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Last week we were down in the basement painting water sealer on the wall and then crawling through the crawl space making sure the foundation was safe and sound. This week we’ll go up to the top of the house and check out the attic and the roof and see what we can get ourselves into up there.

The house I grew up in was a modern-style house with no attic. I always told people looking for our house to go to the house on the left with the flat roof. It actually had three separate sections that went up and down at a slight grade so the water would drain when it rained but it was pretty flat nonetheless.

I think there was some type of sheeting that was put on, then a layer of a tar-like substance and finally it was covered in very small, white gravel. I think the white gravel was there to reflect the sunlight and keep the house cooler in the warm months and also to break up the rain as it hit.

Other than my old house I’ve never seen another roof that didn’t have shingles or metal panels on it around here. I went to England years ago and they still had thatched roofs back then, and of course out west and in warmer climates tiles are used rooftop to protect the house.

And in some places like Nebraska or Norway sod is or was used on top of the house with grass and other plants growing on there. It’s tough enough mowing the yard, I’d hate to have to mow the roof as well. I guess you could get a roof sheep and and keep it under control, but that seems like you’re just getting yourself into another situation: Do I call the roofer or the large animal veterinarian?

Having grown up in a house with no attic, my idea of them was a clutter-filled mystery room above the living quarters filled with antiques, family heirlooms and perhaps a thing that went bump in the night.

My personal reality has been anything but a mystery. Well, there is one mystery in attics I’ve been in, and that was “just how hot is it up here?” The house I’m in now and my parents’ house both have attic spaces, but they are little more than a heat-gathering alcove with insulation hiding endless man-traps just ready to drop you through the ceiling into the rooms below.

The few times I’ve been up in my own attic I’ve had to practically tightrope walk from crossbeam to crossbeam, only in a crouched position that no circus high wire act would ever attempt. I’ve got one of those folding ladders that come down with a loud, squeaky noise, and at the top of that ladder there is a small plywood platform but that’s the only place there’s something proper to stand on.

I don’t have a light up there so I usually have a flashlight in one hand. The other hand I use to try and hold on to a beam overhead while my feet are feeling around in the insulation for a solid piece of two-inch wide wood to stand on. Add enough heat in the summer to make Lawrence of Arabia pass out and you’ve got an idea of what it’s like up there.

I know my insulation is good because when it does snow the snow doesn’t melt on my rooftop first. But that only helps from the rooms below to the attic. From the roof down, there’s not much to keep things temperate. The black shingles I have absorb the sun and warm things up inside. I don’t know the actual temperature but if little kids can produce a cake from an easy bake oven with a single light bulb I bet you could open a bakery in my attic in the summer.

I don’t use the attic as storage space for anything lest it turn to dust once all the water has been baked out of whatever it is I might put up there. On the other hand, maybe I could put the heat to good use and just have a wash tub up there connected to my shower, bypassing the normal water heater for a hot shower. We’re all supposed to be looking for ways to use solar energy, right?

And I could use the heat up there as a security measure for valuables. If I did have anything of value like a collection of rare Eisenhower half dollars, who needs a safe? Most thieves steal because they’re too lazy to work, so I don’t see them climbing the ladder and then doing a balancing act to the far end of the attic in 130 degrees heat just to get a shoe box half full of half dollars. My treasure would be safe!

My parents’ attic has one little finished room connected to it. It has carpet and drywall and a ceiling, but like my attic, there’s not air conditioning vents. They use it for storing some Christmas decor that weathers the heat OK, and a few kitchen appliances like a bread maker my mom never used, but I went up there looking for something once and there were two mysterious piles of fragmented debris on the floor. One was black and shiny, the other tan and crumbly. It took me a long time to figure out what it was, but it turns out my mom had some old shoes on a shelf there and two pairs from the 1970s had literally disintegrated from the heat.

Before the ‘70s shoes were made of “real” materials like leather or cotton. Now, shoes are made with space-age materials that will outlive the last cockroach after a nuclear war. But in the ’70s they were trying all types of things. The black pile was some type of plastic-based shoe that, with age and Georgia summer attic heat, had turned into both a black dust and small, black cubes. The thought of something from a distant planet came to mind but I finally figured out it was just something from JC Penney back in the day.

The other pile of tan dust it turns out was from a pair of summer shoes she had that had a high heel made of cork, of all things. The cork, a product of a tree that grows in Portugal, had given up the ghost twice, once when it was harvested and then when, as a forgotten sole, had turned to powder in attic heat. Talk about unlucky. On the other hand, those cork shoes had walked proudly down a summer evening sidewalk on the way to a hit show at the Wink Theatre, or even gone into an oceanfront seafood restaurant in summer hot spot Panama City Beach while on vacation. Ah, memories.

Let’s go one more level up to the roof of the house. Believe it or not, it’s cooler up there than in the attic, even at noon during a Georgia July. I don’t go up on the roof often, who does? I only go up to get a Frisbee off, clean the gutter or clean off the reindeer droppings after Christmas.

I’ve got a screen that’s supposed to keep the gutter from getting full of leaves, but with so many trees around I need to go up there several times a year. I used to hand clean the gutter, but then I figured out that if I walked around and pulled the screens back all around first I could just get a leaf blower up there and blow out the gutters. The gutters are clean, but the ground around not so much. When I’m on the roof the dog follows me around down in the yard waiting for something interesting to happen. Fortunately, it hasn’t.

The hottest I’ve ever been on a roof was one summer when a group of us helped a friend replace his roof with metal roofing. The house was a small one his grandfather had built decades before. As we took off the old roof we realized the grandfather had saw-milled the wood himself from the farm. No two beams were alike, and, you could tell they had been baked over the years from the heat. They weren’t exactly petrified, more like mummified.

Up on that roof lying on the metal roof sheeting I got as good an idea as I ever want of what a strip of bacon must feel like on the bottom of the skillet.

I’m not a roofer by trade so I’m sure I didn’t follow all the safety rules, such as “don’t hang headfirst down the roof to put in the screws, holding yourself only by your toes on the crest of the roof.” My other friends that knew what they were doing were polite enough not to say anything to embarrass me. Either that or they were waiting for me to fall so they could have a good laugh.

Well, whatever part of the house you’re dealing with that’s not the living area, just be careful, watch your head, watch your step and don’t hang by your toes.

Mark Hannah, a Dalton native, works in video and film production.

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