Nothing wakes me up in the middle of the night like the slow, steady beat of running water. It’s a survival instinct developed during long nights aboard old, leaky wooden sailboats that came in handy last week. 

“What are you doing?” my wife asked groggily as I threw open our bedroom closet, stepped inside and shut the door behind me. 

“Shush!” I hissed, staring into the darkness and holding my breath.

Tap.

“Get out of the closet, you’re scaring the dog.”

Tap.

“You hear that?”

“Hear what?”

Tap.

I reached out blindly for the sound, toward the sewer vent pipe that runs from the main sewer line in the basement, through our closet, along the side of the upstairs dormer and up above the roofline. My hand came back dry.

“Must be the radiators,” I grumbled, closed the closet door behind me, shoved the dog into her bed and hopped back into my own.

Tap.

I flew out of the bedroom, through the kitchen and into the basement, where a dark, wet stain reached out across the ceiling – the first floor floorboards – surrounding the sewer vent pipe. A few puzzling minutes later I was upstairs aiming a flashlight at the point where the sewer vent pipe passes through the roof. 

I watched, dumbfounded, as drops of water intermittently squeezed through the gap between a layer of bitchathane and the backside of the asphalt shingles put on our roof just two months ago.

There are dozens of ways to keep water out of a boat. If the deck is leaking, either re-bed the at-fault deck hardware, replace the worn hatch gasket or track down the hole and inject it with epoxy or 5200, a marine grade adhesive akin to a hybrid of asphalt and superglue. If a wooden hull is taking on water, you can toss sawdust around the boat so it jams in the cracks and swells, eventually sealing the hull. Jamming a wooden peg or ball of cloth into a hole in any hull can also stop a small leak. I read that old school sailors, when confronted with a large hole, will submerge a sail and pull it taught over the hole, allowing water pressure created by the boat’s displacement to hold the canvas in place, hopefully stemming the oncoming flood.

If all that fails there are always electric and manual bilge pumps, a disconnected saltwater engine intake with an overboard discharge or the good, old fashioned, five-gallon bucket.

I know all this, but when it comes to a leaky roof, I am absolutely clueless.

In an act of complete desperation, I went to the basement and grabbed a Tupperware container, a plastic kazoo, a short section of washing machine water hose and two rolls of electrical tape – I was out of duct tape.

I punched a hole in a corner of the Tupperware, shoved the cone-shaped kazoo in the hole and adhered the hose over the entire corner. After some precise placement, the Tupperware was catching drops from the leak, the water was funneling through the kazoo and into the hose, the end of which I tossed out a nearby window.

Over the past week I’ve learned a lot about ice dams and have managed to fix the leak, but have decided to leave my contraption in place, just in case winter decides to drop another five feet of snow on us.

– Nate Jones