#15 24 Hours of Life on the Land

"The impulse to keep to yourself what you have learned is not only shameful, it is destructive. Anything you do not give freely and abundantly becomes lost to you. You open your safe and find ashes." — Annie Dillard (The Writing Life)

Not every day is as busy, but as I wended my way through the last 24 hours, I experienced the highs and lows of life on the mountain: so much activity that my head spins with information and demands, the glorious enactment of a dream about a renovated cabin coming true, but also a cold and foggy-wet night with aching joints and muscles, worries about bills and what’s next in my life, then a morning of radiant sunshine gleaming through the redwoods and pines. With all these fears and joys, I thought of a favorite sliver of potry by Walt Whitman from Leaves of Grass:
Do I contradict myself?
Very well then, I contradict myself.
I contain multitudes.
And then came this adage I learned long ago attributed to a follower of Jung: "Maturity is the ability to maintain the tension of opposites." Stress out; breathe. Hurry, hurry; relax. Worry, worry; have faith.

Wednesday, June 8, 2011
7 pm Returned from trip to town to buy paint, get online, pick up mail, and shop.
7:30 Collected several hoses to water the road. Tomorrow Dan arrives from Mendocino Farm Supply to spray a salt solution on the road in front of the cabin for 100 yards, which will prevent the typical 15-foot high tsunami of dust from hurried country drive bys. See, I’m not that far from “civilization”! The good thing about being so close to the road is that I could always crawl out there in an emergency and I’d be found within an hour or two. Anyhow, Dan said the road should be wet for the solution to take hold. On this evening I enjoy standing in the road for 30 minutes and contemplating the sun sinking to the west through the trees while I water the road. No one appears.
8:15 Typical dinner of couscous and Indian fare from Trader Joe’s. Easier to eat food requiring only hot water since I lack counter or indoor sink. Yummy if repetitious.
9 pm By the time the sun’s gone, I’ve refilled and trimmed the wicks of my two keronsene lamps. I’m reading Annie Dillard’s The Writing Life, but I don’t last long before sleep takes me. It’s still 45 degrees at night, and the floor seems cold despite the layers under Cholo, so I let him cuddle beside me on the bed in his own sleeping bag.

Thursday, June 9, 2011
5am Up, exhausted from Cholo kicking me most of the night. He can’t run anymore during the day, so he seems to do it all at night, his legs busily working into my back by 3 am even though I had him turned toward the wall. Tonight, he’s back on the floor—enough!
6 am With coffee in hand, I re-water the road, then clean out the tool shed of breakable items—the small generator, the two sinks to be installed one day, screens for the new windows, the propane heater for the bathroom, jugs of gas and kerosene, the chain saw. Thompson Tree Service will be here at 8 am to take down a tree so that the bulldozer can get through to dig in the space designated by the county as appropriate for the septic tank. Beda and his bulldozer will be here Monday.
7:15 In our morning greeting, the carpenters and I review what’s in the works: Tom put a beautiful knee brace to hold up the new roof over the back door; they will finish the wall by the back door today. Also, Chris is working on creating vents under the roof. “Here’s your tool vocabulary for the day,” he tells me, showing me the router with a chamfer bit for beveling the vent holes into beautiful little triangles. (He told me that one of the bits is called at OG, which makes me think Old Gangster, but I don’t think that’s what it referred to.) These beautiful details will be sources of meditation for me in the future as I gaze at the artistry these folks have left behind.
7:30 I head up to Jack and Jill’s at the top of the hill (I swear that’s true) whose house overlooks the gorgeous view that we call On Top of the World. They, like me, get waves of dust as cars go by. Jill is going in on the DustOff with me, but can’t get out to water her road, so I’m doing it for her. Another beautiful place to do the quiet work of road watering, the fog settled in the valleys below.
8:15 Mark, Jason, and Brian from Mark Thompson’s Tree Service arrive to take down the tree. Their consensus is that three trees should come down, since the other two are twisted and leaning over the sheds, one of them looking diseased. I go with the experts’ opinions. “Look at it this way: you’ll have an amazing supply of wood for the next two winters.” Yeah, I can dig that.
9:00 They work fast. Tom and Chris, the carpenters on the scene, enjoy watching Brian, the climber, as much as I do. Chris noted the spurs that Brian, the climber, had on: "They giveas Brian rappeled from tree to tree in his ropes and halter. Brian would tie off a 10-foot-stretch of trunk, expertly cutting into it lower down with his mini chainsaw until he gave it a push, and it would tumble, but only a few feet, hanging as Jason below him held it back. Once the trunk was on the ground, Jason and Mark would toss branches into the chipper, and the remains became an excellent pile of future mulching.
Later on the ground himself, Brian explained the “double crotch” rope pulley system he used, he ropes hung over Ys in two trees, which provided enough leverage for the heavy trunk to hang suspended until Jason lowered it. Brian laughed good-spiritedly as he talked and spat his chaw juice a good three feet as he delivered his basic physics lesson to me. Mark and Jason still were cleaning up. The climber doesn’t have to clean up as much. It’s a skill and status thing, I guess.
During this performance, Brian and Jason were “capping” on each other, adding to their tree felling performance a extra show of hyper-masculine cajoling that was equally amusing to me. When I took their picture before they started, Brian said quite threateningly, “Get your hands off me! Get your hands off me!” I thought Jason should desist, but he just smiled, unconcerned. Later, as Brian barked at him above in the tree, belittling Jason’s stature, I saw a smile playing on Brian’s lips. At the end of their stay, when I asked how long the two guys had known each other. Brian guffawed, “Too long!”
“Second grade,” Jason laughed back.
“When this scrawny kid come to our school, he started hangin’ on to me, and I haven’t been able to shake him since!”
Jason just grinned.
Like the carpenter crew, these guys have an abiding respect for each other, perhaps all the more important when they work under very dangerous conditions. But unlike the carpenters I work with on a daily basis, they show their affection in bluster. I prefer a less jocular environment for my daily fare, but I enjoyed the hard work and hard humor of this trustworthy tree crew—and believe me, when 75 foot trees are coming down with only a 10’ x 10’ area to fall in, you want people who know what they’re doing and who enjoy doing it, too.
10:00 As if the trees coming down weren’t enough to contend with, “Dan DustOff” has arrived with his truck and tanks of the solution to spray. He doesn’t take long. The younger guy Brandon working with him is in training and makes the truck jump at one point so that the hose lurches out of Dan’s hands and sprays him. I run to get him a towel, but, nonplussed, Dan uses the teachable moment to instruct Brandon about how to drive while someone is walking behind him spraying. Ah, gentle men!
11:15 As the tree guys are finishing up, Scott from the water department shows up to test my water for chlorine: 6.6 is the measurement he gets, which he says is right in between the recommended limits of .5 and .8. Wish I could dig for well water, but that’s super-expensive and an unsure gamble. Scott offers me his advice for dealing with chlorinated water…
12:15 With the tree guys gone, Tom, Chris, Miguel and I have lunch together (Mike is off sick; Miguel is back to help me paint). Among today’s lunchtime series: the life of a 90-year-old Willits oldtimer, a Mrs. James, who used to drive cattle in the little Sherwood valley at the bottom of my hill (before you get into the Willits valley proper). Chris grew up in this valley, so he knows the lore, as well as the geography of the Indian reservation, the cattle ranches, the mills. Also, Miguel shared his stories of working all over the United States, from a George carpet factory to a fishing boat in Alaska. Of the latter, he reported that it was so treacherous in the high seas, when bodies went overboard, there could be no attempt to save them. Our theme morphed into the nature of brutal work. Never a dull meal around here.

12:45 I’m back to painting with Miguel—and how the paint gives me a glimmer of hope that the cabin really will be clean and beautiful one day. I’ve chosen yellow for the kitchen and bedroom (as if these are separate rooms!), teal for the bathroom, and tan for the closet. The kitchen and sitting room also have the pine paneled ceiling that will need a clear finish. I think of my formerly tar paper walls, how some people live like that (or with newspaper or tin) all their lives; I’m grateful it’s only been weeks. I’m also grateful for Miguel’s help since the taping, then multiple coats of primer, paint and wood finish mount up, and the carpenters can’t do the trim on all the windows and doors until we’ve painted.

2 pm A California Department of Forestry officer arrives to do a surprise check on the grounds to insure I’m following regulations to keep 100 feet of defensible space. He approves! As well he should after I had all the brush and deadwood cleared from around the cabin last winter. He also gave me instructions about how to recharge my fire extinguisher (is your fire extinguisher full?).

3:15 We all clean up. I still have only the one spigot in the yard as my water source for cleaning out the painting buckets and brushes. After the guys leave, I give the cabin a sweep, and collect all the wood for fire kindling pieces left from the various sawing locations on the deck and in the driveway. Then I’m off to town again to get back online, charge my computer, take Cholo for a walk in the city park under the big maple trees.

5:15 I meet my friend Lucy at the Willits Center for the Arts to examine the new exhibit of local artists. Ron Woolsey does some extraordinary work with wood and ceramic, including a bench of highly polished redwood made from a piece of driftwood—he inspires my own desires to make pretty little benches along the trails that will one day flourish in my hilltop refuge for critters, friends and family.
(http://www.willitscenterforthearts.org/wca_members/wca_members_woolsey.html)

6:30 Back home to wash. I’ve moved my personal wash area to the deck since I once saw my neighbor walking by as I was washing my head at the sink behind the shed, not entirely clothed, let’s say (I’ll spare you the details). I’ve gotten really good at the system: one gallon of hot water and a small bucket of cold water is all it takes. Who needs a shower?
Tomorrow: Doors begin to get installed (new front door pictured below).
Next week: Beda and his bulldozing friends install the new septic tank. Ralph will install the solar system, while Tom et al. will install the kitchen cabinets. I still won’t have indoor plumbing in the kitchen for a few weeks until the counter top gets installed, but at least the big boxes in the middle of the cabin will be out of the way, and the semblance of the future interior shall be more evident.
Even as I share the privations and bustle of the last 24 hours, I am cognizant of what life is like for those who are refugees in Syria whose stories were told on the morning radio, or those live and do business along train tracks in India, seen in a video that a friend sent to me. They truly know what hardship is. I’m just taking a peek into such lives in my own small way.

"There is no shortage of good days. It is good lives that are hard to come by. A life of good days lived in the senses is not enough. The life of sensation is the life of greed; it requires more and more. The life of the spirit requires less and less; time is ample and its passage sweet. Who would call a day spent reading a good day? But a life spent reading -- that is a good life." — Annie Dillard (The Writing Life)