|
|
|
transporting a spiral staircase
Sunday, August 9 2026
location: rural Town of Hurley, Ulster County, NY
At around 9:00am, I began my long drive in the Subaru Forester to pick up that used spiral staircase I'd found on CraigsList back on Friday. I was driving to Rowley, a small suburban village in the extreme northeast of Massachussetts, in that little part where Massachussetts ventures a little north of the 42.7056th parallel that it mostly lies south of. Perhaps if I hadn't been so excited about finding a $900 spiral staircase, I wouldn't've so quickly agreed to pick it up from a place that turned out to be 242 miles away. And they weren't just any miles either; it turns out that big interstate highways in Massachussetts are routinely plagued by multi-mile traffic jams. Even on a Sunday, I found myself in too many of those to keep count, beginning 80 miles east of the New York State line on I-90. Up until then, the drive had mostly been a bore, with light traffic and not much to find on the radio (where the Berkshires made it so no station was could be listened to for very long). While in New York, the FM band is full of country music stations, a fair number of right wing talk shows (including Sean Hannity), and a lot of vapid Christian music. But in Massachussetts, the radio environment was very different. I only encountered one country music station, several pop stations, a couple Spanish-only stations, no Christian music stations, and, in the Boston area, a station that seemed to only play 90s grunge-influenced pop (such as Dishwalla and Collective Soul).
After hours of driving, I rolled up to the house where the spiral staircase supposedly was. It was a weirdly-shaped house with a driveway on either side of it connected through a garage in the back that was full of tools and such and spilled out into something of a continous (but unstaffed) yard sale. I went to the front door and pressed the button on the Ring camera, eventually scaring up the son of the guy selling the staircase. He said his father was there and would meet me in the back.
The father was a big hulking old man, maybe in his late 70s. His wife was a smallish woman, and she seemed a little surprised that I had arrived in a vehicle as small as a Subaru Forester, saying she thought maybe I should be driving a truck. People don't generally know utility of a roof rack and that a Subaru equipped with one is better at hauling a diversity of things than a full-sized pickup truck without one. (Of course a full-sized pickup truck for some reason has to have a full backseat for the kids that nobody can afford to have and a bed that is smaller than the bed of a pickup from the 1970s.) I quickly explained that my plan was to put the bulkiest part of the spiral staircase, the central column, up on the roofrack and would be putting all the steps and such inside. But there was a problem with this plan. When the contractor had decommissioned the spiral staircase, they'd been able to remove the top eleven steps from the column, but the 12th one had a stuck set screw that refused to budge, which trapped it on the column along with the final thirteenth step. That was the state the column was still in. The two steps on that column added another sixty or so pounds to it and made it incredibly unwieldy. I didn't want to even try attaching that to the roof rack even assuming the manpower could be found to put it up there. So I borrowed the old man's Dewalt impact driver and a bit and tried to just drill the stuck set screw out. But it was made of some sort of incredibly hard material because the bit didn't make any progress. I tried a couple other bits using the Dewalt as well as a conventional Ryobi cordless drill (including some bits I carry in my Subaru's mobile toolkit). In so doing, I broke two bits and severely damaged an cheapo chuck that can be mounted in an impact driver. At some point I temporarily gave up on trying to drill out the set pin and switch to banging at with a punch, hoping to break it loose enough that it would no longer prevent the stuck step from moving. Meanwhile, the old man had gone next door and scared up a fit younger man who looked to be in his 40s and was covered with tattoos. He and I managed to break the step loose, but even when we pounded on it with a hammer or hammered a prybar against it, it moved only a few fractions of an inch up the pole and then got jammed. Then I found a drill bit that actually seemed to be spitting out bits of metal, meaning it was making progress. And then some taps with the punch seemed to produce a visible crack around the set pin. Shortly thereafter we made real progress with the step, getting it to move an inch at a time. It got stuck again, but that was in a patch of column surface that had been roughened by such activities, and we could back out of that area and I could file it smooth. Eventually the steps were off the pole.
The old man was worried about the pole rolling around on the roof rack and insisted I tie down rectangular lumber on either side of it, which I did with scrap boards and rope he found for me. Then me and the tattooed guy hoisted the column up and set it in the cradle I'd made. He then staged all the steps and such behind the Forester Subaru and then disappeared like Superman off to save the day for someone else. I didn't have trouble fitting the rest of the staircase into my vehicle, though the two curving handrail pieces did reach all the way up into the passenger seat and it would've been difficult to also be transporting dogs or another human.
As I finished tying off the last of the several ropes and straps securing the column to the roof rack, I pulled out my wallet and counted out nine crisp new hundred dollar bills to give to the old man. By this point he was telling me about his career as a science teacher and how he transitioned to teaching more vocational classes like wood shop. He said he'd had his students build canoes from the kind of lumber one buys at a hardware store. Once I had everything buttoned down, he wanted to show me the inside of his house, particularly the addition he and his wife had done together back in the 1980s where the spiral staircase had been. It featured a high cathedral ceiling, exposed pine timbers, and a stucco-like finish, though the ceiling had been done with wide planks. It looked very nice. His wife told me the spiral staircase had to go because of their increasing age and difficulty climbing steps. They managed to put in a straight run of steps from a raised platform up into the loft, and she said that they will be putting one of those escalator chairs there for her to ride up and down from the platform. To better connect myself to these people geographically, I mentioned that my mother grew up in nearby Reading (which I pronounced correctly, of course, it being something of a Shibboleth). I added that her father had run the Boston Marathon seven times, which always surprises people. But, old as they were, they had no memory of Clarence DeMar.
The conversation could've gone on for awhile, since people who have made interesting things like to show them off, but we were burning daylight. So somehow I got out of there and back on the congestion-prone highways of eastern Massachussetts.
I stopped early in the drive soon after I made it down to I-90 at one of the many rest areas mostly to wash the WD-40 off my hands (the old man had sprayed a lot of it on the column in an effort to slide the steps off it). I would've bought some french fries at the McDonalds, but that would've meant waiting in a long line. The rest area was crowded everywhere, much like the turnpike itself. I don't know what the problem was; Massachussetts has a much greater density of rest areas than New York does.
My second top was as I was climbing the slow grade into the Berkshires, this time for gasoline. A little west of that rest area is a sign at the top of a hill saying that we were at 1724 feet of elevation and that this was the highest point on I-90 east of South Dakota. That's still over 76 feet lower than our Aidrondack cabin.
I've always been a little confused by how I-90 connects to I-87 near Albany. To drive to Boston from the central Hudson Valley, one cuts over on a sort of spur that goes east about ten miles south of Albany. But what if one is coming from Boston and wants to continue in the direction of Buffalo (or our cabin)? Google maps wanted me to get to the Thruway via that same spur, but it turns out that I-90 departs from that spur on a stretch of highway I'd never been on southeast of Albany, so that was how I decided to go. This didn't save me any driving, but it didn't cost me any either.
After getting off the Thruway in Amsterdam, I stopped at a Stewarts for the road beer I'd been craving for hours. Out in front of the Stewarts sitting on the slab was a homeless guy with a very cute all-white pitbull who would've looked like Neville had he had some light brown patches. The homeless guy was charging his cellphone from an outdoor outlet. Had he been more enterprizing, he would travel with some bauxite and a small aluminum smelter and be creating some ingots at the same time using the one resource that costs real money when making aluminum: electricity.
On Woodworth Lake Road, a stopped a couple times to gather a few rocks for the wall at the entrance to our parcel, the middle of which has been collapsed for weeks.
255 miles after getting picking up the spiral staircase, I made it to the cabin just as the sun was going down at nearly 8:00pm. I immediately began the process of unloading the car, since I didn't want to do that in the dark and I didn't know how early I would be heading back to the Catskills tomorrow. I was able to get that central column off the roof rack without damaging the Forester, and it turned out it was light enough for me to carry from the middle. But it was too unwieldly to try to get up into the cabin's loft by myself, so I placed it on the floor in the great room. I carried all the other pieces up to the loft. And with that, my long workday was over. I might've gone down to the lake with a beer and taken an innertube ride in the dark had it been warmer, but temperatures had dropped into the 50s.
I then spent a couple hours eating real food (a bagel sandwich containing sauerkraut and Tofurky), drinking booze, and watching YouTube videos.
Spiral staircase's central column as it arrived at the cabin on the Forester. It is 130 inches long. Click to enlarge.
That same column once I got it into the great room of the cabin. Note how much wood we have stacked up near the stove. Click to enlarge.
The other parts of the spiral staircase in the cabin loft, including a little square platform that goes at the top. Note the tools and supplies on the floor behind it as well as the computer workstation to the left. Also note the cellular hotspot reception rig with its parabolic dish near the stove pipe. Click to enlarge.
For linking purposes this article's URL is:
http://asecular.com/blog.php?260809 feedback
previous | next |
