3395 Kelowna Court
Mississauga, Ontario, Canada
L5C 2E5
If all humans disappeared from the earth and 10,000 years from now some alien archaeologists visited the planet Earth to see who had lived here before they would find only 3 clues that humans once inhabited this place. The only remaining structures not consumed by the planet would be:
Yes, thanks to my father my old house will one day be consumed by this planet but the driveway (from the sidewalk to the garage) will remain forever.
Alien archaeologists will one day debate just how the structure was built so I feel it is my duty to create a historical record describing just how the feat was accomplished.
It started on a Friday morning near the end of June somewhere around 1985 when I was awoken by panicked cries from my dad as he thundered up and down the stairs yelling out "oh no" repeatedly. I passed him on the stairs on the way to the kitchen to get some cereal before heading off to one of the last days of school for the year.
"problems...we got big problems man ... we have some big big problems" he kept saying to no one in particular as he clattered down the stairs to the basement once more. I didn't want to know. I never wanted to know anything when he was in that sort of mood because it meant some huge task was about to be undertook.
My dad was a compulsive workaholic and putting in 12 hour shifts at the Post Office was never enough. If the world wasn't ending in some some sort of manner that required fixing he would make mountains out of molehills and since the house wasn't falling into a sinkhole I figured it was the latter scenario that had him in such a tizzy that morning.
After my bowl of Sugar Crisps was finished I headed down to the dryer in the basement to get some clothes to wear for school and it was there, in the left room as I walked down the stairs, behind the washer and dryer I saw the "big problem" ... a little bit of water had formed where the floor met the wall.
Now I am no civil engineer, I don't know anything about structural integrity and i am equally clueless about house leaks. My educated guess then was and still is to this day that there could have been a crack in the drainage pipe outside the house and some water had managed to seep through the brick and concrete foundation of our house but it wasn't anything that would escalate and cause the house to collapse.
But dad thought so.
Fine I thought, he'll have to get down to where the drainage pipes are and find a way to replace one of the sections. Well at least it'll give him something to do for the day. I headed back up to take a shower and get ready for school.
By the time I headed out the back door dad was already knee deep in driveway asphalt and dirt digging merrily away.
"See ya after school dad."
"Just hope you have a house to come back to, it could all be gone by the time you get back, you hear me? GONE."
Morning Calculus suddenly seemed not such a bad thing after all, and I headed off to school leaving my dad and his shovel behind.
Coming down Erinmore Drive after school and turning the corner to Kelowna Court that day is one of those images that is captured in my head forever.
If you position the google map camera to the street corner and looked at my house you would see our house like this and right where the stairs hit the driveway i saw only dirt flying in the air from a massive hole in the ground.
I remember stopping and not moving for a minute and just watching the tip of this shovel throw dirt from the massive hole and occasionally see my dad's hand or arm throw up a rock.
This sort of thing was common growing up with dad. There was always some crazy idea or project that he had going to keep him busy and this was the first sign that a new one had arrived.
So as I walked upto the house I saw that he had dug an eight foot deep trench starting from the back door to the steps beside the house and was about as wide as two outstretched arms.
Did Noah have a son? This is what his son must have felt like seeing his dad building the frame of the Ark on the first day.
"Well good luck dad i've got homework."
"I need your help. This has to be done right now, it can't wait."
I didn't want to get into a fight about it, I didn't want to get hit so I just resigned myself to my fate and grabbed a shovel to help dig.
Except when I climbed down into the trench I saw that he had replaced all the sewage tubes that ran pretty much under the house, he had dug that deep. So why in the hell was he still digging?
"They all have to be replaced now, no sense in just replacing those ones" he said.
"Are you serious?" I said looking at the distance from the stairs to the sidewalk. It was equidistant to the trench he had already built. I'm not even 6 feet tall so the driveway is actually above me by about 2 feet and in front of me is just a wall of dirt and rock. In the trench he had a pickaxe and a shovel. The futility of one flinging one shovel full of dirt up onto the driveway was so apparent to me that I couldn't fathom why he couldn't see it as well. For heaven's sake just hire somebody to come with a construction site digger hoe and the job would be done in a matter of hours. But noooo ... everything with him had to be done the hard way.
11pm mercifully came some 7 hours later and my dad was all in a fluster again as he climbed out of the trench which had yet to reach the sidewalk screaming that he was going to be late for work. I too climbed out of the hole completely exhausted. How could somebody go to work after digging all day, and without sleep from the previous shift as well? My dad could. He could work 3 days straight with no sleep if it meant saving the world, or his house.
He did exactly that. From Friday morning until late Sunday night I don't remember him ever taking more than a 30 minute nap from time to time. Not only did he reach the sidewalk and replace the sewage pipes but he had also gone and bought a trailer to hitch to the back of our AMC Gremlin ... then built 4 walls around it with plywood ... and had made over 100 trips to the Burnhamthorpe Bridge which at the time was under construction and was a perfect place to dump all the dirt and rock we had removed. Then he unhitched the trailer and drove off to work for his 8 hour shift at the Post Office and stayed to put in 4 hours of overtime which he tried to do every single night.
And there ya go ... project done right?
Well that's what I thought. He had fixed the leak in the house by installing all new drainage pipes what else was there to be done?
I found out Monday afternoon coming home from school when once again I rounded the corner of Erinmore Drive only to be met by a new surprise.
Naturally I had assumed that he would do what needed to be done to fill in the trench and everything would be back to normal. But now I found him once again 8 feet deep and this time 8 feet wide in what was not a trench but a full blown crater in the earth. He had extended the same trench to the edge of the driveway of the house next door and he was intending to self dig this thing all the way to the sidewalk. Look at my driveway! You see how long that sucker is? Listen up you alien archaeologists ... I had to dig that monstrous hole every day for 12 hours for a week to begin my summer vacation. It was the second most miserable time of my life. The most miserable being what happened once we reached the sidewalk finally.
People were coming from miles around to take photos of this massive hole being dug by a crazy man and his retard son. The neighbour to our right as you look at the driveway called the police, the mayor, pretty much anybody to get my dad to stop his project. The guy had a van and a car and every day until my dad started his project he had to switch the order that his cars were parked so either he or his wife could leave conveniently in the morning. Ah Manfred, that was his name, it just came to me after all these years.
Ya so Manfred was a bit pissed to say the least. He couldn't shift his cars. He couldn't drive straight into the driveway as well because he feared his wife would back her car out into the abyss that was once our side of the driveway and be killed.
Nobody could do anything to stop my dad and to him that was absolutely wonderful. After a lifetime of living in rooms for rent and taking orders from landlords now he was the landlord and by god he was going to do whatever the hell he pleased while he was the owner of his property.
By mid July the abyss had been dug out completely. I was woken up the very next morning by the crashing back door of a dump truck depositing a ten foot high mound of rock on the street in front of our house.
Then moments later another dump truck came and deposited another ten foot pile of rock right beside the first pile. Then another came, and another.
Mr.Wicks the neighbour to our left came out and I remember him hollering "that's enough, that's enough" because the new city of rocks had intruded their way to the front of his house as well. More dump trucks came around the corner and waited. A large crowd began to gather on Erinmore Drive.
Mr. Wicks and Manfred tolerated my dad and all his antics I suppose because until that point they hadn't really argued. This mess of rocks however was the straw that broke the camel's back ... both backs simultaneously and they were screaming at my dad at the tops of their lungs. To which my dad came inside the house to scream out my name.
"Hurry we have to get these rocks put away. Come on hurry...hurry."
"Put them away where?"
"In the driveway. Come on let's go."
"Are you kidding me?" I remember thinking that had to be an all day project, and I looked at the dump trucks waiting down Erinmore Drive thinking just how many more are coming behind those ones?
So, his plan was to fill in half the hole with rocks, 5 feet of rocks about 25 meters long and 10 feet wide. With 2 little shovels.
It wasn't a one day chore. It was a two day chore that had my back twitching out of control the final few hours from the manual labour.
When i'd fall like a slab of marble into my bed at night dad would be getting ready to zip off to work like a machine.
Again I was awoken by crashes outside the house. See I told you waking up to the impossible, the incredible and the inexplicable was a frequent occurrence in my household. Is it any wonder my mother up and abandoned us in the middle of the day when I was 2 years old?
All morning long dad would disappear with his car and an empty trailer only to reappear an hour later with the trailer overflowing with every type of metal imaginable that could be found in a junk yard. Discarded metal bed frames. I-Frame pieces of iron. Steel poles. Pieces of fencing. It was right out of the scene in Close Encounters of the Third Kind when Richard Dreyfus starts ripping up the garden and throws its contents into his living room. By 10am the pile of metal was as high as the tree trunk you can see in front of the house, say about 12 feet tall.
He came up to get me just after ten in the morning and it was the first time I made a stand against my dad and said "no i'm not taking part in this any longer." The movie Close Encounters has stuck with me forever because his wife leaves with the kids in that scene and it closely resembles how I felt at that moment as well. It was enough.
He worked by himself that day spreading all the metal over the 5 feet of rocks up and down the length of the driveway. It was for support. I suppose he knew that one day the alien archaeologists would visit in their spacecraft and the driveway had to be strong enough to support the weight of their ship. Well the driveway is thicker than the Space Shuttle Landing Facility at the Kennedy Space Center, that baby is only a mere 15 inches of concrete deep. So if our driveway can handle a shuttle landing for sure it can handle any alien ship out there in the galaxy.
I thought by making a stand and refusing to help that I had bought my ticket out of the rest of the project. Wrong! It bought me a one day reprieve only as I was woken up by ... anyone? anyone?
Yes, more dump truck clanging.
This time 10 dump trucks I kid you not were lined up down the street waiting to dump their payloads in front of the house. First rocks, then dirt, more rocks, more dirt ... until there were 10 piles of them taking up half the Court on which we lived. A Canadian Tire store truck came down the road then and two dudes popped out and began unloading bags of concrete by the hundred's ... laying them right there on the sidewalk 10 stacks high. The final thing they wheeled out was a manual stirring cement mixer.
Guess what dad intended to do with the remaining 3 feet of space above the rocks and metal?
If you said self mix and pour the concrete, you're right again.
It was like pissing into a pool to try and fill it up. We started about 7 in the morning. Here's the kicker ... once you start you can't stop until the entire project is done.
Why you ask? Well the concrete will dry and not mix with the new concrete being poured if a break was taken thus causing a gap.
It was back breaking work. To this day it was the longest I ever worked without stopping. But somewhere around 10pm I couldn't lift my shovel, nor could I turn the cement mixer, my muscles couldn't take it. So we had to take a break, or at least I did.
I collapsed on the grass in front of our house and my dad had to stop to mix his own concrete all the while shouting out for me to wake up as the concrete was drying.
If you go visit the house, about two-thirds of the way up the driveway, right where the front of the house finally meets the concrete you can see a small gap. That's the point where I collapsed and dad had to do without me for an hour or so. Just as he promised, the concrete we were pouring had begun to dry and once I had joined back in the new concrete indeed did not mix completely with the older concrete and the gap was formed.
At 3am the last bucket of concrete was poured from the mixer and the driveway project had come to an end, thankfully.
I hated that project. I hated our driveway, it looked and probably still does look odd and uneven. But by god is it ever strong.
Then about a good year afterwards, i'd say it was the following June because I remember being home on a weekday when it happened, a team of construction workers and their vehicles arrived on our court to begin their own project of removing the old sidewalk and replacing the entire Court with new tiles.
They had a digger truck drive up the driveway of each house and smashed the concrete sidewalk to pieces. Then it would scoop up the bits along with some dirt and extra driveway to make room for the guys coming along behind laying new concrete.
"Well this is going to be interesting" I thought to myself. I went inside to make a kettle of tea and sat down on the front porch to watch the show.
When they reached my house the digger truck was able to smash the sidewalk without a hitch but trying to dig in to remove the bits of concrete was impossible. It tried about 100 times to smash our driveway so it could angle the arm to come in and collect the smashed sidewalk but it only chipped the driveway mildly. Again, if the alien archaeologists or the present home owners wish to see evidence of this you can go look at the end of the driveway and see the divots where the construction crew tried to break through the 8th wonder of the universe.
So there you go. The story of the world's strongest driveway has been told. If the owner's of the house are reading this .... if you ever have a leak in the laundry room, or what was the laundry room when we owned it ... then you have the absolute right to repeat what my dad said all those years ago
"We have problems, big problems, big, huge."
Because there is no way anybody will ever dig that baby up. At least not until the Alien archaeologists come that is :)
No comments:
Post a Comment