115 You Shake My House; I’ll Shake Yours

If you are a rocker, you need a guitar to “shake it and make it,” but if you are a roofer, you need a fro to “shake it and make it,” for the best roof bar none, was a cedar shake roof. Bill Mason and I were not rockers as neither of us could play the guitar, but we were soon to start shaking, as each of us was building a new house and we were aiming for a premium roof of cedar shakes.

When I told Bill Mason that I was making my own shakes and I knew where I could get number one premium cedar free, he was onside. I told him if he would supply the truck and the muscle I would supply the saw and the cedar, so off we went one weekend to the Upper Klanawa, in the Franklin River Division of MacMillan Bloedel.

After checking in with the head ranger at the camp we headed off up the Klanawa where we found two beautiful cedar logs in old slash, that you would die for, if you were a shaker that is. One was six feet in diameter and about thirty six feet long and the second one was four foot in diameter by about forty two feet long, together they filled Bill’s truck with premium cedar bolts, but I never worked so hard in my life cutting the logs into blocks with Bill splitting them into bolts and the both of us hauling them out to the road and onto the truck. We worked like dogs until dark, but went home feeling that we had really scored.

A few months later however we realized that we still needed another truckload as I had finished my house and it was obvious Bill’s house would have only half a roof. Now that might not be as bad as it sounds as he lived in Keremeos where it hardly ever rains, but the winters can be touch and go.

What better time to go after more shakes then on a Thanksgiving weekend in October with what looked like perfect weather. So off we went with both of our families for a camping weekend and a little shaking up the Klanawa.

There was a lovely Mac and Blo Campsite, south side of the Nitinat, where we planned to camp with our families over the Sabbath. The campsite was a pristine spot with a beautiful sand beach surrounded by giant Sitka Spruce trees. Some of these trees were gigantic as the campsite was in a west coast rainforest and moss was hanging from all the trees.

Saturday was a lovely day and it was incredible to just sit by the fire and enjoy the family. The Nitinat Lagoon was too cold to swim in but the lagoon was just an awesome place to hangout. After lunch we all decided to take a walk down the south side of the lagoon. After walking for about a quarter mile we reached the Caycuse River, which enters the Nitinat. Here we had to turn back as the river was too large to cross. I still remember the grove of beautiful moss covered, giant spruce trees growing where the Caycuse dumped into the lagoon.

The whole area was very awe-inspiring but I am ashamed to say what really turned me on was what I saw in a small rocky nook. The winter storms had packed the rocky nook solid with cedar logs of all shapes and sizes. This really made my day, as I knew our search for cedar was over.

Bright and early Sunday morning we took off with Bill’s truck to our cache of what turned out to be prime cedar. What complicated things a bit were that winter storms had beached a number of giant full-length spruce trees and with their root as anchors their tops reached the shore. There were several of these but only one presented a real problem as it reached way out into the lagoon. Going was easy as Bill could drive way out into the lagoon and around the root as the tide was out, but coming back was a different story.

The cedar was better even then we had expected and we were able to back the truck right up to where we were cutting, which made the truck easy to load. I was thinking this was a cakewalk until I noticed that the sunny weather of the day before seemed to have vanished during our busy day and it now looked seriously like rain. More about that later.

Well, the truck was loaded, but the challenge now, how to get the heavily loaded truck back to our campsite. The tide had surreptitiously come in during our endeavor and there were now two feet of salt water and a very soft beach to drive on if we ever wanted to get past the largest of the grounded spruce. I said to Bill, “Either we chance it now, or we unload and reload the truck to make it lighter.” Bill only said, “Just watch me.” And with that he got in his truck and put the pedal to the metal and went roaring around the huge Sitka Spruce root with the water flying everywhere. Even with the pedal to the floor I thought Bill had met his match and the sea would win, but no, the truck suddenly picked up speed, sending water everywhere as it literally flew around the old Sitka Spruce root and onto dry ground.

Boy did I ever breathe a sigh of relief, for a moment I had visions of having to leave the truck over night, stuck up to its axels in the mud, and with the job of having to unload and reload it. What a nightmare, that would have been, and to think that Bill could have also lost his truck to the sea.

We made it into camp just as the sun was setting and what had been a light rain was now a steady west coast drizzle. The best thing to do now was to hunker down around a campfire and be glad we were not unloading a stuck in the mud truck. I can still remember sitting around the roaring campfire in the pouring rain under a huge sheet of plastic that we had tied up over the whole camping area. This seemed to work after a fashion but the trick was to not get drowned, because the plastic over the campsite dumped its load of water from time to time and if you were in the wrong place you would get soaked.

I would not criticize anyone if they complained about sitting around a Bob Betts fire under a plastic tarp in the pouring rain. But as I was enjoying my steaming bowl of hot soup with a thick slice of buttered bread in the dark with family and friends I realized how fortunate I was.

The rest of the weekend was so anticlimactic that I have remembered little, except to say, that our tents for the most part, kept the rain out, the cedar was just enough to finish Bill’s house, and we made it home the following day without any mishap.

The splitting of the last load of shakes had been done in unseasonable weather and the sooner we got going on Bill’s roof the better. So off to Keremeos I went on a fine Remembrance Day weekend with Sandy and all the kids for a fun week on Bill’s roof.

Bill had recently purchased a ten-acre fruit orchard, which was home to an old picker’s shack and a mother skunk with her family of little skunks and maybe the odd rattler.

I still remember trying to get some sleep after we stretched our sleeping bags out over the mother skunk’s den, and that of her family of skunklets who lived directly under the shack’s floor. It was really hard to get past the pungent smell of skunk as it wafted up through the holes in the wooden floorboards. It took Bill some time but he was finally able to evict the basement dwellers and the smell over time slowly receded into a distant memory.

As it was November the winter weather was hard upon us but we were fortunate that only the upper mountains about the valley got a dusting of white, as the weather held.

We awoke bright and early Sunday morning and I still remember how everyone got into the spirit of the project. I can still see my wife Sandy, with Bill’s wife June, hard at it on the roof, while the kids pitched in wherever we asked them too. It really felt good when the last nail got hammered in well before the Sun went down on Friday and we could now sit back and watch it rain or snow, we didn’t care, because it now didn’t made the slightest difference, what a nice feeling when you come out on top.

The bonds that form when done with a common purpose are those that last a lifetime. To this day Sandy and I include Bill and his family with our closest friends, more akin to family. Even with the passing of time, Bill remains a true friend, perhaps more like a brother.