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son of a roofer medievalist checking in with a wee thought: All I could think yesterday was about the workers involved in the restoration work; fire can possibly be pinpointed to a single mistake made by one worker. I'm sure there are dozens of workers associated with cathedral+
who are thinking and rethinking every single action they took yesterday trying to figure out if they are in any way responsible. My heart is shattered for them. They might never know for certain and they may never forgive themselves thinking it's their fault. +
To this day--with all the zillions of regulations--building construction is among the deadliest jobs that exist; it's dangerous; it's physically excruciating; it is essential. But constructions workers are never treated as heroes. If anything+
they work they do at places like Notre Dame is only thought of as a nuisance: their scaffolding messes up our pictures; their work sites prevent us from accessing parts we had hoped to see. Nobody thanks them for their work+
but it's not just the medieval masons who deserve our respect today. It's the 15th-21st century builders, workers, roofers, glaziers, masons, wrights who keep our buildings alive. They are not going to show up in touching pictures the way that firefighters do+
but a lot of them are certainly suffering right now. They are still physically exhausted from the work they do everyday but also wrecked thinking they may have been responsible. And they are going to immediately return to that most dangerous work to preserve our buildings ♥
fuck, now I'm crying a lot. This one time I was working on a roof for a friend of my dad. We were ripping off cedar roof which is nasty hot itchy work. It's also super flammable. We all smoked. One of my dad's guys who I worked with a lot pulled me over to a spot where a+
cigarette butt was smoldering. We were probably 10 mins from the entire million dollar house bursting into flames. He held it up: "Camel. That's yours. Be more careful." I took out my cigs: Marlboro that day bc the store didn't have my regular. So it wasn't either of our +
faults but we don't who's it was. Does really fucking matter when a house burns down. Everybody is fucked. And there are thousands opportunities to fuck up everyday on a job like that and 99.9% of the time none of us fuck up at all. But when we do. Fuck.
I slipped into roofing vernacular there at the end. Sorry about that.
