It’s day three of my new job, helping a contractor with a house remodel. In that time, the work has become progressively more difficult, while the weather has become progressively warmer. Today, we’re trying to finish up some heavy demolition, tearing out a two-story fireplace — lots of brick and cinder block to break apart, throw into a wheelbarrow and trundle up a hill to a waiting trailer.
This, after busting up a 6-inch slab of concrete, which met the same fate.
The work isn’t easy. Nor is it my chosen profession. Let’s just say I doubt I’ll be adding it to my LinkedIn profile.
We moved to Fort Collins a little more than four years ago, escaping the Rust Belt at the bottom of the real estate collapse. I worked in television at the time. I’d never had trouble finding work in the past, so we didn’t give it much thought.
But now that I’m 50-something, it appears they’ve changed the hiring rules. After several years of looking but not finding anything, followed by a brief stint stocking grocery store shelves overnight, I was hooked up with “Bob the Builder” by one of my wife’s co-workers. He was desperate, and I had nowhere else to go.
While I always considered myself to be in decent shape, the notion was dispelled some time ago. Now the gods are simply driving home that point. By 10 a.m., I am wilting in the heat. By noon, I am completely out of gas.
My nemesis this day is the 18-inch-wide plank that serves as a ramp up into the trailer where I’m to dump all the fireplace rubble. With every wheelbarrow load, negotiating this incline becomes more treacherous. The preferred method is to get a bit of a running start and just glide up the ramp with a few confident strides. But confidence is supplanted by exhaustion as my legs turn to rubber, leaving me wobbling like a drunk on a balance beam.
Inevitably, I lose control and spill a couple of loads onto the driveway. After that I simply avoid the ramp, push my wheelbarrow to the edge of the trailer and toss the broken stone and bricks in by hand. Bob is not amused but accepts the fact — grudgingly — that the extra time it takes me to empty the wheelbarrow this way is still quicker than collecting scattered chunks of broken masonry up off the pavement.
Lunch, finally, and the chance to sit. How I’ll make it through the afternoon is anyone’s guess. A quick check of my phone provides mute testament to my ongoing persona non grata status in the current job market: no voice messages, e-mails or texts despite perhaps half a dozen applications.
So I dust off my hat and head back to my Sisyphean task, pushing another load of brick and concrete up the hill under that indifferent, perfect blue Colorado sky.
Curt MacDougall lives in Fort Collins.
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