From the Rooftops: Svaneti

The things you learn in the middle of a hated duty...

It wasn't even my duty, but I was helping out two friends who are unmarried siblings, neither of whom is fully fit physically, both in their sixties. The brother has only partial use of a hand and leg, so what we needed to do was particularly challenging for him, but he still kept pace with me; or I with him.

We were doing what people all over Svaneti have been doing who have the misfortune to own one or more roofs off which snow refuses to slide. The main two reasons for this are an insufficiently steep roof pitch, or roof material to which the snow simply sticks: painted metal as opposed to unpainted, wood slats, asbestos, or even the original ancient slate. It's much too early to be doing this, as it's a January through March activity, but there we were, in a December snowier than any other in living memory.

(I also thanked God that this question, which never even came up in our house-hunting and eventual choice of a purchase, was settled happily by a nice "coincidence". Our roof is one of the blessed slippery ones; otherwise I would, after the first winter shoveling it off, have replaced it by the necessary material, regardless of the expense and bother. It's a big, four-sided roof. We have replaced the barn's asbestos one, which was breaking up anyway, and also roofed our new garage in The Right Stuff. I would have this replacement as an optional luxury which I would see more as a necessity; not all people here do, or give it the same priority).

There's an ancient rule which goes along with our hard work up there. You didn't build a house in such a place that, shoveling off the roof, you sent your snow either into a neighbor's space or onto any passing road or track, blocking it. This was what I learned, and also that the rule has been broken many times in recent history.

Another thing which came up during the shoveling was a thought invention of mine. How to get the snow off a first-story roof but from the ground, which is much safer and easier? My implement is like a hoe scaled up, with a longer handle and bigger blade. You could pull the snow towards yourself from below, working from low to high, if it was long and strong enough. Hmm, needs development and experimentation.

And I remembered my agreement with the Inuit peoples' classification of solid H2O into hundreds of different forms of ice and snow. We had at least two main forms of the latter: a soft powdery top layer, and a denser, pressed together one made by the weight above it. The powdery layer would often crumble on the spade or as you flung it away, an exercise in frustration. The harder crust would usually stay together better, resulting in a much more satisfying shovelful and toss.

I am glad not to ever have felt fear of heights, which easily would prevent me from the shoveling. It also helps to remember that, even if you did slip and slide off the roof, your landing would simply be into the very same soft stuff with which you had been working, and be unlikely to injure you. Indeed, two of the former world's record heights for surviving a fall, some interesting if less than useful facts from my childhood reading, were from airplanes at 5500 and 7000 meters, in the 1940s, both into snow. Both people suffered some injuries, but lived to tell the tale. It was just the right thing to land in; water, apparently, has a surface tension which would give the effect of hitting concrete or rock, not much use at terminal velocity for a human.

And THAT is a subset of the thoughts going through my head as we worked to ensure that this house would not collapse in this manner.

Tony Hanmer has lived in Georgia since 1999, in Svaneti since 2007, and been a weekly writer for GT since early 2011. He runs the “Svaneti Renaissance” Facebook group, now with over 1350 members, at www.facebook.com/groups/SvanetiRenaissance/

He and his wife also run their own guest house in Etseri:

www.facebook.com/hanmer.house.svaneti

Tony Hanmer