Making Good Choices
The airborne carpenter incident
Brian and I were framing floors and roofs on some new apartment buildings in Steveston, British Columbia in the summer of 2006. We’d started our own business together a few months prior in a fit of irrationality, and we’d secured steady work for the pair of us thanks to Brian’s reckless charm and surprising business savvy.
We’d learned that as long as you did decent work, got it done quickly, and showed up more or less when you said you would, it was pretty easy for a pair of hard-working young fellas to keep busy. We were 24 and 23 at the time, and invincible.
Considering that we were only two people trying to keep up with crews of five or six wall-bangers; Brian and I did very good and very fast work. I mostly did the good stuff. Brian was blindingly fast. I quickly learned that you can do almost every cut in floor construction with a chainsaw, including cutting joists, beams, and plywood sheathing, and still be creating better quality work than most of the other trades involved in multi-family-unit job sites like this one. We felt like we were raking in the cash because we didn’t know anything about other business expenses yet.
Now that we were on our own and feeling flush, Brian and I could do what many budding, self-employed alcoholics before and after us have done. We stopped taking coffee breaks at 10:00, and instead took an extended lunch at 11:00, as soon as the Buck & Ear pub opened.
Our meal of choice if we weren’t having a burger was a delicious pizza covered with chorizo sausage and banana peppers, and every day, we’d each order a pint of Guinness. Then we’d order a second one.
Brian and I knew the math according to general public consensus and/or maybe science. It was OK for an average-sized, grown man like ourselves to have two beers and legally drive. We also knew that our bodies should metabolize that alcohol at the rate of about a beer per hour.
We made the intuitive leap that if you could legally drive with that much alcohol in your blood, it was also safe to operate machinery and power tools. That thinking further led us to feel comfortable in the belief that we were safe to be balancing on top of four-inch wide walls, or walking on a roof without fall protection after two beers. Sometimes, if we took an extra-extended lunch, we’d feel safe in the knowledge that we had already metabolized the first beer, and thus we could have a third. It was science.
Guinness was an extra safe beer for us to drink on a workday because it was only 4.2% alcohol, rather than the 5.5% alcohol content in our typical Canadian beers. We were making good choices by drinking Guinness.
We didn’t usually give much thought to how our bodies may be affected differently by alcohol at certain times, like on a particularly hot day, on an empty stomach, or when we were otherwise dehydrated, to name a few.
We never considered the fact that the ability to pass a breathalyzer test didn’t mean that your abilities weren’t impaired by alcohol. It just meant that you had less than the legal limit of alcohol in your blood. Semantics.
One sunny day like many others, we went to the Buck & Ear, had two pints of Guinness each, and returned to our nearby job site. We were working on a number of lower roofs, which involved a section that extended all the way up to an upper roof that had already been built by another company.
This site was a bit of a piss-off, because the wall-bangers had done a shit job as usual, and the roof framers had not given a fuck how their upper roof should line up with the lower sections that we would be building later. They just threw their roof together and moved on without a second glance.
Nothing insurmountable was going on, but Brian and I were trying to make up time because we’d been slowed down working off other people’s mistakes and shitty work.
On this lovely and slightly lubricated day, I was working on top of the walls while Brian cut for me and supplied me with lumber. I’d lay out the tops of the walls, take measurements, and install the pieces he cut. I was good at doing the finicky stuff. Brian was too, but he was a faster cutter.
Typically, on these job sites, if your potential fall was less than ten feet, fall protection was not required, so we did everything we could to avoid being seen near the three-storey drop from the outside walls and thus didn’t hook up to fall protection. We’d wear a harness, and we’d have a rope hanging out of the window, but we’d avoid hooking up to those death traps at all costs. They were just for decoration. We both firmly believed that we were more likely to be killed by tripping on a rope than by losing balance and falling off a wall.
I hooked my tape measure to the outside wall, leaned over and started walking backwards on top of the 2x4 wall, marking a line and an ‘x’ every two feet. We’d already built this identical roof feature on a couple of buildings next door, so I knew exactly what I was doing.
I figured if anything, the alcohol coursing through my veins was making me faster and more sure of my footing.
Two feet, four feet, six feet, eight feet… The wall underfoot disappeared. I was falling backwards in slow motion. My tape measure fell out of my hand as my arms grasped for nothing. My pencil disappeared into the ether in a puff of zero-gravity confusion, never to be found again. Brian was hanging out of the window yelling “Wiiiiiillllllllllyyyyyyyy,” and reaching his arms pointlessly toward me. He later professed to seeing my fall in slow motion as well.
I later wondered why our brains don’t see the pre-incident parts in slow motion in order to avoid the incident, rather than suffering in powerless stupidity as we’re falling through the void at 1/4 speed.
I fell nine feet down and hit the plywood floor perfectly-ish. It was like how drunk drivers always survive car accidents because their bodies are basically liquid. My back, legs, and head all hit the ground at the same time, dispersing my weight evenly. My right forearm hit the bottom plate of the wall I’d been walking on, and felt like it would probably be bruised like crazy. My head bounced up and hit the floor again, but it didn’t feel too bad.
Brian had already rushed down the stairs as I was starting to stand up and shake myself off. A couple of other workers ran over and were bewildered that I was uninjured. A little fluid leaked out of my nose as I stood up, but I was otherwise fine.
I looked up and saw that the wall I’d been walking on did a 90-degree dog leg that I hadn’t anticipated, so I had just walked backwards off the end of the wall like a complete moron.
We went back to work, with Brian doing the wall walking for the rest of the day. And, I didn’t drink more than one pint of Guinness at lunch for a little while.
For the next couple of years, I periodically had a clear fluid leaking out of my nose, especially when I was bending over or leaning forward. It was almost like someone had turned on a tap from inside my head. I suspected at the time that I was leaking brain fluid, but that was before smartphones entered my life, with the ability to Google any concerns that came to mind. I certainly wasn’t about to go to the doctor and risk the Workman’s Compensation Board getting involved with our fledgling company. I tried to put my concerns out of my mind, and eventually succeeded after the leaking stopped.
A quick Google search while writing this story convinces me that I was, in fact, leaking Cerebrospinal Fluid through my nose, and was lucky to avoid meningitis or other medical complications.
Young, dumb, and invincible.
