Love's Real Stories

I climbed up on my roof again last week to clean the gutters and blow off the leaves. Every time I take the ladder and lean it up against the roof edge to make the climb, I hear inside my head the impatient voice of John James Miskella, roofer extraordinaire. 

“Don’t EVER lean the ladder against the roof edge!” He would say. “The roofing material hangs over for a reason. It’s the drip edge! The drip edge sheds water. If you crush it with the ladder, you lose the edge. You make a nice place for water to seep under the roofing and begin its insidious soaking of the sheathing and rafters. Then what do you have? DRY ROT!” 

Miskella got into my head about 30 years ago and stayed there. John James and his dad before him installed the roofing on a large percentage of the houses in Chico from the 1950’s forward. John James was the guy Realtors like me called to do roof inspections for home buyers.

“Lean the ladder against a side wall or a fascia board, for crying out loud!” said John James. “And cover the tops of the ladder rails with fabric so you don’t mark up the siding or the fascia boards.” 

Miskella’s ladders had raggedy t-shirts duct-taped to the tops of the ladders.

“Happy Homeowners just don’t RESPECT their own roof!” said John James. ‘Happy Homeowners’ was term Miskella used to reference to amateurs like me, who in his mind are the enemies of the roof.

“They treat roof work like yard work,” said John James. “They run all over the place, dragging their tools here and there, tearing up the roofing material like a bull in a muddy field!”

John James would shake his head. “And they stomp all debris into the roofing material causing irreparable damage.”

“And now we have to contend with these satellite and cable tv installers!” he said. “They care less about their heavy foot traffic and dragging their stuff all over the place than the Happy Homeowner!”

He shakes his head again. “NO RESPECT!”

At a house in the Avenues in Chico one summer day, I met John James Miskella for a roof inspection. He hopped out of his battered, tar-stained pickup, and began his survey of the place.

“Uh oh,” he said with quiet concern. “We have a real Happy Homeowner here.” A ladder leaned up against the roof edge, perhaps a permanent fixture. The drip edge of the roofing was crushed in various spots from ladder placement. 

“New satellite dish up there,” he said with increasing alarm.

In practically one motion, Miskella flipped the ladder off his truck, stood it next to the house, raised the extension, and lightly leaned the tops of the rails soundlessly against the sidewall. He scampered up the ladder to the roof like a cat. I lumbered up behind.

“Walk like this,” he said. “Keep your feet flat. Small steps. Don’t skid!” John James Miskella was a big guy, but he traveled the roof weightlessly, stooping now and then to carefully touch the surface. 

“Too late,” he said sadly. “In the summer they skidded their feet and ran all over the place mushing up the warm, soft roofing. In the winter they came back up and stomped on the little ridges they created and cracked ‘em open.” He kneeled and laid his hand on a cracked area as if he were trying to heal a wound.

“They killed a perfectly good roof,” he said.

John James glared at me. “I have a message for all your Happy Homeowners,” he said. 

“Okay,” I said.

“Tell ‘em John James Miskella says to give their roof some RESPECT!”