By Karen Youso
Say that you’re sitting on your living room window seat. You tilt back your head and look up at the sky. You see a plane arcing across the patch of blue that lies between the green treetops. Just visible are the tiny windows that run along the fuselage. You know that in those oval windows are faces, and in those faces are eyes looking down at you. Not you, in particular, but your house and your roof, to be exact. These people are sitting in a different kind of window seat, and you join them.
Minnesota’s snow-covered roofs and ice-locked lakes fall away as you’re pushed back into your seat. You look down and see how humans build their nests and scatter their livelihoods about them. You see roofs, lots of roofs: peaked roofs, flat roofs, close together, far apart, circled into cul-de-sacs, and lined up like a Monopoly board.
A steady whoosh from the overhead nozzles fills your ears. Your body begins to gently buzz with the spin of the jets. The aroma of fresh-brewed coffee seeps through the cabin. There’s the undulating murmur of humans politely confined. A clink here and a tap there. Your mind begins to wander. Gazing down at the landscape unwinding below, you think, and think, and like a litany it comes.
Peaked roofs are gabled roofs. They’re for sites with abundant rain or snow. Tiled roofs are found in hot and sunny climes; it’s cooler under fired clay. Houses with flat roofs work best in semi-arid climes. You’ll see the tile or flat roof on a Minnesota home. These are built by those who defy nature at their own expense. The wisest ones try to match their dwelling to its location. That can be difficult in Minnesota. The climate is extreme; less than three percent of the world’s population lives with such extreme swings from hot to cold, indeed, very cold. The only thing between Minnesota and the North Pole, you’ve been told, is a barbed wire fence.
The real test of a roof is winter. When icicles hang from roofs so the house looks like it has a runny nose, the roof is not sound; it has an “ice dam.” The “damn ice,” causes snow melt to leak in swelling ceilings, streaming down walls, and dripping out of light sockets.
You can recite the three-step solution like a talking somnambulist:
- Stop air inside the house from getting into the attic by sealing even the minutest of gaps and holes.
- Add insulation to the attic.
- Make sure the roof has enough escape hatches for air, called vents.
Shortcuts don’t work.
- Insulation alone does not keep warm air away from the roof’s underside, it only slows it down.
- Adding vents alone won’t stop ice dams and can actually increase them by acting like siphons pulling additional indoor air into the attic to warm the roof.
Okay. Now is when it usually happened. About here is when the eyes of woman at the party who mentioned that her house has ice dams glaze over and you know it’s time to change the subject. But you’re not there now. Ice dams signal a defective home, no matter what it’s value.
As one of the first to visit a two million dollar house in the winter Parade of Homes, you meander alone through the mini-mansion and come upon the “game room.” Curious as to what that entails, you swing open the door and gasp at the sight of water leaking from the ceiling onto the poker table and chairs and into an ever-enlarging puddle on the floor. A check of the roof outside reveals the culprit – an ice dam with icicles nearly touching the ground. Back inside, you return to the game room and find the door locked with a hand-written paper sign that reads: “Sorry. No entry.” You suspect that some unsuspecting somebody is going to buy the house, and for a couple million bucks.
New or old, low-priced or mansion-priced, flaws and defects are common. Houses need to be built differently, you think, more like cars, maybe. To build a car we don’t call to the driveway a series of workers over a period of months. We don’t arrange for some do the chassis, for others to build and attach the fenders and doors, and still others to install the motor, the brakes, and, finally, somebody to paint it. No, we don’t do it like that because the risk of flaws and defects is tremendous. But this is the way we built houses.
Remember when you last flew into a seaside destination? Remember how houses were clustered cheek to jowl and up against the water and you thought, “What if there’s a big wave?” In your mind’s eye, you see houses washed away and beaches littered with debris.
“What if there’s a rise in the ocean and houses start to sink into the drink?” Conga lines of tiny brown sandbags arch into the lapping water while lines of vehicles snake their way from housetops breaking the swirling surface.
Water. Flying over Minnesota, you can believe boosters who claim Minnesota has more shoreline, more than California, Florida and Hawaii combined. It’s a water-pocked land, and almost all of the water is public. That means anybody can launch a boat into a lake and play for the day.
Sounds like a good idea, but it’s not. You consider it promiscuous boating. Just as promiscuous sex spreads disease from person to person, promiscuous boating spreads invasive species from lake to lake. From boat motors, bilge water and bait buckets come a collection of exotic nastiness to infest sky-blue waters: Eurasian watermilfoil, zebra mussels, spiny waterflea and round gobies. They enter a pristine lake, eliminate native plants and animals and turn it into an inhospitable, weed-clogged mess. Mussel shells, sharp as glass shards, pile up on docks and beaches making them un-walkable. You look down at shimmering waters and wonder what a boat condom would look like.
Promiscuous boating isn’t the only assault on nature’s gift. Minnesota’s winters are growing shorter and milder. Icy, rather than snowy surfaces are becoming more common. More ice means more salt on walks, roads and bridges. Everything applied to surfaces ends up in the lakes. Salt poisons lakes.
Climate change – and the warmth and the precipitation booms and busts that come with it – is making Minnesota’s lakes more like the Southern lakes: warm and brown and devoid of walleye pike.
Sometimes, while flying over Minnesota’s lake-littered landscape, you have to turn in your seat and look the other way.
Night fall. See the luminous discs of orange light that cast a sickly pall around city blocks, or along twisting highway, and up and down fields of parking lots? You know the name of the purveyors of unnatural night-time: sodium vapor lights. On the color rendering index where 100 is best, they are a measly 25. Awful.
See, too, the glowing pots of blue-white lights defining roads and outlining neighborhoods? They are the hallmark of the mercury vapor or metal halide lights. They’re maybe 55 on the index. Better at accurately reproducing color, but not good enough.
Accurate color rendering by street lights is more than just aesthetic, it can mean the difference between justice and injustice. The man who raped your friend served no time for it because she misidentified the color of his red jacket. It looked purplish black under the glow of the mercury street lights. Even with an explanation, the mistake left enough doubt in the minds of jurors to proclaim him, “Not guilty.”
Sometimes, now, you see LEDs or light emitting diodes illuminating car sales lots and shopping areas. Rendering at 80 on the scale, they are very good at color reproduction. Efficient, long-lasting, better in cold weather, containing no poisonous mercury and easily dimmable for times when residents want to see the night sky, LEDs will sometime soon light our nights and transform our lives.
Traveling 300 miles per hour you have but mere minutes to take in all that can be seen from the window seat. And now, as you descend, minutes become seconds. Roof tops, small and far away, get closer and closer, and bigger and bigger till they are gone from sight replaced by the big-to-your-eyes buffer land surrounding the airport: drab, ordinary buildings, hangers, fuel storage rounds and, finally, the terminal.
You detach from the wings that got you here and enter the flow of humanity on the ground. You walk about. No longer do you look down on roofs, you look up. You see jaunty roofs atop brightly-lit houses on a lake’s edge and oozing with curb appeal. The windows hold faces that hold eyes that gaze out at blue water, open water, peaceful water and you join them. You reach out toward to the water and there it is end of your finger. You smile. It all looks so smart, so clever and so healthy from here. How you wish you had a boat for a day.Former Star Tribune Fixit columnist, Karen Youso, has a collection of essays entitled Now… About the House, that is a unique combination of information and memoir. Window Seat is from the collection’s Living Room chapter.
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