Concrete and Culture

By Robby Porter

After a year of homeschooling prompted him to consider how much he actually knew and how he'd learned it, Robby Porter-builder, solar-panel-installer, ski-trail-groomer, woodworker, hydroelectric engineer, and philosopher-decided to write down everything he'd learned that he thought was worth knowing, and the result was this collection of essays

• Language: English
• Publisher: Bar Nothing Books
• Release date: Jul 4, 2021
• ISBN: 9780998770918

Robby Porter

Robby Porter lives in Vermont. He has worked as a furniture designer and builder, carpenter, solar electric installer, snow groomer, and hydroelectric plant operator.

Book preview

ONE

1- Concrete and Culture

When I was 16, I made my first real money by cutting a load of pulpwood. I cut mostly balsam fir and a few white spruce trees. These days, the low‐quality wood that is destined to become paper is likely to be felled by a mechanical harvester and trucked away tree length, but 35 years ago a lot of pulpwood was still felled with a chainsaw, measured and cut into four‐foot lengths, and stacked in neat piles to await the arrival of a log truck. You needed to accumulate 14 to 16 cords—a pile roughly 80 feet long, 6 feet high, and 4 feet wide—before you were ready to call the trucker.

I cut my load of wood in the area where my sister Molly’s studio and house now stand. We called this thicket the swamp because it bordered a beaver pond. It was my father’s objective to clear the whole area and return it to pasture. My cutting of the pulpwood was going to be the first phase. We never got past the first phase, and by the time Molly built her place there, most of it had regrown trees.

One day I would fell and limb trees, the next day I would skid them with my oxen out to the road, where I cut them to length and piled them. I was hardly disciplined, but eventually the day came when I calculated and recalculated and re‐recalculated, measuring over the sloping ends of the pile and the curves of the gully I’d stacked it in, and decided I must have enough for a load. I called a trucker recommended by a neighbor.

A few days later, in the early morning fog, a tractor‐trailer truck pulled up to my pile, followed by a loader truck with a cherry picker mounted on its back. As they positioned themselves to begin loading, the old adage Possession is nine‐tenths of the law swam into sharp focus in my adolescent mind. These enormous trucks were going to depart with all of my hard‐earned wood, and if I never got paid there wasn’t a lot I could do about it.

While they were loading, I imagined various unrealistic teenage fantasies about how I would reclaim what was rightfully mine. An hour of paranoid daydreaming did nothing to reassure me, but the wood was loaded and disappeared with the morning’s fog. I fretted for a couple of weeks and then got a check in the mail—$535, as I remember.

I hadn’t thought about those truckers in years, until a few summers ago. We were building a solar electric installation and needed several yards of concrete. I called a concrete company, one I’d never used before and to whom I was nothing more than a voice on the end of a phone line. Nevertheless, at the appointed time a massive truck showed up and deposited 16,000 pounds of concrete in our holes. Nothing unusual about this. It happens every day on construction sites all around the country. I gave the driver a check and the truck went on its way. If I had decided to stiff the concrete company, there is no way in hell they could have gotten either their money or their concrete back. They could have sued me, complained about a bounced check or no check, tried to ruin my credit, taken me to small claims court; it hardly would have been worth it for $1,000 of concrete.

Thirty years ago, as the log trucks loaded my pulpwood, I realized how vulnerable I was to the dishonesty of other humans. This time, older and on the other side of the transaction, I had a different realization.

We live in a trust and honesty culture.

In this day, when litigious scumbags troll the airwaves and internet for their next cases and when big corporations seem to hate their customers and look for any opportunity to trick them into spending money, it may seem counterintuitive to say that we are a trust‐based culture. And it is true that predatory corporations are doing their best to ruin this culture. But underneath, as a culture, individual to individual, we believe that your word is your bond, and when some guy calls up, gives his first name and an address, and says he wants concrete, the concrete company sends out a truck and assumes he will pay.

Most of what you see in everyday life obscures this fact. The financial industry—the pinnacle of commercial transactions and the sector of the economy that attracts the brightest, most ambitious minds—collapsed (again) in 2008 under the weight of its own lies. One trip through the security line at an airport would convince anyone that we are a fear- and deception‐based culture.

But the vast majority of transactions take place within the bounds of the law, not because people are afraid of punishment for breaking the law but because most of the time and for most people—in other words, as a culture—we have ingested the assumption that we should be honest with strangers. Take away the culture of honesty, as has happened in the financial industry, and the law, far from being an enforcer, becomes just an inconvenience that must be avoided or purchased.

If you run your hand over a piece of sanded wood, you’ll feel one small rough spot even if the rest of it is perfectly smooth. Similarly, it is easy to see examples of dishonesty and harder to see how much trust there is. But once you start looking, and I never noticed until I ordered that load of concrete, you start seeing the strong, smooth sheet of honesty everywhere.

This is a cultural choice. Trust and honesty between individuals, even strangers—especially strangers—is a slender and perhaps peculiar, yet enduring, first principle of our culture.

I know it isn’t this way in every business or in every place in this country, and in some ways Vermont is a bit of a throwback to an earlier time, but this really just makes my point. A trust and honesty culture is our heritage.

Our heritage also includes slavery and genocide of the first Americans. Ta‐Nehisi Coates, whose writing I admire even when I disagree with some of his conclusions, argues that black Americans have lived in a culture of white supremacy, bondage, and theft of their lives and bodies. A person with dark skin can look at our history and conclude that it is a culture of deceit and theft directed at anyone without white skin.

I don’t disagree, but I don’t think this invalidates my observation. The trust and honesty culture has always excluded people and treated those people it excluded from the culture—dark‐skinned, women, Asian, Native American, the list goes on and on—as having no or fewer rights. What’s changed over time is that the culture has gradually become more and more inclusive until now, by ideology, it includes every American, even if there is still a big gap between the ideal and reality.

Even making allowance for how poorly we live up to the ideal and how the ideal itself has had to evolve, the trust and honesty culture seems to me to be somewhat unique in history. Usually trust has been extended between men along familial, tribal, or sometimes religious or political lines. Somehow, despite the white, male, wig‐wearing, slave‐owning, female‐excluding genesis of our country, we’ve expanded the idea of trust between strangers to mean all strangers. It is a remarkable leap ideologically. Practically, we’ve got a long way to go.

If my voice had been female or if I had sounded black, would the concrete company still have sent the truck? I don’t know. I’ve had the privilege of living my life as a white male. This limits my perspective, but it doesn’t stop me from seeing that a trust and honesty culture is a good thing within my experience and believing that the more completely and thoroughly that experience is shared by everyone, the better.

2- Granny’s Rug and Muh’s Casserole

The music of my childhood (and by childhood I mean the period after I was seven and we moved from Clarendon Springs, near Rutland, Vermont, to Adamant, Vermont, because I don’t have any particular memories of music before that), the music I remember, was the album, mostly traditional country music, Will the Circle Be Unbroken; another record that my father often played of black Mississippi prisoners singing as they worked; and a Doc Watson record.

A number of those songs have stuck with me. Some were fun to listen to, like the song Tennessee Stud. A lot of the songs had vocal harmonies, which, to my young ear, sounded dissonant, and I thought those were places where the singers made a mistake and hit the wrong note. This last observation reveals two character traits, arrogance and tone deafness, which, unfortunately, I realize have been with me starting even in my childhood. And some of the songs, Doc Watson’s version of Tom Dooley chief among them, confused and perplexed me.

I couldn’t understand how Tom Dooley killed poor Laurie Foster if he also hadn’t harmed a hair on her head. And given that, I couldn’t understand why he wasn’t protesting his innocence more and seemed so resigned to his hanging. But what really got me was the verse You can take down my old violin / And play it all you please / For at this time tomorrow, boys / It’ll be of no use to me.

The macabre image of Tom Dooley encouraging someone—he says, boys, I pictured his sons—to take his prized possession was even more uncomfortable to my brain than the vocal harmonies, and it disturbed me in a way my young mind couldn’t resolve.

We’re all going to die one way or another, and many of our possessions will outlast us. What’s the right attitude and treatment for the possessions of deceased relatives?

We have several rugs made by my grandmother and given to us by her while she was still alive. When I look at the rugs, it is easy for me to remember Granny’s hands and how she pulled the braids together extra tight so the rugs would last. Her hands were knotted by arthritis, like an old root, by the time she died at 97, but I think it was blindness not arthritis that caused her to give up on rug making a few years before her death.

The rugs have lasted, though. I think every relative has a rug and maybe several. Ours have survived wet boots and dogs, firewood and moths, and the same passage of time that wears us out. The rug in front of the woodstove has given way in one spot and no matter how many times I tuck it under, a small tail of wool braid always manages to find its way onto the hearth, like a pointing finger reminding me that I should have taken better care of this heirloom.

From my other grandmother, Muh, I don’t have many keepsakes: a couple of pieces of furniture, a small, ornate clock, and a round, red casserole dish. Not too long after she died and her possessions were distributed among her descendants, I stowed the red casserole dish under the sink counter, sure that it would get broken if we used it. There it stayed for a few years until we were going to a potluck dinner party and I saw that my wife had retrieved it from its hiding place and filled it with food.

Perhaps I said something, I suspect I did, about how we really shouldn’t use it because it might get broken, and Beth Ann wisely ignored me. What I do remember is that the dish, which is red on the outside and white inside, with a couple of scrolled handles, made it home and I washed it. The handles leave little indentations on the inside which are impossible to get entirely clean, and there are several flutes at the rim that you need to run a sponge around several times. When I turned it over, on the bottom I saw a small, yellowed piece of masking tape with Mary Grahl written neatly in pen. All of a sudden I knew that my grandmother had taken this pretty dish to her own potluck parties, carefully putting her name on it to make sure it came back to her.

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Unfortunately, Beth Ann never met Muh, but despite the miles and years I felt a connection between these two women, both reaching for the same pretty but difficult‐to‐clean casserole dish to take to a party. The red lid eventually got broken but the casserole dish still survives, a veteran now of innumerable parties. Someday it will break and someday the rugs will wear out, but I won’t feel guilt when that happens. And until then, every time I wash the dish I think of Muh, and every time I tuck under the frayed end of the rug I think of Granny. This is the way it should be—the right way to let go of someone, a little at a time, thinking of them as you do.

So when I’m dead and gone, take down my old tools and use them all you please. They’ll get broken and lost, but don’t feel bad. And until they do, I’ll live on a little in someone’s memory.

3- The Dignity of Not Hanging Trees

Jim Bornemeier was a friend of my parents. He worked at the newspaper with my father, Bill, and, like a lot of my dad’s friends, he occasionally came over to our house and hung out. Hanging out meant drinking beer and doing whatever my dad was doing, and one fall it meant going up in the woods to cut firewood.

Bornemeier, as my father always called him, had a flare for language, and he and my mother liked to talk about books. I noticed that when he spoke, he looked for the right word, not in the way of a taciturn Vermonter looking for the most economical version of a sentence, but in the way, I suppose, of a poet, a person who wants just the right word and is always reaching into a corner of the grab bag of language, hoping for an unused word. This quality and his general demeanor gave Bornemeier a certain dignity. He always seemed poised and thoughtful.

On my parents’ woodlot, at the top of the main hemlock stand, the hemlocks start to thin out and the hardwoods take over. Right on this periphery, my dad cut a dead beech, which fell downhill and got all tangled in a hemlock. The beech was light because it was dead and the bushy hemlock held it tightly. My father’s solution was to pick another beech tree and fell it into the first one, hoping to dislodge it.

When you’re logging, every tree is different, every skid is different, and there are continually opportunities for things to go wrong. You are constantly judging the skid road, the mudholes, the direction gravity wants a tree to fall against the direction you want it to fall. Things usually go along quite well until you misjudge a tree and hang it in another tree.

These errors all start with a misjudgment or downright self‐delusion. You think to yourself, It’ll slide between those two trees or It’ll roll off that tree or It’ll break through those dead branches, and it doesn’t. Then you’re left trying to fix a mistake.

Whatever your attempted solution, it is bound to be more dangerous and much more time consuming than simply getting it right in the beginning. And getting it right in the beginning is usually a matter of taking a few more seconds of preparation. Cut the other trees first, see if it is possible to take your tree in a different direction, some little choice that takes a hundredth of the time you eventually put into unhanging the tree, but you don’t make that choice because you err on the side of thinking things will work out. Optimism is not your friend when you are cutting trees.

My dad’s hopes were ill‐founded, and although the second tree succeeded in lowering the first tree, it didn’t bring it all the way down. Now the second beech tree was leaning on the first beech, which was itself still caught in the hemlock.

He examined the cut on the first beech and determined that while it was still propped on its stump, it was broken completely through, and he concluded that we could bring the whole mess down if we could just dislodge it from its stump.

If we had had a winch in those days, we would have simply winched it off the stump. Instead, he put a wedge in the cut and started tapping on it with a sledgehammer. This was not best forestry practice since, if it was successful, it would mean that as the first beech fell, the second one would come down on his head. Naturally, he planned to run at the first sign of movement, and after several false alarms it looked as though the beech was ready to pop off the stump. On one of these false alarms, my dad ran a little distance and Bornemeier, with manly courage and the instinctual camaraderie of men doing stupid, dangerous things, reached out his hand for the sledgehammer.

He and my dad then took turns. One of them would walk in and take a swing at the wedge and then turn and run. Each hit moved the tree a fraction of an inch closer to the edge of the stump. Finally, Bornemeier took his swing and the tree slid off the stump. Just as Bornemeier started to run, he tripped. The trees started to fall with an enormous cracking and rearranging of branches, and Bornemeier started speed crawling through the leaves and forest litter. Crawling was the right choice. Taking the time to get up could have been fatal. A second or two of crawling, palms open, fingers grasping whatever traction he could get from the leaves and the soft ground of the woods, and Bornemeier threw himself in a headlong plunge and lay on the ground, looking back at the trees, which had settled somewhat lower but had not come all the way down.

It was the first time I had ever seen a man, a dignified man, stripped of his pride and reduced to a dog in sheer desperation to keep himself alive. The lesson is that it is safer and more dignified to avoid hanging trees in the first place.

4- Frost and Rust

Rust and frost are two natural forces I was exposed to in my childhood and that shaped my outlook on life. One is the result of climate, and the other, at least in the manifestation that plagued me, is the result of humans struggling against the climate.

Newton’s first law states, roughly, that objects at rest remain at rest. While this may be strictly true for the physicist, it is not true for a New England farmer. A stone wall rests on the ground but the stones somehow manage to topple off and spread around both sides of the wall. The dry stone foundation moves around underneath an old barn. Nothing in this climate seems to stay where you put it.

I understood from a fairly young age that frost was the force moving these stones around. Had I known when I was in my early teenage years and starting to build things that there was something called Newton’s first law of motion, it might have changed my perspective. Or if I had grown up in a warmer climate, where there was no foundation‐cracking frost in the ground, I might have had a different and perhaps less defensive and cautious attitude toward life.

As it was, I liked building things and wanted anything I built to stay built forever, but I saw that every building in this climate was under seasonal attack from the frost. Rather than understanding frost in the context of Newton’s first law—in other words, understanding that the stones and buildings would have, by law, stayed where I put them, but for the renegade Jack Frost—I understood frost in the context of my life. Anything you build, there’s some damn thing that will try to tear it down. That’s the law I observed in nature, personal and somewhat adversarial, more like the Old Testament of the Bible than the impartial reality of physics.

Every rusted fender, broken tailpipe, and failing car frame just added to this conviction. We got the cars of my childhood cheap, used, and mostly worn‐out. Repairing the inevitable breakdowns meant confronting rust. Disassembling any one part often involved breaking a rusted mounting bracket or cutting off bolts too corroded to be spun loose. Nothing came apart easily.

I knew, of course, that this rust was the result of the salt spread on the roads to melt the snow and ice in the winter. Had I traveled to New Mexico, as I did later in my life, and witnessed the underside of a 40‐year‐old pickup truck with perfect‐looking emergency brake cables, I might have seen rust less as a perennial condition of life and more as a collective choice—rusted cars in return for passable roads. Instead, my provincial upbringing caused me to believe that the things I cared about and needed to maintain were under continual assault.

I expanded this into a general outlook on life, a skeptical eye convinced not only that there is weakness and vulnerability in everything, but also that there are forces, adversaries, quietly, invisibly at work against everything you need. The law I derived was to view the world as a dynamic place where everything is in motion all the time and usually in opposition to your efforts. This is not an optimistic way to understand the world, but it does seem to be a common attitude among those people like myself—grim Yankees who have lived in such a way as to have the rigors of this climate interact with our own personal designs and ambitions.

It seems now—older, a little traveled, and more knowledgeable about the laws of physics—that I am perhaps a bit softer, but mostly I’m still formed by the climate I grew up in and still live with. I’d rather not take the afternoon off or wear bright, cheerful colors because I know winter is coming, again.

5- God

Every child, at least every child of skeptical parents, as soon as they are introduced to the concept of God, naturally wonders about God’s existence.

Throughout history, the priests and clerics of all religions, damn them, have done their best to take the wisdom of the true spiritualists and contort it to empower and enrich themselves. It is not fair to categorically condemn all ecclesiastics for the selfish, power‐mad actions of many of their colleagues, but the crime is so heinous and so widespread it is probably the one case where the saying Kill them all and let God sort them out is not entirely unreasonable.

Religions are built primarily around the clergy, not God, so it is difficult for anyone, but especially for a child, to separate God and the existence—or not—of God from religion. Since my parents are pretty much agnostic, we didn’t get any pressure from them, although I think once, at the request of my father’s mother, Muh, we did get sent for a dose of Sunday school.

Nevertheless, religious ideas are all around us and kids pick them up by osmosis, even when they aren’t directly indoctrinated. By the time I was 12 I had a good friend, Sean, who was Catholic. He impressed on me the necessity of prayer for myself and especially if I wanted to save my family from eternal punishment.

Superstitions of all kinds multiply in the same part of your mind, egging each other on and creating a riot of worry and misunderstanding. Around the time I started fearing hell, I also developed a fear of vampires. My friend Sean informed me that if I kept a cross near my bed, not only might it help with salvation but I could use it to ward off a nocturnal vampire attack, so for several years I had a little cross on the shelf where I kept my book. My parents encouraged reading before sleep rather than prayer, but I followed Sean’s suggestion and after reading I prayed every night for my family.

I can’t remember now exactly what I prayed but I do remember that the thought of asking God for something stuck in my craw because it seemed rather presumptuous to interact with God primarily by asking for things, even protection. So, in my prayer God was implied but not directly called upon, something like, I pray that my family will be safe. And then I enumerated all of my family members, including dogs and important farm animals, like my oxen and the horses. I wasn’t sure about the souls of dogs or other animals but I figured it couldn’t hurt. In refusing to ask, I think I probably missed the whole point of humility and prayer.

Praying seemed to me like a small but potentially powerful insurance policy. When I had to read Pascal in college, I saw that he made pretty much the same argument—namely, that you don’t have a lot to lose by believing in God and you do have a lot to gain. I didn’t think much of the logic of Pascal’s Wager when I read it, although the impassioned convictions of someone like Pascal can be quite persuasive and I was surprised at how emotionally moved I felt by Pascal’s entreaty, but by that time I had long since given up on this logic. And that really gets to the heart of my problem with religion, especially Christianity, Judaism, and Islam.

Any religion that claims exclusive rights to the one and only God pretty much forces you into a choice between that religion’s God and justice. Your choice is to worship a God who punishes those, often through no choice of their own, who don’t worship him—a God of injustice—or to choose justice.

Years before, I had put a version of this question to my Catholic friend. Were Asians doomed to perpetual torment even if they hadn’t had a chance to be exposed to Christianity? He thought so; he wasn’t certain, but he was sure they weren’t eligible for all the good stuff that awaited righteous Christians in the afterlife.

I don’t know if a sense of the Almighty is hardwired into humans at birth, but a sense of justice seems to be. I found this idea of a God who would punish people through no fault of their own to be unbearably unjust. It didn’t stop me for a while from taking out an insurance policy by praying. But I couldn’t stomach the idea of obedience to a God (and at this time I don’t think I had much of a concept of god other than the Christian God) who would unjustly punish the unbelievers. After a year or two, I decided that if God was going to punish a bunch of otherwise innocent Asians, then I would have a lot of good company in hell, and I gave up on praying.

When I got older and read the Gospels, which, after all, are not the word of God or Jesus but rather Jesus’s story and sayings as recollected by other men (and a woman or two, although their versions didn’t make it into the Bible), I saw that most of the injustice in Christianity and all of the pageantry and fearmongering was twisted into the religion later by priests.

I brought up this topic to address the existence of God. It is easy to dismiss all of organized religion—history is chockablock full of monstrous deception (and also superhuman generosity) in the name of one religion or another—but dismissing organized religion just sidesteps the question of the existence of God.

When I was in my praying and cross‐trusting phase, I did, in a simple, shameful way, test the existence of God. I bring it up now in the spirit of honesty, but I am ashamed both by the nature of my test and also the waste because, as I realized shortly after, you only get one of these opportunities per lifetime and you should be careful how you implement the test.

I was sitting on the toilet, staring out the bathroom window, alternately puzzling the existence of God and watching the chickens who scratched there in the summer, when it occurred to me that I pretty much always produced sinkers, not floaters. All right, if there is a God, let this one float, I said to myself. In a minute, when I turned around to look, sure enough there was the proof, bobbing away.

Since that is the best argument I can make for the existence of God, I won’t try anymore

On the other hand, I am not a vehement believer in the nonexistence of God. Not only is it impossible to prove a negative, but there is an awful lot we don’t know about the universe; even the space between individual atoms is vastly larger than the atoms themselves. The physicists, the same people who used to use an invisible ether to explain physical phenomena they didn’t understand, now tell us that 98 percent of the universe is