Muckraker

Snatching defeat from the jaws of victory.

Self-leveling concrete is a lie. It joins non-tracking cat litter on my growing list of grievances against the modern world. If you’ve never worked with this stuff (and I implore you never to), it’s like being Kiefer Sutherland in one of those episodes of 24. Once you light the fuse, you can’t stop, not even for a second. It helps level itself at best and sets up almost as you look at it.

After hours of preparation and planning on par with choreographing a ballet, I kicked things off with a foolish sense of optimism. What followed was a blistering blur of mixing and running and pouring and spreading and smoothing and mixing again. By the time I had poured my final bucket and worked my way out of the room with the spiked roller, I stood in the doorway looking in on a placid pool of twelve-hundred pounds of glistening concrete. I’ll tell you now, in that moment I was a masonry maestro, nearly a god. I called for Bridget.

“Have you ever seen a flatter floor?”

“Looks great,” she said.

“All in a day’s work,” I quipped. “It’s not as tricky as they say. At least not for me.”

She congratulated me and turned to leave, and I should have followed. Instead I made a serious error.

“Honey, come back a second. Do you see that?”

“See what?”

“That low spot in the far corner there.”

“No,” she said. “Looks fine to me.”

“That’s definitely a low spot. I can fix it really quick.”

Back to the mixer, back on the clock.

For a good ten feet or so, balancing on shoe spikes with a 60-pound bucket of slurry in my arms, I stepped through that pond with the grace of a thousand Flamingos. Then, halfway across the room, with my eyes locked on the approaching low spot, something reached up from Dante’s ninth circle of hell and turned my ankle.

Bridget says I screamed and that’s what brought her running back, but I seriously doubt that. Whatever brought her, what she saw when she reached the doorway is not in dispute. I was on the floor next to the now empty bucket and dripping with wet concrete. When I tried to rise, I lost my shoe entirely and flailed and slipped again, sliding across the room before coming to rest flat on my back in the half-cured concrete. The scene looked like the aftermath of a monster truck mud show at the fair.

“Are you okay?” Bridget asked.

“I can fix this!”

“Did you hurt yourself?”

“I’ve got a few more bags. I can fix it.”

Spoiler: never try to fix it.

The next day I was at Home Depot buying yards of plastic sheathing and renting a concrete grinder and an industrial vacuum system. Now I have oozing blisters on my palms and respirator marks that won’t leave my face and somewhere on our property is a hole filled with four-hundred pounds of concrete dust, but the hills of hubris were whittled down.

For the second pour (this one necessary to fill in the concrete snow angels I’d made that my grinding couldn’t erase), humility had me enlist my wife to help. I was in the middle of a lengthy technical explanation on the proper use of the electric paddle mixer when she brushed me aside and snatched it up and whipped up a perfect batch on the spot as if she were born to it.

“Where’d you learn to do that?”

“It’s not hard,” she said. “Haven’t you ever baked a cake?” Then she smiled, adding, “Maybe I should pour it this time, too.”

Anyway, we now have a perfectly flat floor. Of course, it will be covered up with oak planks soon, and that little dip I tried to fix never would have been seen. Have I learned anything? I guess so. For one thing, don’t let the perfect be the enemy of the good. But maybe most importantly, don’t get overly confident because fortune has a way of pulling us back down where we belong: struggling through the muck of life, perfectly imperfect, born anew in a baptism of mud.

Now you’re up to date and I’m off to work. There’s a pallet of sliced pebble mosaic tiles from Italy waiting to be laid in the bathroom. No doubt it has something very important to teach me.

Sincerely,

The man in the mud.