Today began the removal of the deck that has sat atop the "new" section of our living room for the past 24 years, when said "new" section was added, among many other changes to the house. This deck was a flat square, paved with rough shallow bricks and bordered by a low stucco wall with a wooden railing on top. You reached it by climbing a spiral staircase up from the patio. I think the spiral stairs may have always been my favorite part of the whole thing. Early on, we were running up and down those stairs all the time. But soon we realized there were some problems with the whole situation.

Much of the time, we've had to cover the deck itself with a tarp, because since the beginning, the whole area has leaked like a sieve whenever it rains. Over the course of things the ceiling below that area and the surrounding walls have gotten all kinds of wet, in various places, damaging our player piano in the family room at one point, when a leak went for a while unnoticed. The paint and plaster on the walls and ceilings did not react very well to this either. Caulking, sealing, nothing ever seemed to work. The tarp finally worked, but only after my dad had to build a frame to go underneath and keep the tarp high in the middle to prevent collapse. So. Much. Bother.

Luckily it only rains between about November and March in Los Angeles, but we still never really used the thing much during the rest of the year either, and not completely because the tarp/structure was such a pain to take off and put on. Part of it was the uncomfortable awareness that we could see into our neighbors' yards, and if we were to see them they would almost certainly notice us noticing them. Not that this ever happened much, but mostly because we didn't go up there a lot.

Probably the best use of it would have been as a sunbathing spot, because it gets dang hot up on those rough tiles. Lying down would put you below the top of the railing, out of view. But none of us were ever much into tanning. Anyway the concept of lawn lounge chairs seems to have eluded my family for some reason, and spreading out a towel on the hot bricks would not have been very comfy, though I think I tried it once.

So there it was, for over two decades, and every now and then we would climb up to the landing at the top of the stairs, try to avoid looking directly into the yards of the neighbors whose houses we were now slightly above level with, and instead look around the other 180 degrees or so of landscape, northish through east to southward. We could see a respectable distance, though there wasn't usually much of staggering beauty in the vista, just the spreading suburbia in which we lived; still, to have the ability to see more distant bits of it was fun: the hills on the other side of the highway, the buildings down near the mall. We could see over into the middle school, on the other end of our block and taking up much of it; we could see The Hill and the distant shape of the rocketship in the park (though that line of sight was nervously close to the house directly in back of us). Every now and then, the air was clear enough to see the mountains on the other side of the basin, especially at sunrise. It was over time spent on that landing that I noticed that the sun was rising at different points along the mountain-edged horizon.

This morning I watched the sun rise from that landing for what may have been the last time, depending on how much of the structures remain by the time I get home tonight. These last few years, climbing the stairs has had to be done more carefully, without the giddy abandon of yore: 24 years of exposure to the elements have begun to rot the thick plywood stair-steps, with the most exposed ones on the verge of becoming dangerous. But those old paint-peeling steps still managed to hold the workmen coming to remove the deck, and who will in turn remove the steps themselves. When I left for work, the demolition had been going for over an hour. Sawn-off pieces of the wooden rails were piling up, and heavy pounding, as of hammers to the walls, had been heard for some time in the rooms beneath.

Bye-bye, old deck; bye, spiral stairs. It was fun knowing you.

update: pictures of the carnage in tomorrow's entry.

contents of purple tricycle are copyright 2004 carrie lynn king unless otherwise noted.