Exercise -- Write about what's under your house
As I explain in my profile, I may upload snippets, pieces, writing exercises that have a small life of their own. This is one such exercise, sparked by the idea of writing about what's underneath the house that I live in. Not what I expected...
I'm not entirely sure how much the state of the house above is due to the state of the house below. Above, the house leans in on itself in various angles; you can feel the place actually dip down in some places, and the walls, though appearing solid enough, have a tired feeling; doorways, where doors are hung plumb, show a difference in height of as much as two inches from one side to the other, the gap at the bottom something of an acute triangle. Going up and down stairs is an interesting challenge as well. There is a sensation of something warped throughout the house.
There is a basement, "unfinished" as the realtors would say. At the foot of the stairs, to the left, it looks like the remains of some kind of landslide; uneven cement, rock, whatever it is. No nice smooth walls and clear space to use for storage down here. To the right, a not-really-room, leading to another of the same. Water heater, sump pump in the corner, no windows, nothing particularly interesting. A small scattering of things that simply ended up down here and never quite found their way up to another part of the house. And to one side, one last area that looks as though it was once intended to be a small room for storage, or for organization, or just one last place for the house to be finished down here. It never happened.
I can look upward to see the ground floor above me -- not the flooring, of course, but the support for it. It doesn't look sagged or bowed, and I'm at a loss to explain why not. I'm no engineer, nor house builder, nor even much of the DIY type, so I wouldn't know what to look for if it were painted bright green and lit with neon signs. There is no question that something feels warped, twisted, very slightly by all accounts and intentions, yet definite. I can feel it when I'm walking through the house; it makes me wonder if it feels like that aboard ship somewhere. A sense that your next step isn't going to land exactly where you think it will, that there is a need to feel the roll, pitch, and yaw changing as you try to keep going in the same direction.
I'm happy to say that nothing has made me think that I'm actually going to fall over while I'm walking around the house. Or perhaps I should say that I'm not going to hurt myself by falling over. I don't think I will. The question for me is not so much if I'm going to fall over as it is when I'll fall over. And I'm less concerned about when as where I'm going to fall over. There are several places in the house where the doors look off, or that I can feel the difference in height or angle as I walk along. In some of these places, there's quite the sense of being tipped, not simply off balance but actually tipped, as if there's some sort of activity making the feeling different.
I could make a joke here, trying to explain to people that I'm not joking, that I'm really "on the level," har-de-har-har. The problem is that I really can't say that. I've been trying to figure it out, and it just doesn't seem to be working right. I've taken a carpenter's level to various locations in his house, particularly those places where the tilt seems strongest. You know how those bubble levels work -- a tube with liquid, and a bubble, and marks on the tube to tell you that, when the bubble is between these lines, then you're level, or square, or whatever direction you want to take it. I've taken an L-ruler as well, those big metal L-shaped pups that help you make sure that you're perpendicular, the Great Ninety-Degree Angle at work. And those two things together should tell me if the house is actually, well, on the level.
And it is.
No matter where I go in the house, I can prove by these instruments that the house is level, that the floors are flat, that the doors are hung correctly, that there are no measurements that are not exactly the angle that they should be. This, by itself, is scary; I find it hard to believe that every single angle in this house is that precise, and I'm talking to within two seconds of a degree. Yet I still see that difference from one side of the door to the other, that two inch or so gap at the bottom of the doorway. The tools tell me that it's not there, but I still see it. I feel it when I walk down the hall, or down the stairs. Everywhere in the house.
Everywhere but the basement. I don't go down there anymore. I tried to get some information from using the carpenter's level down there, but I didn't get very far. At first, I thought that the level was broken, or maybe frozen, but it works everywhere else. In the basement, everything was level; the bubble didn't move. Even when I turned the level around in every angle that I could think of, the bubble didn't move.
I don't think about what's under my house anymore. I think more about watching my step. I think very hard about not falling.