To my surprise and delight, our first real visitors, besides the neighbor's pitbull Hoss (who may have developed a chicken-killing fetish, making him not long for this world), were John and Judy Paulsen, of Grace PCA in Jasper. They drove out of their way en route to camp on the big lake to see us. I have to brag on these good Reformed folks for a moment. As the old joke goes, in the American West, the Baptists settled churches on foot, the Methodists on horseback, and the Episcopalians waited for the Pullman car. How then came these Presbyterians to tramp into the wilderness of our home site, without so much as an address or road sign? I'll call it a work of the Spirit since it was a very good gift, indeed.
Sunday afternoon we went down to Grace PCA to see if we could find them to talk some more. To our delight, they treated us to lunch along with RE Harold and his wife. It was a wonderful time, talking about the redemption of our culture through simple means, and, as Isaac pointed out in his blog, poop. It's always a hot subject, pardoning the pun. We look forward to working with these fine folks toward some new approaches (and old, very old) to the problems of affordability and wage slavery with no end in sight, placated by the glittering allure of cheap and petty consumerism that kills through the erosion of true value. Emphasis mine, of course. On the technical side: Predictably, there is a minor problem with the rain water pre-filter that we need to solve. It appears to be a vacuum lock kind of thing, which will be fixed easily by the introduction of a design allowing some air gap between layers of filter media. All this may sound complex, and in a way it is, but we are really talking about two dumpster-salvaged 5-gallon buckets, some sand and gravel, and a bit of charcoal. It's hard science and engineering on the cheap here. You can all thank the new LDS "church" under construction for several salvage finds in a region where new construction has nearly ground to a halt. We need not go into the troubling sign of the times this represents for the Southern Baptists. My cart for hauling straw bales performed. I won't use any further adverb to describe it. Suffice it to say, I'm thinking of a new carry method involving a couple of sets of poles, sans wheel. Dad, I know you always love a good Mesoamericans without wheels joke, but without motorized machines, it might just make the most sense of our situation. The bales were lighter than expected while the cart's added weight and the resistance of the wheel on the gravel and bumps of the path resulted in pretty hard going. There is also the relative difficulty of pushing a wheeled load uphill rather than pulling. Any mountain biker can attest, it's the front wheel over the log that's the hard part. With a bit of momentum, the rear wheel easily follows the center of gravity well forward of the axle. Dan and I both ran the cart, with me at the front in a "harness" which I tried to convince myself was more like a strong-man pulling a tractor than a dog with a leash tangled under his armpit, with mixed success. Most of the day, I would wonder: Is he really pushing anything? Knowing Dan as I do, he is no shirker. The bottom line: it just wasn't efficient. It seems to me that about 80 lbs. on each of us on foot will be easier and faster. So I'm going to make a simple pole stretcher suspended from longer poles, attached to shoulder webbing. This will keep the center of gravity low and hanging rather than high and balanced. The whole thing will be cinched together with tiedowns, so it will be like carrying a low-boy version of Solomon's traveling love shack (see S of S 3:6-10). No harem, court, or armed guards needed. A long, soft rain began sometime in the night and persists into this morning. I love the summer rain here, warm and wet, adjusting the light in the forest like a camera setting. For those faint of heart toward child labor, read no further. After a Herculean day of bale stocking, I'm not so disappointed by the extra time to rest. Isaac really impressed me, moving at least a fifth of the total bales by himself. He was tireless and sweaty, just like a man-child should be. He commented early on that his eyelids were sweating, but after seven hours, there weren't any comments, nor any novelty, just the solidarity of miserable work binding us together in mostly silence. In fairness to Dan and me, we didn't tell him to do anything. He figured out that he could move a bale at a time with the wheel barrow and went to it. Up and down the mountain, he went, lapping us a couple of times. I'm often especially proud of Isaac, but this was a high point. Now if only Giddy were here, Dan and I could have sat back sipping Country Time and telling fish stories. Last time I took Gideon to work with me, he, too, tirelessly shoveled structural fill into a wheelbarrow for several hours, looking forward to his union mandated "break", jumping the fence to play on the monkey bars at the school next door. Perhaps you haven't really lived until you've seen a boy work so hard, only to rest by swinging himself around and climbing on bars. These are the moments I think, in the immortal words of Davilene Aquila: I could have had me about ten babies.
1 Comment
John and Judy
6/11/2012 11:25:08 am
Your blog is an interesting read Lance! Thank you for kind words--Anything we do is by God's grace.
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LanceLance doesn't like to publish his writing, as he reserves the right to change his mind. =P Archives
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