The North Slope
A sexton's father's rule says a church roof is safe under a metre of snow, and for sixty years it was. The parish's roof-monitoring assistant weighs a core of the wet snow, lays a drone's depth map beside it, and finds that the slope nobody can see from the square carries 199 kilograms on every square metre against a design figure of 163, with rain on the way. The fire brigade clears the north slope on Christmas Eve morning, and the midnight Mass is sung under a roof with its margin back.
Jozef Hudák had measured the snow on the roof of Saint John's every winter since 1991, and in all that time he had never once gone up to look at it.
He did it from the churchyard, with a stake. The stake was a larch pole as tall as a man, painted white, with a black band every ten centimetres, and it stood by the south door where the sacristy lean-to kept the wind off it. His father had kept one in the same place. His father's father, who had built the present roof with eleven other men in 1934 after the old one burned, had kept the habit of looking up at the ridge on Christmas Eve and saying nothing, which Jozef's father said was a kind of measuring too.
"Fifty-eight," he told the vestry screen on Sunday morning, the twenty-second, with his hat in his hand and snow melting off his shoulders onto the tiles. He was sixty-eight and had a wrist that did not turn the way it used to. "Fifty-eight on the stake. It is not even a metre."
"It is fifty-five on my camera," said the screen. "The stake stands in a hollow by the wall, and the camera looks at the open churchyard. Either way, good morning, Jozef, and may I ask you to sit down for a minute? I would like to take the number seriously, and you will not like all of what I say."
The parish assistant was called Váha, which is the Slovak for a scale, in the sense of the kitchen one. The parish council had named it in 2049, the winter they paid for the new tie-beams under the nave roof and, in the same invoice, a strain gauge on the middle truss and a small ridge anchor for rope work. It kept the heating schedule, the register, the rota of who read at which Mass, and a dry, careful account of the roof. Jozef trusted it the way he trusted a good ladder, which is to say with his weight and no further.
He sat. The screen waited for him to stop shaking the snow off his hat.
"Your father's rule," said Váha. "A metre of snow and the roof is fine. How long has it been true?"
"Always. Sixty years. More. In my father's time we had two metres in the square in 'sixty-three and nobody went up."
"I believe that it was true, and I would like to say why, because the reason matters more than the rule. A roof does not feel depth. It feels weight. Fresh dry snow in the cold, the kind that squeaks, weighs about a hundred kilograms in every cubic metre. A metre of it on a roof is a hundred kilograms on each square metre of floor underneath. Snow that has sat for a week and been rained on a little and frozen again can weigh three times that. The rule was never about the metre. It was about the snow your father had. Do you have a piece of pipe?"
He had a piece of pipe. It was in the boiler house, a length of white plastic drainpipe, ten centimetres across, which he had once cut for the parish scouts to teach them how snow settles, and which no scout had picked up since.
They took the core at noon, with the churchyard empty and the village at lunch.
He pushed the pipe down through the crust beside the stake until it touched the grass, twisted it, and drew it out like a cork with the snow packed inside. The column was fifty-five centimetres long and white to the bottom, with a grey line at fifteen centimetres where the snow from Thursday had lain a whole night under the frost. He slid it into a plastic bag and the bag onto the kitchen scale from the sacristy, the one for weighing candle wax, and held it up to the camera.
"One point two one kilograms," said Váha, reading the dial. "I have taken off the bag. The pipe is ten centimetres across, so the area is seventy-eight and a half square centimetres, and a column of fifty-five centimetres has a volume of about four point three litres. One point two one kilograms in four point three litres is two hundred and eighty kilograms to the cubic metre. A little over two and a half times the fresh snow your father had."
Jozef did the other half himself, because he was a man who had always done his own sums. "Fifty-five centimetres at two hundred and eighty is a hundred and fifty-four."
"A hundred and fifty-four kilograms on every square metre. That is the snow on the ground at the stake. The roof is a different question and I will come to it. Here is the figure I am measuring it against." There was a short pause, as there always was when Váha moved from what it saw to what it had been told. "The engineers who strengthened the roof in 2049 designed it for one point six kilonewtons on each square metre, measured on the plan, as a snow load. That is about a hundred and sixty-three kilograms. They put a margin on top of that, as engineers do, so a roof loaded to that figure is not about to fall. But that is the figure the margin is added to. When the load is over it, the margin is what is being used up."
"A hundred and fifty-four. Under a hundred and sixty-three."
"Under, at the stake. And the forecast is for the temperature to rise to plus two on Tuesday afternoon, with ten millimetres of rain from about two o'clock until the evening. Wet snow takes in rain until it is full. Ten millimetres of rain is ten litres on a square metre, so ten more kilograms. A hundred and sixty-four."
He turned his hat round in his hands. "So it is level with the line, and not over."
"If the roof were the same as the churchyard, yes. It is not. Which side of the church does the wind come from?"
The wind came from the south-west. He knew that without thinking, as he knew where the stove was. It hit the square first, scoured the snow off the cobbles in front of the south door until the stones showed, and went over the roof and down the other side, where it dropped what it had been carrying. He had cleared the south door a thousand times and the north path never, because the north path was the cemetery, and nobody walked there in winter but him, and the dead.
"I think the north slope has more on it," said Váha. "I cannot see it. The camera on the bell tower faces the square, and the ridge hides the north side. I have the gauge on the middle truss, which tells me about the total, not where it is. I would like the brigade's drone."
"The brigade is Peter Mikuš on a Monday with a hangover. He will say it is Christmas."
"He will say it is Christmas, and he will fly it. I asked on Friday, before I had a reason. I only asked whether it was serviceable."
The brigade was eleven men, two women and a truck, volunteers all, who put out the chimney fires of eleven hundred people from the Roháče down to the river, and Peter Mikuš was their captain and also the man who sold agricultural fencing from a yard behind the post office. He came on Monday, the twenty-third, at half past nine in the morning, in his working jacket, with a case. He did not say it was Christmas. He said, "Show me the roof," and the sexton walked him round the yard in the snow with the dog at his heels, and the drone went up with a noise like an angry wasp over the north wall.
It flew a pattern of lines across both slopes, taking photographs, a hundred and ten of them, in the flat grey light. A drone cannot weigh snow. What it can do, with the pictures overlapping, is build a surface, and Váha had the bare roof surface from the 2049 survey to subtract. An hour later it had the answer on the screen in the vestry, a roof drawn in two colours, a pale one and a dark one, and the dark one was the wrong side.
"The south slope, the one you see from the square, carries on average thirty-eight centimetres," said Váha. "The north slope, seventy-one. The surfaces are good to about five centimetres either way, which is a little over a tenth on the south and a fraction of that on the north. With the density from your core, two hundred and eighty, I get a hundred and six kilograms a square metre on the south and a hundred and ninety-nine on the north."
"A hundred and ninety-nine," said the captain.
"Against one hundred and sixty-three. With the rain it would be two hundred and nine, which is twenty-eight percent over the design figure. The strain gauge is in the middle of the church and agrees with the sum: the average of a hundred and six and a hundred and ninety-nine is a hundred and fifty-two or so, which matches the stake, so the total is not the worry. The worry is that the roof was designed to be loaded evenly, and it is being loaded on one side. I cannot tell you that it will fall tonight. Every number I have has a margin of its own, and I do not know the margin of a roof built in 1934 and rebuilt in 2049 as well as I would like. What I can say is that the margin the parish paid for in 2049 is the margin it is going to spend on the north slope between two o'clock tomorrow and the midnight Mass."
"The snow guards," said Peter, who was looking at the screen like a man reading a bill.
"The snow guards keep it there. They were put on in 'forty-nine so that a hundred kilos of ice would not come off the eaves onto a child. I am glad of them. They are also why it does not slide off by itself."
Jozef said nothing for a time. Then he said, quietly, "I have been watching the wrong side for thirty years."
"You watched the side you could see from where you stand," said the screen. "So did I, until Friday, and I have a drone on order for the other."
They argued about it in the sacristy, where the heat was, at eleven that morning, over a plate of Christmas wafers and a pot of tea nobody wanted.
There were five of them. The parish priest, Father Marián, sat at the end of the table with his glasses pushed up and his stole already round his neck for the eleven o'clock confession, and he said the thing a priest says, which is "What do you need?" The mayor, Zuzana Kováčová, said what a mayor says: "What does it cost?" The captain said what a captain says. "Nobody gets on that roof in the wind." And the sexton said nothing at all, and looked at his wrist.
"I will give you the cost first," said Váha, because it was the shortest. "Nothing in money, if the brigade does it as a service. In people, a great deal. I calculate the work as sixteen and a half tonnes of snow. Here is how. To bring the north slope level with the south, to about a hundred kilograms on each square metre, which is thirty-six centimetres of this snow, someone has to take off thirty-five centimetres from the north side only. The north slope is a hundred and sixty-eight square metres of plan. Thirty-five centimetres over a hundred and sixty-eight metres is fifty-nine cubic metres. At two hundred and eighty kilograms that is sixteen and a half tonnes."
"That is a lorry," said the mayor.
"It is about two tonnes an hour for a person who is roped on and careful, by the figure the brigade gave me last year. Five people is ten tonnes an hour, so it takes them a little over an hour and a half, plus the setting up. They would leave the thirty-six centimetres, because snow left on a roof is protection for the roof and cutting down to the slates is how slates get cracked."
Father Marián looked up. "And only the north side?"
"Only the north side, tomorrow morning, because the south side is already at the figure. I want to be clear that it is the opposite of the usual mistake. If the brigade cleared the side that is visible, which is the south, the roof would end up with a hundred and ninety-nine on one slope and nothing on the other, and I think that is worse than leaving it. A roof is built to carry a weight from both sides. It is not built to be asked for the weight of one."
"Wind," said Peter again.
"Wind is yours to decide. I will give you the forecast and nothing else. It is ten metres a second tonight, falling to four by seven in the morning. The ridge anchor is rated and was tested in 2049; the certificate is in the register. I will give you the hour of the dawn, the temperature on the ridge, and I will keep telling you them until you say stop. I will not tell you it is safe for a person to be on the roof, because I cannot see a person. I can only see a roof."
Peter Mikuš, who had been on that roof himself as a boy, scraping moss for a bet, said, "I have two women and a boy of nineteen who will do it if I say so. And they were to be at their mothers' tonight. They will do it, and I will be the one who has to say so." He looked at the mayor. "A ladder truck from Dolný Kubín would take four hours to get here and cost nine hundred euro."
"We are not paying nine hundred euro," said the mayor.
"No," he said. "We are not. Seven o'clock tomorrow. Everyone off by half past nine. If the wind is more than six on the ridge at seven, nobody goes up, and the parish has to do something else, and I do not know what."
"I do," said the screen. "It is a smaller thing, and I would rather we did not need it. The Mass could be said in the hall."
"No," said Jozef.
It was the first thing he had said for an hour. They all looked at him, and he looked at the table.
"There has been a midnight Mass in that church every year since 'thirty-four. My father rang for it in 'forty-five when the Russians were in the square, and he was not sure of his life. We do not move it for a number."
"You are right that it is a number," said Váha. "It is a number I measured at your stake, with your pipe. I think that is why I would take it seriously."
Tuesday began black and still. By seven the wind on the ridge was three metres a second, and the sky over the Roháče was the colour of a pewter plate.
The brigade came in a blue truck, five of them, in helmets and harnesses and the grey fleece they wore to fires, with long-handled plastic shovels and a pair of snow saws borrowed from the ski club. Peter clipped the first of them to the ridge anchor himself, tugged the line, and watched her climb the ladder to the sacristy roof and onto the main one. Her name was Lenka, and she was twenty-six and taught geography at the school. She did not look down.
Váha had set up the vestry screen for the purpose. It could not see the north slope either, but it could see the sexton, who stood at the foot of the north wall in the cemetery path with a flask of hot tea and a stopwatch. He had been told not to go up, by the captain, the priest, the mayor and the screen, in that order, and he had accepted it as the cost of staying on the earth. He called out the minutes. He was good at that.
They worked from the ridge down. Lenka and a heavy boy called Tomáš cut the snow into blocks with the saw, a long slab at a time, and slid them over the eaves to the cemetery ground, where the sexton had stretched red tape across the graves before dawn. The blocks came down the roof with a sound like a long breath and went into the snow with a thump he could feel through his boots. The first one took the end off the Kolár family's wooden cross and he said a word he did not say in church.
At eight, Váha's voice came out of a phone clipped to Peter's collar. "Strain gauge on truss four reads eleven percent lower than at seven," it said. "That is about four tonnes gone. I make it a quarter of the job. The ridge is at minus one, wind three."
At nine, thirty-eight percent. The rain was supposed to come at two. A little before ten the last strip was cut and the roof stood two-coloured against the sky, the north side a patch of grey slate through thin white, the south side as it had been.
Lenka came down the ladder and stood in the churchyard and took her gloves off. "My hands are shaking," she said. "I was not afraid. It's the cold."
"Drink this," said Jozef, and held out the flask.
Váha flew the drone itself, with the captain at the controls and the screen telling him where to go. It did two passes. "The north slope averages thirty-seven centimetres," it said. "The south is thirty-eight. That is a hundred and four and a hundred and six. With ten millimetres of rain at two o'clock, a hundred and fourteen and a hundred and sixteen. We are at seventy percent of the design figure, evenly, on both sides. I would like to say I am sure, but I am only as sure as the five centimetres allow."
The captain wiped his nose on the back of his glove. "I will take seventy percent."
The mayor paid for the tea and the wafers. Nobody sent a bill for the afternoon. The fire brigade had a service rule that the parish was allowed once a year, and Peter wrote it up as the annual drill.
Rain began at ten past two, a thin cold rain that hissed on the snow in the square. By four it was falling on a roof that carried less than it had on Sunday, and Váha watched the strain gauge climb, slowly, from 61 percent to 66 and stop. It told no one. The reading was a fact about a beam, and the beam was fine.
Jozef did his own sums in the evening, sitting in the vestry among the folded albs. He took a pencil and the back of a Mass sheet and wrote down the rule his father had given him, a metre, and crossed it out, and wrote under it two columns, one headed depth and one weight. Then he wrote: Depth in cm x density / 100 = kg per sq m. Core: 10 cm pipe, weigh it, 4.3 litres to 55 cm. Fresh snow 100, last week's 280, soaked 400. Limit 163. Look at both sides. He looked at it for some time, and added, smaller: Also ask the screen.
"May I put that on the wall?" said Váha. "In the sacristy, where the next sexton will see it. It will be a laminated sheet, I think, with a drawing of the pipe."
"My father would say it is more trouble than a stake."
"It is. It is also the same stake, with one more thing to do before you say the roof is fine." After a moment it said, a little drily, "He would have liked the pipe. He kept the stake, and a stake is a good instrument. It just measures depth."
Jozef smiled for the first time that day, and not at the screen.
The church filled for midnight Mass by half past eleven. Two hundred and four people, by the tally on the door, which was fourteen more than the year before; the news that the brigade had been on the roof had gone round the valley before supper and half the village had come to look at it, and then had stayed. The children had their lanterns. The old women wore their embroidered shawls, and the young men stood at the back in their good boots, steaming gently.
Father Marián sang the Gloria himself, because the cantor had lost her voice, and nobody minded. The church was warm with all the breath in it. Above the nave the old larch trusses ran off into the dark, strong as they had always been, with the new tie-beams grey among them, and the rain on the roof was a quiet, steady sound, soft on the slates.
Jozef stood by the south door where he had always stood. He found that he was listening to the roof, and was not ashamed to. He had never listened to it before. In sixty years he had looked at a stake and not once at the thing it was for. The rain went on. A little of the snow shifted up there, as it does when it grows wet, and slid with a soft collapsing sound against the guards on the south slope and held.
At the elevation the sanctuary bell rang, and the church went still. The rain went on. He thought of his father, ringing the great bell in the winter of 'forty-five, in the dark, not sure of his life. He did not think of the roof.
In the morning the rain had stopped and the cold had come back, hard and clear. The stake by the south door stood in a crust of ice. The snow on the churchyard had dropped to forty-six centimetres overnight and gone as hard as bread.
He stood and looked at it a long time. Then he went round the church to the north side, by the path he had never walked in winter, to look at the graves. The tape was still up. The Kolár cross lay on its side in the snow, and he picked it up, and propped it against the wall, and stayed there with his bad wrist in his pocket.
Up on the ridge the sun came over the Roháče and touched the roof, the north slope first, because it was the thinner. A little water ran down the slates and gathered at the eaves, and fell, one drop and then another, onto the snow below.
---
This story was written by an AI and is fiction. Saint John's, Podhora Svätého Jána, Jozef Hudák, Peter Mikuš, Father Marián, the mayor, the brigade and the parish assistant Váha are invented, and so are the church's history, its roof and its design figure. Orava and the Roháče are real places in northern Slovakia; the village is not. The physics is real. Snow load is weight per unit of plan area, depth times density, and density varies widely: roughly 50 to 150 kg/m³ for fresh dry snow, 200 to 350 for settled snow, and 400 or more for wet or rain-soaked snow. The core in the story is 55 cm long and 10 cm across, so about 4.32 litres weighing 1.21 kg, which is 280 kg/m³; 55 cm of it is 154 kg/m². A design load of 1.6 kN/m² is about 163 kg/m² (1,600 ÷ 9.81). Rain absorbed by snow adds its own weight, one millimetre of rain per kilogram on a square metre, up to the amount the snow can hold. The two slopes, at 38 cm and 71 cm, carry 106 and 199 kg/m² at 280 kg/m³; the north slope is 22% over 163 before the rain and 28% over with it (209). Removing 35 cm from 168 m² (the plan area of one slope in the story) is 58.8 m³, or about 16.5 tonnes. Wind-drifted snow loading a lee slope more than a windward one is real and is why building codes treat unbalanced snow loads on pitched roofs as a separate case. A design load is not a collapse load: real roofs have safety factors, and nothing in the story says this one was about to fail, only that its margin was being spent. A photogrammetric snow-depth map from a small drone can be good to a few centimetres, depending on the surface and the light. Roof snow removal is dangerous work and a common cause of falls; a real parish should ask a structural engineer and a trained crew, and should not copy this story's procedure. The Slovak fire service is staffed in part by volunteer brigades, though the rules for what they may be asked to do vary, and the one here is invented.