This is not the piece I meant to put out this weekend. That piece needs a bit more work to pass muster, and I don’t have time for that right now. I’ve had to drop everything normal to make major repairs to the deck on the back of my house, after I found a little rot, and then a lot of rot—and that’s how finding rot tends to go. After almost two weeks of this, my hands are telling me that typing is plenty of work for them, thank you very much, but this will be short, as I’m not finished and I’ll be gripping tools with them again in an hour, quieting them with Tylenol.
Just up front: this isn’t going to segue into a metaphorical reflection on rot, though my brief comments on the literal thing itself will only reinforce its usefulness as metaphor.
The really scary thing about rot is that you never, ever know how extensive it is when you find it. Rot doesn’t happen out in the open. It happens sight-unseen, in the hidden places. Circulating air stops rot; enclosed spaces that retain moisture feed it. You might see the damage from former rot out in the open. But rot is usually only actively happening when you’re not looking. I noticed a slight give and creak on the southwest bottom corner of the lowest deck step. Figured a spot of rot there, in the 2x wooden structure underneath the composite decking. Pull the step tread, a little epoxy putty, good to go. I built that deck myself, fourteen years ago, and I built it to last at least thirty years, though honestly I thought it would outlast me, given how overboard I went with materials and fasteners. So I wasn’t worried about the repair. Figured it’d take me a day, max.
At the end of that day, the entire lower level of the deck, constituting what would turn out to be a thousand dollars’ worth of wood, was in a pile of musty bits and scraps on my patio. Finding rot means busting it out, pulling away more of the surface, finding more, busting that out, repeat. It ends when it ends, and you don’t know when that is until you find solid wood—if you do. If it sounds like a sinking feeling, it most definitely is. You’ve lost control—well, you’ve lost the illusion of control that was artificially boosting your mood. Reality is this, not that, and you didn’t know it. Whatever your plans were for the next two weeks, cancel them. And then hope two weeks is enough. The deck you built that you thought was so excellent turned out to be, well, not so excellent. Now that you think about it, it has smelled musty under there for a long time. Too much white mold on the joists. Black mold too. Choosing not to see it doesn’t make it go away. I have two choices, while I keep busting out chunks with a hammer, go to the lumber yard, calculate stringer rise and run. I can keep getting angrier, or I can just admit that I made a mistake, that this is my fault, that the deck did not have adequate ventilation, and that now I have to fix it. I chose the former first, but, finally, tired of that, I copped to the latter, and now I feel better.
And now for my shameless play at making this at least tentatively relevant to the stated themes of Leeway: rot is still an important everyday danger in our built world, but it would have to compete for title of most important everyday danger with rust. For the “wooden world” we lived in until the twentieth century, to use the phrase employed with such felicity by naval historian N.A.M. Rodger and pioneer of American material culture and technology studies Brooke Hindle, rot was enemy number one, and still is in cultures primarily reliant on wood. As Eric Schatzberg noted in his great book on choice in American aircraft materials in the 1920s and 1930s, we think of metal as “modern” and wood as “pre-modern,” but that is somewhat arbitrary and has much to do with considerations other than the actual properties of the two materials. Wood, still, has much to recommend it, aside from cost and availability. (As for cost, however, as of Fall of 2022 in the U.S., the cost of quality lumber is straight-up painful.) The best species for structural use have excellent strength-to-weight ratios. They have just enough flexibility not to be brittle, while being stiff enough to create stout structures when properly joined, and there are multiple effective ways of fastening it, whether mechanically or chemically. The composite decking I used for the surface pieces won’t rot, but it is far heavier than a wooden analog would be and its structural rigidity is about zero. Only real wood will support it.
Wood is one of the easiest materials for us to work with hand tools; you don’t need industrial plant to make something out of wood. Wood is buoyant. It’s easy to paint, or coat with other protectants. Aesthetically, it has a hold on us that no other material does. I think this goes back to its direct connection to the natural world; wood is never far removed, to our senses, from the tree it once was. But that is a topic for a whole other essay.
People literally conquered the world in wooden boats and ships. On the other hand, wood burns, and it rots.
Those who work with any material focus much of their energy on mitigating whatever its weaknesses are. Working with steel means working against rust. Working with wood means working against rot. In the case of modern construction wood, the best stuff is impregnated with toxins against insects and fungi, then re-dried in a kiln to make it straight, dense, and ready to paint. But no matter how well we treat a piece of wood, if we don’t provide adequate air circulation, it will rot, probably sooner rather than later. And nothing helps rot progress like ignoring it. I will be installing a bunch of round aluminum vents in the deck when I finish replacing all the rotten pieces.
And I still have new pieces to install, so I’m going to cook breakfast, gladly, then head out back, reluctantly. I hope you have a relaxing, rot-free Sunday.