The Hard Way on Purpose by David Giffels Page A

to me anyway. He was an engineer first, a man of utility and order and who gave no truck to sadness or complaint. He was also a man of cold, frozen places, of the Great Lakes, which in winter offer something more pure even than the deepest meditation: infinite, white, terrible ice. These lakes aren’t flat when they freeze. Their edges are frozen images of turmoil, waves and swells and garbage-flecked foam, clenched, caught unawares by the hard freeze. To gaze upon this is to set the mind first to flatness then to practicality then invention. Men from the Great Lakes region do not seek therapy, and not because doing so would bring them discomfort or shame, but because it is unnecessary. The winters here isolate everything but our troubles and allow the time and emptiness to solve them or find a place to hide them forever.
    So my grandfather lived his life. When he needed a table saw to build his workshop, he worked out the puzzle in his head: build the saw first. He wrote a little booklet of his own— Home Workshop Handbook— and copied it and offered it “to anyone foolish enough to send name and address and one dollar to cover cost of prints.” The pages are filled with uncanny practicality, handwritten in the precise block script common to engineers and draftsmen, detailing the properties of glues and adhesives; recommended drilling speeds for various materials; maximum spans for joists and rafters; lumber grades, nail sizes, wire gauges, and so on and so on.
    The work is painstaking and tedious and raises the question why, which he answers in a brief, matter-of-fact introduction: “If this data had been readily available years ago, it might have prevented several poorly glued joints, burned drills, broken screws, and sloppy shellac jobs.”
    After my grandmother died and he had to start cooking for himself, he took a shine to prefab, frozen supermarket dinners. But they were too big for one serving, so he took them to the basement, fired up that homemade saw, and sliced the frozen slabs in half.
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    By the time my dad returned home, grinning and caked in white, we’d flung layer after layer of snow onto the continuous mound that wrapped the edge of the driveway, growing and growing. He came right into step with us and we continued to try to scrape away what the night had left behind. The wind had calmed some and the snowfall abated, but not enough to settle the nerves. Nothing was moving, anywhere. Not a single car had passed our house all day, and the sounds of digging and scraping were distant, disconnected. The idea that all of this could have happened so unexpectedly, so quickly, so violently, and so completely disturbed us all, even my dad, I think, though he seemed invigorated by the challenge to set it right. Men like him are at their best when something needs unexpectedly to be fixed.
    We worked until the driveway was clear, ready for whatever might come next, then Ralph and I, and our sister and our younger brother, began to dig again. We hollowed out a cave in a Volkswagen-size snow mound, scooping and shaping deeper and deeper, until we four could sit upright inside. Then we carved out another, then began a tunnel between them and then another, until we had a network like the tubes in a gerbil cage. The light inside was strange, an optical paradox: muted and radiant, opaque and incandescent, and the sound had a similar quality, compressed and private and complete. Even the temperature was ambiguous. The packed snow warmed like insulation, until the cold crept into the bones and refused to leave.
    Later, when night had fallen, I went back out and crawled inside and lay there in the dark, in the snow cave. It smelled like mute earth. I felt as if I could stay there forever, in the peaceful silence that only cold can produce. I closed my eyes and allowed myself to be carried off.
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    We took turns on the sleds, sometimes riding double, sometimes the