The Yooper Schooner (Part 11)

Karen and I had been through a lot already, but all that was nothing compared to what we faced in this part of the story.

Chapter 21: Visitors? No, worse. Relatives!

 

We officially called the Yooper Schooner “home.” Well, that’s where we lived, so I suppose that makes it home though it remained a rough uncut stone of a gem. An orientation that hadn’t changed all that much since the last orientation. The house’s outside had that nice cultured stone along the bottom and above that, the white plastic “Tyvek” everywhere else. The roof was on, the windows in and the shiny chrome pipe smoked away. Inside, the first floor was still only raw, dusty concrete, and upstairs they were unfinished tongue and groove planking. The upstairs walls, except for the closet, were nearly that perfect smooth state�"ready to primer at least. The bathroom upstairs only had a toilet. Downstairs, the bathroom had a toilet, the laundry room had the laundry tub. The kitchen amounted to a partial skeleton of counter framework and bases; the refrigerator resided in its permanent place in the north corner of the kitchen, and the rickety picnic table that held Mr. Coffee now had the microwave oven on it. I accepted the house’s state in general, what more can a person want.

Do you know when you have to, you can cook anything in a microwave, but when Karen decided to fry up something special, like my favorite, fried potatoes, peppers, and onions, she’d check the weather and once again fire up the trusty Coleman cook stove. She cooked outside on the other picnic table I had built over ten years earlier when we lived on base, and it had resided outside in the elements all that time. It was solid, sound, and acceptable. Bonnie loved to hang out under the picnic table especially when food was nearby. When it was hot, she’d dig a pit bigger than her and she’d lay in the cool, damp hole. You’d only see her black bat-like ears sticking out of the hole all covered in sand. She got a bath in the wheelbarrow, but she didn’t like it.

Consider the ongoing jobs: The kitchen cabinets and walls needed finishing. I had installed some of the cabinet’s facing of one by four tongue and groove boards. Even though the vertical grooved boards looked quite nice installed, I wasn’t over enthusiastic about the work. The cabinets were tedious, detailed work that required planning, something I didn’t do so well as you the reader already know. The problem here with the kitchen cabinets was that I couldn’t just begin and end with full width tongue and groove because the door locations wouldn’t allow it. This meant that the doors’ edges had to fall accordingly between boards or the board run begun from a corner so a groove would fall correctly at the door edges. The width of the doors was another planning problem.

In conjunction with the cabinets, I continued installing pine veneer plywood over the concrete walls that were exposed all the way around the house’s lower inside walls. This backbreaking, time-consuming job involved drilling the concrete to put in expansion anchors to attach flat one by fours onto the concrete. Drilling that concrete was a pain, destroying many drill bits and burning out a drill motor. Someone suggested gluing it up, but I did not think that was very permanent or professional. Before nailing the veneer to the screwed on boards, insulation board went between the veneer and concrete in the voids between the boards. This completed the three-step insulation process because there was now insulation on the outside of the blocks, inside the blocks’ voids, and along the inside of the blocks. Admittedly, I dragged my feet on this wall-covering job, but I also have to confess, after Karen stained and sealed the veneer, it was awesomely beautiful!

I finished the downstairs closet with drywall, primer, and a clothes rod. The closet had no door, but it was nice to have a place to hang your coats when coming in the back door. Having an open closet came in helpful later as a refuge. My motivation to work on the house was waning surprise, surprise. I would rather do homework or work on firewood than continue on the house project. I became much more than attention deficit, I became blasé of what needed doing. Sleepless nights and wandering thoughts however, often resolved the problem of what to do next.

One of those things that bothered me, keeping me from my sleep, was the main sewer vent. We had been using the toilets for sometime now and having the sewer vent just open into the roof truss crawlspace was not the best idea. You never smelled anything, but I worried in bed some nights imagining the woodstove chimney developing a crack or my electrical work causing a spark and with the imaginary fumes up there�" kaboom! All that methane gas up there, at least in my mind, would explode. I guess a couple nights of lost sleep produces motivation, and suddenly, the venting became priority one.

Consider for a moment, the trusses were now covered from below with either tongue and groove boards in the front half of the ceiling or just insulation in the rest. The roof-venting job was the first time I had to crawl up into the trusses from below after the ceiling had closed them off. Access to inside the trusses was from inside the upstairs closet. The access could be anywhere I suppose, but the closet would be shut and the future trapdoor in the ceiling less intrusive. Right now, there was nothing there but insulation.

 To make entry easier from below, I peeled back the insulation and constructed a roughed in trapdoor frame. With the stepladder close to the outside wall, I crawled up there, first kneeling on the frame and then spreading my knees to the two truss rails two feet apart, a painful maneuver for the kneecaps. In the future, I would make a few trips up this way to the center of the trusses where there was almost a crawlspace. I could crawl the length of the house on hands and knees to the very front of the house where the chimney pierced the roof. To crawl up there, I placed my knees on the truss plates and scraped my back along the roof sheathing not much space for a semi-claustrophobic guy, and the pain to my knees was almost unbearable with dents, cuts, and splinters.

Anyway, that was my working condition for the venting tight, uncomfortable, and itchy from the insulation. The four-inch stack terminated right there by the trapdoor, above the layer of insulation. I had to add an elbow, a length up toward the peak, another elbow and up, out through the roof. It can’t be easy; I couldn’t exit the pipe right there where it came straight up from below, but nooooooo, because the snow sliding off the steel room could possibly shear it right off.

In the uncomfortable conditions up there, I fitted pipe pieces, sawed pipe lengths, and with the stinky-sticky pipe glue, glued the pipes up to the point of puncturing the roof. It didn’t help that my fingers would get covered with the black goo-glue and predictably, I’d lose my balance or start to cramp and I’d have to hold myself up with my hands. Yep, in the itchy insulation that stuck to my fingers. Eventually, my thighs cramped up like cables, and I had to stretch them out for a while down below. I toted my trusty antique brass plumb bob up there and hung it down, aligning with the upturned pipe elbow. I marked an “X” inside the roof sheathing where I held the string.

With the drill, I poked a hole from underneath through the sheathing and steel roof. I then went down, outside, climbed the ladder, and crawled up on the roof with a drill and cord, drilled a circular pattern a little larger than the piping. Going down and back up, I finished the hole with my jigsaw. I then went down, through the house and up into trusses again to cut a pipe, put the piece through, and glue it. I then went down, out, and up on the roof to install the flashing, caulk it, and screw in a neoprene weather boot around the pipe with another layer of chalk. I then went down and back up inside the roof to finish my gluing and J-hook installations to finally secure the pipe. My body ached from hanging in the trusses and running up and down; my knees had permanent dents in them, and my fingers were aching, cut, and coated in black, sticky-glue and insulation that mineral spirits took care of. By the way, I secretly grew to love the smell of that odorous glue-stuff.

My father called one evening. He informed us that he was coming to visit. My father had kept a low profile the last couple years over an argument I had with him. Karen would prefer not to talk to him at all because of it and his chauvinistic attitude, but what could I say? Tell him not to come? I suppose…Anyway, he informed me that they would be here in two days. “They” I assumed meant him and his “lady friend” another sore subject ever since my mother died while we were in Alaska.

We really didn’t plan anything special, and he called the afternoon of the second day. He said they were at Jack’s Grocery in Harvey and didn’t know how to find our house. I tried to provide directions, but he was distracted or just wanted us to go out our way to meet him. Karen groaned, and we went. Of course, we had to meet “lady friend” and be social, but Karen and I didn’t extend the welcome mat out all that far.

They didn’t stay long, and I don’t remember any compliments forthcoming. I do recall my father asking why the trees were so small. I tried to explain that the aspens were quite huge, but we logged those off. He couldn’t quite comprehend that the aspens do grow big but are short-lived and easily toppled. They stayed to visit only two days. Surprisingly, Bonnie didn’t bite them or even growl at them. Enough of the visitors, or at least, those visitors.

Karen’s work kept on. Throughout the project, her work proved quiet, perfect, and subtle. She did those things that made the house perfect and beautiful, but at first glance, you wouldn’t notice all the work she put in because it was right there in your face. Like scraping, sanding, staining, and finishing all the logs, the hours, days of drywall sanding, the primer coats, and final color coats, the veneer finishing, the ceiling board sealing, all that dirt moving and stonewall building, so on and so forth. Another thing she did was to refinish the upstairs bathroom sink cabinet.

Originally, the cabinet and mirror was her grandmother’s dresser, yes a real antique made of carved cherry wood. We bought a simple oval porcelain basin and faucets, and with a template to guide my hand, I carefully cut the top of the dresser for the sink and three holes for the faucet�"I know�"the destruction of an antique. She finished the dresser now sink cabinet, a pseudo-vanity, and the mirror frame with several hand-rubbed coats of Helmsman sealer. The finish shone like glass. After carefully installing the basin with caulk/adhesive along with the faucets, we hooked it up to the supply and drain lines already in place. Now we had a working sink in the upstairs bathroom. The job wasn’t quite done because only the bottom drawer of the three would go in because of the drain running down inside the cabinet. This dilemma ran on the sleepless hard drive until the only answer remained�"cut the backs out of the drawers. The two top drawers were cut back to only drawer faces because of the basin taking nearly the entire space, and the second drawer, well, it had a huge slot in the center that slid in around the drain crude but effective and sort of functional.

Karen convinced me that she needed the whirlpool tub installed for her to carry on her labors. As I’ve related, “the tub” had a checkered history all of its own. After Mark the plumber’s son blunder in The Infamous Faucet Ordeal and my interference, the faucet now operated, even though the manufacturer sent me two right-hand inserts instead of a right and a left. So installed, the faucets turned the same direction. Sounds okay? Think about turning your faucets, and normally they both rotate toward the center, one right, one left. Unbelievably, it was mind boggling to operate them both turning the same direction. When Karen’s mother visited a couple months later, she actually unscrewed the left fitting because she couldn’t understand the arrangement even though we thoroughly instructed her in which way to turn it. It was hard to restrain our emotions when water spewed all over again! We now return to the tub’s empirical installation history…

 When Ben still lived in the NMU dorm, he volunteered to build the support/surround for the tub, but it was a bit shaky and uneven with all due respect to our one and only son. I tore it out to the bare floor again. Later on, I built one according to the now tatty DIY book. The surround looked nice enough and was solid until the electrical code inspector told me the whirlpool tub needed a dedicated GFCI power source wired in. Remember that? I had to completely tear out the wall behind the tub and, and, the tub surround I had just carefully built. The poor tub remained on blocks for over two years, and survived coming in and out of the bathroom three times.

Karen convinced me that she REALLY needed it at this particular moment, and I finally made the surround happen for the final time. I was now an experienced tub surround builder. With the power wired correctly, I rebuilt the surround correctly with fresh lumber. I dropped the tub in, sealed it well, resecured the insulation underneath to keep hot baths hot, put the pine veneer around the sides, edged it on top with sweet smelling, milled red cedar, and finished it off with a couple coats of Helmsman sealer. It was not as smooth as Karen’s dresser/sink but nice all the same. This bathroom approached completion because its ceiling was dry walled and primered, and it had the code-required cfm-rated exhaust fan with an infrared heat lamp overhead all installed last year. The smooth-riding pocket door, installed months ago, sealed off this luxurious destination for opulent baths and real civilization in the Yooper Schooner. Karen submerged and didn’t come out all evening.

 

***

Dropping a bomb of sorts on us, Karen’s brother Wayne, his wife Mona, and daughter Allie announced they were visiting us for a week in mid-July. We didn’t prepare for my father’s visit, but this announcement started a completely new round of redirected frantic activity. I suddenly became re-motivated. We didn’t have any furniture in the house to speak of because of the dust and the work still needing to be done. Our furniture remained in huge cardboard boxes over in the polebarn. Karen wanted to have the living room set up in our Great Room for the visitation, and that meant finishing the floor because I adamantly told her I was not taking the furniture out once it came in. I deserved what I got for being adamant.

Originally, in our dream house period, we saw examples of etched, stained, and sealed concrete floors that were stunning; they didn’t look like concrete at all. No one in our region sold the products and online we found they were expensive and labor intensive. This process required massive concrete cleaning and acid treating, even before the labor intensive staining and sealing. Money and time ruled that out, and we turned back to the easy way out simple floor paint. After clearing the few things from the floor, Karen handled this job, start to finish, starting with a thorough vacuuming, and a couple washings and rinsings. Therefore, I guess I could not complain. After drying a few days, she primered the floor and after that dried, painted it an earthy rock tan. It appeared so much better than the old concrete, which remained in the back half of the house.

She couldn’t leave it one color though, so we speculated on patterns. Finally, after much deliberation, I suggested an Art Deco tree of life, because I was studying architecture at the time and was taken with the Art Deco styles. I sketched it out on piece of cardboard, and we sketched it on the floor. A huge wide trunk began at the hallway. and the whimsical tree branched out toward the prow front, weaving around the log posts, spiral stairs, and hearth. Karen has an artistic background, so she couldn’t paint the tree in one or two colors, noooo. She did a major dark brown base coat, a secondary brownish red coat, and then used various accent colors of reds and grays to replicate a rough bark. Her pain-staking painting took several days, but whoa, when she completed it�"an impressive knockout! I didn’t want to put the furniture on the fresh paint, but we were running out of time. After hauling the various pieces over by four-wheeler, we set the furniture on bits of cardboard to save the paint. At least that was the plan.

In a mad rush to meet our deadline, we ran down and bought two four panel solid wood doors for the downstairs bedroom and bathroom. Privacy was important with visitors staying for a few days. The doors we bought were relatively easy to install because they came installed in doorframes. This made installing the doors a cinch�"about a half an hour tasks each. This happened to be one of the shortcuts in building rather than building the frames and fitting the doors myself about two hours per door job if everything went well. Karen jumped right in to lightly sand the doors, stain them with puritan oak, and seal them with polyurethane. We were running short on time, but we wanted these few jobs done before our company arrived.

While Karen kept busy in one part of the house, I remained busy elsewhere. We bought a nice gas stove from the American Appliance store. If you wondered, there are no other appliance stores in the area. We had it delivered, and they set it in the gap I left between the kitchen cabinets�"a perfect fit. Outside, I dug a trench around the foundation, displacing all that gravel Karen and I put in for the rain splash, punched a hole through the wall behind the stove, and installed the propane lines and regulator. We retired the Coleman stove and cooked pancakes like civilized humans for the first time in five years!

At this moment, a storm brewed for the country overseas in Iraq, but a storm brewed for us with a vehemence that would test our precious Yooper Schooner and our mettle, but first, we had to endure�"ta da! The�"relatives. 

 

 

Chapter 22: Double-Troubles: First, the Visitors, Then�"

 

The weather was hot and humid with a forecast for the same all week. Our visitors arrived without much hoopla surprisingly bringing along their one clingy, insecure, slobbering dog. Wayne and Mona hadn’t seen our house other than the few pictures they may or may not even looked at. Their daughter Allie and her girlfriend Stephanie couldn’t care less about the house other than its roughness and the obvious lack of creature comforts because after all, they had to sleep on the upstairs floor with no privacy. Wayne and Mona slept in our bedroom, so we were dispatched back to our Little Room in the Polebarn for the night.

I always wondered if our relatives on both sides were either jealous or indifferent to our house building undertaking; I couldn’t tell and couldn’t decide. Nevertheless, we played the gracious hosts and Karen, as usual, gave an in-depth personal tour. I remained aloof while the girls draped themselves across the couch and loveseat to watch a video they brought along, a fashionably violent ghetto story. The next day began with my mug of coffee from my pal Mr. Coffee and shared conversation with other adults, something we didn’t normally have a chance to do.

Interrupting, Allie called from above in the loft, “Dad come up here.”

Wayne groaned while getting up, mumbling, “now what?”

He went up the railing-less spiral stairs, and we heard indecipherable loud voices in the bathroom. He came down before saying anything.

“Uncle Neal,” Wayne always called me by my high school nickname. “You need to do some plumbing upstairs.” With that, I jumped to my feet, ready to shut the water off. My eyes were probably wild with concern over another waterfall into the downstairs.

Wayne realized my concern.

 “Not that big a deal, Uncle Neal. You just have to open the trap in the sink.” I think he did not want to admit, “Allie dropped her navel ring in the sink, and it went down the drain.” 

I did not understand. Mona giggled. Karen shielded her eyes and shook her head.

“What?” I asked.

Wayne stalled a second and with an embarrassed low voice, “Her pierced belly-button ring came off and went down the drain.”

“That’s what I thought you said,” I said.

 I gathered up a couple tools and went up there. The unconcerned girls were wrapped in towels sitting on their sleeping bags while plugged into their music, how odd. They didn’t even look up when I went in the bathroom, embarrassed in more than one way. I pulled the dresser drawers out, took the trap apart, and dumped the sludge into a plastic bucket. The gold ring was there and I rinsed it off in the bathtub. After reassembling everything and cleaning up, I handed the ring to Allie.

“Here you go.”

“Thanks, Uncle Neal,” she said to the ring.

Mona announced she needed a shower after the ring episode. Karen adamantly told her that with all of us wanting showers, we needed to keep them short. Remember our not so productive well? We hadn’t run out of water, but we didn’t want to see what would happen if we did. Mona took a forty-five minute shower. Karen seethed while we were outside on the patio sipping more coffee. Come to find out her bad-behaved dog, experienced “canine separation anxiety” and scratched both the bathroom and bedroom doors Karen had just sanded, stained and double-coated them in sealer a week prior. Karen and I could not believe that Mona didn’t hear the dog destroying the doors.

The ring incident was about the most interaction I had with my niece, and Karen and I couldn’t bear to talk to Mona after the door-gouging. We all went on an outing to the Lake Superior Lakeshore searching for beach stones and beach glass. Mona collects interesting stone for her rock garden and collected quite the pile. Despite frigid Lake Superior that never warms to sixty degrees, the girls when swimming. I could hardly bear the cold water while wading. Meanwhile, the over-clingy dog stayed home. When we came back home, we found the dog had gone ballistic while we were gone, tearing off part of our patio door and gouging our bathroom and bedroom doors some more. Mona laughed, Wayne grumbled, Karen seethed, and I stewed.

Another day, Wayne and I went out four-wheeling with the nice old neighbor Pete. Wayne and Pete hit it off like old long-lost pals. Later, we all went to visit the horse rescue farm where Karen was planning to take a young, part draft horse named Katherine Hepburn. That is another job looming in our future!

One morning, the two girls made French toast.

“Hmmm, French Toast,” I commented.

 They did not reply, but when they turned off the stove, I noticed they made only enough for themselves. The week went by and the night before they left, we had a nice dinner on new, clear plastic plates. The girls thought it was fun to stab the plates with their knives to make the plates crack. Afterwards, we watched the news, which informed us that the hot, humid spell would be soon over with a strong cold front whipping through possibly producing thunderstorms. I breathed a sigh of relief anticipating both the humidity and relatives leaving.

The girls flopped on the couch and loveseat to watch another violent rap sound-tracked ghetto movie. Karen and I were perplexed over this behavior and misdirected interest. They lived in a suburban area in a ranch home, and they were engrossed with the ghetto lifestyle. Early the next morning, they packed up and drove off. It was nice seeing them all, and I took it easy that morning. I recall a sigh of relief from Karen to match mine, but that state of bliss wouldn’t last long.

 

The Storm

 

Sometimes, a stiff upper lip is just not good enough to weather a storm

 

Around noon, when I went out to the road to get the mail, I noticed cumulus clouds and a line of towering cumulus in the west. One of my meteorological instructors nicknamed these “dead poodles” and from a meteorological standpoint, not a good thing so early in the day. We continued cleaning up after the visitors. Bonnie Blue came out of hiding to relax because she spent most of the time during the visit out of sight in her bed. 

At about two in the afternoon, the light winds switched to the southeast and picked up a little, a harbinger of a frontal passage. My nose bothered me, which meant either thunderstorms or a snowstorm. It was still eighty-eight degrees and very humid�"there would be no snow today in the UP even though we were still in the rough-sledding period. We sweated, and the concrete floor sweated. The winds gradually rose a little to about fifteen miles an hour. At three-thirty, we noticed black-based cumulus on the horizon. I went out to scope them out, because I had nothing work-wise in process. The clouds were the standard foul weather towering cumulus, not yet reaching nimbus, thunderstorm height. At four-fifteen, a blast of south wind shook the trees around house, strong enough for us to hear inside at least, maybe twenty-five miles and hour, but then they died off.

At four-forty five, we heard a rumble of thunder. From inside the house, you could never see the weather situation too well through the leafed out trees, but through the leafy gaps, the western sky down toward the horizon was dark gray. Up through our hole in the woods, I could see the huge sprouting, bright white cumulonimbus tops. An in-cloud lightning bolt blasted white-yellow against the black clouds. Karen joined me at the patio door.

“Going to be a bad one?” She asked.

I shrugged. I didn’t like the looks of what I saw, but without checking meteorological tools like computer charts and Doppler Radar, my guess was just that, a guess. Karen, the ever-efficient girl she is, went in and started filling everything that held water�"plastic ice cream containers, Bonnie’s water dishes, and plastic water containers. She gathered up candles and our three railroad lanterns. Habit mostly, because when thunderstorms boom in the UP, the lights go out.

When I noticed what she had done, I said, “It’s not going to be that bad.” These were my most infamous last words coming at five oh five. I took Bonnie out to the patio as I counted seconds between flash and bangs�"twelve seconds. Bonnie foregoed stink-weeding and tinkled right there in the patio’s gravel. She begged to go inside as I counted and studied the slivers of gnarly sky through the gaps in waving trees. Eight seconds�"the storm was a fast mover of a dangerous type. Bonnie gladly snuck inside. A blast of fresh cool air blew into my face from the ravine, south-southeast winds about thirty miles an hour. These winds were coming from high in the atmosphere. Strong non-thunderstorm winds like that aren’t good when coupled with frequent lightning producing thunderstorms.

Karen yelled, “Come in here and get out of the weather, Neal!”

Huge, cold raindrops, probably ice cubes split seconds and thousands of feet ago, fell at a steep angle. They hurt and chilled me. The black blanket rolled overhead and the bright nimbus tops disappeared. Flash�"five seconds apart�"boom. I decided to follow Karen’s advice and went inside. I slid the door shut. Flash, craaack! At the same time, within a mile. 

“Whoa baby!” I always say that with close lightning strikes. Five-ten and the first wind gusts out of southwest hit us. The trees waved around and shook three or four times in quick succession. Winds were maybe forty miles per hour.

“Nothing to worry about,” I told Karen though she read my face a little too long.

“Good thing my brother and family left this morning,” she said ascetically.

 Simultaneous lightning and thunder flashed in the windows of the Yooper Schooner, and the thunder rattled the dishes in the laundry tub. I watched all around as the trees surrounding the house whipped and swayed. Loose leaves flopped against the patio door and flew away.

The sky turned a sick green under the black cloud bases�"a really bad omen. The rain pelted the house, sounding like pellets from a hundred b-b guns on the steel roof and Tyvek plastic siding. The raindrops literally became bullets when the rain became pea-sized hail, then quickly dime sized, and then swiftly nickel sized hail banging onto the windows. After a minute, the hail subsided becoming slush on impact. The winds died off, down to about ten miles an hour. The thunder and lightning had moved off to the east, ten seconds apart. I took a deep breath�"no worry, it was over.

My heart slowed a bit. I glanced to the west, and a chill when up my back. The sky looked unbelievably blacker than ever�"as they say biblically, “black as sackcloth.” Another rash of thunder and lightning approached; there were too many flashes and too many bangs to match and count, too many to distinguish apart, and it began a continuous deafening banging like kettledrums during an orchestral epic. The sky boiled with a stew of black, gray, and green clouds. Beware the green and black clouds.

A new gust front hit rolling in from the west. The trees bent and swayed a few times. A roar, unlike I had ever heard before came from the west. Karen and I looked at each other; I knew I had a frightened expression. Karen looked brave. Now on her feet, Bonnie’s bat-like ears rotated like miniature radars while sensing our concern, scanning out those front vulnerable huge, energy efficient windows at all the tree movement swaying, dancing back and forth in wild jigs.

The roar grew louder and nearer in seconds. The digital light in the stove went out, the only visual indicator of electricity. The three of us moved into the kitchen and bathroom-separating hallway, a strong area in the new house’s structure and blocked from potentially breaking glass. The wind gusts hit hard, maybe fifty miles an hour, as great wads of leafy branches hit the windows and rattled before flying away. You could no longer hear the thunder over the wind. Lightning flashed all around. Standing in the hallway, we had a good view of the trees out front waving back and forth, and yet, the winds increased.

A hard maple out front, about six inches thick, snapped off at about ten feet above the ground. The smaller trees, five inches and smaller were whipping back and forth with their upper branches crashing into one and another, then touching the ground. I heard a crack and peeked around the edge of the house. A soft maple about six inches thick broke off and fell across the driveway. Then, the wind’s speed and roar increased.

And just as suddenly, the gustiness dropped with another heavy railroad locomotive roar approaching. The winds picked up speed, quickly higher, and increasing more yet, incessantly pushing hard on the trees like huge, strong hands pushing them down, keeping them down toward the ground. I ventured glances out the front, down the hallway and out the back windows. Trees were snapping off all around outside, and now bigger trees were going down, pulling up huge mounds of dirt and roots. The winds were somewhere over sixty now, I guessed, branches were hitting the house and flying across from view. Grim reality had me point to the back of the house.

We backed down the hallway and sat on the floor, in the open closet as a refuge. Bonnie lay at our feet alert, looking all around as trees cracked and snapped around outside. This was the strongest part of the house near the concrete wall that provided a protection that even if the house went down we would have forty-six inches of concrete to tuck under. There were log beams above and hallway walls on three sides of us. In this position, we could only catch glimpses out the backdoor’s window and out the kitchen windows. This closet could be the last part of the house standing if the winds increased anymore and the house went down. And yet, the winds increased still.

Unbelievably, the winds hit still harder, maybe eighty-plus and the eight-inch hard maple by the backdoor cracked loud like a cannon and went down toward where the Dakota was parked. We only saw the upper trunk and branches fall out of sight. I expected to hear a metallic crunch from the truck, but I didn’t. Just hours ago, for a week, our visitors had parked in that same exact spot. Those few seconds of hard, straight-line winds pounded around us, then, bam! Boom, boom! A picture fell off the west wall, the glass shattering across the floor. I saw the shadow of a two huge maples, fifteen inches in diameter, had crashed into the house. This double tree had stood on the edge of the patio where the bank dropped into the ravine, and now it lay against the roof.

I envisioned a smashed truck, crushed roof, and broken roof trusses. As quick as the blasting winds started, they subsided. The bam, bump, bump continued on the roof where the huge tree lay on it. I looked out front and most of the trees were still bent over in curving bows despite the lighter winds. Some of those trees remained that way, bent permanently. We could now hear the thunder rumble away in the distance. The winds were still gusty but only about twenty, twenty-five now, and any leaves or small branches that were loose were long gone to the next county. I walked out into the kitchen, surveying the huge tree leaning on the house. In the lighter gusty winds, the tree was moving, still bumping on the roof. I didn’t realize it at the time, but that was a good sign.

In about fifteen minutes, the winds dropped off more, and we ventured outside. Bonnie tinkled again; I think she was stressed. I used the old outhouse myself. The tree by the backdoor lay across the top of the truck, but I didn’t look too closely. A couple trees lay across the driveway. A huge hard maple had peeled out of the ground and laid alongside Karen’s car, parallel, not two feet away from it. Half of the maple’s root system had risen out of the ground with the root ends touching the front bumper and fender�"a narrow escape. I emboldened myself and examined the Dakota. Pulling the branches aside, I found the tree had creased the roof and door edge, but the windshield had survived. On the other side of the truck, the thickest branches were compressed on Karen’s over-engineered garden fence, cushioning the tree’s impact on the truck.

I did not know if I could face the situation of the big tree on the house. When I went around and looked up, it appeared bad with those huge brushy branches extending up over the roof’s peak. I could not see the damage because of the foliage, but just considering the size�"well, I could not face it right then. On checking the street, I saw many trees down and surmised that The Board of Light and Power crews would not be able to get through to fix the power. There was one electric line down right across the street by the farmer’s place. I grabbed and gassed my Stihl chainsaw and fired off the clunky tractor. I bounced across the three trees in the driveway to get to the street and commenced to cutting and dragging logs off the street. The farmer came out to see what was going on and not to be bested, ran to get his saw. We didn’t say a word until I tried to be sociable.

“Have any damage?”   I asked.

“No, not a thing.” He said, then silence. “I saw trees fell on your house and truck.” How’d he see that? “That’s what you get for building a house with trees all around.” Mr. Jealous added.

I found out later from his son that he had a couple barn doors blow off and destroyed, dork! I started my saw and pondered the exchange. I pulled off about ten trees in both directions before the sun went down. Tomorrow was another day to access the house’s internal damage. Karen had lanterns and candles going all around. Using a match, she fired off the stove in the house because the burners had electric ignitions. After eating a simple bowl of chicken noodle soup, the proverbial comfort food, we went to bed early, but I didn’t sleep, imagining the damage to the roof and wall structure. Like usual, I finally got to sleep after six AM.

 

***

 

We still didn’t have power that morning, so we listened to the news on the battery radio. We were astonished at no mention what so ever of the storm! Getting to the easy storm clean up things first, I got the trees out of the driveway. Then, lifting the tree off the truck with the tractor bucket and a chain, I carefully trimmed the tree branches away from the truck until I could back it out from underneath. I chunked the tree into manageable pieces and threw them off the driveway.

The biggest job came in the afternoon, which was refreshingly cool, sunny and bright. The roof had dried, so I threw the rope over and tied myself in. Karen hung on to the other end after wrapping the rope around the tall stump that used to be the maple by the backdoor. I tied a rope to the chainsaw, climbed up, and hand over hand pulled the saw up. I cut away the small branches, throwing them off the roof on both sides until I got to the peak.

I eventually uncovered the main trunks. One was elevated about a foot off the roof, the other up about two inches, probably coming up because the weight of the branches I removed. I examined the damage, now completely revealed. The trees had hit right between the trusses and bent the steel and sheathing down about four inches. I looked closer and saw the tree had originally hit on the truss and slid aside. I would still have to look inside, crawling within the trusses with that itchy insulation, but imagining the worse I had no idea how to fix the trusses if damaged. I had visions of roof removal, truss replacements or special repairs. As I pressed on, the tree’s pieces I cut up there on the roof got shorter in length as the diameter increased until I got to firewood length�"eighteen inches. When I got right on the roof’s edge, I wondered how I could cut it and not send the piece through a window on a bounce. With Karen’s help because she didn’t have to hold the rope when I was on the ladder, we roped the lengths, cut them, and hinged them away from the house piece by piece for the rest of the day.

The next day, we were still without power. Neighbor Pete had a generator for health concerns and said the Board of Light and Power was still five miles away with four crews working on the electrical cable damage. He said there were quite a few poles snapped off. I wasn’t surprised. There was no word of the storm or power outage on the news. We put our frozen things in our camp cooler as the refrigerator defrosted, borrowed water from Pete, and used the outhouses just like the olden days, two years ago.

I steeled myself to go up inside the trusses. I crawled across with those truss plates indenting my knees and palms, and turned down to crawl to the eaves with one hand and one knee on each truss, otherwise I’d go through the ceiling. Surprisingly, and much to my relief, found nothing other than the broken sheathing area between the trusses. There was no structural damage, no cracks, and no nails dislodged. The truss and wall’s double-plate looked exactly the same as on that October day when we had installed the trusses. I slept better in a house without electrical power, and we were without power for thirteen days. The local media never mentioned us!

After the storm, there were some massive trees down on our property, especially on our first downhill trail where a jumble of twenty to twenty-four inch aspens lay across the trail. I couldn’t clear the trails for months. Pete and I took a four-wheeler ride out on trails to the west and found that we sure didn’t get the worse tree damage, and later found not the worse domicile damage. Out there in the west, in the deep woods was the epicenter: oaks, maples, and everything was knocked down flat like mowed massive grass. They all had fallen in the same direction, proving the big winds came from a microburst and not a tornado as most locals insisted. Several people told us they had windows broken and significant roof damage. When the power finally came back on, we restocked the fridge and got back to normal, whatever we considered normal with another shift in priority

 

Author's Note

Okay, we finally endured some real excitement. Did I explain it well enough?

Reviews

[wondering]

okay so the trip in the trusses was over explained despite your discomfort, i kind of skipped by but the storm had me eager to read on, sounds like an adventure anyway.