Scaffolding On Her Shoe

It was a builders’ autumn in the Methow Valley. October may be the most beautiful month of the year, with warm September-like days and crisp, biting nights. October seemed to last until just a few days ago when the snow came to stay and the high temperatures are no longer highs at all. There was still building going on by builders, but appropriate to the Methow, most of it was modest in scale, high in craftsmanship, and low on speculation. Local groups that fight for restraint in land development may have saved the soul of the Methow Valley as well as the construction industry here, considering the way land was greedily misused across the country in the last few years. There are no acres covered by tract homes that have failed to sell. Instead, there are still vast acres of meadows and forests and there is still some really good land still being tended to by family farmers.

Cicely and I spent the last two months of Builders’ Autumn putting together a little building: an East-meets-West sort of concept. I had put this job off until the overnight lows would make stonemasonry complicated, which is about the time I like to get my hands on a hammer and dimensional lumber. The site of the project is astonishing, gently occupied by a discreet timber fame home styled after a Japanese monastery. The property owners desired a “shed” for their stuff that had begun to accumulate on the wrap-around porch. I asked the owner what sheds look like in Japan, and he told me that they look like sheds in America. He showed me pictures from his travels there that were disappointing in accuracy to that description. I went online and typed in “Traditional Japanese Architecture” and this search caused by computer to be taken over by a highly destructive virus. After that, I designed what I thought a Japanese outbuilding might look like, with a bit of a western shed-like commonness. I built this a stick of wood at a time, trying not to think to far ahead, changing my mind from time to time as I went. Now that it is practically done, except for some interior finishing, the owners are trying to decide what to call it: the love shack, the temple, the shed?

We got the roof on three days before the weather changed. There was just time to finish getting the siding on, and we loaded the scraps into the back of the pickup for a celebratory bonfire in the front of our home after the first snowfall. We gathered any other scraps lying around our home from our garage-to-studio conversion. The bonfire was the last opportunity I’d likely take to be bare outside, orange heat on skin, before several months of gray, white, and deep blue.

The door for the shed was my first project in our studio since the garage door was replaced with a wall and wood casement windows. Yesterday we insulated the studio, so with the woodstove we ought to be able to meet the cold with a sense of victory, as this will be the first fully heated and insulated shop I have ever had in fifteen years of being a craftsman.

Our daughter, in her own way of confusing and meshing two incompatible concepts, like the design inspiring the shed, complained that she had “scaffolding stuck to the bottom of her shoe”. Her vocabulary has grown too fast this year for her understanding, and this happens to me sometimes, too. Scaffolding is a portable platform system created for vertical advantage in construction. The material stuck to her shoe was insulation, a glassy material made of strands of air. The nice thing about being ten is that the snow waffles are now sticking to the bottom of her shoe as well. She was prohibited from doing her snow dance until the roof was on, though I am sure she disobeyed me in secret. I hope she did. In a few more days when the Winthrop open-air ice rink opens a quarter-mile away, an ice skate will be stuck to the bottom of her shoe, and alternately a cross-country skate ski. Now that the Builders’ Autumn is over, there is frozen ground to be tread lightly upon, a reprieve to contemplate more than to build, more time to dance, in a father-meets-daughter kind of way.