The Lake House: Beams

The sad truth is that we had to take down trees to carve the driveway, put in the septic, and build the house here at that lake. The trees were tall but were not "Old Growth"; we've been told that the property had been logged a hundred years ago or so.

As we can see by this nursery stump outside our bedroom and other remnants, some of the trees they took way back then were huge; this one had to have been hundreds of years old at the time it fell. That crew could have easily looked liked the one below; players in a hard working, spirited tradition, facing down the elements and death or disfigurement on every hillside of giants they set their jaws and waded in to clear. They look self-satisfied with their harvest, and no doubt exhausted. (That fellow standing on the ground is leaning against the logs for a reason, isn't he?)

Shar's grand, sweeping gesture and smile is not a lumberjack's celebration at having conquered magnificent trees. While the skills employed and risks taken by lumberjacks and loggers are impressive, as displayed for our benefit by Kevin, Sam and Josiah Rodman's climbing, felling, limbing, bucking, and hauling, if we could have built the place without taking down the trees, we would have. So, Shar is not celebrating the harvest, she's smiling because we were going to be able to use those beautiful Douglas firs from the property for the beams in the house, like in the kitchen.

That task, I should say project, serious difficult project, took the effort of a small army. The Eden boys, Kevin, Sam, and Josiah Rodman felled, limbed, bucked, and hauled those big guys Shar sits on in the photo. Our builder, James Schouten found a mill willing to dry and cut those trees into beams the size of these, and then held them to the task when the mill hesitated well into the process. Chad Smith, Jim Lawrence, and Tom Timm, the Mill Creek team, sanded, distressed, stained, strained, lifted, shifted, and set these big boys, and the crane operator lost sleep before squeezing his big machine onto our little lot and lifting, then delicately extending, the heaviest of these beams out to the edge of balance for his 80 feet of crane.

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The milled beams were hauled to the build site as the long, thick, rectangular beasts shown above. I have no idea what they weighed but clearly thousands of pounds, all told. Chad sanded by the hour, smoothing and distressing the monsters to get just the right look. The sawdust on the floor only begins to tell the tale.

These things were cut and worked, stained and rubbed until they began to look like this, which brings me to the wonderful grain of these great firs. As an aside, I've tried to count the rings in this photo, a pretty sloppy count, the edges are lopped off and the rings at the core begin to blend, but they're pushing a hundred.

Back to the grain. The fluidity of the lines, the endless fluctuations of width and shape, are baffling. These trees were milled by length, not by slices; and yet rings seem to begin and end to the side. Again, this is mostly me not knowing why and enjoying the enigma. What are those circles? If they were on a contour map they'd be mountain tops, saddles, or gentle peaks along some ridge line; here they must tell some dramatic tale of the life of these trees, I just don't know how to hear it. Fortunately, whether we know their story or not, they flavor our rooms with their texture and mystery. And there's something else;

These patterns remind me of a type of indigenous art from this part of the country. Here are some examples: This first is an old Haida (a prominent indigenous group from what is now British Columbia) burial chest with a beaver crest. (You don't think that I knew that this is a beaver crest, do you? It's posted and identified on the Canadian Museum of History website. After staring at if for a while you'd likely agree, those teeth in the middle would have to belong to a beaver.)

Here's another, this modern "Salmon" by an artist named David Faulstuh;

And "Creation of the Moon" by Beau Dick in 1976, posted on line for an exhibit at the Berkshire Museum in Pittsfield, Massachusetts

There is a bunch written about this "Formline Art" of North America's Northwest Coastal indigenous cultures "The formline is the curving line, which tends to swell and diminish through out, that creates the outline of the chosen subject" (Burke Museum of Natural History and Culture offers that.) Ovoids (oval-like shapes), U-shapes, crescents, circles, and trigons (curved T or Y shapes) are the elements used to make a Northwest Coast image, regardless of subject.(That from Google's Arts and Culture page)

The pieces are disconcerting, beautiful. While I don't know much about the history of the style, doesn't it have to be drawn from the natural world and woven with spiritual and cultural tradition inspired by Native peoples's relationship with that world? Something specifically inspired the first Formline carvings, whenever that was, and looking at the marvelous patterns of our beams, I can't help but wonder if that inspiration long ago might not have been lines marking the lives of the trees with their "curving line, which tends to swell and diminish through out." Whether that happened or not, the style and the wonder comes to mind at the sight of these beams we are fortunate enough to have in the house.

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A crane had to pick up the beams and gently set them into seats the carpenters had meticulously prepared. The thing looked huge sitting in the little hole carved out of the steep slope down to the lake. As it turned out, it was almost not quite huge enough. The size of the beams going to the rooms furtherest from the crane were almost too heavy, the extension too far. Too far with too much weight translates into the potential for the whole machine to topple over, crushing everything in its path. Fortunately, there are calculations and safeguards, but even then, this was a nightmare of a job for Jason Grove, of Groves Crane. There he is with his rig. It wasn't until after he'd successfully moved that worst of the beams that he told me how much the job had haunted him in the days leading up to it. (Jason, if that's too dramatic, I'm sorry:) Here are a few shots of the operation.

Even with the most carefully planned seating, sometimes a guy needs a few wacks with a hammer to finish the job. There's Chad using whatever straddle, side saddle, and swing necessary to get 'er done.

And looking at the size of those bolts and brackets that Jim and Tom are using to join the beams, the things are probably not going to come apart any time son.

The crane also moved these big boys into the shell of the house. What the guys had to come up with to get them raised and set is the last part of the beam story, and in many ways, the most fun. So how do you take this big pile of sticks sitting in the living room and get them up so they end up looking like this?

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Turns out that there was no tried and true formula and when James designed the house he did not include instructions on how to get beams weighing Lord knows what up 20 feet and secured so that it didn't look like garbage. So, it seems Chad and Jimmy asked themselves, "What would Rube Goldberg do?" More probably they asked themselves, "Is there any chance that we can't figure this out?" Of course, the answer was no and this is what they did.

They rigged a block and tackle attached to a pipe they bolted into blocks they secured to the trusses;

made a contraption using the wench from Jimmy's fishing boat powered by a car battery they attached to a weighted sled;

screwed a plate to the beams, attached one end of the cable threaded through the block and tackle to the plate and the other end to the fishing boat wench;

and raised the beams into place. Here, one or two have already been set and the next is on the way up. Ingenious and crazy effective.

We love the beam part of our home's (or lodge's, or cabin's) story. Like the boulder wall, having such visible bones come from this piece of land gives the place a dimension we could have only hoped for as we started this adventure. As with the entire journey, we've been given the gift of these beams by so many who worked so hard and applied so much skill and ingenuity to get them where they are today. Once again, we thank everyone. And, of course, we thank those wonderful trees.