Most people have not been on a roof. Not in their life. To quote the Gatekeeper of Emerald City in the Wizard of Oz, “Not no way, no how!”

As kids we all climbed trees in the big yard of the farm. There was a red maple that was especially appealing, as we could reach the lower branches and pull ourselves up like doing a pull-up in the gym. From there, the limbs were spaced like climbing a ladder. I could get twenty, twenty-five feet up, and there was no fear because I had something to hang on to and it was just like you could sit there and be away from everything until someone yelled, “Where’s Dickie?” The Italian author, Italo Calvino, wrote a book called “The Baron in The Trees,” about a kid who climbed up into the trees that circled his village and would not come down.

I had no problem in trees, but being on a roof was another matter. Or make that -- on any steep slope leading to an immediate and irreversible precipice. I wasn’t good with heights where the only thing between me and the ground was my sneakers. This fear, irrational in its triggering and in its intensity, was fully exposed that fall when Pop wanted the chimney of the farmhouse repaired.

Knowing I was attracted to masonry projects, early in my high school years, my father assigned me to be the mason’s helper for Old Man Davenport. I forgot his first name, maybe Robert. Everyone called him Old Man Davenport and he was well known around the village. He wore white coveralls like a professional painter/plasterer would wear in those days and he wore a white paper hat, brimmed, with the name of a paint company printed on the front. He was an even-tempered man of fine craftmanship and old-world expertise.

We put the heavy wooden extension ladder up against the box gutter of the farmhouse. Climbing a ladder is no problem, it is just like a tree, something to hang onto. But stepping out onto the box gutter brings into play a completely different set of sciences. I was dizzy. I found myself leaning towards the roof as if I had the dynamics of a slowing gyroscope. Each spin, heavier and heavier. “Don’t look down!”

Old Man Davenport walked up the roof like it was the sidewalk in front of Tick’s Department Store. Sliding up the roof on my butt, dragging an empty bucket with me, the men had a fine and hearty laugh. Davenport’s first task was to measure the arch of the chimney. The chimneys on the Greek Revival were unusual in the fact that they had arches built over the openings, so if you looked at the chimney from the side, the opening of the arch looked like a bell jar or a bon bon. The brick arch ran the full length of the chimney. This arch prevented rain from falling down the chimney and created a wind tunnel across the top of the flue and improved the draft of the fireplaces below.

With these measurements, Davenport built a form out of plywood over which we would rebuild the brick arches. His measurements in hand, we began the disassembly of the arch, and it was my job to walk down the loaded buckets of rubble to the ladder and then down the ladder and into a wheelbarrow. With each passing, my pants got a little thinner on the butt.

Seeing my distress, and perhaps remembering his youth and his own first days on a roof, the next day, Old Man Davenport brought a roof ladder. He had a full range of wooden roof scaffoldings, all of them hand-made by himself and capable of adjusting to any roof slope, and he had thin, light-weight wooden ladders that could be hung over the peak of the roof and all his equipment was painted a dark, unmistakable green, so, if someone saw it, everyone knew it was Davenport’s. With the ladder on the roof, I began to stand up and see the world. Now I could walk step to step up the roof and, believe me, the roof of the farmhouse is NOT steep, and this was a wonderful development. I began to get my sea legs. Going up was no bother as my weight and momentum was taking me away from the ground, not towards a point of possible life-ending impact. The ladder only got me down the top half of the roof, so I was on my own from the end of the roof ladder to the box gutter and the top of the ground ladder. At first, I would do those last few feet on my can, moving the bucket three feet at a time and then moving myself down step by step.

It all slowly came to me. By the end of the job, I would walk up and down the roof freely, standing up, and hauling the bucket all the way to the ground ladder without touching the roof. I was never as comfortable on a roof as my father, or brother, and certainly never comfortable like the great roofers of our time, Bobby Vandermark and Jimmie Del Piso.

But I became comfortable enough to know how to build a good scaffolding and carry on with stonework and chimney work the rest of my life. Old Man Davenport developed Parkinson’s disease, and when the shaking got to uncontrollable, somehow I acquired a few pieces of his roof-peak scaffolding and a couple green roof ladders, and they were with me most of my working life, as is the grateful memory of him right now.