Community day.  Again.  It was fun.

Nice, bright, late-fall day.  Still some orange in the trees.  I am standing in the community wood workshop looking out the windows and I see a herd of goats wandering down the road.  Coming up shortly behind are the two local women whose herd it is.  A few of the goats stop now and then to nibble on trees and things as they pass down the hill.  It is all very, very picturesque.

But I do spend a moment wondering why a herd of goats are headed for the dock………….?

Forty-five minutes later I decide to head home and I, too, begin to head toward the dock.  I am half way down the hill when I see the ‘goat ladies’ tethering three goats and pulling them from the field of one of the local landowners.  Seems the herd found some nice forage there and they had all stopped to snack.  The goat ladies had other plans and schedules and they were now deemed pressing enough to tether a few goats and start hauling them down the hill.

I stopped to admire the scene: a group of fifteen to 20 goats living large off the land of whoever had the greenest grass and two goatherds trying to keep to a human agenda.  It was entertaining.

“Say, why are you taking goats to the dock?”

“They are going for a ride!”

“Lotta goats for your small boat!”

“Only three are going.  New home.”

“Oh.  And the rest of the herd is just along to say good bye?”

“Yeah.  They know.  It’s happened before.  They like to come this far, anyway.”  And then the women pull on the chosen three and the rest of the herd reluctantly began to follow.  We all walked down the last 200 feet to the public wharf.  Twenty little goat bums ahead of me.

When we got to the end of the dock, the ladies hauled the three down the ramp.  The rest of the herd gathered at the head of it but they did not follow.  They just looked on as #1, #2, and #3 were readied for the boat ride.  Then, after waiting for a respectful minute or so, they all turned on their heels and headed back up the hill to the neighbour’s pasture.  The goat ladies just carried on with loading and preparing.  It was a study in natural management.

The goat herd has a home.  It has acreage.  But the goat ladies think that goats should walk in herds to feel fulfilled and so they take them up and down the logging roads now and then for their ambulatory repast.  The goats eat on the go, as it were.  And then they eat on the come returning home.  Seems to work out just fine.  The animals are extremely healthy, quite beautiful in a goat-kind-of-way and quite obviously content in their surroundings.  Nice to see.

And that, in a nutshell, is part of the draw of going to community day.  There is always something of interest going on.  Sometimes it is a new boat at the dock, or the mail plane coming in, maybe an encounter with a long unseen neighbour.  Hard to know.  It is always changing.  Sometimes it is just seeing a herd of largely unfettered goats on the dock saying their goodbyes to a few buddies.

Sal and I sat on the couch last night.  I was reading a book on organic farming (Everything I Want To Do Is Illegal by Joel Salatin) and pouring scotch as required.  She was working on my book.  This is good.  If Sal is on the case, the book might happen.

I may not be a good writer but I am prolific and over the past two years have written well over 700 posts.  About 1200 pages of 8×11 single-spaced drivel.  As you know, it was originally intended as just an exercise to see if I had the discipline to write every day.  That is what the experts advised: “Just write.  Fuggedabout quality.  Just write.  See if you can do it!”

Well, I can do it.  In fact, I can hardly stop myself, actually.  It has become a bit of an obsession.  Well, a habit anyway.  It must be therapeutic in some kind of way.

Even though I trust Sally totally (especially in matters such as these), she is no more an editor than I am a writer.  She hasn’t a clue.

“So, how are you gonna do this?  Do you see a theme, a story line, a book of any kind?  Or do you just see a huge pile of blog posts like I do?”

“I have broken them down into categories, ya know, like building, everyday events, accidents, wildlife, boating……that sort of thing.” 

“I guess that makes sense.  But then what?  Make chapters out of the categories?”

“Maybe.  That might work.”

“What else is there?  I can’t actually see a story, can you?  Got any sort of plan?”

“Not really.  My plan is to first categorize and I haven’t finished doing that yet.  And I keep having to read them again and again to know which category they should be in.  So far, I don’t see much of a pattern let alone a book.  This is a huge job!  Stop writing for God’s sake!  OMYGAWD!  You are writing about this!  Stop!  Stop this madness right now!”

Production, it seems, may be out of control.  Packaging is way behind and we have yet to find a distributor.  I know we are grossly under capitalized and our accounting is a mess.  Labour relations are volatile and we have not established a market of any kind.  In fact, we just have a small sampling to justify our way-over-leveraged commitment.  Worst of all, management sucks!

I dunno………. I may have to sell my shares and get out.

Did more work on the deck yesterday.  That was good.  But it rained the whole time.  Still, we got a few more posts in the ground and there is visible progress.  Sal and I are working well together this time.  We don’t usually.  Too many supervisors on site as a rule, not enough willing workers.  Labour problems seem to plague us.

This is an amazing problem when you think about it.  There are only the two of us!  And we are great partners in most things.  But neither of us knows anything about building – not really – and yet any disagreements are the result of an implied knowledge that one tries to exercise over the other.

“What are you doing?!”

“Cutting a log.”

“Did you measure it?”

“No.  Thought I’d just wing it, ya know….?  Looks about forty-eight inches.”

“What!?  You have to measure!”

“Well, of course I measured it, didn’t I?  It is exactly 46 and seven eights.”

“Well, you didn’t tell me!”

“No.  True.  I try to keep this sort of thing on a need-to-know basis.  I didn’t think you needed to know”.

“Well, I can’t help if I don’t know what is going on, can I?  Why are you being so difficult?”

“Kinda guy I am.  Difficult.  Now, if you don’t mind, I am going to cut the log now, you deck Nazi!”

“I am not a deck Nazi!  You’re the deck Nazi!”

And so it goes for a few minutes and then things are good again and we go along nicely for another hour or so before another petty-tyrant issue erupts.  I can’t honestly say that I am any less guilty than she.  Maybe a bit more, actually.  Maybe.

I sometimes (often) don’t know what I am doing and having questions asked of me at the time is – for me, anyway – vexing.  I tend towards the terse and snappy at such times.  Mea culpa.

Sal is pretty much problem free as a person.  She has a good attitude and is willing to do what needs to be done.  But she does like to have everything explained ahead of time and she likes to understand what is going to happen before it is supposed to happen.  She likes plans, lists and proper preparation.  These are totally foreign concepts to me. 

“We don’ need no stinkin’ plans!”   (Cheech and Chong Institute of Technology)

I tend towards winging it.  I like to think of it as creative.  Sometimes I call it ‘organic’.  And I prefer the ‘just do as I say’ kind of helper – the kind that can read my mind.  So, that prerequisite is, for sure, not really fair for her.  She has trouble reading my mind and, of course, there is no plan in there to read, anyway.  Hell, there is barely a mind!  What mind there is, is usually confused and or empty of the required skill/knowledge information even at the best of times. Even if she could read it, there would be too many blank pages with scribbling all over.  I am much more a ‘sketch-on-a-napkin-as-you-go’ type.

When you think about it, it is a bloody marvel we ever get anything done.  But it does make for adventure.  All the time.  I love working with Sal.

It is not mutual.

“I’ve got this idea for a huge project and I am going to need your help.”

“I am going to be away then!”

“You don’t know what it is or when we are going to do it?”

“Whenever.  Whatever.  I am pretty sure I am booked then.   I am completely sure, actually.  I’ll be far away then.” 

“See, you can read my mind, after all!”

“Don’t you think you should write a bit about our personal growth?  You know, how our experiences have taught us things and how we, well, grew-as-people, kinda? 

“I’ve put on weight…..?”

“No, silly.  I mean, like how we can do more stuff and how we know about wood and stuff?”

“I don’t know about wood.  Neither do you.  You can recognize the species when they are trees but when they are cut into lumber, you seem to have the same trouble as me.  Hell, wet cedar still looks and feels like fir to me!”

“OK.  Bad example.  But, surely we have grown some in the last eight years.  Haven’t we?”

“Well, you are better at a lot of stuff but, really, being able to dock your boat without smashing into it first is hardly personal growth.  Mind you, I do heal faster than ever before now that I think about it.  But, of course, I cut myself more often so that’s a wash.  I dunno, Sal.  Maybe when the bread rises a bit more, we can claim that as a victory”.

“C’mon, you know more stuff about batteries and solar energy, right?”

“Yeah.  I guess.  But it all changes so fast, I am now only two generations behind the technology.  And I am still confused whenever I see more than four wires coming out of something.  If there has been growth it has been nano-growth.  Same for engines.  Just when you think you know something, you have an engine on your hands that ‘makes no sense’.  We may have grown but we have also grown old.  Kinda off-setting, ya know”.

“Well I, for one, feel as if I have grown.  I really do.  Like taking care of dogs.  Sitting on the community board.  Taking care of dogs.”

“You mentioned taking care of dogs twice.”

“We have two dogs!”

“I am not so sure that your sense of logic has grown much.”

“So, why do I feel as if I have grown?  More to the point, why do I think that you have, too?”

“I think it is like when a guy stops beating his head against the wall.  Stopping feels like an improvement.  Personal growth.  In fact, it is just the cessation of self abuse.  We got out of the rat race, the madding crowd and now live a normal healthy life.  That is a huge improvement over sitting in traffic and worrying about bills.  But jumping ship is not personal growth.  It’s just jumping ship.  For personal growth to happen your bread has to rise and I have to be able to fix small engines.”

“Wow!  In that case, we are doomed.”

“Well, the first step is admitting you have a problem.  Let’s call that our first step to personal growth.”

“We gonna stop there?”

“I think so.”

We are not pretenders.  We are real.  Real off-the-gridders.  Real tough guys.  We got our solar panels, our gore-tex, our big batteries.  We even got chainsaws and winches.  We have our ‘rural cred’, our bona fides.  Look out, you city wimps!

Well, you don’t have to look out too much.  Even though we are definitely in the feral zone, we are just.  We aren’t newbies so much anymore but we are still definitely sophomores.  Which means more-than-soft in Latin.  Plenty to learn.

Our rank? One out of ten.  Maybe 1.25.

But good ol’ Sal is keeping up the quest.  Yesterday – between helping me frame a new deck extension – she started making her own bread.  From scratch.  No Mr. Kitchen Aid bread-maker  for her!  This was the yeast and the kneading, the rising and baking kind of bread.  Took awhile.  So did the deck.  Man, it was good! (The bread.  The deck still has some way to go)

What a treat it was to come in at the end of the day. The whole house smelled of bread baking.  It was like stepping back in time.

Don’t get me wrong.  Sal has baked bread before.  There was the five-minute instant bread that came in a Betty Crocker-type box and tasted exactly like the packaging.  Once we had a bunch o’loaves from some biscuit recipe that tasted like a giant biscuit (go figure).  And there were the already-semi-baked ‘just-warm and-serve’ types that, all in all, were OK but are not quite right for the true forest dweller.

But she did once do a make-from-scratch loaf, too.  Sadly, the flour-to-bread ratio was not good.  We had much more flour all over the house than we had in any one loaf and, with the Molly Maid service expense, all the cleaning and extra laundry and the massive flour waste, her cost benefit analysis suggested continued shopping at Safeway.  We probably could have flown to Paris for baguettes, actually.

But not this time.  This time was good.  Very good.  One small step up the learning curve for Sal.  One giant leap for David’s breakfast.

Living off the grid is more than actually leaving grids.  It is a much larger lifestyle change than simply getting your electricity and water from a different source. The activities differences are huge.  And diversified.  Most of the local people have been doing it for years and they are constantly surprising me with logical but unusual activities designed to make life better.

Home-baked bread is just one of the steps.  Every year several people collect apples from various orchards and press them into juice and such.  A lot of folks make jams and jellies.  A neighbour down the way makes wine from blackberries that is far superior to most wines we buy.  People go into our bay in the spring to collect the tops from nettle plants (fresh spinach-like greens early in the season).   Many, it seems, have extensive gardens and they work them.

There’s prawn gathering, clams, oysters.  And fishing, of course.  More and more I am hearing of someone ‘putting a deer away’.  And chickens are common and ubiquitous, though layers are preferred over roasters.  And, while there is a cost saving, this is motivated as much by the health of it.  And the taste of things!  These folks (us, too, to some extent) have made it a lifestyle choice to hunt and gather, grow and do their own processing.  The most productive amongst us could likely survive off the land for a considerable time.

Us?  Not so much.  We still shop.  It used to be once a week then every two weeks and now we are averaging once every three weeks and, without any hardship except a few minor shortages (dairy and some fresh veggies, mostly) we could go for as long as two months without shopping and maybe four or five on a subsistence level.

Still, I do not think we will ever be really ‘up-there’ (in status) off-the-gridders.  There simply is not enough time.  The good ones just know too much.  They can do too much.  They are just so much better at all this (even if they don’t choose to exercise all the skills they have all the time) that we will never catch up to that level of expertise.

Which is good news, actually.  Living off the grid is to prefer the journey over the destination and we are enjoying ourselves no end.  The bread and homemade jam?  A magnificent bonus!

Community day.  Plus we had the Public Health nurses come to visit (flu shots) and the Coast Guard came by for a PR show and tell.  Brought the community a nice big boat to tour.   Big mail day, too.  All in all, it was a busy day.  Even better, the sun was shining.

You’d think we were a huge community if you judged by Wednesdays.  There were over twenty five people at the ‘canteen’ that operates in the bunkhouse on Community Day.  The whole space is less than 1000 sft.  And we must have had a dozen visitors in the workshop.   We may have even done a little work.  And my guess is that were over thirty people – not counting the school kids – who did a tour of the Coast Guard boat.

Community Day – it’s weird.  I go up around 10:30 a.m. and figure to stay an hour or so………just to be sociable, do a little chore……..and then go home.  I never seem to manage that and don’t usually get home til 4:00 or so.  No real reason for that…….not really…….just conversation, that sort of thing.  Time flies.

This time it was the Coast Guard that held me up a bit longer.  One of the crew had been to visit us back when we were starting to build eight years ago.  He was a friend of a friend and they were both in the Coast Guard at the time and so they dropped in and, it seems, he remembered and recognized us.  That same fellow was on the crew that came to attend to me after my mishap with the propeller.  And he remembered that, too.

This guy and I are like ‘ol’ buddies………..?

It is not a good sign when you are recognized and on a first name basis with search and rescue. 

Oh well, I suppose we will be seeing plenty of each other in the near future……….

One thing remarkable about today: no one brought up the US election.  Well, I did, of course.  But no one else did and, furthermore, the responses I got were of complete and total ambivalence.  Not even a quip or sarcastic remark.  It was like it never happened…………?

That surprised me.  My neighbours are pretty political.  They follow politics.  And, to a person, they were Obama fans.  So, why the lack of comment?  I have no idea………….I can only guess.

My first guess is that they were pretty sure that Obama would be re-elected.  So was I but I still talked about it.  Secondly, they have generally rejected the larger system and, when you think about it, Obama is the penultimate representative of that system.  They are not interested in Obama in the same way as they are not interested in the Queen of England.  Thirdly, they are all older.  The political conversations to be had have all been had many times over.  “So, what else is new?”  Of course there is also the obvious: “We can’t do anything about it- whatever it is and we just have to live and cope so what is there to talk about?”  Which is fair comment, I suppose, but doesn’t that apply to a lot of issues?

Bottom line?  No splash.  Barely a ripple in the space/time continuum.  Same ol’, same ol’.  The kind of thing that used to occupy the people I know no longer does.  Well, if the ‘day after’ is anything to go by.

This was a huge cause celebré for the last three or four months in the media!  We were supposed to believe that it was the topic of the day every day!  But, perhaps it was not?  Maybe it was just another thing that was a topic in the media but not so much in the home?

Not in the typical off-the-grid Canadian home, anyway.

When people stock up on supplies the tendency is to plan to cover a specific period of time only and then not to re-stock until then.  In other words, there is a tendency towards a bit of brinksmanship.  We all like to think of that as efficient.

But you shouldn’t do that if you live remote.

When living, planning and stocking to live off-the-grid, you have to plan for ‘some extra’.  The hard part is figuring out how that ‘extra’ need or requirement might show up.

I buy 100 gallons of gasoline for about four months of running boats and small engines and so, as I work through the inventory to month three, I book the barge delivery for the next month.  The assumption, of course, is that the barge will be there for me.  Reasonable enough, wouldn’t you say?

I tend towards having the barge come three times a year when, in fact, I have the storage capacity for leaving it to two times.  But, for that kind of just-in-time management to happen, everything has to run out at the same time and so I tend to overlap a little.  Reasonable-but-leaning-towards-the-cautious side, wouldn’t you say?

Not enough, it seems.

The barge will not be there for me this month.  This time the barge is in drydock.  Like I said – I can stretch propane and diesel til they come back but, this time my gasoline supplies are too low.  And I found out about that when I phoned today.  We will be out of gasoline too soon!  Damn!

I am not really complaining. The barge will be back next month and we can cope till then.  I only have to ‘bridge’ that 30 day gap and I can do that with a few portable Jerry cans.  No big deal.  We did that for years.  Some people still do (full containers really stink up a car when you are traveling over bumpy roads.  It is something to be avoided if at all possible).

But, honestly, this is just another small example of being just a smidge behind the learning curve out here.  I really should have enough of all fuels on hand for five months and plan on calling the barge as month three is ending.  I really should have had that extra month in reserve.

Lesson learned.  Another storage container will be purchased.

As I plan and stockpile into my eighth year out here, I still wonder if I have the right assessment on things.  It is only natural.  I am still learning and not fully confident in my off-the-gridding competence.  I kinda know I’ll screw up a bit now and then but the comfort comes from knowing that I won’t likely make the same mistake twice.  The discomfort comes from knowing that there are always new ways to screw up.  And I will find them.  This time it was fuel.  And, like most screw-ups, the situation is made a bit more dire by it being winter.   Travel plans are always more ‘iffy’ in the winter.  There is a bit more urgency to it now………….

Is this worthy of a blog post?  Perhaps not.  We all run out of things now and then.  That’s life.  In fact, it is the very definition of life – we run out of it!  But running out of fuel when you live remote is a bit more vulnerable-making, a bit more ‘dicey’, don’t you think?  Well, I do.  I will address this issue a bit sooner rather than later.

It is the prudent thing to do.

People continue to wonder how it is that Sal and I can live remote, isolated and seemingly without all the comforts of the city.  The answer is amazingly simple:  we don’t feel in the least remote nor isolated and we want for no comforts whatsoever.  Admittedly, we lack for a few conveniences but, with a bit of planning and a smidge extra work, we can stay comfortable enough to meet our own standards quite nicely, thank you. So can anyone.

We don’t have 500 channels of TV.  The mail is not delivered every day to our door and frequent shopping is impossible. I definitely do more of my own maintenance work and we don’t get the restaurant experience much any more. 

Boo hoo.

Constantly ‘encountering’ people I know is also greatly reduced.  But I can live with that and I think some of the people involved are relieved anyway, so it’s win-win socially-speaking.

In exchange for those minor alterations in lifestyle I live in a virtual paradise of flora and fauna.  Think: living in Stanley Park overlooking Siwash Rock – it is better than that!  I am also healthier if for no other reason than the air is pure and the work is more physical.  And Sal’s food is better than any restaurant.  The seafood is definitely fresher!

There are no rules.  There are no sirens.  There is no traffic and I have no stress.  We need less.  We want less.  And, thank God! there is less!  Less bills, too.  And, in this sense, truly, less is more.  More satisfying, more relaxing, more healthy, more affordable and more normally livable.  It really does not get much better.

So, if that is the answer (and it is not rocket science)…………….what are they really asking…?

I think their questions are more of a normal exploration of possibility.  These are tiny, baby steps for people getting to the same place, perhaps, in their lives –  the place where they quit and change from what they have been doing – as we went through.  I think people ask the ‘usual’ questions wanting to hear the answer they already know they are going to hear: It is not hardship to leave the city.  In fact, it is a better lifestyle.  And they want to hear that from the horse’s mouth.  You know, the horse that actually bolted from the barn?

And, when I say ‘people’, I mean ‘retirees’ or soon-to-be’s.  Baby-boomers.  People my age.  People winding down, thinking of the cottage, thinking of checking out on their own terms instead of being escorted from the building by security.  People who have, perhaps, had enough of the rat race……just thinkin’ about the right timing……..is it now………..or later?

Mind you, I could be ‘projecting’.  I do tend to think that every one basically thinks like I do.

Anyway, the point is this: if you are thinking about it, you should do it.  Now!  I say.  And here are a few reasons why: 1. You are not getting any younger and up-rooting and moving is a task in itself.  If you simply moved from your cul-de-sac to your cottage with no chop-saws or hammering in between, it is still a big effort.  If you are going, go sooner rather than later.  Much easier.  2. The ratio of relative values is good.  Rural land is cheap, urban real estate still expensive.  The ratio is always in your favour but right now is a particularly good time financially.  3. Living in the city is expensive.  And that expense is what sets your perspective on what you need to live.  In other words, most people think they need more money than they do.  So, they continue to eat into their last remaining real capital…………..which after 60, is TIME.  Too many people plan on maximizing their pensions at a cost of eating into their remaining lifetime.  A smidge delusional, from my point of view.  4. There is no such thing as security.  Things happen.  Life happens.  You may as well be proactive and do something rather than be so cautious that you don’t.  Something is going to happen either way.

Just sayin’…………

“Geez, Dave, why you sayin’ all that?  I have no intention of leaving the cul-de-sac.  I love it here!  You are wrong.  Not everyone wants out of the modern city.  It is a marvel of civility and society and I like it!”

Right!  Sorry.  I do tend to project.  Sorry about that.  Just being encouraging.  You know……for those who are still weighing the pros and cons……?

Dinner party last night.  Just down the way.  Good food, lots of fun.  Home-made blackberry wine, garden vegetables.  Organic just about everything.  Fabulous.  Think Norman Rockwell does hippies.  We all had rosy cheeks and full bellies!

The talk was politics.  Well, politics, the apple crop, the new grandaughter, salmon and a lot of island stories but Obama/Romney was sprinkled throughout.  As was the new puppy that was brought along by one of the guests.  Part of the reason for that is that several of the guests were ‘Mericans.  Been here since the 70’s.  All Canadianized now.  Mostly.  Kinda.

Mind you, as you can likely guess with a bunch o’ off-the-grid, organic, hippy-types (within which cohort I proudly count myself) they were unanimously in favour of Obama.  Romney scares the hell out of them.  They still follow their politics.  Still care.  And more than a few with dual citizenship made sure to cast their ballots in the advance polls.  That is pretty responsible.  I respect that.

Canadians generally have a 60% turnout and that is when the polling station is at the end of the block!

I was reminded of that kind of political apathy recently when discussing politics the other day with another neighbour who works up north.  He reported that all the ‘guys’ up there are in favour of the pipeline and oil exports.  “Cause it’s jobs, eh?  Average guy up there makes better than $10K a month, eh?  New cars, man.  Whole town is doin’ good.”

No point in bringing up climate change, polluting the coast, selling out our sovereignty to China, totalitarian-esque behaviour by our Prime Minister and other assorted lies and crimes of the Federal and Provincial governments.  I had nothing to compete with “….jobs, eh?” coming from someone who had just made a big effort to get a much-needed one.

I am not sure it is fair to say this, but it seems to me that Canadians seem to vote even more with their wallets in mind than do ‘Mericans.  Americans are more divided on issues (fer sure) and such but, at least it is as much – if not more – about issues as it is about the economy.  I dunno………I could be wrong…………but I don’t like the comparison……we don’t look so good as conscientious citizens doing the moral thing…….or is it just me?

After dinner, we left.  It was 9:00-ish.  It was black as pitch.  Slight drizzle.  Couldn’t see a thing except for the little strobe light on my neighbour’s dock off in the distance.  We headed out in Sal’s tiny 11 foot boat.  I lay horizontal over the bow and held the flashlight out in front so that Sal could maneuver through all the wood that was floating due to the high tides.  It was a real obstacle course.  But it was kinda magical all at the same time.

My mind rested as we ploughed through the sparkling phosphorescence.  I let politics go for a few minutes.

It is not easy.  I admit that I am somewhat of a political animal.  And I am still trying to subdue that beast. Boating at night helps.  It is one of those things that affects me a great deal and that I can effect only infinitesimally.  The cost benefit ratio is just not in my favour.  But, of course, that is what the political bastards count on.  They know that apathy and impotence go together and the more impotent the populace, the greater power they can exercise.  “Wadda they gonna do?  Protest?!  Hahahahah.  By next month the whole bunch o’ them will have forgotten about it!  Hahahahah”.

And they are right.  Remember all the lies, crimes, deceits and fiasco’s of the provincial Liberals over the last ten years?  No?  Even I have trouble remembering them all and I keep a list!  Remember all the fascist-style parliamentary moves of Harper?  No, not even I can do that.  Remember all the Federal Liberal Party crimes when they were in power?  Ancient history, right?  It is easier to remember the Paul Henderson goal in the 1972 hockey series with Russia than last year’s political rap sheet.

We seem to prefer hockey and new trucks to politics.  What the hell is wrong with us?  Should we be more like the ‘Mericans?

As I have said many times, living off the grid is a huge learning curve.  And I am just barely graduating from kindergarten.  So much to know…………..

My friend, D, has a portable sawmill.  But, of course, there is nothing portable about it.  It is about thirty feet long with a twenty foot bed and sports a pretty big engine turning a six-foot or longer horizontal band-saw.  It weighs what a two ton truck might weigh.  He bought it.  Shipped it.  Carried each piece and assembled the whole damn thing in the middle of the forest.  Then he cut all the wood he needed for his homestead and for that of his cousin.  That is a lot of lumber.  And that is a lot of work.

Just the milling is a lot of work.

Even tho D has some standing trees on his property he occasionally purchases logs from the local logging outfit.  It’s easier and no one gets injured.  He had about a dozen twenty-foot lengths at his work-site and none were less than 20″ in diameter.  Each was only a quarter or a fifth of a tree but they were still very big and heavy.

D had agreed to mill some siding and some beams for the community project and only requested a bit of assistance.  Like a fool, I squeaked when I should have kept quiet.  Yesterday we headed out in his beat-up pick-up in the rain to make macho in the woods.  Like lumber-guys.  But he remembered to wear his red-plaid heavy flannel logging shirt and a filthy cap.  I was dressed in a clean hoody.  I have so much to learn!

The second thing I learned is that it is pretty bloody hard to move those logs around a muddy field.  So, real men use real trucks and real ropes and they drag them into approximate place.  Some of those real men stand around and watch.  Those ones pull up their hoody instead.  Then the real men use peaveys to roll the log onto the bed of the mill.

And we begin to mill.

It is truly a fascinating concept, actually.  We, as a species, have decided to carve out square sticks from big round ones.  Or, more accurately put: we make rectilinear boards from round trees.  Waste is prodigious and inevitable.

“Hey, D, now that I see how this is done, wouldn’t it be more efficient to make octagonal beams from round trees?”

I heard him say, “(The other guys warned me about this)…………Just push the log and you can work out the philosophy of it all later, OK?  And when you do, ask yourself how do you fasten octagonal ends?”

So that shut me up for a while.

When we had finished milling we stacked all our fresh-cut lumber on the truck kitty-corner across the bed.  Had to.  The wood was all longer than the bed of the truck.  We ‘stuck out’ six feet on either side.  That is not so much a problem when you are going down a two lane paved road.  Scrambling a mile or so over a heavily rutted dirt road with strong saplings growing right into the road way was like negotiating some kind of weird forest-guy slalom.  And to keep the wood relatively in place and because the passenger side door would now not open, I sat atop the load.

Next time I will scootch across the driver’s side and sit inside.  I kept seeing saplings just miss the load as we whizzed by.  Catch a sapling and I would be sent airborne.  Been there.  Don’t need to learn that lesson again.

But, just as the skies really opened, we arrived at the project and unloaded.

“Geez, man!”, I said, lying through my teeth, “That was great.  What a great day!  Great experience!  Yeah!  Just great.  Have to do that again some time……….but, well, I think I’ll go home now.  We done?”   All the time I was saying that, I was also vowing to pay whatever the price was for milled wood without ever even thinking of complaining about the cost again.

And I have shelved my plans for getting my own mill.

I learned my lesson.