ICE DAM HELL

Unless you have been living under a rock this past winter – and in hindsight that actually might have been the smart thing to do – you know that Boston and her suburbs endured an epic amount of snowfall and historically cold temperatures. The news stations reported daily on roof collapses, the dismal state of the broken down “T”, and the record-breaking cold. Every conversation began with a discussion of the daily inconvenience of living with so much snow. How much snow are we talking? Well, this season 110.6 inches of snow fell, the most in Boston’s history. For Boston city dwellers it was a nightmare of cancelled public transportation and buried cars. Out in the suburbs, we had our own special kind of hell. While you lived your happy, little carefree life filled with unicorns and rainbows under that rock, we out here in the Boston suburbs had sunk silently into the miasma known as… Ice Dam Hell.

If you have never experienced an ice dam in your house, consider yourself very lucky. An ice dam results when ice and snow build up on your roof and, instead of staying frozen, melts due to heat rising from inside the house and then refreezes just enough to stop (thus the dam part) all the other ice and snow just on top of it, now also melted, from going anywhere but up under your shingles and down into your living room. Or kitchen. Or bedroom. Or all three.

After the initial shock of disbelief (Is… that… water??!!) you grab anything you can to contain the water now pouring from your ceiling, windows, archways and down your walls. Buckets, bowls, towels, anything will work, just as long as it can be either 1) emptied and replaced under the dripping water, or 2) added to the ever growing pile of towels on the laundry room floor. After that, you call your roof guy, assuming you have one. I called Chris, my go-to gutter man. Sure, he would come over. But he was booked, so, how about the Thursday after next? Fighting back tears and a scream (drip, drip, drip), I agreed.

After that first week I figured I had better get started trying to clear out the dams myself so I grabbed my roof rake (What? You don’t have a roof rake? Sheesh. Rookie.) and climbed a ladder and started to pull down the 5 feet of snow on the one roof I could reach from the ground. What I discovered was that under all the snow lay foot-thick ice. Thick, compact, blue ice. Needless to say I didn’t make much progress.

Let me tell you what I learned about foot-thick ice on your roof and ice dams. For starters, sock monkeys filled with calcium chloride DO NOT WORK. Oh, yes, I know – it was all over the Internet. Just fill up your pantyhose (pantyhose? Who the heck wears pantyhose?) with calcium chloride, and lay them over your ice dams until they melt. Suuure. It’s akin to trying to empty a swimming pool with a plastic spoon. Yah, maybe you will get all the water out of the pool that way… by the year 2150. I’ll tell you what does work. Chinese water torture. Holy Jumping Jesus, that drip! drip! drip! will drive you nuts! It will make you think you hear water dripping everywhere. It will make you think that, no matter where you step, it will be in water. Crazy doesn’t even begin to tell the story.

By the time Chris showed up with his guy my family room ceiling looked like an upside down sepia-toned map of the Rio Grande. The kitchen ceiling had disgorged huge chunks of plaster into my sink, and for some reason my stove’s overhead fan was leaking too (that got me out of cooking dinner for a few nights, so at least I came out ahead on that one). Chris and his guy got to work shoveling snow and hammering away, but they also made little progress. And still the dams grew and grew until water was pouring down in almost every room in my house, save a few. Every roofer I called was booked for weeks. In desperation I called our insurance agent and explained what was happening. He said he would send a crew over as soon as they arrived… from Minnesota! This was some serious shit. And all I had to do was wait.

So, I sat in my house and listened to water dripping. Luckily, I did have my one guy, Chris. He and his “crew” of one came over four times. Each time he would spend the day and clear a little bit of roof, climb down and say, “Well, I hope I don’t see YOU again.” I started to take it personally. Hopefully he was just trying to be optimistic. He really didn’t mind seeing me due to the fact that he charged me $800 each time he came. I just think he was hoping he would see me, say, next fall, when I needed my gutters cleaned and not the following day, with another roof emergency. But it wasn’t enough and Chris and his man could not keep up with the snow or break up the ice. Drip, drip, drip.

During this time my contact with the outside world was limited. For one, I could barely see the outside the world due to the 10 foot high mounds of snow blocking my first floor windows. In addition, it’s really hard to leave the house when you have to empty those aforementioned buckets and bowls as you never know when they might reach CAPACITY and OVERFLOW and then you are not only dealing with ICE DAMS but a FLOOD. Starting to sound biblical? Do you see the darkness yet? Because, ladies and gentleman, I can assure you that in Ice Dam Hell things get dark. Fast.

So. Let’s talk about this “life inside the house,” shall we?

As far as hygiene went, expectations were low. The morning came fast and first thing I did was run downstairs and empty the buckets. Frankly, I did not have time for the niceties of hygiene. No teeth brushing. No showers. Oh, okay, go ahead, judge away. But you weren’t the guy who had to come home to me at the end of a hard day’s work. Lucky for me, my husband is the kinda guy who notices, well, nothing. I could be swinging naked from the foyer chandelier with baby koalas hanging from my shoulders and all he would care about is whether I shouted “HELLO, HONEY!” when he walked in the door. Lucky for me he also has a terrible sense of smell.

After bucket duty and coffee, I reheated frozen gluten-free pancakes that I had made the week before. They were fine, okay? Fine! I like reheated food! Who cares that I had to chisel them apart every morning? I added plenty of hot maple syrup and butter and declared them good. There are plenty of people who have less, who expect less. They expect cold cereal. I expected hot fucking pancakes if I was going to put up with drip, drip, drip for the rest of the day.

The true low point came one morning, about mid-way through February. I had planned to go to Florida and I had a round-trip plane ticket booked and paid for. On the morning of my flight I realized that I couldn’t possibly go and leave behind a dripping house. I had to cancel the trip! My escape from Ice Dam Hell was foiled. And to add insult to injury, I knew that I would be charged a $150 cancellation fee. So what did I do? I called JetBlue and pulled a “Sheree.” My sister Sheree is the Queen of Getting Out of Shit. How? She cries. Speeding and pulled over? Tears. Late on some payments? Copious tears. So I pulled a “Sheree” and cried to the Jetblue lady that I lived in BOSTON and that it was AWFUL and that I REALLY WANTED TO GO TO FLORIDA BUT HAD TO EMPTY BUCKETS OF WATER! And it worked! No cancellation fee. I had learned from a pro.

A few times that month I got a knock on my door and various strange, toothless men would be standing there. They would hand me business cards stating they were in the “masonry” business or landscaping, and ask, would I perhaps be needing their roof-clearing services? all the while smiling at me like a character from a Dickens novel, “heh heh, tip o’ the hat to ya, ma’am.” I could just imagine that they had driven by, espied my house covered in Deathsicles™ (I coined that term – trademark pending), and felt sorry for me. I backed away, shut the door and locked it, and then threw away their cards deep in the garbage, so far that down that my husband couldn’t dig them out and shake them in my face and ask, “Why didn’t you have these guys do the work?” Simple. Apart from the lack of dental care and insurance, I knew that when some guy has to knock on your door to look for work during the worst winter and biggest snowfall in Boston’s history, which in turn created the biggest need for manual labor in Boston since the Tea Party, then the red flag popping up wildly in front of your eyes needs heeding. Do not hire them!

After several weeks of this and prior to the Minnesotans showing up I was finally able to convince a tree company to bring their bucket truck over to clear my roof. Little did they know I was bordering on insanity. I was so desperate to have them stay I brought them fresh brewed coffee for their first coffee break. That wasn’t enough. I needed them to stay ALL DAY. I was sure they were going to leave at lunch, so I baked them homemade blueberry muffins and brought them out while they were still hot! I bribed them with a warm foyer to rest their weary bodies! I laughed with them and pretended that we were friends and that we had friends in common! HAHA! Bob? Sure I know Bob, that old coot! I joked around with them, anything to get them to stay! They did stay and cleared almost the entire roof of snow, God bless.

Then, like magic, the Minnesotans showed up with their ice dam steaming machines. By then I resembled Jack Nicholson from “The Shining.” I greeted them dressed in striped pajama pants, a fleece-lined flannel shirt, and a wild print ski hat. My hair was dirty and straggly, and I hadn’t brushed my teeth or washed my face in weeks. I figured I’d get out of their way and make myself useful so I grabbed a shovel in one hand and the roof rake in the other and headed to the end of the driveway to shovel the mailbox out (step, draag, step, draag). And as I stood at the end of my driveway I realized that I had in all likelihood seen the worst of what was in store for me that winter.

I took my time shoveling. When a car would drive by, I would stand back and watch them pass. I made slow but steady progress, and when I was done I felt good that I had cleared a path for the mailman. And while it took them all day, the Minnesotans removed every bit of ice and cleared all the dams. Sure, the snow banks were still 15 feet high and my house was in ruins, but the dripping had, finally, stopped.

Once they left I took a nice, long hot shower, brushed my teeth and put on some make-up. I surveyed the damage around me – ripped open ceilings and walls, buckled floors, stained ceilings. I knew that the next few months would bring estimates, then renovation and repair.

So I did the only thing I could think of doing that made sense. I logged onto my computer and clicked on the Jetblue link and I rebooked that ticket to Florida.

One-way.