I Went to the Woods: Not-so-skilled labor

Published 5:30 am Saturday, March 21, 2026

My hands hurt. Well, they don’t hurt, but they are sore from three days of shoveling snow and building a roof over our deck. It’s not a huge structure and there’s not a lot of heavy wood, but I’m not a contractor. Morning workouts and dumbbell carries are not the same as holding onto a rafter and triggering a drill.

It was my first attempt at rafters, though my first experience with rafters was when I was in middle school. I handed Dad the boards one end at a time then helped with the blocking as he blasted away with the nail gun from the ladder. I didn’t absorb any lessons, just suffered the indignity of porous hand-me-down rain gear and waited for the experience to be over.

Huge lag screws went through the ledger board and into the side of the house, but I don’t think he messed with the bird’s beak, birdsmouth, v-notch, whatever you want to call it.

There are a ton of Youtube videos with “Easy methods to make birdsmouth cuts” that I found to be false advertising.

The wizardry of professional builders is often reduced to a simple adage, “measure twice, cut once.” However, attempting to get the pattern for the rafter right, I ended up measuring half a dozen times and cutting at least that trying to get the wood to fit snug against the ledger and rest cleanly on the beam.

I get owned by the pin pricks of small inaccuracies. The measurement, the initial mark, the width of the cut, the inevitably warped lumber, though I try not to blame the wood for the same reason I take it easy on the golf club, rifle scope, fly rod etc. User error means it is within my control to get better. If I wait for perfectly straight, dried wood, I’d never build anything.

I didn’t expect this to be easy. Skilled builders earn their reputation and rates. But there’s something deceptively straightforward about cutting a rafter to an angle, and cutting a notch at the opposite end. It’s less complex than spey casting that requires feel and touch and assessing multiple variables all at once. But the math is waiting, lurking. Stalking?

I asked a buddy of mine, who builds homes (mine included), if he ever uses a calculator or works out the calculus.

“Nah, I got a speed square.”

Tools of the trade. Simple. Effective. Largely unchanged since it was invented in 1925.

A little off plus a little out of square and you’re faced with the critical question, Is it just, good enough? Say yes and it might mean you’re okay with imperfection, that you’re rushing, that you don’t take pride in your work and that it’s a good thing you didn’t choose this as a career because you don’t have the chops.

Or it could mean that you’re the only one who will notice and it will have no bearing on the structural integrity of the structure. Plus it’s almost time to meet your wife who just picked up your daughter and is heading to a potluck.

My wife wants to teach our daughter to knit and I am excited about that. I hope she fills down time with a skilled craft. It doesn’t matter one bit if the craft is obsolete, outdated or anachronistic in the eyes of contemporary society. Maybe that’s the point. My phone tells me the world is burning but believe me, when I am building anything, I don’t have the bandwidth to be concerned with anything else.

Precision certainly matters, but there is an inevitable human element that keeps things a little out of square. The same could be said about most Alaskans which is part of our charm.

Jeff Lund is a freelance writer based in Ketchikan. His book, “A Miserable Paradise: Life in Southeast Alaska,” is available in local bookstores and at Amazon.com. “I Went to the Woods” appears twice per month in the Juneau Empire.