I spent Labor Day pulling up a rotten 16-foot-long board on our deck. I pulled all of the nails out and bought a replacement from Home Depot.

I am a machine at pulling nails, thanks to life experiences in my early twenties. I learned how to pull a nail with a clawhammer, a nail puller, a flat nail puller, a crowbar, sometimes twisting sideways to get it going. If it’s rusty and stuck into some particularly hardwood, if you yank too hard., you are liable to wind up with only part of the nail and the rest of it stuck deep in the board. And then good luck to you. I learned to apply just the right pressure or turn just the right way. Even with just a claw hammer, there are multiple ways to ease a nail out of a tough board.

I learned all of that in my very first job that I got for myself. I guess my work history depends on what you consider my first job! When I was old enough to get one, I had a paper route while we lived in Texas, I guess it was about seventh or eighth grade. Probably eighth. And so, I threw the Dallas Morning News. Greg and I would get up at 4:30 or 5:00 (or truthfully, Mom would get us up) and roll the papers and head out on our bikes. 

All through high school and the first year of college, I had a lot of different jobs.nWe were expected to work if we could. And back then, child labor laws being what they were, it was possible to sneak all kinds of things past the authorities. So, by the time I got married during college, I had worked in retail, painting houses in the summers with my geometry teacher in high school, and even a summer job with a surveyor in my parents church out in Colorado.

But the first real job I ever got on my own was bridge construction with the McKinnon Bridge company from Dyersburg Tennessee. They were building bridges on Interstate 40 near Jefferson City, Tennessee, where Vickie and I lived after marrying at Christmas of our sophomore year at Carson-Newman College (now University).

This was the summer of 1974, and I worked at the bridge company while she went to the Magnavox assembly line. I worked on bridges full and part time until 1976, whenever I could get hours because the pay was so good ($4.75 an hour—unheard of—as an apprentice carpenter). I needed a job. A baby was on the way.

I turned 20 years old three months after hiring on. They felt well enough about my work to let me work different hour arrangements and go to school. Sometimes three days a week sometimes two. And in the summers work full time.

I worked with moonshiners, a crane operator who had done time for murder and a Ph.D. in history who couldn’t find a teaching job and went to work as a rod buster for his brother. We were putting in the bridges for a stretch of interstate 40 before it was opened from state line to state line across Tennessee.

Married students were always looking for part time and summer work. When we heard rumors of places that were hiring everyone rushed to get there first.

A rumor went around that the bridge company needed some workers for the summer so a couple of us drove down. The superintendent’s office, a man named Jerry, was a small trailer with a window unit air conditioner and a secretary. We filled out applications and got hired on the spot. I started out as a common laborer. The first thing they did was tell me to take a hammer and pull about 20,000 nails out of boards from wrecked forms that have been pulled off of a bridge that had already been poured. And that was how it all began.

That’s how I got started. I learned everything about it on the job watching and working with others. It was a great experience, and, it turned out, was great preparation for the ministry. Being in the rough and tumble of the world was an advanced education in empathy training and understanding how different people could be.

But the entire first two weeks was pulling nails out of plywood forms and 2x4s. by the end of two weeks I had developed some pretty impressive biceps and triceps,and a world class set of blisters on my hands, which sent me to Sears to buy some workman’s gloves.

A nail will go in a lot easier than it will come back out. Hit it straight and hard and wham, it’s done. When I moved up from laborer to carpenter, we used to practice at break driving 16 penny nails into an oak board with one blow. By that time, I had a craftsman 24 oz. straight claw hammer for form work. You could deal somepowerful blows, and it came in handy when you went to the Portolet, since your coworkers thought it was funny to nail you in.

Yeah, got to be good and driving ‘em in hard and straight and true with a single blow. But pulling ‘em back out? Man, that could be a job.

I got to thinking about that while I relived the glory of my younger days while wrecking off a single deck board and pulling all those nails, rusted from years of rain. Some had broken off and when I levered the board up with the crowbar, the head just ripped through the wood and sat there, looking at me defiantly. “Okay, old man, let’s see whatcha got.” But I still remembered how.

I think a lot of our lives are littered with old rusty nails. Drove ‘em home in our younger days with authority and the stupid certainty of naivete. Words we said, things we did, or didn’t do. Slamming forward with little thought as to whether we would have to undo the damage one day. 

Eventually, a board gets so bad you have to do something, and there you are, having to repair, pull ‘em out, and sometimes, when all else fails, just drive the dang thing down into the board, forever there to mock you. Not as strong as you were when you were that young man, shirt off and muscles gleaming, on top of a bridge, soaking in the sun so you could go to the dermatologist one day and be read the sentence, “It’s too late. We’ll just have to keep an eye on it. Come back in six months.”

Christians talk a lot about a man nailed to a cross. We hook it up with the idea and mystically all the terrible wars and murders, violence and cruelty of the humanheart, put behind that Roman soldier’s swing, put prints into the hands and feet of an innocent man that day, so that when Easter came and the disciples met up with him again in a locked room, the only reminder of his suffering was the prints of those nails. He even invited old skeptical Thomas to feel them so he could believe the impossible.

That’s what I was thinking about, pulling nails on Labor Day. I didn’t even put those nails in. Somebody else did. They had been there a long time. Every now and then, one had caused a split. I thought about those bridges, and my fellow workers, and how easy life felt at twenty, and how much I thought I knew because I was so young and strong and all of life still to come.

We had a little baby girl to take care of, and no health insurance, but we could do anything we set our minds to. So, every morning I left early and drove out to that bridge and swung that one-and-a-half-pound hammer like Thor himself, and never wasted a moment worrying about who would have to pull out my nails one day. 

That’s what a young man does. So now, I think about the nails I’m leaving behind for somebody else.