Sailing Off the Roof

My garage is attached to my house. Just like millions of other houses and garages. But, my garage has a flat roof. Not an arched roof, not a triangular roof. A flat roof. Open the door from my bedroom, and there’s the flat roof. This flatness, though, gives it the unfortunate habit of allowing water to pool atop it, and when it’s winter, that water pooling atop it is snow. Heavy snow.

So, one of my duties in the wintertime is to shovel the snow off the garage roof. It is perhaps the most dangerous activity in this man’s sedate, suburban, middle-aged, bookwormish, pot-bellied life.

One day, my wife fears, I’m going to go sailing off the roof. As is, I’m forbidden going up on the house roof to remove leaves in the fall. Shoveling snow off a potentially icy slick roof would be out of the question, had we not been informed by the home inspector that it was a must-do every snowstorm.

“This roof will collapse if enough snow sits on it,” he warned. The wife and I smiled obliviously and closed on the house a week later.

How much danger are we talking about? I must admit it’s very, very low on the danger scale. Especially in an age where we have heroes fighting for us in the deserts of Iraq and Afghanistan. Heck, even a patrolman in my town probably faces more danger, and I live in a fairly nice suburb. However, I also have to admit, that given an extremely rare and vile piece of luck, I could meet my demise if I sailed off the roof at a particular angle and landed in a particular spot with a particular part of my anatomy.

The front edge of the garage roof looks down on my driveway, about a ten-foot drop to the asphalt. The back edge overhangs some very piney-smelling hedges about six-feet down. Both these edges are about ten feet in length. The real danger comes from the side edge, about twenty feet in length. Directly below is a three-foot wide walkway a dozen feet down. The walkway is bordered by a stone wall. My neighbor’s yard begins immediately on the other side of this stone wall, four or five feet below my property. Worst-case scenario is I fall on my rear, slide off the side edge of the roof backwards, land head-first on that stone wall twelve feet down, then flip over and land against my neighbor’s house five feet later.

Yes, I realize I’m being grim. I’m also trying to hone my dark comedy bones.

But – have no fear, friends of LE! There’s no cause for alarm over at the Hopper’s house post-snowstorm. For now I only go out onto the roof with a bedsheet tied around my ankle and fastened to the bedpost …



See! I’m not telling tall tales here. This is a picture from just beyond the center of my garage roof, facing southeast. For reference, that chain-link fence gate in the lower right corner is about eight feet below the top of the roof. Yikes!