The Gate

Zephaniah Sole

If you visit the food cart lot at 4038 North Williams Avenue in Portland, Oregon, perhaps while grabbing Mexican or Thai, you may notice it has a new gate. A beautiful piece of craftsmanship. Solid steel. A lovely shade of bluish green coated in powder. The gate is comprised of five rails covering the West and South sides of the lot’s entrance. These rails are intricate: upper portions made of bent bars forming a pattern of intersecting curves, lower portions made from steel plates cut to form a series of eight-point stars.

But the gate, like all things, did not just appear. Francisco put it there.

***

In June 2020, Francisco Paxtor, 43, a resident of greater Portland who originally hails from Guatemala, lost his job.

He’d been working as a collision repair specialist at an auto shop, using a skillset he’d developed over 16 years. But when the pandemic hit, people weren’t driving as much. His manager laid him off.

“My wife, Danielle, said it’s okay if we lose the house,” Francisco recalled. “She said it’s okay if we start again.” He shook his head at the memory a year later. “My wife loves that house. She grows kale and lettuce in the backyard. Green beans, tomatoes. She’s already introducing our children [Isabelle, 3, and Edward, 1] to gardening. She said we could sell the house and move into an apartment. But I couldn’t imagine shrinking their space, shrinking their happiness.”

Francisco was anxious to find a way to keep his family’s home. But with the pandemic going on, no one was hiring. Needing a solution, Francisco pulled from his past. 

Francisco grew up in San Cristobal, Guatemala. When he was 10, his father would drop him off at an uncle’s welding shop on the weekends. This uncle taught Francisco welding; Oxy-Acetylene and Shielded Metal Arc. Francisco fell in love with it. At 16, he shadowed a journeyman. In his 20s, after immigrating to the U.S., he acquired I-CAR, TIG, and 3G welding certifications. “I don’t want to become complacent,” he said. “I love learning.”

And he couldn’t learn enough about welding. It was his passion. He was good at collision repair, but he never felt it challenged his creativity. Maybe now, with so much at stake and so few options, it was time to take a risk. So in September 2020, with Danielle’s support, Francisco put the word out amongst his friends: he was starting a welding business.

It was a month before he received his first call— a month of scratching by with odd jobs wherever he could find them. Cleaning roofs. Cleaning yards. Installing windows. Buying used items from Craigslist, then fixing and reselling them on OfferUp.

So when he received a call from Alem Gebrehiwot, he jumped at the opportunity. 

Alem had heard of Francisco’s new business through a mutual friend and had just purchased a pair of steel handrails he believed were very special. He wanted Francisco to see them. 

Francisco met Alem at the ReBuilding Center on North Mississippi Avenue in Portland. One of the rails was about 17 feet long, the other, approximately 12. Both had the same arabesque design of intersecting curvilinear bars and octagram stars. 

Alem wanted Francisco to replicate these rails and build them into a new gate for the food cart lot he owned at 4038 North Williams Avenue. The gate would need to cover about 60 feet at the front of the lot and 10 feet on its side.

Francisco agreed immediately. He needed the money. He and Danielle were depleting their savings. Anyway, he could envision the gate already. The original handrails would cover 29 feet at the front. He could build a third rail to cover an additional 11 feet and a fourth rail 20 feet long that could roll on tracks he’d install on the ground to open and close the gate. Lastly, he’d need to build a fifth rail, about 10 feet, to cover the right side of the entrance. This made three rails he had to build which replicated the design of the two originals and fit into a folding gate. Easy. 

Francisco and Alem agreed upon a price, and Alem gave the go-ahead to start working.

***

Francisco started by measuring the steel plates forming the eight-point stars of the rails’ lower portions. Three new rails would require 93 of these specially cut plates. He sketched designs and took them to his friend, Albert, whom he’d known for 15 years from working in auto collision together. “It was a very complicated project,” Albert recalled. “But Francisco’s my best friend. And when he gets something in his head, he doesn’t let go.” Albert had access to a metal laser cutter. He helped Francisco cut the plates. 

But when it was time to tackle the curvilinear pattern of the rails’ upper portions, Francisco began to worry he was in over his head. To replicate this design, Francisco needed to cut one-inch steel angle bars into 90 three-foot pieces and roll-bend each piece to the same radius of curvature as the originals. But roll-bending steel is no easy feat, especially when the steel is angled. And it needed to be rolled leg-in, which makes one side of the angle stretch while the other compresses. “You have to keep it straight while you roll it,” Francisco explained. “Otherwise the angle splits, you create a twisted diamond and ruin the metal.”

An angle roll-bender costs between $7,000 and $20,000 dollars. Even the lower end of that range was more than the amount Francisco had received for the whole job. He researched companies with access to this machinery, hoping he could subcontract. He called a company in Clackamas, but they said no— they only worked with established customers. He called another in Tualatin; they said yes, but their price would have made Francisco lose money on the project. 

Francisco had given his word he would complete the gate. He could still envision it – its curves and stars pronouncing a restrained beauty to those who chose to look as they crossed its threshold. But he couldn’t financially ruin himself in the process. He and Danielle were only hanging on because they had recently gotten a mortgage deferral approved.

Francisco needed to figure out how to roll 90 steel angle bars without going into debt. Again, he drew on experience from so many years ago. 

When Francisco was 18, he enrolled in the Universidad de San Carlos de Guatemala to study mechanical engineering. He loved it, but his family lived in poverty and he had no financial support. “Every morning I’d wake up early to leave home by 5:30 a.m., walk a half hour to the outskirts of San Cristobal, catch a bus to my welding job with a textile manufacturer in Salcaja. At noon I would leave work, take another bus to the university campus in Quetzaltenango, eat a quick lunch, and attend class from 2:30 to 9:30 p.m. Then another bus ride back to San Cristobal and I’d stay up until 1 a.m. trying to complete my homework while my father, drunk, would yell to stop wasting electricity and turn the light off. After three years of this, I became very sick. The doctor said I had to make a choice if I wanted to be healthy. Work, or school. I could not do both.” 

Francisco’s family needed money. He dropped out of school.  

But Francisco remembered what he’d learned in those mechanical engineering classes as he brainstormed how to roll the steel bars. In his mind, he constructed a special jig that could leverage the force needed to roll the bars at the proper curvature. He went to his friend Andy, another good colleague from auto collision, and described his idea. In December, Andy helped Francisco build the jig. “We went through six, seven modifications,” Andy said. “The first three, four attempts [to roll the bars] didn’t work. We went back to the drawing board and mounted the jig on a frame machine. The radius of curvature on the frame machine was the same curvature we needed. We got lucky.” Over the course of a day in mid-December, after hours of sweat and sore muscles, (“Your back hurt so bad pulling. Your arms hurt, everything,” Andy said) they successfully rolled the 90 bars of angled steel leg-in.

Afterwards, things went smoothly for a while. Working non-stop through the holiday season, Francisco finished the three handrails within the first few days of January 2021. Then it was time to incorporate the rails into a fully constructed gate. Francisco visited the lot in the middle of January to take some final measurements. But when he arrived, his heart dropped. 

Alem had mounted an electrical box directly in the path of where Francisco planned to install the ground tracks. This meant Francisco could no longer create a simple rolling gate. 

He would need to change the whole design.

Frustrated, he brainstormed once more. Because of where the electrical box was placed, the only design that could work around it would be a gate where one of the handrails slid open while supported on one end – a cantilever system. This was far more complicated. The opening rail of the gate weighed 600 pounds. In his prior design, the ground itself would have supported this mass. Now, Francisco needed to calculate a system that could support this load from one post.

He called a structural engineering firm, asking how much they would charge to conduct the calculations for such a cantilever design; he needed to ensure its stability. But the price they quoted would put Francisco in debt. 

Francisco thought back to engineering school. He reminded himself he was not a person who gave in or gave up. He had dropped out because of circumstances outside his control; poverty, a lack of support. He had completed three out of four of those engineering school years. He had the knowledge necessary to properly design the cantilever system. He could do it.

So he did it. He spent the next week calculating and recalculating the loads the new system could bear. He made sure to consider the effects of metal deflection while welding. He built a new 350-pound counterbalance with steel tubing.

Of course, this led to another problem. Because of the additional time and material spent on the project, Francisco was on the verge of not making a dime. He wanted nothing more than to finish the gate. It was his first job with his new business. It was a reflection of who he was as a man and a worker: intricate but solid, with the utmost integrity. He refused to save money by cutting corners or skimping on the gate’s quality. But at this point, he and Danielle had completely run down their savings. His family still needed to eat. 

Once more, Francisco searched his past. 

***

When he was in engineering school, his father had not only yelled at him to turn the light off. His father said other things too. Things Francisco still doesn’t like to repeat. But the general theme was as follows: Francisco was stupid. Francisco was worthless. Francisco was wasting his time trying to become an engineer.

After he left engineering school, Francisco made his way to California, then Portland, to escape the crushing poverty of his life in San Cristobal. He always worked. Always. He made good friends working. Friends like Albert and Andy. And when he wasn’t working, he enjoyed his life. He found the people in Portland welcoming. He joined a church. He joined dancing groups. Dancing was how he met Danielle, the woman who gave him a family. “Portland is special to me,” he said, musing on why he never gave up on the gate. “I could be dead in five years. I wanted to know I left something right in this city.”

And the city could certainly use it. The past year had not been kind to Portland. Nightly clashes on its streets between groups of varying ideologies had become par for the course. The pandemic didn’t help. Not to mention the wildfires that blotted out the sun that September and temporarily gave Portland the worst air quality in the world.

But if Francisco wanted to leave something right in his suffering city, he needed to confront the turbulent voice in his own head. The voice that said he was worthless. The voice that made him undervalue himself and his work. Confronting that voice, Francisco came to realize this: he had charged far too little to build the gate. There was no other way forward. 

He spoke with Alem. 

It was not an easy conversation. But Alem understood. He agreed to increase Francisco’s price for the job. Francisco would make a profit after all.

Reinvigorated, Francisco continued building the gate. Andy let Francisco use his shop for the welding. Toward the end of January, Francisco visited the food cart lot.

Again (again!) there was a problem. 

The posts Alem had installed were not reinforced enough to support the gate’s load. Francisco told this to Alem, and Alem had the posts reinforced, but this took time. Time in which Francisco was not getting paid and had to resort back to odd jobs for survival.

In mid-March 2021, Alem informed Francisco the posts had been reinforced with concrete. Francisco inspected them. The concrete was strong enough. He continued working on the gate, custom building the cantilever rollers, the catch and the locking mechanism.

At the end of April, Francisco finished the gate’s components, all weighing over 1,000 pounds. His friends helped load these parts onto a truck to take them to a powder coating shop. A few weeks later, on May 15, 2021, Francisco installed the gate at 4038 North Williams Avenue.

The gate held. Everything worked. From the cantilever rollers moving the curved steel and octagram stars, to the latch and catch that allowed it to open and close. Francisco took a picture and texted it to Alem: “Happy Saturday.”

“Lovely!” Alem wrote back.

***

At the end of June 2021, I visited the food cart lot with Francisco. He showed me his work with pride. The gate’s solid. It moves smoothly when opening, like a well-engineered vehicle. Francisco’s calculations had been impeccable. 

We stood in line for Thai Time Café. Things were going well. Francisco had taken on four more jobs for his company. He and Danielle were paying their mortgage again. Their children still play in the garden.

“I’m not after money,” Francisco told me. “I just want enough to raise good human beings. My father, I’m not mad at him. He suffered too. He was picking cotton at ten on the Mexican border. He was an alcoholic. His father was an alcoholic. I’m trying to do something different.”

We ordered our food. Pad Thai for him. Cashew chicken for me. He spoke warmly with the woman operating the food cart. It was 90 degrees that day, so we sat on a bench in the shade  and watched customers enjoying their sunny afternoon, coming in and out of the lot, crossing and recrossing the threshold of Francisco's gate.