Doggin’ logs.  Finishing Sal’s boat.  Fixing the sailing dinghy.  Helping a real estate deal get done.  Preparing for the season’s first woofers next week.  Startin’ the garden.  Consulting on a mediation.  Lookin’ for a new boat or at least a new boat design that I can easily build.  Planning the new work shed.  Schlepin’ in windows and skylights for it. Getting some more stuff done on the funicular.  Contemplating the pile of logs gathered at the beach and…….well…..that is only about the half of it!  There is so much more!

I can’t honestly say that I work harder now that I am retired because I work at my own pace and, because of that, things just don’t get done as quickly.  And I do enjoy doing them more, which is nice.  So work piles up and I just look really busy. “Image is everything!” (Andre Agassi)

When I worked for or with others, the pace was quicker and the work less fun.  Had to be.  Time is money!

Now no one will work with me so I get to set the pace.  A plethora of riches but without the money.  Ironic, eh?

I remember distinctly hearing: “If you want something done, ask a busy person to do it!”  And it is true. Sal gets stuff done.  Because I can pace myself, well, I pace myself………the truth: I have a lot of things to do but I am not that busy doing them.

I’ll have to get them woofers on it.

I’d like to use the excuse that I am gettin’ on.  But Sal’s dad, who is 88, does twice as much around the house.  So do a lot of old guys.  Met a guy the other day who is older than I am by four or so years and he was heading up the coast to rebuild a crumbling dock!  That involves huge creosoted beams.  I don’t think I can deny it, I am soft.  Round people often are.  Maybe I should have been a chef?

Actually, I am still somewhat busy.  Just not as busy as I should be, I guess.

Maybe.

The best part of my day is writing the blog.  I just sit down and ‘kill an hour’.  It’s fun.  I also read for about two hours every day.  Maybe three.  Amazing how many books you can get through with a reading time allocated.  I get through two ‘heavy’ books a week and often two light ones as well.

‘Course my retention level is waning.  The books blur into one another.  That is not so good.  I am basically attracted to social trends, politics and economics.  The not-so-recent economic crisis of 2007/08 has spawned a lot of post analytical financial books and they are fascinating to me.  Ooohh, I know so much more about liars and cheaters and greedy pigs and how the system is designed to breed more. 

You have to wonder if that is not akin to some kind of porn fetish, eh?

But it has occurred to me: I could be barking up the wrong tree.

Henry David Thoreau wrote Walden; or Life in the Woods.  Somehow he knew of the difference between living and existing for trivial pursuits.   Pacing myself is living properly.  So, that’s good.  Some of the pursuits, however, may be trivial (skylights in the new workshop?).  I am going to have to read Walden again.

The authors of the books I read, however, seem to have missed the essential point of living altogether.  And those they write about are actually heavily invested in the opposite.  A lot of people are.  Maybe we should all read Walden again.

“I went to the woods because I wished to live deliberately, to front only the essential facts of life, and see if I could not learn what it had to teach, and not, when I came to die, discover that I had not lived. I did not wish to live what was not life, living is so dear; nor did I wish to practise resignation, unless it was quite necessary. I wanted to live deep and suck out all the marrow of life, to live so sturdily and Spartan-like as to put to rout all that was not life, to cut a broad swath and shave close, to drive life into a corner, and reduce it to its lowest terms, and, if it proved to be mean, why then to get the whole and genuine meanness of it, and publish its meanness to the world; or if it were sublime, to know it by experience, and be able to give a true account of it in my next excursion.”

— Henry David Thoreau

…..bit of a tangent…………you may wish to skip this…………..

Things change.  Generally, things change incrementally.  Little changes year after year.  Neighbourhoods change.  People change.  Cities change.

In nature, Darwin called those baby-step-changes evolution.  In culture, we call it fashion.  Basically, it just means that a small amount of change is actually the status quo.  “Change is constant.”

But things occasionally change significantly.  Huge change can happen now and then.  Massive.  Catastrophic at times.  Even social change can be a major upheaval in the status quo.  There was the ‘Peace and Love phenomenom’ of the 60’s.  There have been major medical breakthroughs, like penicillin, the X-ray or the birth control pill.  There was oil and the internal combustion engine.  Airplanes.  And computer technology.  BIG CHANGE happens……….(stay with me.  I’ll get to the point.  It is a question, actually.)

N. Taleb calls change like that a black swan in his book by that name.

And big change makes for paradigm shifts.  Big change changes lots of things. And then we think differently.  We are different after BIG changes.

For instance, climate change will not only change our climate but, very likely, it will also change everything we do, everything we use, everything we are.  IF we still are.

‘Course, you know all that.

My question is, do you feel it?  Do you have a sense of it?

The possibility of change on that kind of scale (BIG) usually brings about a sense of fatalism.  And fatalism is close to apathy.  We get numb to the possibility of such a thing.  And then we don’t feel it.  We then don’t even worry too much about that kind of change.  Too big.  Too much to grasp.  Impossible to deal with.

My friends are likely saying: “Oh no, not this again?!  Look!  There is nothin’ I can do about it.  I don’t even want to waste time thinkin’ about it.  Let’s talk about something else.”

Those statements make me think they do feel it but don’t want to admit it.  They don’t want to make it a conscious thought.  They might have to do something and, of course, they don’t know what that might be.  Too hard.

I remember (way back) when we were all worried about a world that might fully engage in a nuclear war.  “May as well run toward the mushroom cloud as away from it.  It’s all gonna get us eventually.  Better to end it quick.  And not waste time worrying about it.”

I am not so sure that BIG change is ever really a sudden surprise.  I think some people can see ahead to the BIG change around the corner.  We may not be able to foresee the date of the tidal wave washing away the nuclear reactors at Fukushima or a huge earthquake dropping California into the sea but we know of those potentials.  We know they can happen.  We can move from LA to Wisconsin (mind you, if you are silly enough to live in LA, then maybe you don’t know….?).

Anyway……..the point is: it feels like BIG BIG change is in the air.  To me, anyway.  And I mean bigger than Obama-change.  Bigger than any one election.  Bigger than all elections combined.  It feels like a massive, socio-cultural, people-based unconscious shift of some kind is either happening already or it is primed to happen.

Paul Hawken writes about that kind of change.  But he hasn’t really identified it except where it is small and local, albeit spread quite internationally.  I talk about it but have no idea what I am talking about.  There is a huge industry in books about various types of change in economics, education, climate and that sort of thing.

But that is not it.  Those books have an ‘inside-the-box’ view.  It feels like something bigger.

I have no idea what I am talking about.  Do you?  Does anyone who reads this have a sense of BIG change pending?

A bit more history…………

It may seem silly to gather bits and pieces of equipment and materials for a project that I hadn’t even identified or planned.  And, I suppose, in many ways it was.  But I was pretty sure the dream would eventually involve building a cabin of some kind.  Something quirky.  Or a nice big deck at the very least.  And it was likely to be on the property we had.  ‘Surely‘, I thought, ‘we’ll be building something there?!’

I mean, I hate tents.  And we no longer had a big boat and, basically, there was nothing there to receive us – not even a flat surface.  One has to sleep somewhere.  Right?  Wasn’t it obvious?

I’d have to build.

So, I gathered bits and pieces.  And tools.  It all made sense in that ‘buy-it-all-first, then-you-have-to-do-something’ way men have.  Like barbecues.

If you gather supplies in a goofy, whimsical, bargain-if-you-use-it-waste-of-money-if-you-don’t-kinda-way, you can save a lot of money.  Or lose it, depending.  I lucked out.  I went with the whimsy and we eventually used it.

Savings?  In the tens of thousands.

One of the things you can be sure you are going to use when building is fasteners.  And fasteners are something I know a bit about.  When living on a boat, (three different boats over a period of eleven years, actually) one becomes fairly familiar with fasteners, glues and big metal things like chain and pipes and such.  I knew we were going to need such stuff.  I just didn’t know exactly what or where.

Worst place to purchase such stuff?  Home Depot.  Best?  BC Hydro salvage yard (unfortunately no longer in operation).  Second best?  Normal, basic, junk and metal salvage yards.

And if you know you are going to need chain or pipe, you may as well get something big and strong enough to do anything you might need it to do.  Bigger is better.  Even if it seemed a bit much.  So, I jumped at the chance to pick up some 8′ lengths of 6″pipe.  I eventually got half-inch chain, some 3/8″ cable, lots of 3/4″, long, heavy galvanized bolts and tons of heavy, hot-dipped galvanized steel beams.  Not to mention hundreds of assorted screws and smaller bolts.  I even got a bunch of very heavy-duty, industrial grates about three feet square and weighing 200 pounds each.  “What was all that for?”

At the time of the purchase?

No idea.

When things began to fill up the driveway, Sal was not amused.  I really needed to get an idea.  Even getting a clue would help.

Of course, I had plenty of ideas but none of them would strike Sal or some other confidant as plausible or likely or, in some cases, do-able or livable.  Interesting?  Not even a little bit.  They didn’t even want to think about it with me.  Not really.  I was starting from a completely blank slate and quite ‘by myself’.

Which is good.

I contemplated a huge tree house – one slung from a metal collar on a huge tree with cables hanging down.  Kind of an industrial Robinson Crusoe-type thing.  A friend of mine in Oregon makes the hardware for that.  “No way!” said Sal (she didn’t spend a lot of time thinking about it, either).

I envisioned utilizing shipping containers (I had this idea before the craze hit, I want you to know).  I was going to re-do the interiors and place three or four on foundations joined by a huge deck……..“No way!” said my closest neighbours a quarter of a mile away but in a direct line of sight.  They, too, didn’t hesitate with the nixing.  They just lacked the vision, I guess.

I thought about building a small 500 square foot building designed to incorporate an anticipated exact-sized extension.  And that building would have another natural place for a further addition and so on.  Sorta like a planned-expansion design.  A cabin concertina.  The idea was to be able to frame and close each ‘box’ in a weekend.  I called it the Weekend Warrior cabin.

I even had that one professionally designed.

John Robinson now has it featured on his website.  He has embellished the original idea and I am sure for the better.  http://www.robinsonplans.com/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=208&Itemid=126

But the more I dreamed and designed in my head, the more I realized how little I knew.

I whined and complained one day at dim sum (fitting, in a semantic kind of way, don’t you think?) to a friend of mine about how stupid I was.  “I  already know that!” he said, not in the least bit sympathetically.  “But I own Linwood Homes.  Did you know that?  Anyway, why not go to work there.  Learn.  Share some of your stupid ideas with my partner, B.  He’ll fire you pretty quick, I”m sure.  I hope.  But, in the meantime, you might learn a bit about building”. 

I worked there for a little over a year.  Bill was more than patient.  I just wasn’t useful.  Not really.  Too much of a learning curve.  But, for me, it was better than taking five years of the building trades at BCIT.  I learned a lot.

Linwood makes a great product.  They also provide a fantastic service to go with it and they are worth what they charge.  I am a big fan of Linwood Homes. 

But I didn’t buy one.  I wanted to do it myself.  I wanted to design it.  I wanted to do the organization and the purchasing.  I wanted to build it.  I appreciated their expertise and I borrowed from it liberally.  And it was generously offered.  But I wanted to do it all.  With Sal too, of course.

It was a primal kinda-thing, ya know? “A man should be able to build his own house-kinda-thing.”

So, the dream was taking a bit of shape.  It was primal.  It was building.  And it was all about me.

But it had some fits and starts.

I started by wanting to do timberframe.  So cool.  But a friend of mine in the timberframe design business, Nick Kokas, talked me out of it.  “Dave, if you are building all by yourself and doing so in the remote woods, you need to use pieces that you can lift.  Trust me, even 4x4s get heavy when carted up hill.  I love timberframe but if you do not have road access, workers and a crane, fuggedabout it.”

I learned a few years later how right he was.  I thought of his words with every 2×10, every 2×12 and every 6×6 I lifted.  I am glad he advised me to go ‘stick-built’ rather than timbers and I am even more pleased that I listened.

But I am ahead of myself.  All that was part of the learning process.  And there was so much more to come.

More history will continue after a brief interlude……………

Home!  Thank God!  Omygawd, I love being here………..my own bed, my own chair, my computer works properly……………a crackling fire warming me up………boxes of supplies all over the place (feels like security, in a weird kind of way)……..dogs are happy, Sal is ecstatic. 

“Why the hell do we ever leave this place?”

It’s a schlep, tho.  Left Victoria at 9:30 am and phoned Sal’s parents to report that we were safe and sound at 9:00 pm with all of the stuff still to unpack.  Almost 12 hours in transit what with shopping and schlepping and such.  Unloaded at low tide, of course.  Rule of living on the coast: when arriving home in the dark with a heavy load, the tide is low.  The bigger the load, the lower the tide.  It’s the law.

We’ve pretty much adapted to the ‘loading’ and ‘unloading’ thing.  We try to ensure everything is in a plastic tote and we try to limit the weight of each tote to twenty or so pounds.  But sometimes, it just doesn’t work that way.  We can easily have six or seven totes, a few coolers, luggage, building supplies and another 30% in loose bits and pieces.  A box of wine.  Couple of boxes of dishes or glasses, fifty pound sacks of this and that.   All in a 16 foot boat.

This trip we also have several hundred pounds of glass and skylights in the utility trailer to come over.  We’ll get to those another day.

The worst: Reddi-mix cement and wet peat moss.  Wrestling wet peat moss into a boat and then up a rocky shore really brings up the value of a bag of peat moss I can assure you.  It is worth ten times what I pay for it by the time it is in the garden.  Same for cement.

Sal and I are also trying to increase our locavore-ness.  We want to buy locally.  And there are plenty of places along the highway that provide.  But damned if I can find them.  These small-time local producers are well known to those who frequent them but they do not make much of an effort to attract new customers.  As a consequence our conversation goes something like this (while driving at 80 km/hr, towing a trailer and in a line of speeding vehicles).

“I am pretty sure H said that the farm was around here.  You see it?”

“No.  Is there a sign?”

“I don’t think so.  There is an old red tractor but it is in the neighbours yard and that neighbour is on the other side of him, I think.  By the time you see the tractor, you have passed it.”

“I saw a red tractor a minute or so ago.”

“Damn!  OK, who is next on the list?”

“Well, there is the duck lady who lives down on some beach but she doesn’t have a phone.  Is there a sign?”

“Geez, I didn’t ask.  Who else we got on the list?”

“Well, there is the chicken place…..OOOHH!!  OOOHHH!!   That was it!  That was it!  We just went past!”

“Damn, damn, damn.  Can’t stop here.  Can’t turn around here either.  How bad do we need chicken?”

“Oh, we are good for a bit.  We can try again next time.”

“OK, what do we have next?” 

“Well, I was going to stop at Save-ON”. 

“OK.  I can do that.”

We are still working on the locavore thing.

Sal’s parents are of British origins.  English, don’t you know?  They claim not to be anymore because they are so very proud to be Canadian and choose to identify with ‘us’ rather than ‘them’.

Right.  It’s like an orca claiming to be a salmon.

Sal’s mother has the manners and the mannerisms of the Windsors.  More so, I suspect, since I am sure the Queen (Elizabeth) occasionally plays hall-hockey in her socks or air guitar when no one is looking.  (Well, so rumour has it, anyway). Sal’s mum, on the other hand, is the queen at all times.

She really is quite regal.  Sal comes by it quite honestly.

Today we and her parents celebrated Sal’s birthday (’cause we were in El Salvador when the day truly arrived) at the Bengal Room at the Empress.  We took the Indian curry buffet complete with large gin martinis and a polite nod and acknowledgment to the senior waiter (over 20 years) who knows them well and seats us at their favourite table.

“Ya know…….?  This is all very, very nice.  Extremely so.  Really.  Thank you.  But you have to admit it, don’t you?  I mean, this is veddy, veddy British.  Don’t you think? 

“Don’t be daft, silly boy!  Martinis are Italian.  Of that I am quite sure.  And if they are not, then they bloody well should be!  And curry, of course, is Indian.  Everyone knows that quite thoroughly.  No contesting that, eh, what?!  We are not in the least being British.  What poppycock!  We are Canadians.  And I do not wish to hear another word on the matter, if you please.  Tut tut!”

I guess I mention all this because we also saw my friend, D, who normally lives full-time in Hong Kong.  He is Chinese.  Quite, actually.  And we really enjoy discussing our respective cultures.  He, of course, is civilized.  The Chinese truly are civilized.  Read Confucius.  I am, sadly, just a barbarian.  Worse, I can’t really argue with that.  Comparatively speaking, I am a barbarian.  The more I see of Chinese high culture, the more impressed I am.

Don’t get me wrong – I can argue well the flaws in their larger culture.  We all can.  And ‘D’ wouldn’t argue back.  But, honestly?  If we simply put ‘civility’ at the top of the priority list, they come out leagues ahead.  Think about it: 1.6 billion people!  Cooperating!

There is a price for that social attribute (civility) and it is paid by the sacrifices of the individual for the greater society – something we barbarians are not always prepared to do.  Still, harmony, good manners, order, respect, obedience, hard work, harder study and humility make for a very civilized environment.  They don’t do hockey riots in China.  They don’t do random mass shootings at schools or fast food restaurants in China (unless it is government sanctioned for the greater good, of course).  Basically, they get along to get along.  And they get ahead as a result.

I am not so sure that we really have a culture in Canada.  Not high culture, anyway.  We got the CBC, beer, hockey and trees and stuff.  And lots of immigrants to provide some real spice and colour.  We now have First Nations prominently adding something to the picture, too.  I understand how Canada plays out differently than most other places.  But a unifying national culture?  Some kind of ‘linked-together’ bonding thing?  I don’t think so.

I don’t think we even have any ‘real Canadian’ meals, do we?  Poutine is French Canadian.  Beef is too international to count.  Salmon too BC.  Wadda we got?  Wheat!?

I dunno……I am not complaining.  Not really.  I mean, who wants to identify with fried bread, bangers and mash and squishy peas?  Who needs too much civility, eh?  I’m OK with being a bland barbarian, I guess.

Just sayin’………

Here it is: I am in a city (Victoria) getting a few chores handled and I can’t write.  That’s right…a ‘writer’s block’  kinda.  So, I think about it……..

Wait a minute……..there’s no block!  The reason I am not writing is that there is nothing to write about!  There was traffic.  There were stores.  And then there was more traffic.  Now and then we went into a sushi place for sustenance and then went back into traffic. Wahoo!

What’s to write?

You want dull?  Go to the city!

OK, I am being a bit ‘snarky’.  I know that.  But, honestly, being snarky is about the only thing I got going for me down here.   I get to see my family and some friends and that part is good. Fabulous, actually.   I get a needed part for a doo-dah.  Great!!   But I am now grossly ill-equipped for tolerating the madness that passes for normal life.  Hours of my day in traffic!  How stupid is that!?  Ten minute line-ups to buy a loaf of bread.  Signage.  Rules.  Prices!  The gestapo that is the BC Ferry service.

It feels even crazier to me when I am back.

Last night a Korean Air jetliner had an ‘ incident’  aboard and the flight was redirected to Comox air base.  It was accompanied by two US fighter jets.  All the passengers were subsequently screened and released.  Prssumably the flight continued.  Eventually.  The official spokesperson said, ” All emergency assets were deployed.”

Emergency assets, in this case, were US fighter jets!  Their assistance?  They could shoot the plane down.  Some assistance!  Some asset!

Oh, I could rant some more but traffic beckons.  Chores are calling.  Gotta get going to get into some line-up!

More irony?  Yesterday I was in dolphin traffic and it was OK.  Today I am in human traffic and it is not!

Monday: Heading down-island to Victoria.  Got luggage and two dogs.  Sal was down at the beach with it all and was waiting for me while I had gone around to the other side to get the boat.

A few minutes later I was leaving the dock.  I was about 60-70 feet away when I heard something.  It was a little ‘whoosh’, almost a whisper.  Like the wind in a bush.  But I was moving through the water and the engine was running.   It didn’t really register.  I was heading around the point and going a bit slow to rid myself of the rainwater in the bilge. I wasn’t focused.

And then a fin appeared.

Then another.  Then a few more.  Within seconds, I had twelve or so white-sided dolphins slicing along right beside me.  A few more were not five feet from the boat.  It was very cool.  I ambled along at just a few knots and they zoomed around me, under the boat and criss-crossing in front.  Like in the movies, ya know?  Just like dolphins are supposed to do.  And, I confess, I spoke to them.

“Hey guys!  Waddya up to, eh?  Playing around this time o’the morning?”  And further nonsense like that.  I was pretty amused.  We see dolphins all the time but it is rare that any come up close and I have never had a dozen or so frolic around me.  It was very neat.

But I was slowly making my way in a southerly direction to the point and I was going to turn around it and head in a northwesterly direction.  I fully expected them to keep their heading and that we’d part.  Not so!  When I turned, they turned with me!  And so it was that I was accompanied several hundred yards around the headland of our property  by dolphins.

As I turned into the beach where Sally was waiting, they simply dropped out of sight.  Went deep.  Disappeared.  Gone.

No big deal.  I know that.  But it was early, I was still sleepy and subdued, not overly keen on driving all day.  Maybe a smidge grumpy.  But not after them!  It was uplifting.  It cheered me up.  I picked up Sal with a smile.

A dolphin escort will do that.

There is a great deal more to that chapter and I’ll eventually get back to it but, to move the larger story along, Sally and I were now left alone to build our cabin.  And we weren’t really ready.

Of course, we had all the raw materials and I had tons of previously stored and transported junk and equipment on site.  I had tools up the wazoo and we were stocked with food and water and even had a box of wine and a few bottles of scotch.  We had the stuff.  But did we have the right stuff?

Neither Sally nor I had ever built before.  Not from scratch.  We had done most of the work on the boat shed (no running water, no bathroom, no real kitchen – just a campstove, etc. etc.) and that turned out good but it was just twelve by sixteen.  We really had no idea where to start on a house.

But that had been taken care of for us.  Kinda.  The boys had gotten us off to a good start.  We had a level square platform of 900 square feet looming in the air at the top of the slope.  The fact that we had expected  a great deal more was beside the point.  We had a floor on a good foundation and the outside walls were up.  We got some How-to books from the library and decided to just carry on.

“Right!”, I said, rubbing my hands briskly, “Just where do you think we should start, sweetie?”

“Don’t you know?  What do the books say?”

“Well, all the books start at the beginning, the foundation.  None of them really have a starting point beginning with the rough exterior walls.  I mean we are somewhere around chapter four in a 20 chapter book, I guess.  But, exactly how do we pick up the pieces from where Wayne and the boys left off?”

“I dunno.  I was cooking.  What was the last thing done?”

“Last thing done, I think, was completing the perimeter walls.  When that was done, we were all pretty wet and exhausted but we were happy.  And then we quit and everyone went home.  But Wayne had also placed some second floor joists as the first walls were going up.  I am pretty sure he was thinking of completing the second floor next.  In fact, that little temporary shelf-floor stuck up there was to be used for that, I am sure.  I think we should now finish the upper floor joists.”

“Right!  Second floor joists it is.  You get some joists and I’ll get the instruction book!”

And that is how the house was built.  One step following the next and the books telling us what order to follow.  It was mid May when we started.

By mid October, the house had been completed to lock-up.  The roof was on.  Doors and windows in.  Outside cedar cladding had been installed.  The building could handle the coming winter.

But we couldn’t.

Firstly, we were exhausted.  I was falling asleep around 8:00 pm and somewhat reluctant to get back up before 8:00 the next morning.  Trying to get stiff muscles to even move took a long while.  Plus we were living in the 12 x 16 boat shed and that was also the space in which we stored everything.  We had a small antique propane heater for warmth and, now that Fall was well underway, we were using it already to capacity.  We just couldn’t imagine working on the house through the winter.  Frankly, I found it hard to imagine ever completing the house at this point but we knew we couldn’t keep going.  We had to stop.  And so we did.

“So.  We can’t keep working throughout the winter.  And we can’t live here.  What is the plan?”

“What does the book say?”

“It says, ‘Go to Mexico.  Live on the beach.  Return in the Spring’. 

“Those Sunset books are great, aren’t they?  Did they happen to mention how we were going to do that?”

“Yeah.  It was very specific.  It said ‘camp in car and then camp on beach.’  We can do that.  We’ve done it before.  We jump in the car and we camp all the way down and all the way back and, while we are there, we just keep on camping.  Piece of cake.”

“OK.  Let’s go.  It is starting to get cold.”

The rest of the winter was logged in at: http://hippyredux.blogspot.com/2007/02/baja-diary-2007.html

Back to the main story next blog.

A carryover from the ‘history’ – last blog

“Hi!  Do you still want a sponsor for your trades class?”

“Yeah!  Great!  Let’s meet at the school tomorrow morning.”

And, with that, the die was cast.  I went to the Ladner High School the next morning and met Wayne, the teacher, and some of the 20 or so young men who were to form his class.  They were a pretty loose group.  Goofy, kinda, in a bunch o’ teenage boys kinda way. And they didn’t listen to their teacher very much at all.  I wasn’t overly impressed with anyone, really, but I wasn’t about to miss out on this window of tolerance and largess that Sally had offered.  I’d work with this motley crew.

“Before we start on this, Wayne, I should tell you that the building I am planning has a 900 sft footprint.  Zat too big?”

“Nah!  We have been doing 400 to 600 sft each year but going up isn’t a problem.  You know, we build it here at the school and then dismantle it for transport to your site.  Then I take the kids up for a week and we erect it on the foundation that you have already put in place.  Can that be done?”

“Yes and no.  The foundation is piers.  Legs.  Piles, if you will.  The site is a severe slope so the back side will be ready, concrete and solid but the front will be elevated on posts.  I figure the posts to be about 20 feet at the very front.  So, we’ll do it all except for the front two rows of posts.  About twelve or fourteen of them.  They will have to be done at the time.  Will that work?”

“Oh yeah.  No problem.  You also need to transport twenty or so people from the lower mainland, feed and house us for a week and then get us back home.  OK?”

“Yeah.  By the way, how far will the crew get in a week?  I can’t imagine getting to lock-up like you said.”

“We’ll get to lock-up.  Maybe even get the metal roof on.”

I had shown Wayne the pictures of the site.  I had shown him the inclined slope on which we were building by measuring it and then holding a yardstick at the proper angle.  He was not deterred.  We shook hands and I handed him the first few thousand of what was to be a $30,000 materials and shipping bill within a month or so.

Every week (Friday afternoon) I’d show up on the school grounds (with donuts and cokes) to get to know Wayne and the boys a bit better and to monitor their progress.  He had some good boys, some bad boys and some real screw-balls but they were doing good work and, within a few months, the floor was set and they were starting on the walls.

When May rolled around I made the necessary arrangements to haul everything (large flat bed truck on the ferry, transfer to barge and then the barge would deliver the materials to the site a week before the boys arrived.).  Sally and our friend, Perci, shopped and spent a fortune filling the larder of my neighbour’s place in anticipation of a marathon cooking, eating and cleaning exercise of military proportions.

I settled all accounts and we were now definitely ‘into’ the project in a big way.  It was not turning out to be any cheaper, however, than had I simply hired local people and bought the materials up here.  Actually, it was more expensive.  But cheaper was not our motive and, at the time, we didn’t know that there were local people available.  We felt as if we had ‘done good’ by the school and, anyway, it was the ‘kickstart’ the project needed and it was the kickstart we needed.  We were ‘on our way’ and there were no regrets.  Not yet, anyway.

Long story short: it rained torrentially for the first three of the six days (not the promised seven!) the boys were here.  No one could do a thing.  No blame.  Just circumstance.  Also the boys were not a team.  Some were phenomenal – about four of them.  About the same amount went and hid every morning to avoid work.  Wayne had way overestimated their ability and way underestimated the site difficulty.  Especially when wet.

After three days of basically wasting time, it was not looking good.  I was not pleased.  I told Wayne that he and some of the useless boys may as well go home early.  I’d finish myself with whoever wanted to stay and get it done.  I told him that I was not going to feed a bunch of nincompoops and listen to anymore vulgar, stupid nonsense.  He was apologetic and later told the boys what I had said.  They were appropriately embarrassed.

In the meantime, Sally and Percy were working like rented mules.  They literally pumped out food by the tub-full.  It was amazing.  The best part?  Sally and Percy are great cooks.  They made biscuits and pies and cakes and everything from scratch.  It was all delicious.  The boys had never eaten so well.  Even the bad boys fell all over themselves complimenting the cooks and being on their best behaviour around them.  What started out as an unruly bunch of foul-mouthed slackers quickly changed to a group of respectful, polite, helpful and even pleasant young men.

But now the weather was holding us back.  On day four, Wayne and some of the hardy boys showed up on site anyway.  And they worked like dynamos.  And, by mid-day all the boys were on site, working hard and getting soaked and muddy.  It was a wonder.  We got all the posts up and started on the floor.  The next day the floor was up and we had a start on the walls.  The third day the walls were up and that was all we had time for.  Lock-up?  Not even close.  Now what?

Still, when I saw the kids showing up on the second morning in still-wet clothes from the day before and some with dried mud in their hair, it was starting to feel OK.  When we were hauling walls up the hill with wet moss underfoot and kid after kid slipping with some of them continuing on down the hill, it was starting to feel like a team.  And, when we had the first floor up and the walls all around, well, it felt like a victory after all.

And by then, I had formed a few friendships amongst the boys.  And, to a kid, every single one of them would have traded their own mothers for Sally or Perci in a heartbeat.  They may have been rotten teenagers but they weren’t stupid!

More on that week later.

(Apologies: this historical filler is 1200 words.  A bit long.  Sorry)

2004.  We were still at the stage where I was dreaming and reading, collecting junk and working at a ‘packaged home’ company to learn about building and design and such.  I’d pretty much stopped mediating but I would always do what was needed for a previous client.  So, I was pretty busy at times.

Sal was still working and ‘getting ahead’.  She went to a lot of meetings, pushed a lot of paper, strove to get the latest ‘re-org’ to work and continued to put out office fires while wading hip-deep in alligators. She, too, was busy.

Even though our combined annual salary was something the middle class deemed middlin’ enough and was something many people would wish for, we weren’t getting ahead.  We had two kids in university and, even though they did their bit, they needed a big chunk of financial support for their first two years in school.  And a bit more now and then after.

Neither of us had bad habits to support.  We didn’t spend much on ourselves at all and both cars were over ten years old.  Basically, the money just flowed through.  We hardly saw it at all.  At the end of every year, I borrowed to pay the taxes and buy a small RRSP.

OK, admittedly, I had a garage full of old junk and salvage materials but, honestly, everything was bought cheaply.  That stuff was not the problem.

It would have been depressing except that every year the value of the house went up.  So we seemed OK ‘on paper’.  After much contemplation, I decided that we were basically just running in place.  And lucky to be able to do so.  We saw more than a few families implode between 2000 and 2004 when we left.

Some of the cul-de-sacers stopped drinking the believe-in-the-system kool-aid and, instead, opted for the booze or even in one case, the hemlock.

There was a constantly increasing and evident cognitive dissonance in the neighbourhood – people driving shiny cars to Blockbusters and getting bigger TVs at the same time that their families were being driven apart by financial worries and self-destructive behaviour.  And the recent rash of corporate and government downsizing didn’t help matters either.

2000-2004 may not have been an officially recognized bleak time in the media but it seemed that way to me.  I can’t say that I consciously observed or really understood the feeling.  But I definitely felt it.

I distinctly recall going to a beach town in Mexico one winter for a couple of weeks.  We stayed at a friends place.  We learned that a half acre lot overlooking the ocean in the village was a bargain at US$100,000.00.  $250 K all-in complete with a hammock on the porch.  We were advised that it was a great deal!

All I saw was a piece of rubble in a town whose median income couldn’t afford a tenth of that price.  All I could focus on was open sewers, a broken electrical system, corrupt and intimidating cops and building standards that wouldn’t have met Fred Flintstones expectations.  To me, it was a money trap.  Mexico was a legal, financial, health and life-style trap, as well.  You’d have to be stupid!

Mind you, I am not partial to the heat.  So………….

Worse, Mexican beaches are hot as hell.  And that is in the winter!  Try living in your hovel in the rubble year around and, even by real estate booster standards, ‘you have to go back home in the summer or else the heat will kill you.’  In effect you were paying $250,000 for a dump that was only tolerable half the time!

And house prices in California (we drove up and down) were even higher.  You could buy a cheap piece of ticky-tacky crap plunked flat on some desert floor a hundred miles from anywhere for even more money.  Starting at $500,000.  And they were selling!??

‘Course it was happening back home, too.  And it made no sense.  If two working middle classers couldn’t achieve much more than just keeping their  noses above water, how the hell was a single mother coping?  How did a single income family survive?  Who was buying new cars?  And why?

Mind you, I have a debt phobia.  My perspective is a bit skewed.

But to me it was obvious – the system couldn’t hold.  It wasn’t possible.  Too many people could not afford to live.  It had to collapse.  It had to.

(I tend to see the glass half-empty, too.) 

But it didn’t collapse.  Not quite.  Not yet.  Took three more years of systemic lying and cheating on the part of the banks and the governments.  The first thing that happened to cushion the pending crunch was the lowering of interest rates.  That helped fool everyone a bit longer.  It allowed house prices to continue to go up anyway.  It made debt seem easier to float.

But it was still debt.

Mind you, they made debt easier to accept as a normal coping mechanism, too.  House prices went up and interest rates went down so we all thought we had more equity to play with.  And many people play with new toys.  Consumer spending went up.  Debt load was increasing while real wages were falling.  Couldn’t people see that?

Not enough of them, anyway.

I am sure many did, though.  But most of those who understood that or intuitively felt this invisible pressure on the system just kind of hunkered down and kept their noses to the grindstone.  I have never been very disciplined like that.  Grinding it out is not my style.  I tend to flaky sometimes.  I wanted to run.  I wanted to hide.  I wanted off the bus before the next big curve.  Please.

Sally is the type, however, to put her shoulder to the wheel.  When the going gets tough, Sal just gets tougher.  She just put in more hours.  She just took shorter breaks.  She would beat the next ‘re-org’ lay-offs ’cause she would do the work of three people.  She was like Bruce Willis in Die-Hard.

But it was killing her.

One day I noticed that her rosy cheeks were fading.  The instant and impossibly beautiful smile was a bit hesitating.  She was getting tired.  Normally, I would use that to my advantage and strike.  I am a pig.  And I needed the edge.  But it just so happened that fate intervened for me.  Sal read that the local high school was in trouble.  And Sal decided that we should help.

“The local school has a building trades program.  Every year they build a small building for some sponsor.  That becomes their learning-by-doing project.  This year the program is without a sponsor.  You want to build a cabin.  I think we should be their sponsor.  In that way, you and they get what each other wants and I don’t have to worry about a cabin you built falling down on my head!”

“You serious?  This means that we will be hightailing it within a year, you know…..?  Can you quit?  Can you make the leap?”

“I dunno……….but this is what you want, isn’t it?  I think we should at least take the first step.  Phone the school.  Right now.  Tell ’em we’ll step up.”

“OK, I will.  But first I have to say, there is a second step, you know?  There will be more steps, too.  This is not something that will be satisfied by a high school class.  If you can make the leap – the whole leap – I will make a promise.  I promise to buy you the dog of your dreams.  Any dog.  It’s a promise.”

“Dial!  I am in!”