who had never touched we concrete in his life. Yet to my surprise, (after he confirmed my thumb was going to be fine with no real permanent damage) Dave relayed to me, in the sort of relaxed elation of one who has just achieved a significant feat, that the pour simply could not have gone smoother. The mud was the perfect consistency, and the weather was perfect. Pat had been alert, quick to learn, and not afraid to jump in and do whatever Dave asked of him. They had worked non-stop with no breaks for breakfast or lunch, but they were able to get it all done, and done well. Dave had great things to say about Pat’s effort and attitude and backed those words up with a man’s wages for his hard day of work. And while I have no doubts that Pat performed admirably, the glory of this success belonged to primarily to Dave. His skill had been pretty severely tested, and deserved every bit of his endorphin induced elation. After some dishing out some good natured ribbing over how I was even willing to mutilate my hand in order to avoid a concrete pour, he took us all out to an early dinner.