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Seasons and chimneys on the mind

Overnight, or so it seems, 2006 has entered its dotage. The aspens, dogwood, saskatoons and the lone out of place maple bordering the Dog have dropped their drab, end of season colour and switched on their ironically warm reds and golds.
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Overnight, or so it seems, 2006 has entered its dotage. The aspens, dogwood, saskatoons and the lone out of place maple bordering the Dog have dropped their drab, end of season colour and switched on their ironically warm reds and golds. Any day now, a wind storm that seems to come out of nowhere will strip away all pretence of warmer months and they’ll dance naked in the crisp autumn air, revealing neighbours’ houses I generally forget are just on the other side of their bushy borders.

Fall arrived officially while I was traversing the prairie. Fall in the prairie isn’t announced so much by a change of colour as it is by a change of texture. Fields of wheat, oats, canola and other cereal crops stop swaying in the relentless wind and become stubble as combines lumber toward the distant curve of the earth… then it snows.

Unhappy cottage owners have shuttered summer away, drained their water systems, trailered their fishing boats and shrugged grudgingly toward winter. Locals, so few in number and rich in years they can’t keep the neighbourhood firehall running anymore, are laying in firewood, tuning up snowblowers, hoping they can get another year out of their Ski-Doos and wondering who among them will still be around when things green up again.

Me, I’m dreamin’ so much about skiing I can smell ski wax in my sleep.

Or maybe that’s still fear.

As Dog days dwindle toward just a few, all the jobs I’ve been procrastinating doing — pretty much all of them — loom large. Largest of all has been the job I’ve been trying to avoid all summer… and all last summer if truth be told.

I was puzzled a year ago when I arrived to open the cottage and found something that looked vaguely like a chunk of asphalt lying beside the house. There being nothing paved for several hundred feet, it was a curiosity the origins of which I couldn’t begin to fathom.

Later in the summer, the penny dropped. The long discarded object could only be the top of my chimney. At least that was my best guess. The top of my chimney is high. Very high. Running along the outside of the house, the chimney and house depart company at the lower roofline. The hip roof goes off in two angles — steep and steeper — and the chimney just keeps going and going and finally ends somewhere near the 40-foot elevation. It is the CN tower of chimneys. And when I looked up, with the aid of binoculars, wondering if it was the source of the puzzling detritus, I could clearly see one of its topmost bricks was loose.

Being a relatively handy kind of guy, there was only one thing to do. I ignored it. I knew this wasn’t the kind of thing that was going to fix itself but I knew it was the kind of thing I needed to be in denial about. I knew somewhere in the depths of denial there lurked a solution and if I actively avoided doing anything about the crumbling chimney, that solution would eventually make itself known to me. If this problem-solving technique sounds familiar to you, it’s probably because it’s a tried and true variation on the Guy’s Medical Problem Avoidance Tactic, also known as the My Prostate’s Just Fine, Thank You dodge.

As summer wore on, I resigned myself to the fact that no solution was going to magically appear. At least not until I’d somehow gotten up to the top of the chimney to see for myself what things looked like up there. Problem was, I didn’t have a ladder nearly tall enough to get there. Or so I thought.

Smilin’ Dog Manor came with all sorts of things the previous owners didn’t care enough about to move: a couple pair of ancient skis, a bit of firewood, several rolls of barbed wire, assorted broken lawn chairs, splintered but carefully stored lumber, an antique leather horse collar, a rusty spoked truck wheel and what may well have been the prototype of all extension ladders. I remembered seeing it hanging up in the garage and seemed to recall it was long.

I found it right where I thought it was. It was longer — and older — than I remembered. It was made of wood and looked like it weighed a tonne. Hanging off pegs near its ends, the middle of its span swayed gently, but noticeably, under the pull of gravity.

“You’d have to be insane to use that thing,” I thought to myself.

Being fully qualified, I grunted the slimmer of its two sections down and wrestled it out onto the yard. It was over twenty feet long and weighed even more than I imagined. The wider section was bulkier, heavier and left a monster sliver sticking out of my palm when I finally bulldogged it out.

I’d never put two pieces of an extension ladder together but looking at the grooves along the uprights and the pulley and cradle atop the wider section, I eventually got them together and roped up so they worked. At least while they were lying on the ground. Ready to see if they worked standing up, I lifted one end. A tonne, it turned out, was a conservative estimate.

I had to find my How to Fool Yourself Into Thinking You can Fix Anything book and read up on the technique for erecting an extension ladder that is too long and too heavy to just prop up against the side of the house using muscle power alone. It didn’t sound promising. I was going to need help. The only help available was my Perfect Partner and I was pretty certain she wasn’t going to look favourably on me going 40 feet up in the air on an antique extension ladder of dubious reliability. I was right.

When she finally relented — after several test climbs to lesser heights — I tentatively got to the top of the chimney. Inspecting the brickwork and liner one thing became perfectly clear: this job was going to take a whole lot more procrastination than I had summer left.

Which is why a year later, for the last two days, I’ve been standing atop my chimney watching my life pass before my eyes. It took that long to figure out an approach that was merely life-threatening. I haven’t been this scared of an exposed place since I watched Rob Boyd slip entering Exhilaration… and then grin at me and say, “Your turn.”

I wish I was there again.