#17 That Darkest Hour Thing

Cliches become cliché because they are so often true. "The darkest hour comes before the dawn": Does it have scientific truth? I don't know, but the emotional truth seems obvious, the anxiety that builds while waiting all night for the light to return and being plum worn out with whatever keeps us up and exhausted.

For me, the physical renovation of the cabin has been nearly three months in the making, not interminable compared to constructing a whole house or renovating a building larger than my 600 square feet, but made more difficult for me by not having electricity, heat, or indoor plumbing at home for the duration. The process has reached a contradictory climax in the last two weeks: The end seemed nearer because the walls were freshly painted (by Miguel and me), beautiful trim graces the windows (thanks to Tom, Chris, and Mike, featured right) and light fixtures gave the place a finished look inside (the work of Ralph and Jeff, below).


Meanwhile, outside all hell broke loose.

The septic tank going in behind the shed (see photos below of the tank arriving, the Really Big Hole dug by the backhoe and its placement) meant having the excavator and backhoe ripping up terrain in what was essentially my front yard and outdoor kitchen area. It only lasted a few days, but the open trenches were an open wound when I was already weary of coping with carrying water. The resulting dust—and when it rained lately, mud—from the newly churned earth were not much fun.

The contagiously cheerful and splendidly helpful “Septic and Big Equipment” man, Beda, made enduring the havoc pleasurable. As he looked at one open trench for the phone line and another for the water line, with the excavator poised for replacing the shed, he commented, “It’s really coming together!” Yeah.

True enough. I mean, this trenching means that the connecting energy sources of the cabin will be conducting their forces soon, like the nervous and digestive systems of the body. The water, gas, electric and phone lines all converge and soon will spark and flow.

In the meantime, I keep my weariness at bay, my brain juggling new understandings of all these systems. I work this job from 7 am to 4 pm, then race down the hill into town to get online and deal with other projects and responsibilities, then back up hill while it's still light to clean up the newest debris or otherwise trying to make order out of the chaos of construction. The debris, dust, noise and garbage seem endless (see some piles, right).

During this whole process, I keep renewing my faith that at the end of each day or after a few days, the latest stage will reap benefits and ultimately order.

For example, on Monday, another Mike (left), the brother of Chris the carpenter, arrived and with Miguel, helped transform the stack of tree rounds into useable firewood. I now have about two cords of wood that will keep me (and you, when you visit) warm for a couple of cold winters (below, right). Mike used a wood splitter, a gas powered machine that supremely simplifies the work of heaving an ax over and over again (so my ax wielding lesson will have to wait). I learned about such obvious basics as 2-stroke versus 4-stroke machines; using an oil-and-gas mixture; that gasoline comes in red cans while kerosene comes in blue; and that a cord of wood is 4’x8’x4’ (the latter is valuable knowledge for me, since I had to buy a cord at the beginning of the winter but didn't really know what it should look like). After Miguel, Mike, and I all donned earplugs, we spent a couple of hours cutting and stacking. The end result of this hugely loud process was this amazing pile of wood. Now to cover it and keep it from getting wet and moldy in the winter…

Bats in my belfry I haven’t wanted to mention some of the more unpleasant aspects of living in the shed, like finding mouse poop on my bureau after I’ve been absent for a day or so. Also disturbing is listening to the mice scurry in the wall behind my head at night when I’m trying to sleep. Earplugs work well for that little problem, though getting a “mouser”cat is recommended for the long term. One evening I saw a bat fly above my head in the shed, rather startling. I thank Mike (the carpenter), an eternal optimist, for pointing out that the bat will take care of mosquitoes. So yeah, I stopped worrying about any nefarious impact of bats. Besides, I don’t have enough hair for them to mess with, should they even try to live up to their reputation. I’m good with mosquito patrol. After a few months of all this home havoc, it might drive one a little batty.

Who knew that I could ever miss a cold, wintry night? But now that the summer is setting in, mosquitoes can plague the evening with their insistent buzz. I keep thinking about the saying in Minnesota that their state bird is the mosquito. At least ours are still small. I strive to work that “eternal optimist” discipline, too. It sure creates far less anxiety and resentment.

Lessons learned

So all of this web-log is about sharing what I am learning as a neophyte in the woods and getting a chance to exercise my sense of humor under often challenging moments.

As the renovation process comes to its gradual close, I see reinforcement of lessons learned along the way. One is the warning that Nancy, the architect, and Tom, the contractor, offered at the beginning of the process: It is usually better to tear down a dysfunctional structure and start fresh. So far I am glad I didn’t, but I understand now much better why they would advise such a seemingly drastic approach.

For example, Tom had Chris muck around under the house to inspect piers and posts that form the funky foundation after we had the humongous support beam go in under the loft. Chris showed me one of the posts he had replaced: it was “mushy,” he said, and I was horrified to see it broken in two pieces like mere cork. They also found that the floor of the loft was not well supported (here Chris shows the horrifying hole in the floor that one might have fallen through had there not been a chair in that corner all these years). Thanks to all of them, I have a fairly well supported house now. Since I’ve now got a beautiful home, I want to insure it will last longer, so a future urgent project is to get a continuous foundation poured under the perimeter of the cabin.

I also keep returning my lesson about the way the mind sometimes only opens when forced to see new possibilities as the old version of reality drops away. We are sometimes forced to lose someone or something, perhaps due to neglect or to some force beyond our will and control. We grieve, we mourn, but soon we can begin to see new opportunities that arise from that vacancy, perhaps a way of being for ourselves that could not exist because of the predominance of whatever was there before.

That new possibility was true in a very physical sense for me in this project when the closet came down. It once dominated the cabin, dividing it into two semi-rooms, and because the cabin had always been that way, I was attached to The Way It Was. We can convince ourselves of the inherent value of The Way It Was and thus perpetuate the past, unwilling to adopt or even think about change. However, when change happens (such as the closet being ripped out), we can even feel some relief.

In the same way, I experienced that breath-giving change when the tool shed got dragged from its previous location—an amazing process in itself, requiring Beda, Chris, Mike, and Tom to make many calculations of how to use the excavator, chains, and skids to get the shed off its post and piers and out of the way for the septic tank to get put in, and then return the shed to a post & pier position. The problem was worthy of a high school mathematics study brought to real life. But once the shed was moved, I had the opportunity to think about permanently relocating the tool shed, rather than just putting it back where it had been. In fact, it was better to move it further away from cottage shed (where I am currently living, and that will one day be a guest cottage).

Finally, I keep learning over and over how electrifying it is to try out new skills. Here I am with the "whacker," compressing soil after the new phone-line conduit trench was covered up again. I don't have a driver's license for this machine any more than I did for the excavator, and I nearly lost control of it, but I had fun trying.

Next week my sister Chris arrives to teach me about tiling with her help in the bathroom--it will be so great to have family here and have help from a friend! One more week to go and then a little celebration with the cabin 95% done. The light is coming.

#16 God Is in the Details, and So Are the Goddess, Yahweh, Allah, and the Creator

“Attention must be paid!” cried Willy Loman in the play Death of a Salesman. Willy Loman was desperate, referring to the way a person and a society can fall apart if we don’t pay attention. His life's dreams dissolved. I am happily not in his situation, but I have always paid attention to his words, taking them to mean that our lives (and those of others) will be richer if we do pay attention. With attention, we can make a difference, create aesthetic joy, hear what is truly being said, observe our own selves and one another in a spirit of appreciation and understanding, take in beauty however we can, so as to feel nurtured emotionally and spiritually.

These days, I have been paying attention to the craftsmanship, beauty, skill and talent all evident in the details of the work of the artisans around me. Check out these details from the Cabin as It Is Becoming.

1) Windows Remember the windows stuffed with newspaper (below, left)? Hah! Here is custom-designed trim (below right) on the window that my sister-in-law Wendy sent me, a design that Chris, Mike and Tom are producing all over the house. By now, Tom, Chris and Mike all know that I will always ask, “What is it called?” referring to tools, or processes, or styles of woodworking. Tom replied on this one, “Kim’s style!”

2) A well crafted knee brace: The back deck now has a doorway with Tom’s special kneebrace (left), made with the router and the chamfer bit, to hold up the roof over the back door. Notice the artisanry of its shape, the lovely redwood, the work that the brace does, holding up a roof but not complaining at all.

3) The Feng Shui Entry Way (below, right) provides tightly packed in pine panels with the window above. Soon there will be a redwood slab from a tree that came down in the yard in order to provide more sunlight and satellite. The trim over the doors matches trim over the windows. Tom’s eye seeks symmetry and beauty in every detail.

4) The bathroom: How I have maligned the overdevelopment of bathrooms that seem to become temples grander than the homes that so many people ever get to live in, such as this one:

Yet the biggest and most dramatic change in this cabin is the indoor bathroom, an addition that brings me into the 19th century (though much of the world still lives in much measlier conditions than I have ever had). Tom, Mike and Chris blended well the two buildings--the original cabin and the outhouse--so that the bathroom that will be a site for ablutions and a temple to the tropics (see the room in process on left a month ago and the almost finished version on right).

The web site below explains that much of the U.S. only got indoor plumbing in the 1930s. http://www.livinghistoryfarm.org/farminginthe30s/life_13.html

5) Learning new tools: Below left is Beda driving the excavator through the yard so that he could put in the lines for the gas and water (he has also been excavating and overseeing the installation of the septic system). Notice how close he comes to Buddha on the pedestal on one side and the little table of tools on the other, but he drives like he is definitely paying attention!

When I drove it, you can see I reacted at first to the whiplash I was giving myself, but then I got to enjoy the feeling of grabbing a load of gravel in the bucket and dumping it.

6) Gables: The pine gable on one side (left, below) compliments the fir paneling on the wall opposite into the loft (right, below). Great work went into choosing each piece of pine on the left and the few fir boards needed to fill in what had been an odd gap in the wall of the loft—one of many oddities that will be replaced by the kind of conformity that creates visual and aesthetic unity.

7) The Woodpile comprises the last little detail to share, but it means a lot to anyone living in the country since fresh wood has to be cut and dried six months before winter. We were laughing the other day that just when summer arrives, you sadly have to start thinking about winter again because you need to have the wood pile ready, but winter wood is the last thing we want to think about.

From all the debris of the demolition of the previous structure and the sawing of wood for new posts, beams, trim, etc., I have a whole pile of kindling that is sweet to the eye, since last year I had to buy kindling a couple of times at the hardware store. From the trees that were cut down, I will also have a wonderful stack of wood to keep me warm through the night. I am grateful.

The End Is Near
I sent out an invitation to the gang of folks who have worked on the cabin for a celebration, since Tom has predicted that we could be done with all the major work in three weeks. My invitation read, “I hope Tom is better at predicting The End than Harold Camping was regarding the apocalype in May.” (Here is a photo of Tom with what I call the Sword, but is really called a "sawsall.")

The remaining doors should be installed this week, as well as the trim finished on the windows and doors, and the floors in soon, leaving only the bookshelf and raised and tiled woodstove box to be built. I have lots of painting to do, but that’s like the icing on the cake now.

I may yet find a way to help others build their homes one day, the way this project (like Habitat for Humanity) has helped shanty dwellers find more stable homes--very inspiring!
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7PEiaz1AvzQ
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3RO4Iae4HPU

#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)

#14 Holes and Filling Them

May 25, 2011 Yet More Rain and 40 Degrees at 6 am The last week marks a subtle transition from the active deconstruction of the cabin as it was--getting it down to the bare bones of post and beams, tar paper and plywood--to a greater emphasis on renewal, the root of the word renovation.

Sure, the new sliding glass door was the first and most dramatic and positive change on Day 2 back in mid-April, a huge new hole in the wall that let in the expansive view of the forested ridge across the canyon (right). But since then, the cabin has seen a steady process of its pieces being taken away. For me living in this space intermittently has meant a symbolic stripping away of what was, while having faith that the carpentry crew Tom, Mike, and Chris, along with the electricians and plumbers, are steadily creating the vision of what could be.

The other day I murmured, “I sometimes doubt the cabin will ever be clean again.” It has been a cesspool of dust, some emerging from walls being taken apart, some carried in from outside. Let me count the kinds! Sawdust, dirt dust, muddy-sawdust dirt (definitely a different species), green paint dust (probably from termites in a previous incarnation of the cabin), pink insulation and yellow insulation sprites, sheetrock dust, iron nail dust, solvent and paint dust, road dust.

Each night I sweep the dirty red painted plywood floor of the cabin so that when I re-enter after the work is done, I can fix my meals on the stove (after I clean it too) and be inside when it is cold outside (which it seems to be, relentlessly). Living in this dirt, I thought it best to be flexible under the circumstances, to keep my It’s-All-Relative Perspective and relate to all the people in tornado refugee tents or people with dirt for floors and who have never had any option otherwise.

However, I'm getting eager for options ahead. The wind and cold come through the holes in the shed wall (a couple gleam through the light in the picture on the right). Cholo, now sleeping next to me on the bed with his own sleeping bag, runs in his sleep and keeps kicking me, but banishing him back to the even colder floor seems cruel at his 14 years. I'm secretly jonesing for a better heated sleep, not to mention a hot shower more than once once a week.

One cold morning last week when Mike and I were talking about working inside, he said so very seriously, “But there’s nothing to do in there.”










“What?!" I guffawed loudly. "Haven’t you seen the holes in the walls?” Again, it’s all relative. To an experienced carpenter who sees the sweep of the whole job in his mind, the holes that needed to be filled required first the attention of the electrician, plumber, and sheetrocker before the carpenters could apply more plywood or tar paper, much less insulation and inside walls or ceilings. All I saw were holes, huge gaping holes.

Letting go, opening the mind
I had been holding onto my pine paneled walls, thinking they were crucial to the feeling of being in a cabin in the woods (aside from the small size of the place and its outhouse). However, Tom and crew kept taking off more and more pine boards in order to provide better reach for the electricians and plumbers for new wires and pipes, and to install humongous beams that would improve the inherent instability of the cabin-as-it-was (fie on the original builder!). On the left is pictured preparations for the Big Beam, and on the right is Tom beaming at the successful placement of the Big Beam. The beam will better hold up the loft that was otherwise pitifully supported--scary, actually, the paucity of the cabin's infrastructure, kind of like what's happening to our defunded national infrastructure, but that's another story.

Anyhow, as each wall came off, I laughed in woe with Tom about the increasing demolishment of my home.

But eventually they realized they could save enough old (and admittedly nasty) boards that survived being wrenched off the walls, and in planing the 30 year old surfaces, make them better than new because, as Tom noted, they now have some real character (see old kitchen ceiling with no planks on left and new kitchen ceiling on right). It’s a more expensive process than buying new pine boards, but the recycling is well worth it to me for the next 30 and more years in a cabin that is overall better built. Each renewed facet will help contribute to the longevity of the cabin.

All too often we don’t know what is possible until someone teaches us to see the possibilities.

More Serious Holes and the Contractor’s “We”
As a naïve neophyte in the realm of construction, I am not afraid to ask questions or even to question the authority of my "boss," Tom, only because if he fires me, I have other options. (Again, having options in life is crucial; otherwise, we feel trapped, victimized.) So Tom asked me if I wanted to dig the hole for one of the new foundation posts, going under one end of the Big Beam. I cheerfully said yes.

After spending a mere 45 minutes in the hole, I had much more empathy for Miguel who had spent several hours digging out the hole for the foundation of the bathroom, including attacking a root ball for a tree growing next to the future addition. Having thought I’d done a good job at digging said hole, I called for Tom’s approval. He offered the most joyous rejection possible of my accomplishment. “That’s good, Kim! But it needs to be deeper and more square.” (I'm digging on the left in the mud.) Tom pulled out his tape measurer—I kid you not—and had me measure the depth of said foundation hole. Mine was pushing 10 inches. He wanted 14. Now he laughed, “Yeah, I’ve known people to mound the dirt on the edge so it would look taller.” As if I would do such a thing (not after that warning!).

So I dug some more. I thought I really had a great hole there. I was also having tremendous empathy for all the poor boys in the excellent young adult novel Holes by Louis Sachar who are forced to dig holes for seemingly no reason in the desert in the juvenile delinquent camp where they endure a sadist director—no resemblance to Tom, of course, but you know how the imagination can wander when you’re spending an hour or two at hard labor. I thought about the men in stripped prison outfits on chain gangs, the Chinese men digging their way through the mountains for the railroads, oh, I had lots of time to think in that hole.

I called Tom back a second time, and he was equally pleased with me as he commented, “That’s great, Kim. Now just a little deeper because we want to dig down past the roots there to the red dirt or clay--"

“We? Is that a royal 'We'?!” I laughed back.

Mike, overhearing this part of the conversation, called out, “That’s the 'Contractor’s We.'”

Another half hour later, I asked Tom if he was hoping I would dig to Red China in order to get to the red mud, but I also admitted that he had a point—well, he always has a point. Though the clay here is yellow, his analysis was that the cement will bind to the clay better than to mere dirt (and especially not loose dirt). When he pointed out that the goal is to have a strong and stable foundation pier for the Big Beam, I complained not.

Actually, I never complain in earnest. I trust his judgment entirely, both in safety and aesthetics. This picture that Chris took of me in the next hole I dug captured my exhaustion in body but not in spirit. And oh what biceps I have!

What Would Richard Do?
I have a new and very unlikely culture hero, one I share with the crew. Chris turned me on to the film Alone in the Wilderness about Richard Proenneke. At age 51 in the 1970s, Richard built a log cabin in the isolated Alaskan wilderness all by himself and filmed the process by setting up a camera on a tripod and creating a visual and audio journal before YouTube even existed. Here is a 10-minute clip of the film: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iYJKd0rkKss

Chris informed me that I could rent the whole film at our (cool, natch) local video store, which I did, saving up my laptop battery to be able to watch Alone in the Wilderness while I was alone in the wilderness.
The next day over lunch, I waxed enthusiastic regarding Richard Proenneke’s amazing craftsmanship. Mike (left) had seen most of the film, too, so we all compared notes. Tom hadn’t seen it yet, so I passed the DVD on to him. Since then, Richard has become our touchstone for how to think about building and surviving in the wilderness. For example, when it was minus 20 degrees outside, Richard noted on his video journal with his very dry sense of humor that “It’s a balmy 41 degrees in the cabin.” When we were on break the other day, I commented that it was so chilly in my cabin that we could see our breath. But Chris (right), dressed for the cold weather on the hill, reminded me that if Richard considers 41 degrees balmy, we are nowhere near potential for complaint. Richard really is an inspiration and a hoot.

The Joys of Warmth by the Woodstove
I began this web log three months ago, writing early about learning to keep a good fire. On many nights in recent weeks, the holes in the cabin have been so predominating—open air between post and beam—that building a fire was useless. On Monday Chris and Mike put in the remaining plywood walls, and I started putting up insulation. Cholo and I can now sit comfortably by the fire evenings (pictured with the kerosene lamp to right), so I can read and Cholo can happily chase rabbits in his sleep before we head out to our glorified tent, the shed. The couch is still out on the porch where it really needs to stay since it’s only in the way.

And what the heck, it's only a few more weeks. After all, 41 degrees really is not so bad. Good night.