Garden of Words: THE ART OF JETTY CONSTRUCTION

July 07, 2007

THE ART OF JETTY CONSTRUCTION

In the event of a war between those who engineer and those who construct, I've come to believe that the engineers will be doomed. This past week, I joined Nikole's brother and father in a construction project filled with bumps, scrapes, aches and a lot more study and analysis than I am used to -- which might be why most of my projects collapse in on themselves eventually.

The project: Replace an old jetty at Nikole's grandfather's house on the Chesapeake Bay near Deltaville. Over the course of four days (three of which I was working) last week, a decades-old jetty was removed and a new jetty was installed. Removing old jetties will be work I will avoid in the future.

I missed Day One of the project, which largely involved the removal of the first leg of the old jetty by BJ and several of his friends. When I arrived on Sunday, there was a massive pile of wood and timbers (and loads of rusty nails) stacked on the shore (pictured below). It was just a taste of what was to come.

Day Two, which is when my involvement began, started easily enough -- the gentle construction of a ramp leading to the pier (pictured below). I hauled some wood, hammered some nails, developed a bit of a sweat. A bit later in the evening, I worked with BJ and his dad to "box in" the corner where the new jetty met the shoreline wall. The goal in all of this work is to trick Mother Nature into depositing large amounts of sand along the shoreline, expanding the beach, reducing erosion and ultimately limiting the impact of big storms sweeping up the Bay. Boxing in the corner essentially means sealing the point where two walls intersect, eliminating the flow of water and sand between the two.

I ended my work late Sunday evening (Day Two) with the beginnings of a sunburn and a dirty shirt. You can see the sunburn (and a new shirt) below:

Day Three started with engineering -- apparently, there is a lot of studying you can do in the process of building a wall. Jay (Nikole's dad) studied. He analyzed. He assessed. And around mid-day he had us start up the pump and get to work.

The pump -- a small, lawnmower-sized engine -- spluttered away on a nearby float (pictured above), pulling water from one end of a hose and blasting it the other. The end that blasts water is shoved below water into the sand, clearing large trenches that allow one of several things to happen: a) old pilings and beams from the old jetty, buried deep beneath the surface (anywhere from three to eight feet into the sand), are loosened and emerge; b) new pilings and beams can be more easily inserted deep beneath the surface in the construction of the new jetty; and/or c) people working on removing or installing a jetty can sink into the trench, or periodically try to flush six pounds of sand from their shoes.

The first piece of work involved the continued removal of the old jetty. While BJ and his friends had hauled a few dozen beams from the water, there were several dozen more (mostly broken-off, buried and largely invisible to us) that needed to be scouted out, blasted loose and hauled to shore. The original jetty had been constructed years ago using creosote-soaked timbers from an old railroad bridge (read: heavy, sturdy wood) -- they were 4 inches x 8 inches, and ran between 6 and 16 feet, depending on whether they had broken off or not. Water-logged, they did not float and needed to be pulled from beneath the water, dragged to shore and eventually lifted and tossed over the shoreline wall. I use "toss" liberally, since I struggled to even get an end of the 16-foot timbers raised above my chest.

At some point, HL (a family friend) joined us to man the pump, and things began to roll. As the sun set, a pile of timbers lined the shore. A new wall extended out some 15 feet. My sunburn and my dirty shirt seemed dramatically more intense, and my body felt like a freight train had piled into it, again and again. Not one to shirk from work, HL told us that he'd meet us at 7:30 Tuesday morning to finish up.

Bright and early on Day Four, we limped down to the beach. We thought the bulk of the work was going to involve finishing the wall -- running some long stringer boards between pilings, inserting more boards to extend the new wall, and then running a layer of two-inch tongue-and-groove board atop the wall to seal any gaps where water was flowing through. Little did we know that another batch of old timbers lay buried beneath the surface...

By noon, we were almost done. We'd removed the last of the old wood, affixed about a half-dozen stringers (pictured above), finished the main wall, pumped in some new pilings (pictured above) and put 24 pieces of new tongue-and-groove board in. HL left. We had lunch. I took a nap. And then my wife woke and asked if I could help her brother with something.

Something turned out to be another three hours of heavy labor. We enlisted the help of Nikole and Rebecca (BJ's wife) to scrape barnacles and remove nails from another 30 pieces of old tongue-and-groove that had been removed from the old jetty. Once cleaned, Jay and BJ and I spent our Tuesday evening pumping in the last of the tongue-and-groove, and nailing it in place. We ran band boards along the outside to hold everything in place. And then we called it quits.

And that is how I spent my Fourth of July vacation at the beach. Or most of it.