I had a job walk the other day with some visitors to the project I’m on. As we neared the end of the walk, one of them asked me how long I’d worked for the company. I told him I’d started in 2004, but came up through the trades, becoming a superintendent in 2015.

“You came up the right way then.” He told me, surprised by my answer. I was surprised by his answer too, as he’d gone to college and was now in a pretty high position.

“Maybe, but it was certainly the long way.” I said, thinking back to my tumultuous ride into the office from the field. As we walked through the job site, a tower crane rose upwards, concrete walls and columns popped up like plant sprouts rising from the earth towards the sun. The crane’s long jib swung gently across the sky carrying a large wall panel used to form concrete. A myriad of noise filled the air, bangs of hammer on metal, a skilsaw, a pneumatic impact gun, truck engines and back up alarms. It’s the sound of money being made.

The job site is busy. Bustling with workers on every corner of the building footprint, like ants on a freshly discovered food source. Carpenters, electricians, ironworkers, waterproofers, plumbers, laborers, sprinkler fitters, operators…all sorts of tradesmen applying their unique craft to the project to create a single end product that will last longer than any of our lifetimes.

It’s a beautiful thing watching professionals work. Each step calculated to produce the most efficiency. No struggle. Nothing extra or undue. What might look like chaos is actually years of experience playing out. Little tricks taught down through the generations and in play and I see the smallest parts of the craft being put to work.

As I watch these carpenters around the job site, sometimes I’ll ask myself: Could you jump back in there with them if you had to?

Yeah, I’m pretty sure I could. I want to believe I still have it in me. Things are slightly different. No more power cords for tools. They use screws more than nails these days. But everything else is the same. My body would more than likely struggle to adjust back to that life. It’s softened after years of working in the office. At my prime in the field, I would hump heavy pieces of material over my shoulder while carefully balanced high up on joist or building ledges. My body used to be primed to climb, kneel, take a beating in the sun and wind.

I have all this carpentry knowledge stuffed into my brain that I never use anymore. All the little tricks I knew, trying to master the trade for eleven years, are tucked away in the dusty corners of my mind decaying. The numbers that would pop into my mind adding up lumber dimensions for form building. Measuring, cutting, nailing. The hours whizzing by as I worked diligently with my hands.

I can remember hearing better ways to do things told directly or indirectly by stories from the older journeymen I worked around. A better way to hold my hammer, pull a nail, arrange something in my tool bags. I’m sure those tricks were passed down to the older guys who taught me. And I taught these same tricks and told these stories to the apprentices around me as I became a journeyman, then foreman.

Even my dad, who was a carpenter, taught me little tricks to better my craft and have just the slightest edge to be faster at something. I come from a family of builders. Uncles. Cousins. Brother. All are or were carpenters. Building runs in my blood.

Every structure I enter, I think about how it was built. I know that someone struggled inside of the structure to figure something out that nobody will ever know about. Somebody was up worrying about this ‘building’ before the public ever stepped foot inside. About an obscure or maybe prominent item that we end users take for granted. A threshold at a door that tens of thousands of people step over with no thought, might have cost hundreds of hours to figure out how to place it or fix it or make it work with the door or flooring nearby or get power to it. The location of a hole through a wall or where to place the crane to reach and build that wall, the start of tile layout in a bathroom, light fixtures intermingled with an architectural ceiling system, the slope to a drain that nobody sees.

But these are thoughts of my current builder self. Everyday I forget a little bit more about the carpenter–the person–I used to be.

It feels very much like I was a carpenter in another lifetime. I’m reincarnated now into this ‘office guy’ who sits behind a desk typing away, speaking English all day, using clean bathrooms, splinter free hands, never getting my pants dirty, or using my muscles to earn a paycheck.

I’m a different person entirely.

Every now and then I’ll get flashbacks of that other life. A bit of longing for what I was will nip at my chest. I’ll look back romantically at how tough it was. How I endured. How I would come home dirty from truly working. Easily forgetting how I could hate the wind, rain, and heat.

It’s only nostalgia that calls me back. I remember the glory of it and conveniently forget the pain.

Still, I’ll reminisce on all the things I used to do with my leather tool bags strapped on. The things that used to worry me. The countless hours spent reading carpentry books, on the job learning, and simply striving in every way to get better. So far I’ve lived a few lives as an adult making money. Three lives to be exact.

There’s the Navy Life.

The Carpenter Life.

And now, the Construction Management life.

Pretty soon there will be the Early Retired Life, where I’ll stuff into the dusty attic like corners of my mind the current job skills I use. I’ll pack this knowledge away with my diesel mechanic and shipboard fire fighting skills, right next to my compound miter cutting and stair rise and run formulas. And there they’ll rot away, slowly forgotten as I age, so that I won’t remember the details, just the idea that I was once something else. And I’m pretty sure I’ll miss it. Like I miss everything in my life that once was.

It’s sad in a way, to think that I’ve spent years of my life learning things, only to move on, and never use these skills to their full potential again. But this is a part of life. This is what growth is. It’s changing. It’s fighting stagnation–learning what to remember and what to forget. It’s discarding the past to move onto the future.

And was any of it a waste? No. It was a ladder. A step towards another path. I wouldn’t be here now without any of it. Those lost skills made me money at a certain time in my life. They made me valuable to my employer, whether a private construction company or the department of defense, I played a part in something bigger. I still play a part as I evolve from a worker to an owner. Each paycheck adds grains of sands to the scales as I buy shares of companies. Soon enough the scale will tip; I’ll be enough of an owner that I will no longer need to be a worker.

End of Apprenticeship

The Northern California Carpenters Apprenticeship Program lasts 4 years. It consists of working as an apprentice for 4,800 hours with 612 hours of classroom instruction. This is what my labor union (and the state of CA) say it takes to be a competent tradesman.

I always worried that I wouldn’t be ready when my time to journey out came. Carpentry has so many aspects to it. How can anyone get a little experience in all the subjects in just four years time? I had a giant text book issued from the union program filled with different parts of the craft. Everything from wood framing, to cabinets, to metal stud framing, to installing windows, decks, doors, scaffold building, layout, you name it and it was in that book.

My fear was I wouldn’t be ready and would lose my job to other journeymen who were better than me. It was easy to be an all star apprentice, because firstly, everyone expected you to fuck up, but secondly, it’s a much smaller pool on any given job. Becoming a journeyman meant competing against guys doing it for ten, twenty years. I would never be ready.

It was my last job as an apprentice that it happened. I became a journeyman in a matter of seconds. It was like a switch had been flicked on. It took an instant. The years I’d put into my training suddenly built up and burst, like some dam breaking. I’d been told that it was a gradual process, and while that’s true, once you’ve attained that level of knowledge it’s hard to know when the line has been crossed.

I remember sitting down for lunch with a few other carpenters who’d just transferred over to our job. We were talking about what we would be doing next week, and I mentioned I’d be in school.

“No fucking way. You’re an apprentice?” They asked me. Instantly I felt my stomach tighten. My cover had been blown, though I didn’t realize I was hiding anything from them till then. I just assumed they knew I was an apprentice.

“I would have never known. You’re flying material up to the deck and laying out. I can’t do that.” One of them said.

I was shocked.

How did I appear to them?

How do we appear to anyone who doesn’t know us?

I was only an apprentice because in my mind I believed it. The moment I stopped thinking I was an apprentice, well, I stopped being an apprentice. I didn’t act like I was a first year guy not knowing what to do. Nobody really needed to tell me what’s next when I finished a task.

That’s when it changed for me.

Everything in life is about mindset and first impressions. It doesn’t matter what official qualifications you have, what school you’ve attended, the only thing that matters is how you act and how others see you. Shakespeare’s poem that starts out with: “All the world’s a stage, and all the men and women are merely players” is true.

You are a novice till you stop acting like a novice.

I’m not saying having a good education or qualifications doesn’t help. Education opens doors and reveals short cuts. It gets you ready to play your part. It gives you options and choices. But when the time to act comes, everything that got you to that moment in time to perform goes out of the window. It’s only you and your audience.

Writing about this makes me think about how my life will be post work. What will push me to master or become journey level at anything if there’s no money incentive? Will there be no play in which to act? No stage on which to perform? How will I challenge myself without work? Lately, I’ve been having to speak in front of large groups of people. It’s one of the things I hate most. Talking in front of large crowds. Yet in these last few weeks, I’ve done so with a few unexpected compliments afterwards. I’ve noticed the buzzing effect of dopamine once my time in front is done. Without work pushing me to do these public talks, I would never have just done so on my own. Where else will I get this external push to challenge myself to do things I dislike?

Looking ahead, I wonder what my next ‘apprenticeship’ will be. Early retirement doesn’t have to mean stepping away from growth or building or being a ‘worker’— it’s just a new stage to perform on. Whether it’s applying myself to getting published as a fiction writer, learning a new craft like sailing, or finding ways yet discovered to challenge myself, I know that feeling of mastering something is still out there. After all, we’re all apprentices in one way or another — until we stop thinking we are.

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