SON OF STAIR TASK


So it was that on the first morning I stood, coffee in hand, gazing like MacArthur out the kitchen door at the site of The Stair Task, sussing it all out, making all the mental calculations, selecting the tools, establishing procedure, estimating costs and times for a work force of one soft male getting on in years who still thinks he has the body of a long receiver and an intuitive lock on the common sense of a civil engineer. I am surrounded here on the mountainside by superb stonework, as manifest on all the rice paddy terraces going up the mountain, and as the ancient buildings of Japan, the temples, castles etc. can attest, some of the finest and most amazing stonework in the world can be seen here. I have seen it and studied it, so no problem with that little staircase in my garden, right?

That was a couple of weeks ago. I got all the many rocks together, good ones flat on one side with slightly rough surfaces, culled from among the many that reside on my mountain estate, then I tore out the old gap-toothed staircase and began to lay out the large and heavy, diversely shaped rocks to achieve a stable level surface and discovered what I already would have known, had I been more attentive back in geometry class: you can't make a flat surface by stacking randomly irregular polyhedrons unless you're god, or have access to a godly time scale and resources.

Despite what I had led myself to think, this was not at all like building a wall, where you start at the bottom with big rocks and build up with smaller ones, following the many rules of rockwall construction until you reach the top. I tried different tacks, of course; I leveled some dirt and dug in and arranged some large and heavy rocks atop it so they were rather even along the top, then realized there was no way I could stack rocks atop those to achieve an even and stable step without using cement, which I did not want to do because I knew even less about cement than I knew about rocks, and I don't trust anything in which I can be permanently immobilized.

So I gave myself some badly needed advice and purchased some flat rock slabs to use in forming the steps and risers. "This worked for the pyramids, so it should work for me," was the logic I employed. These slabs weighed about as much as I do, maybe more, so it wasn't easy to try it this way and that while turning the dirt of the staircase into mud with my sweat. Sweat seems sweatier when things aren't going the way I've assured myself they will. So after attempting a variety of Macchu Picchu and Easter Island techniques, I managed to get one step to stay in one place without falling over in a half-ton pile of rubble, but then the weather spotted me in the garden and proceeded to rain for all four days of my vacation, as I stared at the step from the kitchen doorway through some of the hardest rain I've ever seen in my life; I imagine that many folks caught out in the open were knocked insensible by the falling drops.

Today, in the sunny blue sunlight that flooded the garden as though I were going to work, before I left for the office I noticed that the stone step was still standing, but it was way too high and in the wrong position. Thank goodness the rain had stopped me. Thence, in the delight of that knowledge, to the office.