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these weren't squirrels
Monday, September 24 2007
Preventing roof leaks requires attention to detail. It's never yet rained on my new woodshed roof, but I wanted to make sure that when it does there would be no leaks. Chief problem areas included the high edge of the shed roof, where water drops could slip beneath the roofing (and above the plywood) aided by the magic of surface tension. I gobbed a bunch of asphalt flashing goop up under that edge and then capped it with a long narrow piece of galvanized steel left behind by the house's previous owner. I also dabbed asphalt goop onto many of the heads of roofing nails, which I'd nailed through ridges in the roofing metal to secure it to the building. Those nails all come with neoprene washers to seal the perforations they make, but covering them with a dab of goop is an added precaution I learned from my father back when we did the many metal roofs of my childhood in rural Virginia. In order, those roofs were the old barn's hayloft (covered with corrigated aluminum), the complete re-roofing of the house, the so-called "honey house" (a 500 square foot structure for bee-related things that now mostly serves as a storage building), and the Shaque. Those last three, like the woodshed I've been building, were all roofed with galvanized steel, which seems to far outlast asphalt roofing materials. The re-roofing of my childhood house has proved particularly successful; aside from some rusting around the chimney (caused by corrosive chemicals naturally found in wood smoke), it doesn't appear to have aged appreciably in the 25 years since my father and I installed it. I like metal roofing because it seems to outlast the buildings beneath them. The old barn slowly collapsed even while the aluminum roof I'd installed still kept out the rain, and a huge ramshackle garage next to the honey house is probably over 40 years old, and its roofing is still in good shape (though it was installed incompetently and has always leaked, mostly onto oak structural members that have mostly rotted away).
As I've been working on this woodshed, I've come to realize that I have a lot of carpentry wisdom that I learned from my father. He and I built the honey house from scratch and the re-roofing of the house and the upgrade of the Shaque (which started out as a tiny smoke house) were both big undertakings. My parents are unusually iconoclastic and had little time for common American pastimes such as ancestor worship, but the carpentry knowledge (along with artistic, botanic, and gardening knowledge) constitutes something of a family culture, one that I'm inclined to believe is somewhat multi-generational. My father didn't know his father, but he had his mother and a bunch of uncles who taught him the things they knew, knowledge with origins in peasant Austria and Bavaria. I'm sure, though, that like me, my father added significantly to the passed-on wisdom of his mentors. When that wisdom reached me, it had nothing to say about electrical wiring, plumbing, or computers, all things that I either taught myself or randomly learned in a class. Everything I know about electrical wiring I learned in a 10th grade shop class taught by a Mr. Oieson — he was a great teacher, though a life spent teaching the most surly and ignorant of a school's rednecks couldn't have been easy.
In the forest today I saw Eleanor run off the trail and down a steep hillside toward something, and when she got there she stopped and started barking. And then I saw what it was, a pair of squirrels climbing a tree in a weird choreographed manner. But wait, Eleanor never barks at things so mundane as squirrels! Then I saw that these weren't squirrels. They were the arms of a bear, one mostly concealed by the tree trunk. When confronted by the dogs, bears always climb trees, though they're more than strong enough to defend themselves against a overemboldened forty pound critter. But would such a defense really be worth the bother and the possible retaliation of the society of people to which every dog is attached? This is a calculation that bears probably make in these situations, and they always decide that avoiding confrontation is the best policy. Normally they slink off undetected, but when that's impossible they'll climb a tree.
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