The Stairs to Nowhere

The Stairs to Nowhere

Here in Boulder there is more and more noise and less and less quiet in my life.

In a real sense, it is the garbage and recycling trucks banging around the 30-gallon bins we have put out or the lawn maintenance crews with their roaring leaf blowers. In a metaphorical sense, it is the government of this country of ours doing cruel, corrupt, stupid things without forethought, precedence, or reason. We are living through an unhinged time, filled with the cacophony of chaos.

Today, I shut down my computer, put my phone on the charger, and went outside to clean up the stairs to nowhere.

We have an embankment rising eight feet above the level of our backyard here at the Creak House. The embankment has been there for over 100 years, long before this house was built, keeping an irrigation ditch in place.

The embankment is also steep, making walking uphill difficult. Sometime ago, it occurred to me to build a staircase up the hill. On trips to Japan, I had admired a number of gardens, including the walkways that were artfully done, often with embedded rocks in patterns.

Building stairs should be left to carpenters. I am not a carpenter. But I proceeded nonetheless by building squares about twice the length of a footprint using 2 X 6 redwood and mitering the corners. The bottom of the hill is held in place by a small rock wall. Starting just above the wall, I dug out room for a step and lined the bottom of the dug-out area with rocks. Then I built a wooden square that measured 20 inches on the sides and moved it around on a rock and dirt foundation until it was solidly in place and level.

Did I have plan in mind? Sort of. One of the ideas I got from Japanese gardens was the placement of points along the path where a walker could stop, turn, and look around. I wanted the same thing for my stairs. This justified making some steps twice as long so that a walker would have room to pause, breathe, and enjoy the view.

After building and embedding the first square, I dug into the hill some more, laid a rock foundation, built another square, and placed it just slightly on top of the first square. Once leveled, I drilled holes in the front of the new step and into the back of the first step, then pounded in foot-long 1/4” rebar to join the steps.

Over a couple of days, I built my stairs to the top of the embankment. It was easy physical work, which allowed me to concentrate on construction and not think about much else. Staying focused to avoid rumination is a good thing. Of course, I measured the drop from the top of the embankment to the top of the wall and calculated exactly how many six-inch high steps I would need to get to the top of the hill.

Calculating anything mathematical is not one of my strengths. I flunked the basic math course at the University of Maryland four times. Close to graduation, I met with the instructor of my fifth attempt at the course and suggested a deal: I explained my previous failures and I promised that if he would simply give me a passing grade, I would not darken the door of the math department ever again. He smiled and agreed.

As I worked, I remeasured the drop to make sure my last step would be flush with the top of the hill. Much to my surprise and pleasure, the last step was even with the grade at the top of the embankment.

The last part of the project was to buy some small river rocks at the local landscape materials supply yard and fill the steps. Not artfully, as a Japanese gardener would do, but just enough to fill the steps and make the step surface level, albeit a little lumpy.

For several years, I used the steps often to get up the hill. I always felt good about the utility of the steps and my work. Or at least the fact that I had ad-libbed a stairway and gotten away with it.

Sometime later we decided to have an eight-foot steel fence built along the top of the embankment. Blue Eyes and I had watched all sorts of wildlife amble through our backyard. We are only a couple hundred yards away from the open space and greenbelt that surrounds Boulder.

The irrigation ditch serves as essentially a wildlife corridor from the greenbelt. Once we had a mountain lion climb 30 feet into one of our trees and fall asleep stretched out on a limb. Some busybody put the news out on the neighborhood website and pretty soon the cul de sac was filled with lookie-loos. The mountain lion ignored all of us and left at dawn the next morning.

Visiting mountain lion in one of our trees. Photo by Becky Anderson

Coyotes, bears, wildcats, and raccoons were common visitors, not to mention herds of deer. So we made it a point to be loud when we went out back. There were often piles of bear scat in the backyard, and the occasional bunny leftover or deer bone.

We had a good reason for getting the fence built. Blue Eyes was working at her desk next to the backyard slider and happened to look to her right to see a large black bear staring at her from the other side of the slider. Queue the steel fence contractor.

But here’s the thing—once the fence was built, I had stairs to nowhere. To avoid underground cables in the embankment, the contractor built the fence right to the top of my stairway. He asked if I wanted a gate put in and I said no. I didn’t need ready access to the ditch and I could walk around the fence if need be. But I had to smile at the irony of having built something with great care that was now pretty much useless. Still do smile—learning humility is a good thing.

This week, I took a half-day to dig out the rocks from the steps, clear the detritus, and replace the rocks. The stairway to nowhere looks great, a reminder that there is a certain peace in getting totally immersed in a project and ignoring all the noise that has become an endemic part of our lives.

I wish the same for you this week.

END

Writer’s Note: “Creak House” is not a typo but the name of our house. When we bought the house it was a run down rental in a nice neighborhood. Wherever we stepped, the floor would creak, and in a high wind, the entire house would creak. Several years later a complete renovation solved the creak problem, but the name remains.

Maybe I’ll climb up on my soapbox with a rant of some sort for the next essay. But, for this week, I just wanted to take a moment for reflection, some time off from the fray, and write something calm and maybe calming.

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