Roof stability

Necessity is the mother of invention, the saying goes, and nowhere have I seen this better demonstrated than up above Monteagle town in Tennessee. The ground there is so steep that instead of building their cabins from the ground up, locals start at the top and work their way down. As each wall nears earth, the builder stakes it into the sod with wooden posts. I suggested to one fellow that if he wanted even greater stability, he should plant fir tree seedlings along the support walls and add some  Wizard Water^©. He did so, and sure enough, the seedlings sprouted almost instantaneously. They grew a foot a second, and soon the walls were girded with a fence-like series of living support posts.

My method would have worked perfectly if the seedlings hadn't displaced the roof. The fir trees shot through the shingles and lifted the beams skyward. Soon the fellow had a wonderful, four-walled enclosure fit for chickens and goats, but no shelter against inclement weather. He was so upset that he began throwing everything he had at me. An adze inadvertently hit the roof and knocked it off the treetops. The roof crashed into the mountainside and rolled until it lodged atop a church in the town below. The church's congregation was overjoyed. They had just lost their meeting house roof a few weeks earlier when it slid off during a storm. They had been praying for a replacement and now their prayers seemed answered, as this roof fit better and didn't wobble on the steep slope. The choir sang their thanks at the following Sunday service.

No one heard them, though. Nothing beats a roof with a perfect pitch.