Left Uncovered

Dear Uncle Bodie,

We expect it to rain here tonight. Anywhere else, that wouldn’t mean much. But here, we’ve had only two brief rains in the last nine months. Even for a dry place like Los Angeles, this drought is extreme. All over southern California, people are going out in their yards and putting away their yard tools and taking a look at their roofs, wondering if they’ll hold up during the rain.

You’d be interested to know how different things are here in California from Ohio. Take a look at the picture.

I took this picture one evening early in October after the roofers had left our house for the day. You can see that they left the roof stripped off, completely uncovered. Not only that, they left their tools, including a Sawzall, sitting on the roof for the night. This isn’t unusual for southern California. Dad and I have been amused to see work sites where stacks of drywall sit uncovered in the open for days on end. I know what you’re thinking: they must be careless, wasteful people who lack discipline and character. You wouldn’t say it that way but you taught us that leaving your tools out or not covering up a roof or valuable materials is something no responsible workman would ever do.

It’s taken me a lot of years to understand that these folks aren’t careless or wasteful They do know for an absolute certainty that it’s not going to rain. Not only that, there’s not even going to be any dew in the morning. The weather here comes in from over the Pacific, and we know at least two days in advance of any chance of rain. Think of it: no dew! No damp grass or wet roofs. It’s amazing.

I know what you’re thinking: if that’s true, if every crew in California doesn’t have to spend the last 20 minutes of the day putting away tools and covering up materials, these must be the most productive work crews in the world! If you figure a crew of 5 times 5 days a week times 20 minutes a day, they must get 150 hours of extra productivity a year. Not so. Here’s why not.

Los Angeles is all about water. We do not have any water here. It comes through aqueducts and it flows into reservoirs during the short rainy winter. When water does come as rain it comes in deluges that inundate the city and quickly run off the vast paved area that covers the LA basin. Even the river channels are paved, which amounts to an immense mass of swift-moving water rapidly dumping into the ocean. When water runs off a job site in Ohio or Oklahoma or New York, it ends up in a local creek, then a river and has a chance to be aerated and purified by natural processes before it ends up in the ocean. Here, floods of torrential rains pour down concrete channels and in one or 5 or 20 miles wash the waste of the metropolis of 10 million people directly into Santa Monica Bay. What’s this got to do with that job productivity? This: there isn’t a single construction site in southern California that doesn’t  need to be surrounded with water-retaining plastic sheeting held down by sandbags. Thousands of miles of plastic and tens of thousands of sand bags. Even if they sit there for years while a project continues, and even if it doesn’t rain for nine months, they have to be there. Otherwise, when it does rain, the topsoil and brush and debris go straight down the storm drain and in just a few minutes can be part of the pollution problem in the Bay. It kind of balances out. All those thousands and thousands of hours of labor not spent covering up roofs and stacks of lumber gets invested in ringing every construction site with water-channeling divergence dams.

And there are lots of other things that we didn’t have to deal with, like disposing of leftover paint or packing material or other waste. We just dumped it somewhere out in a field, but today it’s weighed, assessed and you’re billed before it goes anywhere. On just our little residential job the roofers removed 14 tons of old roofing from our house and paid a fee for the environmental cost.

We had it easy, Bodie. Still, I’d give a week’s pay to be here if you saw some roofer climb down off the ladder at the end of the day with the roof left uncovered, leaving a bucket full of tools on the roof. I can hear it now….

Sincerely,

Brad

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Ora “Bodie” Nixon was my great-uncle, one of my grandfather’s brothers. I worked with Bodie in the family construction business from when I was about 13 or so until he retired when I was in my 20s. While most of the Nixon men were taciturn, Bodie was a puckish, exuberant imp, full of life and never quiet for more than a few minutes. Picture a compact, muscular Popeye the Sailor, full of salt & vinegar. While my dad and grandfather mostly assumed that I’d learn what I needed to know by watching them (and I learned a lot), Bodie couldn’t resist the temptation to pass on what he knew: direct, full of an exuberant desire to teach. One of the moments that best sums up Bodie’s joyful wisdom was the time he saw me driving nails with a tight, intense swing of my hammer. He told me to swing the hammer from a rhythm inside me: “Play the music that’s in you,” he said. Those were his exact words. I’ve never forgotten them. I miss that guy.

© Brad Nixon 2010, 2017