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The Great Abraham Barrier

MEMOIR PROJECT ROUGH DRAFT

Lake Erie behind my Grandpa Abraham’s house, sitting by myself at the top of the concrete stairs while my grandpa slept in the living room in a chair with his mouth open and loud snores shaking the house. Sitting at the top of the stairs that lead down to the lake, looking out over the waters and watching the sailboats go by during races on beautiful summer days and looking further out and at the enormous ore ships on the horizon that didn’t seem to be moving, but eventually they passed beyond the vista of vision. Or just watching the waves beat against the enormous slab chunks of busted up concrete used as a breaker wall to keep the water from eroding away the backyard into the lake. (Footnote: The houses on Lakeshore Drive in Lorain sat a good 50 feet above the lake and the yards ended in abrupt, near cliff descents down to sandy beaches. Then one year, a horrific storm came through and destroyed the beaches and washed them away. My mom remembers the storm. Then, the lake rose from the pollution and other scientific reasons, started eating away at the cliffs and the yards of the affluent houses started falling into the Lake in dangerous chunks at a time. The residents of the shoreline homes had to either build breaker walls, or risk the possibility of eventually losing their homes. The city offered no standards or help, so each family built their own breaker wall, unique from one house to the next. Most families designed breaker walls to not only keep the Lake at bay, but also to serve as an extension of their property, by including patios and small boat launches into the breaker wall design. But not Mike. My grandpa fixed the problem with one simple, absolutely function over form answer: to horror of the neighbors, a fleet of dump trucks filled with enormous chunks of broken concrete from some demolition job—protruding rusty rebar included—arrived one day, and one after another backed up through the Abraham property, and dumped the rubble down the cliff and into the Lake until a wall of craggy rubble served as a barrier between the Lake and the base of the cliff. So on either side of the Abraham’s, formed and molded concrete structures looked orderly and still functional, behind the house of Abraham, a more natural looking breaker wall served it’s purpose, and all for a minimal cost in comparison. No architects. No construction workers. And done in a day. It must have really pissed off my grandma.)

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© 2006 Christian Cloud Abraham

Posted on August 2, 2006 in
Emotion: Indifference, Type: Creative Nonfiction