Gleaning

“When you reap the harvest of your land, do not reap to the very edges of your field or gather the gleanings of your harvest. Do not go over your vineyard a second time or pick up the grapes that have fallen. Leave them for the poor and the foreigner.” — Leviticus 19:9-10

When I was a boy, America was a much more biblical and less greed-driven society. You may never have encountered the bible verse above but it was an integral part of my youth, especially relating to residential construction sites.

Every twelve-year-old I’ve encountered understood that when construction sites were abandoned over weekends and holidays, any wood which was not firmly nailed in place was left there intentionally for use by local twelve-year-olds in the building of age-specific structures like bicycle ramps, tree climbing ladders, and (in the case of the industrious) “no girls allowed” tree houses.

I was industrious, as was my neighbor Barry. It also happened that there was a gigantic cotton filed behind my house which had originally been bounded on two sides by a creek. Anyone knows that where there’s a creek, there are healthy trees, placed there by the Creator of the universe — and author of above verse — specifically for the building of tree houses by industrious young boys.

By the time I was in first grade, my father had taught me to nail two boards together and by the time I was in sixth grade, I was an accomplished carpenter — at least in my own mind. My father also kept on hand an abundance of hammers, saws, and sixteen penny nails.

Being a frugal man — and apparently unfamiliar with the biblical mandate above — my father would only purchase enough wood to complete whatever project he was working on. Subsequently, there was rarely any wood upon which to practice my budding carpentry skills. Fortunately for myself and Barry, the local home-building crew attended a church much more in tune with God’s will and left us plenty of skill-honing material to be gleaned on weekends.

Over the extended July 4th weekend in 1966, Barry and I happened to be inspecting the craftsmanship of a new residential project adjacent to our elementary school playground. Those particular carpenters must have attended the same non-biblical church my father attended because the sinners left not one speck of good wood product for our scavenging. Barry and I were disgusted by their theology and on more than one instance, invoked God’s name in a curse of them.

Apart from the multitude of 2×4 studs which had been cut and nailed firmly into place, there remained a single stack of studs roughly four feet wide by four feet tall and banded together tightly with three one-inch steel bands in order to discourage pilferage with anything less than a forklift. Fortunately, my friend, Barry and I were industrious.

We discovered that by kicking vigorously at one end of the studs in the center of the stack, a couple would protrude from the other end. By tugging with all our strength on those two protruding studs, we were able to slide them out of the stack which had been greedily banded by the Godless builders. After those first two studs yielded to our will, every following stud became easier to liberate.

We further discovered that we could each easily haul two studs at a time on our Schwinn Stingray bicycles. So, much like Noah led the animals into the arc two by two, we led every one of those studs to salvation in a sturdy Live Oak tree abutting that cotton field. Apparently, no adults in our little enclave disagreed with our theology because over a half day of two boys conspicuously transporting 2×4 studs for a mile through the neighborhood, on their bikes, no one intervened.

If I were a dishonest person — or even one of those heinous exaggerators — I’d allow my readers to assume those studs thrived happily ever after atop that Live Oak, but being a scrupulously devout truth-teller, I must admit we hit a slight snag. We both possessed the ability to cut and nail boards but we still lacked the critical engineering skills I wouldn’t master until college.

Using hammers and saws borrowed from my father’s shop, along with a five-pound coffee can full of old nails, we set to work constructing the mother of all tree houses. We cut a series of two-foot boards and nailed them to the tree trunk as a ladder, and then we set to work on the floor. Two six-inch limbs veed out from that tree trunk and provided the perfect perch for our mansion in the sky.

Since the tree limbs grew further apart as they extended from the trunk, the outer edge of our floor became somewhat “flexible” in the center. Drawing on our sixth-grade knowledge of construction techniques, we simply tripled the thickness of the floor until we had a six-foot by eight-foot platform, six inches thick and fifteen feet in the air. (That’s about 600 pounds of wood if you’re counting.) Neither of us had ever imagined such a magnificent structure in all our lives…until Barry stepped out near the end and heard the limb crack.

Fortunately, only one of the limbs broke — at first — and the agile and monkey-like Barry was able to make his way back to the tree trunk before the whole mess clattered to the Earth. Facing discouragement beyond that with which our youthful minds could cope, we left the entire mess — including uncut studs — at the base of that tree for some other kids to glean and use for their own project.

But to this day, I sometimes awake in the morning and revel in the thought of the just rewards those stingy builders encountered when they arrived at their construction site on a Monday morning to find only three empty steel bands where their hoard of pine studs had once sat.

A meeting of great minds who think alike