Healed

Barnhart and son Alan got it worked out. I didn't understand a word they said. They got here late morning and got out before the snow set in hard. After they leave I send the accumulated paragraphs, and Barnhart fixed my AOL toolbar, so I can work the way I have for years. Sort through e-mails, delete everything. They brought food too, so I eat ham salad (a favorite) and cheese on crackers for the rest of the day, and a lot of olives. Took a break and went outside to sweep the back porch, three inches and falling still for eight more hours. Thank god they brought me whiskey. The mice are getting bold now, and I set all the traps. I hate to kill them, but they're a mess and certainly not sanitary. Temps drop all day, then dip even more as night falls. All sound is muffled. I stay up reading so I can stoke the stove one last time, then curl up in my mummy bag and sleep a few hours, warm and fetal. Ten degrees just before dawn and I'm in full survival mode, which means doing nothing but staying wrapped up, every few hours put another log on the fire. Cold enough inside that it's difficult to roll a decent smoke, but I can't see my breath and that's a good sign. I built this place for 25 thousand dollars, all the money I had, and I actually needed another 10, to finish and weatherize everything properly. Result being that I can be comfortable down to twenty degrees, slightly uncomfortable below that, and zero is a pain in the ass. Design temperature is an important factor when you build a house. It doesn't matter quite so much if you have central heat, you just pay more in winter and listen to the furnace all the time. Building houses off the grid has always been interesting to me, so many cards to shuffle, the logistics involved. Rural life is different. It's not the same set of configurations. I hear it snowing, I crawl in my sleeping bag and take a nap. Exhausted, and I haven't even done anything, I'd like to hibernate. I do, actually, for six hours and miss my wake-up call, which is based on drinking a glass of water before I go to sleep. The house is cold, but my feet are warm, but eventually I get up, put on my bathrobe over my clothes, get my great Montana house slippers, and make a cup of coffee. Build another fossil-fuel fire, spreading my footprint, and settle into reading mode until the house can heat up a bit. Then I need to eat, so I think about that, settling on hash and eggs, then realize I need to water-proof my work boots so I can get out to the woodshed. Listening to Science Friday on the radio I laughed out loud, when some guest said that Tweets were now the chicken entrails of the past. Ironic or sarcastic but it was a genuine laugh, and since I hadn't made a sound in many hours I found it interesting. Snowed-in and completely isolated. When I go out for an armload of wood I'm extremely careful. Still, I'm not sure I can do this anymore. I wouldn't mind having a bathroom with hot running water, instead of an outhouse and a kettle on the wood stove. And I've already proved I can split wood. A small house on the outskirts of a small town in the panhandle of Florida, with a propane furnace and a flush toilet would be very nice. Going outside with a headlamp and a walking stick when it's five degrees doesn't seem right. The hand you draw. I need to start carrying in frozen wood tomorrow, to get it thawed and dry, but otherwise I just settle in my nest with a mug of tea. Like Badger, I intend to eat, then nap through the day. I spend a fair amount of time reading about off-beat building techniques, it's an interesting subject. Bamboo, mud, cow-dung, tusks, bent sticks, ice-blocks, dirt, various skins, the list goes on and on because habitation is necessary. For the true hermit, a hole in the ground or a cave is fine. In Utah I found a couple places in old ruins that looked quite comfortable, a place to sleep, a place to cook, a place to shit; a night-time fire to keep the predators at bay, a bear skin to sleep under and you were good to go. I've spent a few nights in these places and it's not that bad, as long as you don't have to get up and go to a job. Melt some ice, make a cup of tea, eat a military surplus meal, and get on with the day. Gather enough wood for the next night. Keep them fucking wolves away. Bloody cold outside, near zero and six inches of new snow. I sit back with another mug of tea and design a snug little cabin in my mind, something 16 by 20 feet with just a couple of windows and a door built like a bank vault. I do the math on the footage necessary for bookcases. I'm well over 200 linear feet here, but I could do that, in a cabin, if I isolated a sleeping nook with bookcases. It's so cold the mice are going crazy, snapping traps is the story of my life. The crows, I think, will be happy. Toasted cheese and tomato soup, a dram of single-malt, later, I can hardly roll a smoke, my fingers aren't working properly, and I look forward to just climbing under several blankets. It's supposed to be a bit warmer tomorrow. Crash early and sleep long, very cold temps are exhausting. At zero degrees you can burn a great deal of firewood. Just caught the fire about four, stoked, had a smoke and a wee dram until I could damp the stove, wrapped back up and went over to sleep on the sofa. After some time I do a body check: feet are warm, legs are warm, butt is fine, torso is warm, and finally drift off. The progress of the world, let's call it that, is not based on Mad Tom's examination of his body, but rather on hot running water and a thermostat. You can shave, you can bathe. My main interest is whether or not my toes are frost-bitten. My schedule is skewed. I was rereading Guy Davenport's essay about Olson's The Kingfishers, pretty much in a trance. I made a mushroom hash that was quite good, with an egg on toast, a brown butter sauce. The sink drain is frozen, so I can't wash the dishes, but the temps are rising, and I think I can solve that problem with some hot pasta water tomorrow. I use cheap bulk paper plates (they're quite sterile) for chopping and eating when it gets cold, because I can burn them, and I don't generate much trash. Anything organic is eaten, anything that will burn is burned, still, I produce trash, and it bothers me. Glossy paper, auto auctions and the like, are so full of filler (clay) that they don't burn, and I hate burning plastic, so there's a certain amount of trash. Everest is strewn with debris, there's a collection of crap in the Pacific larger than Connecticut. Plastic bottles and tennis balls. This whole consumer economy is a dead end. I have a large supply of relishes and chutneys, right now, so I cook a pot of rice, and fry some salt-pork. I might get to town, do some laundry, go to the library. But this time of year I can't depend on getting anywhere. I don't have to get out, I have plenty of rice and beans, and a great deal of canned fish products, salmon, tuna, sardines, shrimp, eel, anchovies, all of which I enjoy on rice with various sauces. The onions have sprouted, but I have plenty of dried flakes, on to dried or canned potatoes. I still have a few winter squash, from the last raid on Tim Horton's fall display. Acorn squash that I'll stuff with sausage and cornbread, dessert squash, stuffed with raspberries. I had forgotten how good roasted acorn squash was with raspberries. Like applesauce and polenta. The wind is a full gale, it'd better go. A brief window before days of rain, so I make a quick trip to town. The driveway is a bit slick, going down, and I know it'll be dicey getting back up. Groceries, drinking water, whiskey and tobacco, a quick beer at the pub. The rain starts before I get home, stop at the mailbox and get a bag of mail and New Yorkers, a couple of books, then turn in the driveway and stop, put it in four-wheel low. A little slippage near the top, but I make it back home and breathe a sigh of relief. Re-provisioned. I puts oats on to cook, in the baby crock pot, because I want oats and fruit tomorrow. Power went out at 1:30 AM and I went into headlamp mode and read a Thomas Perry novel. I light a candle over on the stone kitchen counter, so I can see my way around. The wind is howling, shaking the house, it's dramatic. Hard blowing rain, branches flying, the trees shrieking. Too warm for a fire, so I eat a can of cold beans. Cold beans and crackers, to which I have a long affinity based on fishing with Dad, in a boat or on a jetty somewhere, often in lousy weather, because we'd heard the mullet were running, or the perch were bedding, or the bass were spawning. This all comes back to me, years later, fishing for native trout, high in the western Rockies. I carried a milk-crate, with food and supplies, in the back of the truck, a baby-food jar of pork fat, some rice, and a few cans of beans. I usually have a lemon, because there is no better dressing for a cut-throat trout at breakfast, and lemons keep very well, mid-summer in Utah. The wind dies down, the rain slackens, at 4:30 the power comes back on. I remember thinking I was on the main track here, not the false assumption that anything actually made sense. But that I was well and truly engaged in the moment, whatever it was. I know a lot about forks, but I try to not let it show, everyone hates a smart ass. Later I was considering the relative valence of conjunctions and commas. Every drop of rain is completely random. A percussive event. Don't get me started. The noise was extreme. I could hear hard waves of rain coming through the leaf-litter before they slammed into the house, the violence was startling. I was reading about a set of bronze doors in Florence. They weighed ten tons and I wanted to know how they had installed them. You have to carry that load, and it has to rotate. There has to be a lubricated joint in there somewhere. Probably not a gasket, because you'd have to lift a five ton door to replace it. Now you'd probably do this with a very hard ceramic material, lubricated with space-age bacon fat. I was interested in the way that very heavy stone caskets were slid into place. Small marbles, arrow shafts, and bacon. This got me thinking about tolerances. Thinking about tension and compression, the outward expansion of materials under load. The snap of a mouse trap brings me back into focus, food for crows dear Percy. Another morning of mist and clouds. I can't see across the hollow, steady drip of rain. A mug of coffee, and a bowl of gruel (cornmeal, oats, sliced bananas) staring out at a very bleak landscape. Before I can start a pot of beans I have to wash some dishes, deal with compost and ashes; then make cracklings, caramelize onions and peppers, take my usual reading breaks, and carry in some wood. That would be my day. I can't imagine I'd get all that done, but it's good to have a plan. Above freezing, so the house is easy to heat and I putter around, in bathrobe and slippers. Making cracklings always puts a smile on my face, remembering Mississippi. We'd kill a hog at Roy's, butcher it, salt down belly fat, and bury the hams and bacon in the first stage of cure. Then we'd make lard, rendering skin and scraps, dipping out the cracklings with a slotted spoon. Anyone who dropped by would stay, to eat cracklings and drink home-brew. No TV, no attention to outside news, just telling stories, comfortable around a pit fire. Once or twice a year Roy and I would kill a large hog just to make sausage (we had a back-list of orders) and we'd skin that hog, so there'd be a surplus of cracklings. Roy had a permit to set up his grill on Saturday, down town Duck Hill, and he'd cook to order for people and also sell ribs and chicken, and great sandwiches with his special sauce. Crackling sandwiches were in much demand. These were served as a fold-over in soft white bread. Folded-over white bread was the tortilla of the deep south. I've had turnip greens and fried salt-pork with mayo, crawdads with cocktail sauce, and many kinds of beans served that way. Roy's big seller was a ham steak sandwich, between two pieces of bread, overhanging on all sides and dripping with sauce. Bone-in, because everyone wanted that little morsel of marrow. I started helping on Saturdays, after an article came out about him in the Memphis newspaper, and we became fast friends. We shared an interest in fried fish and hush puppies; he raised world-class coon-hounds. Red-Bones and Blue-Ticks, beautiful dogs, with great deep voices. We had some wonderful times, sitting on my front porch, drinking shine, listening to his dogs run the bottoms. When the rain finally stopped, I got outside, but it was so dreary, I went back inside and read about Brunelleschi's dome, not the dome itself, which is a marvel, but transporting the materials, then hoisting them into place. The dome itself is estimated to weigh 37,000 tons, which is a lot of outward thrust, and difficult to deal with without buttresses. The problem is always the same, to carry the load down to a firm footing. There's dead load, the weight of the materials, and there's live load, three feet of heavy late winter snow, and everything needs to be factored. Decades of working with engineers and building inspectors and the occasional architect taught me to just over-build everything, I liked seeing the structural members. I've always used natural sticks, tree trunks, wherever I could, in construction. They're beautiful, and it's always interesting working with components that aren't straight. It's a look I prefer, and I wanted to build this house without any right angles, which I could do, but I was limited by time and money. It's faster and easier to frame a place conventionally, and I needed a place to live.