The beam in the basement that helps hold up the house is in
a...
The beam in the basement that helps hold up the house is in
a state of failure. The house is sinking. We were hired to put in new columns to
help bear the load. A straightforward situation: dig some holes in the basement
floor, pour some concrete, jack up the house to remove the weight from the old columns
that aren’t doing anything, and put some new columns in place. Except the beam,
when we began to raise the house with the mighty jack, cracked and checked;
dark fissures began to grow and gape in wood that’s been bearing weight for a
century or more. And below, the existing concrete floor began to cave. The
basement floor is a potato-chip layer of concrete ontop of sand. When this
became clear, M. used the phrase “worst case scenario.” The pressure is too
much. Time and weight combined to have their way against mistakes made
generations ago. The foundation isn’t strong enough, and everything’s
collapsing.
Sometimes metaphors are too easy. Standing in the basement
these last days, the risk of a house coming down upon us, watching the supports
crumble, seeing the floor disintegrate beneath us, what could I think about but
the things you need to keep something supported, strong, stable, safe, and it
felt too heavy a load for my mind. Work imitating life in so obvious a way, too
much, too much. A faulty foundation, inherent imperfections, problems growing
quietly in time until it’s all too much to fix. It is fixable, and we will, new
supports to bear the present-tense weight, but it doesn’t feel like that right
now. Right now, things feel sunken, unlevel, crumbling, collapsing, collapsed.
