
By T.W. Burger
"Almost exactly 12 hours after he surrendered to police after a three hour standoff, Douglas Dubs found himself sentenced to finish out the "bad time" of a four-year-old prison sentence," I type, my eye flitting nervously over the drift of hand scribbled notes and photocopied court documents spread in front of me on the kitchen table.
On the other side of the window, six feet away, an electric screwdriver yowls and sinks another galvanized shank into the treated lumber.
“Shortly after 1 p.m. that same day," I continue, hopefully, "Presiding Judge Oscar F. Spicer told Dubs to spend the next 9 1/2 months in the Adams County Prison for violating parole.”
My neighbor, Stella, walks by the window, carrying a stack of four decking planks. Ed makes some quip and she bursts into laughter. Ed lets loose with the nail gun. Bap! Bap! Bap! Bap!
I launch another assault on the keyboard.
Bap! Bap! Bap! Bap! I look up. Ed, Danny and his girlfriend, Tina, are staring through the picture window, watching me type.
“You're gonna have to get yourself a privacy curtain or something," Danny suggests, helpfully, from a spot that used to be about five feet off the ground. "Anybody could look right in.”
Sighing, I walk outdoors to join the hubbub. Some days are just not meant for writing.
This has been going on for a little more than a week. Earlier this summer, I contracted with my friend and neighbor Ed to put a deck on the house and, busy man that he is, he couldn't get around to it until now. Danny is helping Ed in the evening, when he gets home from his day job.
This being the kind of neighborhood it is, the deck has become sort of a collective project.
Over the Labor Day weekend, while the deck was still a waffle-work of two-by-12 joists and six-by-six posts, some of the seasonal folk walked up the creek bank to remark that, yessir, that's gonna be some deck.
We all stood around and discussed the state of our private road, one of those topics that, in Marsh Creek Heights, is as regular a topic for ratchet-jawing as the weather. (Not like it used to be...etc.)
There was also a lot of chin-stroking and opinion-giving about the size of the deck, the state of lumber in the world today (not like it used to be...etc.), and rueful jokes that our row of 20 or so houses had been built by people with a very relaxed attitude about the craft of carpentry.
From what I understand, a traditional building material used here when these places were built 70 some years ago was beer. These were, after all, holiday cottages, and probably were built by people who were feeling a lot more festive than home construction usually requires.
This may explain why one or two of the places out here are kind of held together with long bolts run through them, and why, when I first bought this place, I found the outhouse in the garage. But then, I'm no expert.
Anyway, everybody who walks out on the deck does this funny little squatting sort of thing, stomping their feet and then shaking their entire bodies, trying to make the deck wobble. It's a sort of ritual, like dances the Indians used to do to lure the buffalo.
But Ed is building this thing as though he thinks I'm going to park my car on it, so it doesn't move. It is more sturdily built than the house.
I go out and stand on the deck, resisting, at least for a while, the temptation to stomp and shimmy. I receive a barrage of abuse for wearing a tie. But I am still working, I start to explain, before I realize how really stupid that sounds, and remove the doggone thing.
Soon, the shoes and socks go, too.
The cats are having a field day, though they are not too fond of the power tools. The kittens discover that they can run back and forth on the joists on the unplanked portion of the deck.
They're everywhere at once. I fear that some might get power-screwed into place by Danny, who is planking fast enough to set a record.
The cats have spread out along the main part of the deck, plotting how this new development might bring them closer to the crafty squirrels.
Danny buries another screw and reaches for the next plank. The cats eye him with suspicion. Stella brings a few more planks before she heads back home for supper. Tina wanders off to change for a night of throwing darts; she and Danny belong to a league. Ed begins to stow things away, getting ready to head off for a weekend jaunt to an exhibition of antique steam engines.
Soon, I am standing there, alone, my bare feet cool on the new wood. It all seems like magic, this shaping of raw lumber into a deck, a house, whatever. But, as I often tell Danny, carpentry is one of the many skills I managed to miss. Heck, I had to read the directions when I bought my hammer.
I go back in to the kitchen table.
"Constable James Sterling and a deputy sheriff from Adams County arrived at Dubs' girlfriend's home at 3585 Baltimore Pike at 10:30 p.m., Wednesday," I type, trying to remember where my thoughts had been when last interrupted. It's the memory, you know. Not what it used to be. Etc.
Later, when it is dark, I go out on the deck. I stomp and shimmy, go back in the house feeling sheepish. My luck, when I wake up in the morning, the yard will be full of buffalo.
T. W. Burger was raised in town and graduated from Athens High School in 1967, then worked as a driver of everything from fork trucks to garbage trucks and has been an apprentice mortician and ambulance attendant.
He is now a semi-retired journalist who resides on the banks of Marsh Creek, just outside of Gettysburg, Pa.
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