Howdy, folks. Glen Blamstead here. I told the weatherman he was wrong the other morning. He said it's just a front. Now I don't know if he was talking about the cold front rolling into Mora or if he was owning up to his whole career, but either way it stuck with me.
I was standing in the driveway at five-forty-five, coffee in one hand, dog in the other, watching a wall of gray cloud walk across Kanabec County like it owned the place. The forecast the night before had been very specific. Sunny. High of seventy-two. Wind out of the south at a whisper. A perfect day to set trusses on a new build up by Pine City. The kind of forecast you plan a whole crew around. The kind of forecast that turns out to be a personal insult by nine-fifteen.
By six-thirty the sky had gone from gray to a sort of bruised purple that Minnesotans recognize the way sailors recognize a shark fin. My foreman called before I could call him. "You seeing this?" "I'm looking at it right now." "Weather says sunny." "I know what weather says." There was a long pause. Then he said the phrase that I have heard him say maybe two hundred times in the years we've worked together, and it is always followed by an interesting Tuesday. He said, "Well."
We regrouped. That's what you do in this business. You don't fight the weather in Minnesota — you renegotiate. The trusses could wait a day. The customer up by Pine City is a patient sort who knows enough to know that a truss going up in a thirty-mile-an-hour crosswind is a truss you'll be picking out of somebody else's cornfield by supper. So we called him, he laughed, he said his wife wanted him to run errands anyway, and we shifted the crew over to a smaller job in Ogilvie that could handle a little weather.
That's when the weatherman came on the radio.
Now I have nothing against weathermen personally. It is a hard job. You make a prediction on television at ten o'clock at night and then you have to live with that prediction the way the rest of us have to live with a haircut we asked for and now regret. And most days, most of the time, they're roughly correct. Roughly. Correct-ish. The way a horoscope is correct-ish. But this particular morning the man on the radio was doubling down. He was insisting. He was, and I quote, "promising the listeners a beautiful August day."
I was, at that moment, watching a fence post in my yard bend at what I would describe as a concerning angle.
So I did what any reasonable Minnesotan would do. I picked up the phone and I called the radio station. I have never in my life called a radio station before. I don't know what came over me. Maybe it was the coffee. Maybe it was the fence post. Maybe it was that the dog, who is normally an unshakable optimist about weather, had already gone back inside and buried herself under the couch. Whatever it was, I dialed the number, and a very cheerful young lady answered, and she put me through.
"Sir," I said. "I am looking at the sky. I am telling you that you are wrong."
The weatherman, to his enormous credit, was completely unruffled. He said, "Sir, it's just a front. Should be through by noon."
I hung up. What are you supposed to do with that? The man had defeated me with a pun before I had even finished my first cup of coffee. Just a front the way the ocean is just a puddle. Just a front the way a hornet is just a bug.
The front, of course, came through. About seven-thirty the sky opened up and Kanabec County got a good hour of the kind of rain that fills every low spot on every job site in a thirty-mile radius. The wind pushed a lawn chair I had forgotten about across the road and into my neighbor's driveway, where it will stay for at least three weeks before either of us admits ownership. The dog stayed under the couch. The crew stayed in the Ogilvie shop reorganizing screws by length, which is something they do when they are being paid to be patient.
And then, right about eleven-forty-five, the sky started to clear. By noon it was seventy-four and sunny. By one o'clock it was, and I say this with a straight face, a beautiful August afternoon.
So the weatherman was right. He was also wrong. He was both. That is the great and terrible truth about Minnesota weather and about a certain kind of man on the radio. They are correct on a long enough timeline. They are wrong on the timeline you actually have to schedule crews around. And when you point this out to them, they will hit you with a pun that is somehow both an apology and a shrug at the same time.
We set the trusses at Pine City the next morning. Beautiful day. Not a cloud. Wooden trusses on treated posts, exactly the way we always build them and exactly the way Sherman has always built them, and up they went, one after another, until the barn had a proper roofline and the customer stood in his gravel driveway with his hands on his hips looking at it the way a man looks at something he'll be glad about every winter for the next forty years.
If you're thinking about a build and you'd like to talk it through with people who take the forecast seriously and the weather more seriously — holler at us, or stop by Sherman in Mora. Bring a jacket. It's Minnesota. There is always a front.
