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.