All photographs courtesy of the author.

I usually tell people I don’t know well that my work is roofing and siding. I also tell people this when I, correctly or incorrectly, assume they don’t know what weatherization is. When I type out weatherization, a red line appears underneath the word, indicating that the program I use to write doesn’t know what it is either. I don’t explain that I’m usually crawling, crouching, and squirming around an attic, air-sealing; or a knee wall, air-sealing; or in a crawl space, air-sealing. In other words, blasting spray foam in a small, gross space. Sometimes I explain that I’m up on a ladder—anything from a sixteen-footer to a thirty-two- and, sometimes, but rarely, a forty-footer—drilling holes into the wall between each bay, from the outside, underneath siding that has been taken off to expose the home’s sheathing. Sometimes holes have to be drilled inside a house—interior drill and blow—because of asbestos or because there’s a dormer on a third or fourth floor sticking out from a too-steep roof. Sometimes I mix up the job’s jargon—strats, rafters, studs, strapping, joists. Something like foam could mean spray foam or foam board, it all depends on the context. I’m usually covered in dust, mold, and rat shit, squeezing through knee walls, attics, crawl spaces. This is all considered unskilled labor.

After holes are drilled into the wall, or the attic’s prepped, the necessary spaces get filled with cellulose, a kind of insulation made of things like shredded newspaper. When I’m cutting open the bags to load it into the blower machine (versus into the truck to transport it), I think: What history or literature is being blown into these walls? Returns that got pulped? My book? My friends’ books, my foes’? Sometimes you can catch a few words from things like grocery-store flyers—FROZEN LASAGNA MEALS $6.99.

It’s Salem, Massachusetts, and it’s October, two-sweatshirt weather now. It’s estimated that two million people will visit our small city this month for history (witch trials) and haunted houses and dressing up and walking around, which can make it hard to drive back to the workshop at the end of the day. This is my fourth or fifth time working for my uncles’—R. and D.’s—weatherization company and my longest stretch working for them. I didn’t plan it like this, but we have a baby coming in December and we moved back so we could have him at the same hospital where we had and lost our first son a year and a half ago. We are trying to find a way to live here but with how expensive it’s gotten, this is what’s panned out for now. Rent’s higher than in New York City. You can’t buy a house for less than a half mil. I’ve always wanted to raise a kid in Salem. Nothing like growing up near the ocean.

Driving to and from the jobsite: golden retriever chasing falling leaves in the park next to a pipe painted pink with a cartoon sea monster’s face. I see a sign for BILLY SWEET CHIMNEY SWEEP and a crashed-into Dunks sign. Folks in Mass call Dunkin’ “Dunks.” Dunkin’ was a dumb rebrand. A guy on a motorcycle with a skeleton on it. Crowds on every corner already. Bridal party dressed like witches, one in white. Every day-business selling its parking space at night. A second bridal party. Birds or shadows of birds across the Four Points Hotel in Lynnfield. I think Lynnfield. Stuck in traffic, listening to our go-to songs—“HIGHJACK (right back)” by A$AP Rocky, or the Silver Jews’ cover of “Friday Night Fever,” or a couple of songs by this pop-punk band my buddy Aleks likes called Dear Maryanne—and thinking about the job, staving off the dread of getting into the attic full of moldy sheets of faced Rockwool underneath faced fiberglass, sweating in our Tyvek suits. The better you insulate, the hotter it gets up there.

***

I put my time card into the machine and it stamps out “6:44.” Go up to see R. and D. They tell me what crew I’m on. With Aleks. I like working with Aleks. He’s got way more experience than me, so he’s always showing me tips and tricks. But he’s late again, so I walk around the shop’s yard. There’s a dozen of us, give or take, maybe six box trucks, a roofing truck, and a dump truck. A few people are sitting in the back of a couple box trucks taking inventory, staying out of the cold. Anybody standing in a group is laughing or complaining about someone they worked with last week. My uncles and the crew—pairs of brothers, guys from California, Salem guys—they’re all characters, they’ve all got their big personalities, everyone’s telling a joke they just learned or retelling one they’ve already told. They call me sobrino. Some bad moods, some good. We’re all weaving around one another, the masonry guys we share the yard with, L in the Terex moving pallets and eating a microwaved hamburger. I help load a truck with insulation. I look for Aleks’s list to see what we need in the truck. We loading cellulose today? How many sheets of foam board? Cases of spray foam? Masks, Tyvek suits, trash bags? Sheetrock, lumber? Aneudy gives me a hand. He’s probably the coolest twenty-two-year-old I know. I like to say to him and Aleks—posing ’cause I’m the oldest—when I’m sore, when we’re all sore: “I’ll tell you what, boys: Don’t get old.”

This week’s days are a single long day. A life lived on I-95 and in a stranger’s attic. Today is a big job—second- and third-floor walls, attic, four complicated knee walls.

Once Aleks pulls up, I tell him he’s got me today and that I couldn’t find the turbine vent we need. We double-check the list and get into the truck and drive to Market Basket for coffee and breakfast, then to the hardware store for the vent. The traffic is crazy, with the shop being in Salem and it being October. We get to the blue-gray house in some Boston suburb. From the outside it doesn’t look like it’d be too bad of a job, but we’ve learned. We roll slowly out of the truck to set up. Put down tarps, plastic. Grab hardware-store buckets with utility blades, foam guns, trash bags, extra masks. Air-sealing and pulling sheets of Rockwool—sixteen fifty-gallon trash bags’ full. Finish spray-foaming the long top plate and one gable end. So much hot crawling around. Itchy everywhere, paranoid about breathing in mold and fiberglass even through a mask. Somehow both wet and dry. We take a little break, set up the insulation hose, pull it through a window and up through the attic hatch.

I’m lying on plywood in the attic while cellulose snows over me. My back feels so good lying down like this. And I’m breathing in the clean, chemical smell of my mask, but part of me still winces. I don’t want the dust on me. After a minute I let it happen. Fluffy chunks of brown-gray dust from all the pulped paper float down and land on my face, chest, belly. It sticks to you and looks like patchy fleece and dryer lint. Like you’re a dog with mange. I hold the insulation hose, giving it slack sometimes, pulling it back sometimes, so Aleks can maneuver around some of the smaller areas of the attic, around the collars and the air handler and along where the roof’s slope meets the joists on the ceiling below us.

Aleks eats his lunch in the cellulose closet built into the back of the box truck, lounging on the big brick-like bags of cellulose. Same bags I’ll be loading into the blower (Dave Krendl’s Cool Machines, and I love that that’s the brand name) shortly. Today, I lie on my toolbox at lunch, in the clients’ driveway, with both sweatshirts on, trying to suck in the sun. Lunch cooler as my pillow, just a little taller than my toolbox.

As I’m putting the Tyvek suit back on, a falcon flies overhead. Then a little hairy woodpecker in the pine above me. There haven’t been as many woodpeckers this fall and I’ve got an eye for them. Flickers and pileateds—forget about it, I love a flicker. My sister sent me a video of a downy in the trees behind her house yesterday. We’ll be insulating her house next month. Love seeing woodpeckers, hawks, falcons, ospreys all doing their thing. Seagulls in the Market Basket parking lot. The last week of September, Aleks and I saw a pair of hawks when we got back to the shop. One with a rat in its claws, its mate following behind. Before we pack up, Aleks has to put in the turbine vent. I go up onto the roof to pass him parts of it, a level, caulking. I listen to seagulls that sound like hounds a few streets down. Climbing down the ladder, I look up and see another falcon.

Nathan Dragon is a writer, an educator, and a weatherization technician. He is the author of The Champ Is Here and a frequent contributor to NOON Annual. Along with his wife, Raegan Bird, he is the cofounder and editor of the publishing project Blue Arrangements.