The Shingle Lady
I
I can tell you, readers of the Edge,
what one Cannon Beach artist/
craftsperson does in the winter: she
shingles. Her shingled walls decorate
many of the finest homes, commercial,
and public buildings on the north coast.
For Laurie Beers walls, dormers, and
gable ends present fresh canvasses,
framed and awaiting the artist's eye and
hand. She selects from her palettes a
variety of materials crafted by mills from
the northwestern United States and
Canada: Number 1 and Number 2
Western Red Cedar shingles (Laurie
eschews #2 shingles -- poor grain and
minimal longevity), raked shakes, longer
"Hollywoods" and "Royals", and a
miscellany of decorator shapes harking
back to Victorian styles.
A freshly shingled structure, the
product of Laurie's patient and arduous
application of straight-grained red cedar
shingles, is a visual delight. A spectrum
of tints -- ranging from dark browns and
burgundy reds to penuche blonde --
characterize a typical sidewall. The
visual effect pleases the eye; repetition
and variation both vie for attention. The
play of salt, wind, rain, and sunlight on
their surfaces transmute these colors to
silver gray.
Laurie selects her shingle lots with
great care. Poor shingles fail quickly and
take much longer to apply. This week her
project requires 37 squares ( a "square" of
shingles covers 100 square feet). The
shingles, of an exceptionally high grade,
were sawn and woven into bundles at the
A. and J, Shingle Company in Kelso,
Washington. Fine, well-seasoned old
growth cedar characterizes this lot. The
□ueber family will have an extremely
durable and long-lived skin on their new
home.
Basic shingling woodcraft appears
-reasonably simple to the casual observer.
Successive "courses" of shingles rise on a
house's walls, each shingle receiving two
nails or staples approximately 1" to 1 1/2"
from the edge of individual shingles.
Shingles come in various standard lengths
from 18 inches to 24 inches; widths are
random, ranging from about 3 inches to 11
inches. Gaps between the shingles of a
specific course and the gaps on shingles in
a course immediately above must be 1 1/2
inches apart. Error potential for the
home handyman abounds. Wavy course
lines, leaks, shiners (exposed nails
inadvertently rusting), and non-level
courses plague first time shinglers.
Laurie's work, if not truly art, is high
craft. She brings patience, honed skills,
pride, and an exceedingly critical eye to
the job site. Each shingle is spaced
precisely the width of a poker chip from
the two adjacent to it. If shingle
irregularities occur, Laurie hand-planes
the edges of each offending shingle. Most
contractors place interior and exterior
com er boards vertically at wall ends.
Shingles butt against these corner boards
in common practice. Not Laurie. She
prefers "weaving" shingles at corners, a
process requiring much greater time and
expertise. Each shingle must be shaped
and sculpted in a delicate taper mating it
to its com er neighbor.
Laurie initially encountered subtle
resistance from male tradesmen.
Exceedingly attractive, she grudgingly
tolerated the jibes, catcalls and hijinx
from "the guys." Now her position is
secure. Consensus among contractors
here at the Edge is that she is, quite
simply, the best.
Not for the frail, tentative, or faint
hearted, applying shingle siding requires
sinew and grit. Scaffolds, ladders, planks,
and shingle bundles move from the
ground up the sides of buildings.
Conditions during winter months on job
sites are less than ideal. Jello-like mire,
slashing rain and chill winds tax Laurie
most days. A new home without gutters
installed allows a curtain of rain to fall on
a shingler working up walls below. Water
cascades down the sleeves of your rain
jacket like Niagara,
I visited Laurie this week at her latest
project. Perched aloft on her plank 36
feet from the ground, she deftly fitted
lustrous sidewall shingles to the last six
feet of a gable end wall. With the last
pieces of the cedar jig saw puzzle
assembled, the mosaic of the Dueber
family's exterior wall stood complete. I
salute the artist on yet another
composition marvelously conceived.
The shingled works of Laurie Beers
may be visited at numerous sites. The
Professor will apprise you of locations on
request,
V É L O C IP É D IQ U E S
M IK E’S BIKE SHOP
CANNON BEACH
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February, the cruelest month. The solstice
and holy days over, the gathering of the light. The
swelling of expectation, the rising of sap, the vague
lust for result damped by a spring not yet come.
From this is derived the hexagram of Courtship
and the ritual surrounding Saint Valentines's Day.
Yes, hide the children, a column about love.
Long before the advent of greeting cards,
overpriced chocolate, and wild weekends in
Aspen, western civilization had evolved a notion of
romance that presents considerable challenge to
modern couples. The notion was courtly love, the
elevation of mating to high art. As a practice, it
has not stood the test of time.
Love is the most potent of magic and courtly
love a powerful ritual form. A morality play for
two, it celebrates the ardor, respect, and
unswerving devotion of man for woman, woman
for man. The ritual's success depends, not upon a
delicious and fatal attraction, but upon honor and
trust between two human beings, the willingness of
a man and woman to accept roles in which each is
both the giving and the gift.
Courtship is the high magic of faith, the
highwire act of yin and yang, the seeking of union
between twin forces of nature, the evocation of
complementarity and the evocation of shared wills
and common dreams. Now, of course, one must be
watchful for signs of codependence, victimization,
and the sin of enabling behavior. For lovers, these
are not easy times.
In its quaint naivete, courtly love assumes
that both parties are of good character, possessed
of honor, and sharing the best of intentions. That,
in short, their hearts are in the right place. There
is nothing random or willynilly about courting,
nothing properly called a dating game. Courtship
embodies the notion of the proper match: the
idea, not altogether lacking merit, that one should
apply the same standards to one's own mating
habits one would apply to one's springer spaniel.
This isn't to say that, in days of yore, there
were not lies told, agendas misrepresented, and
horrible mistakes made; or that, then or now, only
the pure and the well-intentioned ever find
romance. We are, after all, dealing with humans
in a probabilistic universe just trying to get through
the night, Courtly love does not deny human
frailty; it merely sets moral ground rules
recognizing courtship as a no-nonsense affair, a
very personal piece of what the ancients called, in
all seriousness, the Great Work.
The most crucial and ignored aspect of courtly
love is, small surprise, the most demanding. The
faint of heart may want to sit down. In order for
the love of a knight for a lady to be the holy
mission and vision quest it is, the object of his
devotion must be, at least to his mind,
unattainable. For courtship to be what it is, the
search for the divine in the touch of a hand, those
paying court must have no hope of success. They
must recognize their goal to be an impossible
dream and, at the same time, behave as if it were
fact. Had Lancelot believed for a moment his love
for Guinevere had the smallest chance of
consummation, he would have thrown himself on
his sword.
There is no contradiction in this. The noblest
pursuits are always those without hope of
completion: the search for truth comes to mind,
and beauty, and perfect understanding. So it is
with romance and courtly love. Unless we believe
our heart's goal is beyond us, that this woman or
this man so far exceeds our worth as to constitute
an object to be venerated from afar, the magic of
our courtship is not high but low. As Saint Francis
of Assisi said of another love: In order to see God,
we must give up all hope of seeing God. Courtship
is the humility and selflessness that prepares the
vessel.
So it goes. The purist acts, those rituals with
the most chance of succeeding, are those without
lust for result. Courtly love is the celebration of
desire without need. The ritual of courtship is,
personal ads notwithstanding, neither mysterious
nor complex. We must simply love without hope
of being loved in return. There is no higher magic
than this. Not even a weekend in Maui.
Happy Saint Valentine's Day.
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Only little boys and old men sneer at
love.
Louis Auchincloss
I