This photo shows the guts of the corner of the camp's "piano room." It's dark, but maybe that's not surprising--it is a picture of dirt, after all.
After working on the family camp, I understand why surgeons aren't allowed to operate on their family members. When you're looking inside something that you normally see only the outside of every day, you see stuff you maybe didn't really want to see. Or, more articulately: yuck.
For example, joists aren't really all that big. The ones under this room are 2 inches by 6 inches and eight feet long. They help hold up an entire room--four walls and a ceiling and flooring--and everything in the room. In this case, a piano. That's a lot to ask from wood, especially wood that's been exposed to critters and some weather for decades.
And wood, when it rots, is spectacularly scary. It flakes, it gets iridescent, it smells, it squishes. For something that starts out very solid, it sure can adopt a lot of different un-solid textures over time.
On the up side, you do learn a lot when you're underneath or inside something you normally see only the outside of. When you're digging ten feet away from a birch tree, especially if there's a building between you and the tree, you don't expect to hit tree roots. But you do. Apparently the root systems for birch trees aren't particularly deep, but they creep a long way, horizontally, from the tree. Who knew?
Birch roots poking up from under the soil can look like human knuckles, especially if you've watched a lot of CSI shows recently. Also, birch roots have a layer of red bark under the top layer of grayish-brownish-tan bark. You have to cut through birch roots to see it, but it's there. And it's not the kind of thing you would normally see, driving at highway speeds looking at stands of birch trees.
Does the "huh, that's cool" factor outweigh the "yuck" factor? I suppose that depends on your tolerance for frailty, whether of humans or lumber, and your memory. Once the camp is closed up--which should be in the next week or so--I will eventually forget the details of the dark and musty foundations. I'll focus again on what I can see, every day.
But I will continue to depend on the foundations for support as I enjoy the camp. I'll consciously remember the digging, and the tree roots, and the shards of broken china that turned up under my shovel. I'll walk on new flooring, paint the new support beams, sweep the floor, rearrange the furniture. And I'll know, at some level, that the dirt and cement blocks and beams and joists make all that possible.
