Outside The Box

Last week I ripped up the stairs to our deck. They were built in 2019 with “premium” pressure-treated pine, coated with stain and maintained on a sunny south-facing wall. They looked fine on the surface, but inside they were black with rot, spongy, the grain splitting like cheap veneer. The deck was built in 1987 with lumber probably from the same mill as the stairs. After thirty-eight Georgia summers it remains hard as iron, the grain tight. Same soil, same rain, same sun. Different wood.

The difference is everything.

Once upon a time, shipbuilders and cathedral carpenters built with oak—slow-grown, dense-ringed, soaked in natural tannins that defied rot and worm. A white-oak beam felled in 1650 might still carry a roof in 2025. It took a century to grow, but it lasted five. Today oak is reserved for bourbon barrels and millionaire flooring. The working man gets plantation pine—harvested at eighteen years, wide-ringed juvenile wood, soft as balsa, grown fast and cheap because the market demands volume, not permanence. Then we dip it in the new “eco-friendly” treatments—micronized copper, alkaline quaternary—that barely penetrate the surface. The old chromated copper arsenate (CCA) was banned for being too effective, too permanent, too indifferent to minnows in distant streams. The new stuff leaches out in five seasons. The core rots while the surface still looks green.

We did the same thing to men.

The men of 1950 were structural oak. They matured slowly in a harsher world—cold winters without central heat, food that came without high-fructose camouflage, water that didn’t arrive in estrogen-mimicking plastic. Their testosterone curves peaked later and higher; their bones were denser, their grip stronger, their sperm counts much higher. The 20-year-old man today is as virile as a healthy 60-year-old in 1980.

Paul Anderson, the Olympic champion turned strongman, was the extreme expression of that old-growth stock: 350 pounds of dense American oak who lifted weights that modern drug-tested lifters still chase in vain. He ate steak and drank whole milk, trained with barrels of water in a backyard pit, and never touched a steroid—because the first practical anabolic wasn’t widely available until the early 1960s. I saw him drive a nail through a 2×4 with his hand at the Central Baptist Church in Gainesville, Georgia. Then he lifted the pastor and all the deacons on a makeshift wooden platform. He was what the old forest occasionally produced when left alone. I wish I had some of the lumber from that platform, but it was most likely thrown away because good wood was cheap and plentiful then.

Today the old-growth forest is gone. We harvest boys at eighteen biological years, but their hybrid grain is wide and weak. Puberty arrives earlier, growth plates close sooner, and the final product is taller yet lighter-boned, longer-limbed yet softer. Average testosterone has fallen roughly one percent per year since the 1980s—roughly the age Paul Anderson pressed double bodyweight overhead for repetitions. Sperm counts in Western nations have halved since 1973 and continue downward. Grip strength, the simplest measure of overall robustness, has declined steadily in every measured cohort.

We treated our males with the moral equivalent of micronized copper. Plastics, phthalates, pesticides, and fire retardants—ubiquitous endocrine disruptors—act like a weak, leaching preservative. They don’t kill outright; they simply prevent the deep hardening that once made a man rot-resistant. Seed oils and sugar replace saturated fat and protein; pixels replace sunlight; climate-controlled offices replace the kiln of physical labor. The protection we added for “safety” and “sustainability” has proven superficial. The core decays while the exterior still photographs well.

Yet world records still fall, and here the analogy sharpens. Elite endurance athletes today run faster than ever, but largely because of carbon-plated super-shoes—external scaffolding that returns energy a natural foot never could. Elite strength athletes deadlift a thousand pounds, but almost always in untested federations where pharmacology functions as illicit creosote. The global talent pool is deeper, the science more refined, the incentives obscene. We scour the planet for the last old-growth beams—Kenyans raised at altitude, Icelanders descended from Vikings—and then saturate them with modern treatments (legal or otherwise) to push them beyond what any natural man ever was.

Paul Anderson remains the telling exception: an exceptional oak plank from a vanished forest, outperforming most of today’s enhanced men of particle board without a drop of extra chemistry. The modern giants are impressive the way a laminated I-joist is impressive—engineered, optimized, strong in the laboratory—but remove the glue and the carbon fiber and the drugs, and the underlying fiber is unmistakably softer.

We replaced oak with particle board, heart pine with pulpwood because oak was expensive, slow, and politically inconvenient. We replaced men of oak with men of particle board for the same reasons: faster growth, lower cost, fewer emissions, less “toxicity.” The cathedrals lasted a thousand years; the McMansions rot in twenty. The old men built civilizations that endured; the new ones struggle to build families that reproduce.

A rotting deck is not an anomaly. It is a parable. We changed both the timber and the treatment in the name of progress, sustainability, and kindness. The bill always comes due, and it is measured in spongy joists and crumbling cultures.

The oak is still out there, scattered in remote pockets—boys raised on farms, fed real food, tempered by real risk. But they are rare, expensive, and increasingly illegal to harvest at scale. The rest of us walk on particle board and pretend the sag is normal.

When the whole structure begins to come apart, we wonder why it didn’t last like grandfather’s barn. The answer will be in the grain, and in the treatment we chose when we decided permanence wasn’t profitable, or convenient to our particle-board ideologies.