This is Clouds Form Over Land, weekly writing about resilience, imperfection, and our relationship to the earth.
There comes a time in everyone's life to stand cluelessly in an aisle of Home Depot (or your local alternative).
This often begins as a quick jaunt, a way to make progress while also taking a step back from the project at hand. If luck and experience are on my side, I’m in and out. More frequently though, it’s like searching for a needle in a haystack.
In the fall of 2019, we were tucking into the rainy season and spending a lot of time in the Home Depot store located in Emeryville, California. This store holds some sweet memories. In the winters, we roamed the aisles for holiday lights to string up the mast of our sailboat and in the springs we renewed our attempts to grow herbs in the salty air of the marina. Before we took out a loan to buy the boat together, we tested the waters of our relationship by going in on a two-pack Dewalt drill and impact driver.
Plumbing is my most dreaded section. Some fittings have me feeling like Ahab searching for the white whale. I have logged hours pacing these sections, going cross-eyed looking for pieces with the required male and female connections to meet our non-standard marine sizing. Asking for assistance is a mixed bag. The person next to me is just as likely to know the answer as the stockist in uniform.
At the time, I was also managing fifteen solar repair technicians across two warehouses in Northern California. I entered the industry in 2015, moving to San Francisco on a hunch and taking any job I could get. From there I climbed the ladder I was on — operations management. This was my first time directly supervising employees, rather than processes and projects. I drove a branded pickup truck, led safety talks at 7 AM, and visited customers’ homes to de-escalate disappointments, set expectations, and perform quality control. The job was straightforward enough, although my coworkers weren’t used to seeing a 5’2” feminine person leading the huddles. The job itself didn’t require much electrical know-how, but it certainly helped gain some credibility. I spotted that fact years prior and had begun spending weekends on volunteer solar installs with the tremendous non-profit GRID Alternatives. Their model is similar to Habitat for Humanity but focused on solar and industry training. They have offices all over California, as well as Colorado and DC.
All that to say, standing in the plumbing aisle, searching for my coveted fitting wasn’t my first rodeo of feeling out of place in a construction environment. I was used to the occasional drive-by comment, often generated by surprise rather than malice. The pull to be more masculine was matched by my resolve that a little softness could really help how we worked.
Some part of me wanted to take up space in every corner of the store.
Most of our shopping trips were in search of a specialty piece that may not even be stocked in those hallowed halls. This wasn’t Boat Depot, so my application wasn’t standard. I often puzzled associates and began observing that it’s easier to say a part isn’t stocked than to persist toward a solution.
Our project list was growing and I knew it wasn’t sustainable to experience the churn of frustration every time we tried to find something in the store. The idea of walking every aisle started needling at me, and on one trip I suggested taking the extra time to get the lay of the land. My partner joined me one blustery night, grabbed a cart, and eased into things in the plant section. The aisles blend into each other, with occasional big jumps in categories. I built up some level of comfort by browsing items I didn’t need — ceiling fans! paint! lumbar! — and this cushioned the time spent intensely searching for something critical. We found helpful items we didn’t know we needed and restocked consumables like electrical tape, heat shrink, zip ties, and paracord. I added fish tape to the cart to make wire pulls a little easier. I don’t recall if we found everything we came for, but I do know that subsequent trips were made easier by the mental map of the store and low-key practice of searching. I returned many times in my branded work polo to find parts for technicians and in my hand-knit sweaters for personal projects. Before we sailed south of the border, we made one last full walk through the San Diego store to catch anything that might be trickier to get later.
After over a year of sailing and boat maintenance in Central America, the straightforwardness of the Home Depot store layout and access to assistance in English is as striking as the abundance of parts and the scale of those stores. The skills are the same. Any do-it-yourself endeavor requires some gumption and tenacity to start and complete projects. Often it requires asking for help and continuing to puzzle out a solution if none is available. No one knows it all and it requires emotional flexibility to build experience.
Walking every aisle was an important and easy step along the way.
Can Do List:
Make a corner of your home a little cozier for these long nights.
Take a peak at the full moon on Friday.
Diet culture is at its loudest around the new year. Remind yourself that personal worth is not tied to waist size.
Walk every aisle of the hardware store.
Written in the spirit of not letting what we can’t do get in the way of what we can.
Did you try any of these? I’d love to hear about it.
