Creek Running North

They built well in the late 1940s. The studs in the shed are clear-heart old-growth redwood, tight-grained and hard. I’m drilling holes in them to run Romex, planning to put separate circuits in there for computer, lights and outlets, and each three studs about exhaust the battery on my cordless drill. Our house’s walls are thick, plaster and lath and more ancient redwoods and stucco, and even in the last few weeks as temperatures rise into triple digits, our rooms stay nice and cool.

And the sidewalks? No slip-shod, lowest-bidder chalk-filler workmanship there. The walks that were poured when the house was built are four inches thick, massive, with river rock as filler. They are tough. I expect they’ll be intact a hundred years from now.

Except the one I busted up yesterday afternoon.

It was too hot to go hiking. A hundred in Pinole generally means 104 in Concord, which means hotter on Mount Diablo. I stayed home with the boys, who even in the relative cool of the house panted in their fur and lounged dramatically, looking at me as if I could turn the heat down but simply refused to out of cruelty. Besides, there was watering to do, and the lawn needed mowing, and a few of my weeds had grown to prodigious heights. Home needed me.

Of course the less-strenuous tasks were done by noon. Of course I started thinking about the piece of sidewalk I needed to break. We put in a flagstone patio in back two years ago, raised above the previous sidewalk by about three inches, and I’ve meant to pour a ramped sidewalk to it since then so that I can haul things by wheelbarrow to our backyard without resorting to inclined planks. And I’ve put it off for too long, and have missed god knows how many opportunities to move tons of gravel and manure and such. And there was a sink full of dirty dishes in the kitchen, desperately in need of washing, attracting ants, and vacuuming to be done, and an article on border issues to be written. My duty was clear. I needed to break the sidewalk right away.

There is something affirmative and pleasing about a twelve-pound sledge’s hard wooden handle felt through a pair of leather gloves.  My forehead streamed moisture into my safety glasses, which fogged up. They came off. There is something archetypal and correct about twelve pounds of hardened steel at the end of an arc five feet in radius, the familiar flexing of trapezius and latissimus. Hit the slab once and you make a mere dent. Aim for that same spot, closing your priceless and stupidly unprotected eyes a half second before impact. The second blow deepens the dent a little, a minor gouge of dust to fill an impact crater. Throw the hammer again. You will need to lift it perhaps several dozen times, perhaps several hundred. Allow the hammer and gravity to do the work. Your job is merely to pull it away from the planet, to determine its trajectory as it falls back to earth.

It is only after the fifth blow with no real progress that impatience usually begins. I wiped my forehead with the back of my right glove. Weed seeds stuck to my eyebrows. Six blows, then ten. The site of impact was a shallow bowl filled with concrete dust. I bent to blow the dust away. Lift the hammer, drop the hammer. It is not so much that the hammer falls to Earth, to be precise, as that Earth and hammer rush toward one another at 32 feet per second squared. Total distance traveled from the zenith of the hammer’s arc is about nine feet, and the Earth covers about a quadrillionth of an angstrom of that. I had a place to stand, my shoulders the fulcrum and the earth moved.

My shirt was sodden. It came off.

A jagged hairline crack ran the length of the square of concrete. I gauged a vulnerable spot along the crack’s length, a place where it bowed toward the edge and then returned. The narrow part would be weaker. I raised the hammer, let it fall, raised it again. It fell again. The dull concrete timpani changed timbre. The crack forked. I had three rough triangular sections now, jointed by hairline cracks. I hit one of them a few times in its center, perhaps just a little way toward its outer edge. It cracked with a few blows, and along its length the first crack was now wide enough to slip a coin between.

I grabbed the four-foot pry bar, tried to work its blade into the widened crack. It didn’t fit. Put down the prybar, picked up the hammer, a few more blows and tried the pry bar again. It just barely went in, but the concrete edges rounded off when I tried to coax the slabs apart. My hair is long these days. Sweat dripped from its ends. I took off my ball cap and was a bit cooler. I set it aside. I now wore shorts, gloves, steel-toed boots, and a layer of wet dust. Three more blows with the sledge and the pry bar slipped to the slab’s base. I pulled away a chunk of concrete the size of a grapefruit, tossed it to one side.

Another chunk came loose and I removed it as well. From then on the task was straightforward: nibble away at the slab with six or ten hammer strikes, then pry chunks away with the bar. In twenty minutes I had it half demolished. And then the coup de grâce: I wedged the bar beneath the remainder of the slab, placed a chunk as fulcrum, and lifted the slab an inch, then two. A fist-sized fragment went beneath to prop it up, and I grabbed the hammer, swung it into the air once more, and that one blow broke the rest of the slab into four pieces.