From the ground up. I grew up in San Francisco, California, and moved with my family to Point Reyes on the Marin County coast when I was 14. I did summer work landscaping and fence-building for neighbors when I was a teenager. This lead in a natural way to construction work after I finished high school. Starting out at the bottom in the construction world, digging ditches, I worked my way up to foundation forming, framing, rocking, landscaping, and finish carpentry on houses in Marin County.
I attended a local junior college for a year right out of high school, but I couldn't then decide on an ultimate focus. Marin in the 1970's was very much a place to experience American culture out of the mainstream. The beat, hippie, and new-age movements had roots in Marin and San Francisco. I learned about the rest of the world via travel in California, the American Southwest and Southeast, as well as Mexico. My pastimes included fishing, backpacking with the Boy Scouts and the Sierra Club, technical theater work, Aikido, raising animals, and gardening.
Woodworking. Cedar-shingled exterior walls have been part of the rich architectural tradition of California since the Victorian era, perhaps reaching a stylistic peak in the Craftsman period of the turn of the century. The less ornate but quality-conscious residential designs of the contemporary period often employ cedar shingle siding. Climbing onto scaffold plank, working in the open air with sweet smelling wood and a light set of tools, has been a treat for me.
Another craft I have pursued is cabinetmaking for kitchens, baths, libraries, doors, windows, and storefronts. There is an enticing magic and art in using naturally finished woods, mixing contrasting materials and matching panels cut from the same tree.
Much of the California woodwork of the 1970's was clean and elegant, influenced by Scandinavian, Japanese, and Shaker styles. And much of it involved putting up rough redwood anywhere you could stick a nail. The Hippie Carpenter style may not be valued as highly as the Craftsman or Mission styles, but preservationists should conserve at least a few examples of the fuzzy redwood extravagances of the period.
Floods and fire. In California, weather and geology often conspire to change people's lives. At a New Year's Day bonfire celebration on a Point Reyes beach in 1982, the sky turned black. Through the afternoon the strip of gray clouds far off on the horizon became a looming dark wall. As it overtook us on the beach, lightning flashed and pitchforked down to the dunes around us, thunder rolled overhead, and the heavens opened up. In the next few days, a winter's worth of rain fell, sending landslides and tree-choked debris flows down the coastal canyons. The storms were attributed to the warm coastal "El Niņo" weather system. With my neighbors, I sandbagged and shored houses in Inverness for days.
Geology and engineering suddenly seemed worthy things to pursue, and should, I imagined, certainly make me employable in California's environment. I felt the urge to finish college and reacquire skills in the intellectual realm, but also worried that at some future point I would be unable to haul full sheets of plywood and cabinet assemblies on my back.
Back to the books in Berkeley. California's flexible community college system augments its fine university system, such that freshman and sophomore courses can be completed part-time in small classes at local schools. At the beginning I chose both architectural and engineering classes, eventually settling on engineering as better suited to my practical nature. At College of Marin and City College of San Francisco, from 1982 through 1985, I plodded through the required prep courses for admission to a good engineering school. This was a major struggle after years of hefting boards instead of textbooks. I was thrilled to be accepted at UC Berkeley in 1985. This made me proud not just for myself, but also for my mother, who had started at Cal in the 1930's, but could not finish because of familial obligations, and who helped support me through college.
Geotechnical engineering. I finished my bachelors degree in civil engineering at Berkeley in 1987. Geologists and geotechnical engineers seemed congenial, healthy, and not as pasty-faced as other engineers. I craved intimate knowledge of the mystery, the romance, the grandeur of geology and things underground. Really. So there I stayed for another school year, finishing my coursework in geotechnical engineering in 1988.
A few definitions for those unfamiliar with geotechnical engineering:
soil mechanics--soil composition, characterization, testing, stresses, strength, settlement, stability, and effects of pore water pressure;
foundation engineering--from the geotechnical engineer's standpoint, judging the appropriate foundation type for a structure, with consideration of the effect of the surrounding soil state and geology on the development, and the settlement or distortion induced by the weight of the building on the soil -- geotechnical engineers rarely, these days, actually design the structural details of foundations, but instead consult with the structural engineer or designer in charge;
geotechnical earthquake engineering--site seismicity, the influence of building type and soil conditions on response to earthquake shaking, mitigation of liquefaction, and seismic building codes.
Consulting. I took a staff position with an engineering firm in San Francisco a week after graduation. This firm provided general civil, structural, and geotechnical engineering consulting services to public works agencies such as Caltrans and the City of San Francisco. Our staff engineers did field sampling with drill rigs, logging, mapping, analysis, lab testing, and drafting, initially with the direct supervision and help of more senior engineers, later more independently.
Within a year or so I was given more responsibility over the preparation of engineering reports and managing field investigations all over California. Liquefiable bayside fill, soft bay clay deposits, and intensely folded, crushed, and faulted accretionary rock deposits on the margins of two tectonic plates, present challenging problems in the active and varied geologic environment of California. Many projects required sampling, testing, analysis, and recommendations for both soft soils and hard rocks. During this time, I passed the State exam to become a registered civil engineer, which has given me the authority to provide civil design and consultation services, and affix my stamp to engineering reports and plans.
Retrofitting the infrastructure. Many consulting firms worked on many Caltrans bridge retrofit and other seismic upgrade projects in the 1980's and early 1990's. The Loma Prieta Earthquake of 1989 necessitated a great deal of geotechnical investigation work for the repair of damaged structures. Public works agencies were also undergoing infrastructure upgrades, such as sewer and water system improvements to comply with more stringent environmental and health standards.
But since the state and local agencies have largely caught up these projects, and as the California real estate boom of the eighties has subsided, there has seemed to be less work of a dependable nature for geotechnical professionals. My firm laid off a number of engineers early in 1993. Since then I have worked for a number of other firms as a project engineer on an assortment of public and private projects, and worked at odd construction jobs in between. In order to survive future economic spasms, I am learning AutoCAD and brushing up on general engineering and technical writing skills.
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