Roofing It (with apologies to Mark Twain)

      Lightning flashed.  Thunder ripped and rolled.  I was scantily clad in the warmth of a late spring night (or was it early morning?)  I tugged at the tarp.  At first, the wind blew not at all.  It was the eerie calm before the storm.  Then the breeze picked up and the folds of the giant tarp grew recalcitrant.

      The Goodwife repeated for the fourth or fifth time, “We’ve got to get off this roof.  It’s crazy to be up here in this weather.”  We were trying to cover the gaps in our roof to protect it from the approaching storm.

     Then it happened.  Down I went!  We weren’t exactly working in the best of light, but the continuous sheets of lightning wouldn’t allow one to say it was pitch dark, either.

     My left foot found the hole left from removing the six-inch chimney pipe that ran from the living room up through the attic and out through the roof very near the peak. Unlike the lightning flash that revealed to David Balfour that he was about to take his last step into nowhere in his miserly uncle’s unfinished castle ruins, the lightning flash came after I had already suffered my fall.

     Instead of seeing a drop-off with rubble and ruins below, I saw a roof stripped of shingles and tarpaper, with gaps where the 1X12’s had been removed to make way for new rafters.  A major rainstorm would be disastrous for my attic and ceilings below.

     I went down nearly to my hip, catching myself on the decking with my left elbow.  In the brief instant I spent caught in the hole, a few things raced through my mind, my thoughts rivaling the speed of the lightning flashes.

      The “I-should-haves” replaced the initial panic and fear.  I should have done what I had toyed with for a few weeks prior to taking on the roof project.

      It was the driest time on the plains of Eastern Colorado and Western Kansas since the thirties.  But experience told me that when I got the shingles and some of the sheathing torn off, regardless of the presiding weather pattern, it would rain that night.  Sure enough, it was going to rain in this drought.  My roof was off.

    The idea I had toyed with was going into the rainmaking business.  I would take out a full-page ad in the local paper, offering the local farmers a guaranteed rain.  I would charge them a fee ($50? I don’t remember) with a money-back guarantee.  A “rain” would be anything over, say, a half inch as measured by the local weather observer.

     I figured to use the money I made from the venture to hire someone to remove and replace the soaked insulation and redo the new sheetrock job on the house ceilings if necessary.  If it didn’t rain, I would simply refund everybody’s money and I would only be out the cost of the newspaper ad.

      I didn’t do that.  I should have, I thought.  I should have anticipated the storm and spread the tarps in the evening before calling it a day, but I was tired and didn’t do it.  So here we were, making lightning rods of ourselves.

     Also running through my mind was the many experiences when a roof tear-off had been followed by a late-night deluge.  Two preceding roof jobs on the very roof where I was standing had suffered rain damage when a roof was bared and left overnight.  The most recent was when we had put up the new roof that connected the old house with the new garage.  Working Friday evening through Sunday evening with relatives and friends helping resulted in getting the rafters up and the ½” sheets on the rafters, but no time or energy to cover them with tarpaper.

      Sometime in the early Monday morning hours, the wind blew in soppy drizzly clouds to wet down my new sheeting.  I used a personal leave day from school, which meant an early trip to my classroom to lay out lesson plans and materials for my substitute.  Then, back to the ranch and spend my day diverting rivulets away from the living quarters.  This roof leakage wasn’t as serious as an earlier one because I had no ceiling beneath much of the new roof.  It dried out about 2 p.m. and left me time to clean up and recuperate a little.

      A few years earlier, we had started a reroof on the north slope of our roof.  We tore it off on a Sunday, thinking I could get the felt down on Monday after school and shingle every afternoon as I could.  The tarpaper left after removing the shingles was in pretty good shape, being less than ten years since we had shingled before.  I thought it would protect the roof and attic.  It would have, too, but the wind came up in the night and rolled the paper off in great sheets.

     That time, I went to school and left the Goodwife to try to catch the leaks in the attic.  She had done her best, allowing only a little water in on the dusty old insulation in the attic.  None of the moisture reached the ceiling.  That afternoon after school, it was windy and cold, but the drizzle had ceased.  Uncle Mel arrived with a bundle of old interior trim pieces, base shoe and quarter-round.

      The girls, Uncle Mel and I all on the roof, we managed to roll out and staple down the new felt and tack down the overlap seams using the trim pieces.  By cold sundown, the roof was moisture-proof again in its secure (we hoped) tar paper covering.

       The worst case of rain on the raw roof happened way back in 1976.  It was May.  We had taken on a reroof for a fellow teacher who was suffering from cancer.  This time I wasn’t in charge.  Burke was. 

    It was really several roofs to redo, as the “house” was really two old houses that had been moved in and joined together with several smaller roofs adjoining the two main roofs.  In May we had lots of daylight after school let out for the day.  With several roofs, it was possible to tear off one and get it covered in a couple of days.

      It came to pass that we tore off part of one of the main roofs on a Thursday.  There were several layers of shingles where roofers simply shingled over the existing shingles instead of tearing off and re-papering.  I left school Friday afternoon and headed for Hays.  The other two finished tearing off old shingles on the main roof.  I would be formally awarded my Master’s Degree, which I had finished in December of ’75.

     We went to Hays, went through the ceremony, renewed old acquaintances with former fellow students, and drove home in the rain.  It was still raining when the phone rang at 6 a.m. Saturday morning.  It was Burke.  Win, the cancer victim, had been in his attic all night, catching drips, handing down full kettles to his wife, taking up and placing the empties under drips.  He called Burke and Burke called me.

      Out into the rainy morning we went.  Win’s stepson had gathered a bunch of tarps and met us there.  Over the roof we clambered, spreading tarps and nailing them down.  We were soaked when the job was done, but Win was able to crawl down from the attic and report that the dripping had stopped.  It rained nearly three inches from Friday night to Sunday morning.   

     Those experiences were in mind when I arose from my bed, pulled on shoes and shorts and mounted to the roof in the intermittent dark.  They didn’t have to replay themselves when I found myself hip deep in the gap in the roof.  I took stock of my situation.

     Shock was quickly replaced by relief.  Only a small stinging on my shin meant a small abrasion.  I would be able to extricate myself without pain or suffering from sprain or broken bone.  Perhaps another thought at that moment was the Goodwife was right.  Get off the roof.   

     It was that 1976 fiasco I had in my mind as I finished pulling myself out of the chimney access and made a few more attempts to secure the tarp.  The wind came up and we crawled down.  For a while I paced around looking out of windows to judge the storm’s path and ferocity.  Raindrops hit the windows and the bare roof.  Some even managed to fall on the tarps we had successfully placed and secured.  Finally, I decided there was nothing I could do, so I returned to bed to try to regain my strength for the day ahead.  In such severe dry times, it was sacrilegious to hope or pray that it would not rain.

      The next morning revealed less than a quarter of an inch of moisture in our rain gauge.  Not too far north of us were reports of one to three inches of rain.  I breathed a sigh of relief as I heard the rainfall reports.  I could only imagine what the attic and ceiling would look like if we had received three inches.  As it was, there was hardly enough moisture to settle the dust in the old insulation in the attic, let alone soak down to the plasterboard and sheetrock.

      I had hired two high school boys.  We would go on to get the new rafters in and the sheeting on the day following the rain.  Getting the metal roof on was a challenge for two days following the storm?  The wind came up, and one of the boys decided he had enough, I guess, as he reported not feeling well and went home.  Two of us finished installing the metal in the nasty wind. 

     Sure enough, it didn’t rain again or even threaten to for weeks.  It’s not nice to fool Mother Nature.  I only wish She didn’t get such a kick out of fooling with me.