In The Gutter

When your mind is in the gutter, at least you know where you are, right?

Today was officially Gutter Cleaning Day at my house. Which meant getting on the roof with my 7-year-old son, Ryan, and cleaning off all the debris that'd collected over the summer and early fall. (Are we into winter already? I can never see the clear demarcation point. It was 90 degrees last week.) I'd waiting until Wendy went out shopping with Abby because it's difficult enough to have one child at the bottom of the ladder bugging you two come up. I don't know what happened to my generation of adults, but when I was a kid, we didn't want to be anywhere near our parents and their ladders. We begged to go watch TV. We knew if we went up there they'd make us do work. And they'd yell at us. Mostly to stay away from the edge. ("Keep away from the edge, Tim!") I remember getting kicked out of a friends yard because I was goofing off instead of helping his family unload a cord of firewood. Can you imagine? I was hurt, insulted. I was also pretty stupid. Why the hell would anyone want to help unload firewood? (I really don't know. It must have been because my friend was there, because I'd be damned if I wanted to help my own family when it came time to unload our cord of wood.)

Hard as it may be to believe, when I got up on the roof, I was actually happy with my wife's decision to cut down the wretched eucalyptus by our bedroom window. This was a tree literally two feet from our house with branches sweeping majestically against the roof tiles during windstorms. A nightmare, essentially. Our roofer told us the debris it was dropping was guaranteed to take 5 years off our 10 year roof. (Which sounds like a deal, 50% off, but really it's not so much.)

When I got up to the roof with Ryan I was met with 75% less debris than I was used to. (Which really is a deal.) In my move to do my own gardening this year, I'd bought the Black and Decker Mulch Hog or some such deal, which is a blower and a vacuum/shredder, which turned out to be the perfect thing for the roof.

Hilariously, I always forget that cleaning the gutter is a multi-step process sort of like painting,
you always think of the painting itself, which is the easy part, the labor is really in the cleaning and prepping. So the first step was getting rid of Abby. Check. Second step, taking all the tools you need out of the garage so you won't have to come all the way down to grab something, or try in vain to yell at someone inside the house to come out and throw you up something. Check.

While Ryan pruned branches and threw them over the side, I took the blower and scooted everything into a couple of corners. Then, Transformer-like, I reversed the blower into a vac and bag and sucked the whole thing into two trash bags, instead of the usual 10. Of course, some of this would have to do with the disappearance of the eucalyptus, but there's always something that beats hard in a man's heart when the machine he bought is living up to the task.

This whole process took about an hour. And you may notice is has absolutely zero to do with the gutters. Well, yes, to the untrained eye. Fact is, when the winter rains come in two weeks or so, all those leaves, seed pods, branches, etc. float across the roof and try to go down the gutters. Now when the gutters are clogged with all this stuff, the water stays on the roof. You don't need Bob Villa to tell you that's not such a great thing or that even the sturdiest of roofs can hold only so much water before it drops it on its surprised occupants.

After having Ryan stick a hose down the first gutter, I was ready to have him come down and start chopping up the branches he just cut. Well, I got him down, but the fact that I was up on the ladder in the front yard turned out to be too intriguing to him. Oh, and the fact that the water was streaming steadily down the driveway, into the street, and down the other gutter into the sewer. Turns out that's really fascinating to 1st graders and no amount of yelling from 10 feet in the air with your hand stuck in between a gutter and a saltillo will make any difference.

Oh, well, I thought. What good is yelling at him going to do? I decided I'd only yell at him when he came over to tell me he was bored or could he come up the ladder, which was exactly 5 times.

Gutter cleaning, like dish washing, is lauded by the Zen Buddhist monks who tell you this is where you find enlightenment. But, really, for the rest of us, it's drudge work. The kind of work our immigrant forefathers did before us and the kind of work current immigrants do today. Of course, there are those of us who can afford to have those immigrants over to do stuff like this for us, but for some reason, good or bad, I think it's one of those drudge jobs you might as well do yourself. I didn't get a glimmer of enlightenment while I was cleaning, but I did pass through some pretty interesting conversations in my head while I was working, "Why do I keep hearing the tune for 'Jessie's Girl'?", "How long did I live with my first girlfriend before we got sick of each other?", and "Those guys who painted the house did a great job, but man, why did they screw up all the things that hooked on the screens?"

Ryan came over occasionally to hand me the hose or ask if he could come up, which led to me saying thank you or yelling at him.

I did see an article in Martha Stewart about cleaning gutters, but a couple things about it turned me off. A) The fact that the guy in the picture was wearing khakis and obviously was posing for a photo shoot and not actually cleaning gutters, as his clean pants would attest to.
B) Do I really need Martha to tell me how to clean gutters? I mean, isn't this one of those things, like peeling an orange, that comes naturally to all of us? The article did mention something called a Gutter Cleaning Tool, which looked more practical than the one Advertised on TV that can be operated while you drink your coffee and read the paper. Still I was suspicious enough not to investigate the tool and take the complicated task of gutter cleaning into my own hands.

My dirty, grimy, filthy hands.

The only advice I have for you is to wait until you are absolutely finished cleaning out the dry gunk (which is fire tinder dry if you live anywhere out in the Southwest) before you shoot a hose down the gutter to really clean it out as that stuff that hasn't been cleaned out gets nice and gooey after a good spraying. Turns out it's also a little harder to handle. I probably learned this lesson last year, but I have a really bad memory. My thought was, I'm not going to place my ladder precariously every five feet and clean that out by hand only to have to come back to each spot to clean it out by hose. That seems to be the only way to do it, by the way. Well, unless you like wet gooey hands.

I almost lost my wedding ring in the gutter. Gotta make that note for next year: Remove wedding ring before starting.

I was halfway around the house when I realized I am never going to get this done in one day. I think this is a step in the right direction for someone like me. Someone prone to keep working until he has to clean up the area while holding a flashlight and rake. Someone who discovers in the morning that he's left his ladder and blower out on the front lawn all night and now they are very wet from where the sprinklers hit them.

I cleaned up, trimmed the branches Ryan refused to take care of, and still have time to remember I'd left my wedding ring in the jeans I was just about to throw into the clothes hamper.

All in all I'd say it was a successful day.