The Skeeter Daddle Diaries

I was visiting a friend who has a farm on the north end of the island last week, got a tour of the new calves that will be hamburger for us next year, a spin around the gardens and orchard, then a detour past a dilapidated building he planned to tear down.  He figured he could just jerk a couple of beams in the middle with his tractor and the whole kit and caboodle would collapse, easy as pie.  Naturally I told him about tying a rope to my old shed, hitching it to the pickup and driving away … only to have the entire shed, instead of collapsing in a heap, fall toward my truck, missing me by only a couple of feet.  Always happy to give advice based on my own idiotic misadventures….

Which got me to telling the story of the day when I had already finished framing and roofing our new house back in the last century and needed to cut away some studs in the downstairs for the massive masonry stove’s brick wall to be exposed to the bedroom for heat.  No big deal, I thought, as usual neglecting small details like bearing loads and beam calculations, just knock out a 2×6 or two, probably add some structural support …  you know, later.  But after removing the first stud, I didn’t notice the adjoining studs were starting to bow.  At least not until I knocked out the second 2×6.  Then I could actually watch the next ones in line bending with the weight they couldn’t support by themselves.

I tried to jam the last missing stud back into place but too late, the first story floor had descended too far for that so I ran into the next room, lopped off a few inches of the 2×6 and rammed it into place.  Whereupon it too began to bow.  If you can imagine what it’s like to watch your entire house slowly collapsing, you might have some notion of the panic I was feeling.  The question that ran through my fevered head went something like this:  at what point do you save yourself even if you lose the house, your life’s savings, your months of work and sweat?

One more shortened stud, I figured, and if that didn’t work I would have to get out from under the falling tonnage of a two story house succumbing to gravity.  It too was bowing once it got in partly in place and I’d beaten on it with an 8 pound maul I used for splitting rounds of firewood.  Amazingly, miraculously, the slow descent of the house stopped.  I rammed another stud into place and listened for creaking or cracking.  Nothing.  Completely wasted, I sat down to ponder what had just transpired.  And to count my lucky stars.  Later I would have to rebrace that bearing wall.  But … definitely later.

There is a nearly incalculably small margin between luck and catastrophe, success or failure, happiness or misery.  For me that margin is about an inch and a half.  The distance I never quite managed to raise the floor back to its original level.  It’s okay, it’s just fine.  You watch your world tilt on its axis, you maybe won’t mind if it doesn’t come back completely to its former orbit, just so long as you weren’t spun off.

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