Passage Island Retreat

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The roof, despite its five-inch edge beams, was extremely flexible in its unsupported condition. I discovered much later that someone had decided to demonstrate this flexibility by jumping up and down on the edge of the roof, causing the green concrete to crack in two places. The most serious crack was at the supporting pedestal, which allowed the corner of the roof to part company from, and slide over the top of, the pedestal, twisting a bunch of newly exposed rebar from the edge beam.

For safety's sake, I shut the job down immediately and ferried the stone masons back to town. While there, I picked up some jacks to support the 17-ton roof from the inside while I figured a way to repair the damage.

Fortunately, the repair proved less difficult than I'd feared. I jacked the roof up to its original position and anchored steel rods to bedrock at the base of the pedestal. Then I cast a 12" X 12" concrete beam with eight 3/4-inch rebars on top of the pedestal and anchored it to the roof so that it would take the whole weight when the jacks were removed.

The roof once more securely overhead, the stone masons came back and finished their job. Falsework was hurriedly torn down, and Julie and I became the first immigrants to this new world on September 1, 1969.

Of course, because of the lost time, there were no kitchen cabinets, no finished flooring, no furnace and no walls or closets for the bedroom. The only finished room in the house was the bathroom-a concession to Julie. I had managed to get the curved ceiling and the inside walls plastered, but that was it. We lived out of cardboard boxes for three months while I finished the house. My days were filled with laying tile, suspending the fireplace, installing cabinets and adding the innumerable finishing touches that magically make a house into a home.

But, even after it was finished, the hyperbolic paraboloid had another lesson to teach us.

The next spring, on the first really warm day of the year, I was in town on business when I received a panic call from Julie by radio-telephone. "The fireplace chimney is breaking! It's making terrible sounds. I think it's going to fall down. What shall I do?"

"Get out of the house!" I shouted. "I'll be there as soon as possible." The vision of the 750-pound, bell-shaped chimney crashing to the floor caused me to finish my business in minutes, but by the time I arrived home the day had cooled down and so had Julie. There were no "terrible sounds" coming from the chimney, and a quick tour of inspection showed nothing amiss.

The next day dawned bright and clear. The morning sun soon had the house up to 80°F in a demonstration of solar heat. I was standing on top of the stepladder, checking the chimney where it was suspended from the roof, when suddenly there was a loud report, like a pistol shot. It startled me, and I almost fell off the ladder. The shot was followed by another, then another. Unable to locate the source of these noises, I timidly climbed down the ladder, not knowing whether to run, jump or hide. Julie was out on the patio, shouting at me through the screen door to get out of the house, which was starting to sound like a shooting gallery in a penny arcade. Little puffs of white powder drifted down from the ceiling-and that was the first clue.

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