Cabin_ Two Brothers, a Dream, and Five Acres in Maine - Lou Ureneck [64]
At first, I was confused by the sight of it, sensing only that something was wrong, and then I focused on what was wrong and saw the disaster that had occurred. All of the rafters we had erected had been knocked down. Some of them lay flat across the tops of the walls, and others had dropped all the way to the deck. One of the beams, at the far end of the cabin, had blown out and was lying in the snow. Apparently the trusses, which were big heavy triangles, had acted as wedges as they collapsed, forcing apart the timbers.
I was taking this in when Paul came up behind me.
“Catastrophe,” I said.
“What?”
“Have a look.”
We walked up together.
“Son of a bitch,” I said. I walked among the welter of twisted lumber.
Paul looked at me and smiled. “Well, what’s a construction job without at least one disaster?” He was oddly upbeat. “We can fix it.”
Kevin, who had been lugging the generator up the hill, now joined us on the deck. “What happened?” he asked.
“It must have been one hell of a wind,” I said.
The sky was gray and threatening rain, which might come down as sleet or cold drizzle at any moment, and here I was confronted with the loss of all our overhead work and damage to the frame. I had been worrying all week about the harm that rain—rather than snow—might do to the deck if the roof didn’t soon go up. If the deck’s plywood were to get wet, and stay wet, it would begin to delaminate. It would have to be torn up and replaced with new plywood—more time and money. I had a diminishing supply of both. It had been dicey but acceptable in the coldest part of the winter to leave the deck uncovered. Snow would not damage it, but now we were moving into a season when it was likely to get wet from melting snow or rain. I had wanted to hurry the roof along in the next couple of days—and now this event, which would delay the completion of the roof even further. How much time would the fallen rafters cost me—a week, two weeks, more?
I told Paul I remembered nailing scrap two-by-fours across the tops of them to prevent them from racking in the wind.
“Yeah, we did,” Paul said, “but it wasn’t enough for whatever blew through here.”
Paul and Kevin seemed not at all set back, and Kevin began working out a way to untangle the mess. He offered his ideas to Paul, who listened and offered some of his own, and the two of them were in deep conference, buoyed by the challenge of it. It was as if they were two mathematicians standing in front of a chalkboard examining a long equation for the errant variable. This is what they liked: problem solving. Finally Paul put forward a rescue plan. We would leave the fallen rafters where they were for the time being, and first we would brace the walls against any further splaying. Then we would go to the opposite end of the cabin and bring into place, atop the wall, the other rafter assemblies we had constructed the previous week, the ones we had yet to set up. Once they were well secured and braced, we would return to the damaged end of the cabin, swing the fallen rafters that had not been twisted too badly back up into position and pull down those that had gotten too mangled. We would build new ones where necessary.
To my astonishment, we had the new rafters in place before noon, and by midafternoon we had repositioned the fallen ones. Kevin was the