Highest Duty by Chesley B. Sullenberger

one mile of each other. The first was her childhood home, built around 1918 by my grandfather, Russell Hanna, who used materials hefound right there on the property. He cleared the land of a great number of large stones, cut them with the help of a hired hand, and used them to build the house and other farm structures. From that home, my mom at age twenty-one moved just down the road to the little place she built with my dad. She’d live there, on Hanna Drive, for the rest of her life.
    Certainly, my maternal grandfather could have named that gravel road First Avenue or Main Street or whatever. But the road led to his property, and so it bore his name. That’s where I grew up, 11100 Hanna Drive, an ever-expanding house next to Lake Texoma, eleven miles outside of Denison.
    My dad’s father, who died before I was born, owned a planing mill—a final processing plant for lumber—and my paternal grandmother continued to be involved in the office operations after he was gone. It was right there in Denison, and when I was a young boy, I’d visit and play happily in the huge mounds of sawdust. The place was thick with the sounds of giant woodworking machinery and the wonderful smell of lumber. There was also a cool device on my grandmother’s desk, a coil-springed gadget shaped like a human hand and made of stamped-out sheet metal. My grandmother stored envelopes and paperwork between the hand’s fingers. Having grown up in that mill, my dad had a love and knowledge of woodworking, and of making things with his hands. By adulthood, he was a very able handyman.
    That helps explain why, every few years when I was a kid, my dad would announce that it was time to enlarge the house. He and my mom would decide we needed a new bedroom or a largerliving room. “Let’s get to work,” my dad would say, and we’d pull out the tools. He was a dentist, but he had taken drafting courses in high school. He had a big plywood drafting table he had made himself, and he’d sit there for hours with his T square and a pencil, drawing up plans. He was always reading Popular Mechanics and Popular Science , clipping articles about the latest home-building techniques.
    The goal was to do everything ourselves, to learn what we didn’t know and then have at it. My dad taught himself to do the carpentry, the electrical installations, even the roofing—and then he taught us. When we were doing the plumbing, my dad and I would heat the copper joints together, holding the solder, letting it melt from the tip of a soft wire. When we did electrical work, we knew we had to get it right: If we didn’t, we risked electrocuting ourselves or burning down the house. None of this was easy, but it was satisfying on a lot of levels, and we were learning how to learn.
    My father liked to use craftsmen’s adages, such as “Measure twice, cut once.” The first time I heard that particular phrase was after I had cut a piece of wood to go in the framing of one of our hallway walls. I cut it without paying close enough attention and it turned out to be too short.
    “Go get another two-by-four,” my dad told me, “and this time, measure more precisely. Then start over and measure everything again. Make sure you get a consistent answer. Then cut the board a little wide of the mark, just to give yourself an option. You can always make a board shorter. You can’t make it longer.”
    I did as I was told, very carefully, and the board fit right where it belonged in the wall. My dad smiled at me. “Measure twice,” he said. “Cut once. Remember that.”
     
    T HE FOUR hammers in the house, one for each of us, got a huge workout. In the morning, before it got too hot, my dad would send us up on the roof to pound nails into the shingles. He never considered hiring a contractor or a roofing crew. For one thing, we didn’t have extra money for that. And besides, as my dad saw it, this was a great family activity.
    My sister, Mary, smiles at her memory of my dad