Civil Engineering Reference
In-Depth Information
logs on a trailer behind my Land Rover. On the way
back up I slid into a ditch and overturned, which
delighted the owner of a Japanese four-wheel drive,
until he tried unsuccessfully to pull me upright.
That's chapter one. A couple of weekends later,
Muskrat got together another set of friends and rented
a huge truck to complete the move. But no one would
drive it up that gullied road, so I volunteered. Never
have I been so banged about as I was inside that metal
cab. The steering wheel cracked me around like a
whip, but we got to the top of the hill.
Then, after we'd loaded many thousands of pounds
of logs on the beast, everyone sort of looked at me
again. Well, so much for a misspent youth driving log
trucks. In I climbed and down the mountain we
lurched. That truck was never the same after that.
The story would not be complete without the
house-raising that followed some months later. A
third set of friends (notice how all but a couple of them
seem to have learned from experience?) gathered on
one of those rare sunny November days to raise the
cabin.
There was lots of good food, hard work, cama-
raderie, and even suspense (Murphy had coded more
than one log with a given code number). We almost
flattened two of our number under a plunging 400-
pound log from high on one wall. The kids and dogs
loved it all. Later there was some fine mountain music
around the campfire.
More Cautions
There have been other near misses. Once my brother
John and I tossed a top-plate log onto a pile of split
shingles, nails, and other roof debris below, reasoning
that this would cushion the log's fall. It did that, along
with my own, when a protruding nail caught under my
wedding ring and I was jerked off the high wall. I came
down with the log, somehow staying out from under
it, to smash onto the scrap pile, bristling with sharp
points. Miraculously, none of these pierced me. The
worst pain was a sore ring finger. My wife understood
when I stopped wearing the ring. In another incident,
a friend and I were taking down a log barn in Nelson
County, Virginia, and started an avalanche of roof
rafters when we removed the vital pair. We dodged the
Building codes will generally not allow loose stone pier foundations.
A continuous foundation must have vents and metal flashing between
the masonry and logs.
