The Path (now 99% poison ivy free!) Today we took a much anticipated day off excavation to do a little sight seeing and visit neighbors with Anna and the kids. Foster Falls held lovely views and some very cold swimming under a 60 foot waterfall. The hike down was steep, but with the abundance of O2, surprisingly easy both ways. We met some vacationing climbers from MI down for the holiday weekend who were very friendly and gave some good indication what the climbing was like in the park. To my surprise, access is free. Dan, Isaac and I enjoyed the water on this unseasonably hot afternoon, however, in the low-slung river valley, the air temperature was fully 10 degrees or more cooler than at the rim. Yesterday, Dan and Isaac went to the Cove (Coppinger Cove is just down the mountain from us) to a swimming hole frequented by locals for a weekly bath in the summer. They enjoyed rope swings into the river and meeting some new friends Isaac's age. I stayed behind to attempt some more excavation and moved some rocks. When Dan returned, we started a major stump-removal that will take us a bit more time to finish tomorrow. We are waiting for parts to finish up the water collection on the shed, which should arrive the day the rain returns. Sugar helped me at the hardware store, rendering the most competent customer service I've had from a lumber yard in all my life. If you are ever building in SE TN, I can't recommend Collins Materials enough. The staff are friendly and knowledgeable and actually got up off the chair to walk around the store with me finding parts I needed and offering creative suggestions. Around here, when you tell people you are going to do something "unconventional" with a building material, I find they just smile and helpfully suggest how to make your idea work instead of telling me what can't be done or wondering why anyone would want to do anything so dumb. They seem pretty used to people coming up with creative solutions. Sugar turned to another customer who wanted in on the action and said, "He's gonna rig it." The customer laughed and said, "Riggin' it, that's the way to do it, you know." It seems they generally share my suspicion of pre-fabbed solutions to unusual problems. I got the same response from Advanced Auto when I bought battery cable. As soon as I said I wanted it for an off-grid system, the lady helping me instantly understood and made a great suggestion about a source (not even her store) for other salvage parts. I hate to go on in this Utopian vein, but I see a lot of hope ahead, in spite of the nearly impossible tasks of excavation awaiting our return to work. As I was telling my dad on the phone recently, it really is other people that make this place so great in spite of its challenges.
0 Comments
So we have a shed of sorts and a water catchment system started, just in time for the rain to stop for a week. We'll wait patiently and work on excavation until it returns to test out our experimental pre-filter. Basically, the simple and scalable pre-filter we have consists of a five gallon bucket with washed gravel (quietly salvaged from a neighbor's driveway run-off into the road) nested into another bucket. The gravel will filter out the large material without clogging up with leaves. After the gravel, the water drains out of the bottom of the first bucket through a series of carefully spaced (for any Phil Hartman: the "Anal Retentive Chef" fans) 1/4" holes. Next, the water will pass through about a 4 inch layer of mason's sand and a silt fabric, then through 3 inches of crushed charcoal and another silt fabric and into the water container. I'd go into the details of this last connection, but it would only interest about 1 in 1000 of you. Considering about 15 people are reading this, that seems a pretty poor return. We found a free source of 55 gal. plastic barrels from a great guy named Doby up in Whitwell. As for the larger cistern, we found IBC totes (275 gal. water containers) for about $30 each here as opposed to $100+ in CO.
On the church front, much to our surprise and those who know our staunch Calvinism, we've continued to enjoy worshiping with the Nazarene church in Jasper. I spoke with Tankersley today about this and he concurred that there is something different down here that draws people together in the bounds of Christian love acros s these ideological lines that we found drawn in such hostility in the past. I'm impressed with the faithful service of the young pastors here. Kevin, the senior pastor, expressed an eager willingness to cooperate in ministry and to share thoughts and resources in sermon/lesson prep. He was exited to sponsor a mountain Bible study and looked forward to participating and co-teaching. This is something I've found to be like pulling teeth within my own denomination, yet here, in an episcopalian government even, I find greater cooperation and support than I ever found from within Reformed Presbyterianism. I've been singing in the choir and Isaac plays guitar with some fine bluegrass musicians that accompany worship. Tomorrow he's being taken to a senior home to play with one of the adult Sunday School teachers who will give him some instruction on the accordion and lead the old folks in songs of praise. All ecumenicism aside, I'm as predestinarian as the day is long, but I'm sure willing to get along with these folks of good will and faith until they say otherwise. Once I've built some trust and can explain that I may be absent, but I am committed and will return, I will go visiting other congregations to see if I can find a similar spirit of cooperation. I'm not sure where that will lead, but the usual suspects among my Calvinist brethren sadly seem out of the running for now. I hope that changes since I believe they can bring a lot to a meeting of the minds as I envision. What I am looking for is pretty simple, but I've found elusive until the Nazarene pastor and the District Superintendent assured me of their help. I just want a group of people who are called to preach and teach who can share ideas, study resources, and discuss the merits and pitfalls of exegesis and interpretation for the good of all congregations and the fortification of our unity as preachers and the beneficiaries of our great Gospel. This might mean a phone call met with an eagerness to look at a text with another, sharing books, reading papers, reviewing notes, sharing in the inter-congregational inter-denominational need for discipline and accountability in personal holiness and doctrinal soundness, and, I would even go so far as to say, sharing in corporate worship for special occasions and even sharing the teaching pulpit with the appropriate caveats about organization and authority. It seems so painfully obvious to me that this is needed, yet it has been so difficult to find. For whatever reasons, I've found a greater appreciation for what I'm talking about here among rural folks than in the city. The same was true in Fairview, MI as it seems to be here in Jasper, TN. My friend Sam Powell stated it well, I think, in his defense of denominationalism: Unity in the faith, but distinct in organization. He insisted that we can be and are united in one Gospel while we reserve the right to maintain organizational autonomy from those who differ. I would take this a step further and suggest, as a rabid Congregationalist, that the Gospel so transcends many of the peculiarities of our larger organizational groups, however precious, that we must seek out and actively develop relationships between congregations which display our unity by mutually edifying across organizational lines. Sacred Harp singing has been one of these occasions for us and I'd love to take it and the spirit of mutuality and respect therein to pastors and teachers in the aforementioned ways. Enjoying the hospitality of the Great American South, Lance It seems the drought in SE TN has broken large on our heads. It would be great if we didn't have so much digging to do and no shelter. What they call a drought here is three weeks with not more than .5" of rain. According to our crude estimate gleaned from careful calculations of the wheel barrow and our up-turned dinner bowls, we've gotten 1.5" in the last day and a half. The tree frogs are loving it: pollywogs leaping from the water with amorous plans sung out at all hours of day and night. I've never heard so many varieties of song-birds. It sounds as though a mocking bird near our camp has been smitten with a cell phone ringer and calls potential wireless mates at first light. Box turtles venture into the open in the rain, but not their venomous reptilian cousins. It is paradisaical here, but with a trace of hostility. The poisonous plants are only a few of many elements that make it unsuitable for human habitation in it's raw form. Without some serious efforts at civilisation, this place would best fit the "fine place to visit, but . . ." category. However, those who have carved out a foothold for themselves and come to some balance with nature never want to leave. It will be a long process to make late spring through early fall really enjoyable, but we've seen that it can be done and with great rewards.
On the civilisation note, a couple of observations: 1. As we constructed our path to the building site, the many refrains Isaiah uses of the rough ways made smooth ran through my mind. When approaching a mountain, one cannot even estimate the value of a well-formed path. One of my joys as a younger mountaineer was the absence of any such path. Becoming lost to the route-finding was part of the thrill. Yet, it was then, as it is now, impossible to really communicate the difficulty of forging ahead without a path to those who'd never ventured off the trail. Now, a new dimension has occurred to me: the perspective of trail-maker. I lost track of how many times Dan and I wold turn to each other and say, this is really hard work. Isaac settled in to the repetitive task of cleaning the organic matter from the fill dirt as we excavated. The clean fill would be used to fill the voids left by boulders we removed. As we looked back on each section, the indications of what had taken place to smooth this very rough terrain under foot were gone. In their stead was a path that looked as natural to any hiker, and as ancient, as the roads of Rome. Gone was the frustration of rock and root, poison ivy, saw-vine, stump, and overdense saplings, unspeakable insects and arachnids. There was just a path in the wilderness made smooth. It looked like it had always been and there was no reason to expect otherwise. 2. The inherent inhospitality of the wild I spoke of can be seen in Exo. 23:28-30 and Deut. 7:22. These are current realities for us and we have the benefit of a mighty Western civilisation minutes away. It is terrifying to think of Adam and Eve banished from a garden, tended by the Great Horticulturist, into the wilderness, showing them only fang, claw, and thorn. It's not much better to be Noah and family. For those who don't experience this end in the wilderness, please be mindful of Deut. 32, which tells the fat and complacent, grown so by the ready availability of consumer goods and general ease, that their feet will slide in due time, for the day of their calamity is at hand. We finished the path up to the site, and none too soon. The rain returned with a vengeance last night as we went to sleep and has persisted until this afternoon with no sign of letting up. The poison ivy saga continues as yet unabated, but the Prednisone should make a difference in the next day or two. Until then, I look like a leper. Everyone at church came up and said, "Well, it looks like you got into it." Though the digging of the path is done, it won't really be finished until we get some gravel or something on it to make it walkable in the rain. Right now, the scalped portions are a muddy mess. Fall leaves will also make an improvement, but it will be a while before we see these.
Tomorrow we will hopefully have a reasonable footing base for the shed and begin framing it the next day. Pastor Kevin of the Church of the Nazarene is treating us to the Cracker Barrel tomorrow night and we may have some new accommodations thanks to Theresa, our neighbor who has offered her guest house. It's 60 deg. and rainy. Even the mosquitoes and ticks are in hiding, but the toads are out in force. We got the generator hooked up to a smaller inverter by way of the generator battery. I'm glad we went with the pure sine wave inverter because when Dan plugged in his hair clippers to the gen and the inverter, the difference in performance was huge. I can only imagine what the gen would do to sensitive electronics. The inverter performed very well, though. At some point we'll try the mobile wifi hot spot, but for now we are waiting until at least the shed is done. Until then, we have power for small and large tools and possibly a dry place to sleep. Hallelujah! Amen! |
LanceLance doesn't like to publish his writing, as he reserves the right to change his mind. =P Archives
April 2013
Categories |