On this rock I build my house

Sorry everybody for the delay in this post. I promised myself that I wouldn’t blog until I finished the last project; shoring up the foundation of the cabin so we could move on to building up. Little did I know that the flurry of activity would make it impossible to blog until I had more than one blog to post, fortunately, I have a few days off, So I will be able to post BOTH blogs in short order.

With a morbid creak, the cabin started to move. Slowly, I pumped the handle to the 30 ton bottle jack I had propped between redwood slabs, cautiously peering between the concrete and the wood of our foundation. With each pump of the handle, the cabin raised a few more millimeters, the wooden supports groaning precariously, until I saw a fingernail of sunlight through the opposite side. Working quickly, I took a maul and knocked out the old wooden shim, and banged in an identically cut block into its place. Checking to make sure the alignment was perfect, I pulled the handle from the jack and using it to release the pressure, I slowly lowered the cabin back onto its concrete piling as the wood gave a sickening, stressful moan.

I was sitting under the cabin with Gabe, a WWOOFer from Washington who was on the first leg of a motorcycle trip around the continental United States. He had just come from working at an oil refinery, and I was grateful to have somebody with me who knew tools, and understood how they worked. As we worked we told stories and got to know one another. He liked metal, had remarkably similar political and apocalyptical views as myself and was out to learn everything he can about everything there is. Needless to say, we got along great. Meanwhile, Tom Stu and Dave, three British wwoofers were demolishing the old animal pens and loading the truck up with rotted wood.

The cabin now supported by a piece of wood that did not look like swiss cheese, we hollered off the measurements for the side blocks as Creek worked rapidly to cut the blocks on the chop saw in the shop. The difficulty of cutting 16x9 inch blocks of wood with a chop saw should be obvious, but the table saw killed the generator, so it was our only choice. We marked the eighth of an inch metal straps that would secure the cabin on the foundation, and sent them up to the shop to get drilled by Creek. We hammer drilled through the pilings, fit the blocks and straps together, drilled through them, using a 50 year old auger bit that belonged to my father, and slipped ¼ inch bolts through the whole shebang, binding them together with an impact driver.

Working there, securing the foundation of our cabin, I was forced to think alot about tools and collaboration. The drill bits and 6 foot pry bar were my fathers, the drill press was an early Shop Smith, which my friend Matt had sold to my friend Zack when he followed my lead; selling everything he owned to go wander Asia for a few years. The tape measure was a janky broken-locked 12 footer from Tap Plastics, which had somehow moved up here when we vacated the SF warehouse and which belongs to my old roommate Ed, the mad scientist. And, all the while, I was surrounded by men from around the world, who I had known for only a few days yet who were here helping me build my home for free. I knew that in addition to building memories for all of us, I was building upon memories: With each strap, I thanked Matt, with each hole through the foundation beams I thanked my Father, and wondered what he had done with these bits so long ago. And at the end of each day, I thanked the young men around me profusely, knowing that someday, soon, I would live in this house they were helping me build.

There were 12 foundation pilings to support and by the last one, I was lying prone next to a small patch of poison oak, with barely a foot of clearance as Dave handed me tools, and worked from the outside to get it all together. But now, the foundation is secure, the rebuilding can begin in earnest, and I will hopefully never have to pick up another house again. Whew!

Edison's Medicine

After sundown, the silence is dense and heavy. The weight of the star filled sky comes down on the cabin like a lead shroud, and the daytime sounds of lizards, frantic tow-truck bugs and overhead hawks fade away, leaving nothing but the vague hints of distant animals. On moonless nights the silence is accompanied by an impenetrable darkness. Huddled around the campfire in our front yard we see nothing.

Click.

"Then pull this forward… and yank…"

Gruuuunk!

Chug…

Chug…

Chug…

"Then just slide the choke back to here.."

ere…ere…ere…ere….REEEEEEEEEEER!

As the generator steadied into a consistent roar, Edison's medicine surged through fifty feet of cable and the ten year old halogen lights in the shop fluttered to brilliance, eclipsing the stars and luring every moth in twenty miles to our doors.

We spent a long time living in a tent with solar charged batteries providing our light though small LED headlamps, and standing there in front of the cabin, bathed in the bleach white glow of the lamp I was struck by how far we had come. The campfire, only fifteen feet away seemed ancient and the shattered silence, obnoxious in its volume, spoke of futures of civilization, of finished walls and conveniences.

We barbequed burgers on a cheap grill as I sautéed mushrooms on our faithful campstove. We chased the burgers down with beer, joking about how we no longer needed to go to town for cold beer and hot burgers.

"How far have we surpassed car camping?" I laughed, looking sideways at our bags sitting in the middle of the shop, bags that less than a year ago had carried our lives' possessions to the spot where we now stood, bathed for the first time in artificial light, surrounded by the sparking promise of electricity.

REEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEER……

Ere… ere… ere… ere…er….

Err…

Err…

Cast back into darkness the forest was alive. Moths battered themselves against our battery powered lanterns, forcing me to ponder what Darwinian trick had lured their kind to ancient lights; provided only by fire assuring a scorching and immediate death to their ancestors. Instead, their shadows played at the edges of the tent, alluding to monstrous fifteen pound moths, with foot long wingspans.

Our noise, our light and our cooking changed the place subtly, and that night we would listen to moths bat gently against the tent, as packrats looted our trash can.

Civilization had come to the mountain.