Repairing the Roof

“Director’s Notes” are excerpts from our monthly email newsletter, “Stories from the Garden.” Subscribe and see past issues here.

Dear Friends, 

Under the house, thirty feet or so beneath the west lanai, sit neat stacks of heavy ceramic roof tiles. When W.S. Merwin built his house on Maui’s north coast in the early 1980s, he stashed these extra tiles here—and for this very moment, as it turns out. Late last year, we noticed a leak in the roof on the front lanai, just over the front door, and the vixen who guards it. A few months later, we’re below the house, behind three large cisterns of William’s design, wrapping up our plan to repair the broken tiles way above. William wrote about these tiles in a reminiscence about his early days here in Peʻahi: 

In my first sketches for a garage, up near the road, and for a house, part way down the slope, I planned a large water cistern under each building and I wanted the house, at least—whose cistern would supply the drinking water—to have a tile roof. Not the baked terra cotta tiles of southern Europe, but here in the middle of the Pacific the green, glazed tiles of houses in the islands and around the Pacific rim.

As with each choice he made in building his house and making the garden, the selection of tile was both aesthetically precise and eminently practical. Or perhaps better said, highly intentional: the tile was practical in terms of its function—as part of the water catchment system William had designed—but not at all practical in its sourcing; in records Paula Merwin kept of house projects and repairs, she wrote on June 27, 1984 of their efforts to acquire more of the same tile for the garden dojo:

The tiles for the garden house roof are on their way via barge, and will arrive, of course, just as we leave for Lanai and Honolulu. We must arrange for a large truck to pick them up—they weigh two tons—and bring them out here, along with a forklift to unload them—a procedure of at least three hours, expensive and laborious. Then they have to be carried by hand, three or four at a time, down the hill to the house.

Standing here beneath the house exactly four decades later, I am thinking back on the many delightful discoveries we’ve made over these early years of our custodianship. Four summers ago, right here under the stairs to the cisterns, we found several empty bottles of 1962 Château des Moines, Lalande de Pomerol. On the landing at the top of the staircase, we came across dozens of tea canisters, each holding leaves from a specific place and time. And in the meditation dojo inside the house, after walking by it without notice for years, we saw, at last, a stone figure of a fox sleeping subtly atop a round and impossibly heavy millstone. All of these objects, the old roof tiles among them, are both relics from the past and guides to the future of this place. And now, as the sun tilts and we turn toward summer long after these first choices were made, we ourselves turn to a very practical question—how to fix the roof in ways that honor craft, embrace the cycles of nature, and ensure longevity for those who come to spend time here long into the future, in this place where both pasts and futures feel very much alive. 

With warm wishes for a happy summer,

Sonnet