Summary of The Night the Roof Blew Off
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The Night the Roof Blew Off
The Night the Roof Blew OffWith the help of his grandchildren, the author struggles to save his books during a fierce storm.
Answer:
The Night the Roof Blew Off
At any rate, it was the unique construction of the Tin Palace which made this particular event possible. It was basically just an oversized shack jacked up on a pier foundation, with sheets of tin nailed over a lightweight wooden framework, and windows of various sizes interspersed at random points, an art gallery in the front, living space in the back. When we moved in, we added insulation on one wall, but left the rest of the house largely as it was, and we didn’t touch the roof at all. In retrospect, this was unwise, because the lack of insulation left the house literally freezing in the winter, but enough insulation for one wall was all my father could afford.
The roof was made from overlapping sheets of tin, just like the walls. Some clever person also installed some clear corrugated sheeting, which acted sort of like a skylight, making the Tin Palace much lighter inside than it would have been otherwise, with a diffused sort of light which was actually rather nice. The panels of the roof were simply nailed to the rafters, like anyone would do when building a shack.
When it rained, of course, the rain would pound on the roof. We got used to it, after a certain point; you kind of have to, or you would spend much of the winter not sleeping. Thus it was that one winter night, my father and I were fast asleep despite the extremely high decibel level of the rain. Someone unfamiliar with it might have thought that it was a machine gun strafing the roof, but to us, it felt like a gentle murmur.
I woke up because of a change in sensation. It’s sort of hard to explain what it was, exactly, that woke me up. A splashing sort of wetness, I want to say now, but it wasn’t quite that. At any rate, I swung off the couch for a moment, trying to orient myself in the din of the rain. It was pitch black, with the heavy clouds obscuring any light from the moon or the streetlights, and I walked forward a few steps, trying to figure out what was different.
It was at that point that I encountered a rather large pool of water. I took a hesitant step into the pool and then felt the unpleasant sensation of extremely cold water cascading down my back and bouncing off my legs before splashing into the puddle, which I realized was rapidly spreading.
My first concern was for the books and records, which I knew were only feet away. I waded gingerly across in the dark, and lit a candle off the remains of the fire to check, relieved to see that the uneven floor left them on high ground, for the time being, and then I dashed upstairs to shake my father awake. When he woke up, we both looked skyward, and realized that a large section of the roof was gone. It was actually kind of hard to tell, at first, because it was so dark that the line between roof and sky was hard to find, but eventually we realized that the section of the ceiling which looked different looked that way because it wasn’t there. I’m not quite sure how my father didn’t wake up, given that sheets of rain were being driven across his bed, but evidently he was a sound sleeper.
Rain was streaming into the house, and we lit a couple of guttering lamps while we secured the books, piling them up on tables and pedestals we dragged in from the gallery before covering them with anything vaguely waterproof we could find, including the sleeping bags. Once the books were dealt with, we went back upstairs to survey the damage.
What had happened, of course, was that a panel loosened in the high wind and ripped, taking another panel with it, and so on, in a domino effect. My father woke one of the neighbors, and the three of us slithered around on the roof in the middle of the night to tie a tarp down to keep the rain out for the night, until we could go to the hardware store in the morning to pick up new sheeting. The weather actually lightened up a bit the next day, long enough for us to nail new panels down, and to add reinforcement in the form of blocks bolted to the eaves through the roofing panels.
We only found one of the errant roofing panels, because it wedged itself into the fence around the cow pasture. As for the rest, I have no idea where they ended up; presumably someone found something to do with them, as the panel we did manage to find was in reasonably good shape.
The night the roof blew off became one of the enduring household legends, tinged with a certain amount of terror that it would happen again. In every storm with high wind, we would tense as the roof groaned and buckled while the wind whistled through the myriad cracks of the house, waiting to see if it would happen again. Our bolted reinforcements seemed to work, though. Although a few panels loosened and flapped in the wind in a couple of bad storms, none of them blew off again.