An American Man takes a stand against the vicissitudes of time

Lo all these many years ago, way back in the early part of this century or perhaps the tail end of the last, there lived a man. He was a respectable man, with a house and a wife and a very small dog.* He went to his government job five days a week, and he collected junk the other two. He began to feel the cold tentacles of mortality wrapping silently around his body - he wasn't as spry as he used to be, and he'd put on some weight, and as it turns out he wasn't very smart or rich or satisfied with his family. This pressure built up inside him like a seething Chihuahua until finally he snapped.

"Wife!" he announced. "We shall install a pool for our (grand)children! Then everyone will know that we are respectable middle-class homeowners. We will stand beside it, holding hands and laughing, while our (grand)children splash merrily in it. Why, if only photographers for glossy homeowner magazines knew about us, our backyard would be published in Happy Backyard Families!"

The wife replied, "But we live in the desert, and you never finish what you start, and you're going to make me clean the damn pool."

"No, no," he said, "this time it will be perfect. And of course I'll clean it myself."

The wife grumbled and shook her head, but the man was not to be dissuaded. He bought a pool - not one of those fancy gunite pools, no, he was a modest civil servant, not some rich fat-cat. He bought an above-ground pool kit and installed it.

He consulted his hoarded lovingly stockpiled back issues of Pools Today and Deck the Yards and Practical Deckbuilding magazines. He planned out a nice circular split-level deck. Because this pool was his Stand Against Mortality and Decay and Everything Wrong With America Today, he spared (almost) no expense. He planned for a pier every five feet. He used 3" deck screws, not nails. He bought redwood 2x6's, plus some of that redwood stain wood sealer, so those private-plane fellows always zooming overhead would know that his deck was redwood.

His marriage fell apart. They probably fought over who had to clean the pool. The tiny dog vanished. His surefire guaranteed pension government job began to look less and less surefire. He got older, fatter, and greyer. It took seven years to sell the house - seven years of listening to his ex complain about the pool! But by god, the deck was there to stay. At least there was that.

...

And then I came along and ripped it out in two hours this afternoon. Our Hero didn't bother with treated joists. Oh, he bought the right joists - the whole deck sat on 4"x6" joists - but they weren't treated, and they weren't watersealed, and they were so rotted that the 3" screws yanked out as easily as nails.

Something about the combination of deck screws and untreated 4x6 joists really pissed me off. The stupid deck was built to last... except for that one huge corner he cut, skipping the treated joists. Did he think they'd never get wet? Beside a pool??

I'm all about building stuff that'll last exactly as long as you want it to. If you want a pool for your Norman Rockwell children to frolic in, great! But that stupid above-ground pool isn't going to last forever, so why overbuild the deck? Why the hell would you use screws? Just use nails!

*I found a very small dog collar under the deck. There is no other evidence of a dog of any size living here before us.