First real day of summer. It was warm verging on hot. Larry and I worked on the front deck and Bert and the gang continued on the back extension. We worked til 2:00 when the big beams were finally in place.

“So, what’s next?”

“Well, that’s one major hurdle out of the way and I can’t see starting a run at another now. We are old geezers. We’re gonna fade in an hour or so. I say, ‘let’s fade early!”

“Good call!” And so we packed up and headed home in the sunshine, happy with a major step accomplished. As we were all leaving, tho, there was a trace of guilt lingering in the air. ‘Maybe we should have put in another hour’ was the unspoken thought……………

When that happens, guys tend to say, “Yeah, well, getting off early is good. Gives me time to get home, fall a few trees and buck ém up. Gotta get some more wood in for the winter!”

“Yeah, me too! Gonna move some of those boulders on my road there. Gotta get the surface ready for some new gravel.”

“Yep. Gonna go home and paint the house, myself. Glad for a little extra time.”

Larry’s the youngest of the bunch but he knows BS when he hears it. He leans close to me and says, “They are all going home for a nap, right? I am!”

“Yep. ‘Course they are. Those guys are getting on. They are pretty beat. A nap will do ém good. Like to have one myself but I gotta get the logs up the hill and then attach those rails before this weekend. But a nap sure does sound good!”

I’m lying, of course. I can see the pillow already.

But I walk the walk. And I talk the talk. And I am glad that both ended by 2:00 today.

Bunkhouse work day. 10:00 sharp. Ish. Don’t forget my lunch!

Sal may have the day off. Hard to say with her. Most of the cleaning is done. This weeks baking is done. It’s a nice day. No logging without the ‘winch guy’. Could be a day off.

Never gonna happen.

Sal doesn’t do ‘days off’. If she has a day off, she hikes up a mountain or paints the house or goes gold panning or something. A ‘day off’ for her is a misconstrued construct that involves work. We’ve talked about it…..

“Maybe you should just get a box o’ bon bons, turn on the tube and read your book while sipping mint julips while your dogs lounge at your feet? Seems to work for most people? Waddya say? Gonna take it easy today?”

“Absolutely. I got a new Vanity Fair and the lounge is outside and it has a reserved-for-Sally sign on it! I am there! Just gonna fix you lunch and do breakfast and the dishes but then lookout cushions!”

“I am gonna defrost the freezer, tho. And do the laundry since it is such a nice day. Plus there is all that paperwork I have to get finished for the group. Plus the newsletter for book club. But that is nothing. I am gonna spend some serious horizontal time today. You can bet on that!”

“Want me to take the dogs?”

“No! Me and the dogs will go for a nice walk. I was going to go up to the old cabin and give it a bit of a clean. Plus they like to chase sticks for a bit. No, I got the dogs.”

“OK. But, ya know I’ll be back by four. How ya gonna ‘take it easy’ if you do all that while I am gone?”

“That!? Sweetie, that and tending to the garden, working the compost and sorting the recyclables plus hanging the laundry is taking it easy! Maybe you can help with dinner?”

“Nah, I’ll be too tired by then. But I’ll pour the wine.”

A man has to know his limits.

As I mentioned before, I am not overly fond of my chainsaw. I consider it a necessary evil that will eventually do me harm. OK, more harm! Chainsaws are accidents running to make it happen.

As I also mentioned, Sal and I have been ‘into’ gathering logs these days. Got another two yesterday. Firs. “Hard firs are good to find” (Mae West during her logging camp era). And it is there that today’s story begins…

Sal and I are on a remote beach up the coast doing the log-salvaging thing. We are ‘peaveying’ logs and wrangling them to the waters edge where we will hook them up to the boat for eventually towing home. Larger logs are easier to wrangle if cut by chainsaw into thirds or so. And that was what I was doing when a small aluminum boat with two of our neighbours comes in to see what ‘Dave and Sal are up to’.

We chat. Crack a few jokes. And then I say, “Well, gotta get some of this cut up………” and head off to do some cutting, firing up the ol’ killing machine at the same time as I skip golightly over the slippery and rocky terrain of a wild, rocky coastline.

‘T’ is a first aid attendant to the really, truly remote logging, mining and other Northern work site locations. She just came back that day from a few weeks in the Yukon. “Gonna get your safety chaps on, eh?”

I was in shorts and a t-shirt.

“Unh, no. Not gonna. Don’t have any. Don’t want any. Safety equipment is too dangerous. Every time I wear some, I get hurt. Too encumbering.” She and ‘D’, her husband, who knows more about trees and wood cutting than MacMillan Bloedel, nod sagely as if to say, “Well, we know how that guy is going to die!”

I cut into the wood. My chainsaw works harder than it should. The chips are not flying. I get through the log but it is a painful exhibition especially considering the audience. “Sounds like that saw could use a bit o’sharpening, eh?”, says ‘D’.

“No!” I say a bit too emphatically. “I sharpened it. But I may have left the rakers too high since I don’t really know how high they should be.”

“Well, bring it on over to the boat. Let me have a look. Soon sort that out!”

“No!” I say with panic and desperation in my voice, “I’ll do it.”

Then I realize how stupid that sounds so I explain myself, “I can’t bring my chainsaw over to you, man. Too embarrassing. A man’s gotta do his own chainsaw, ya know? Can’t go exposing oneself like that. Too humiliating. Like flipping your penis on a table for comparison purposes, ya know?”

‘T’ laughs and says with a grin. “Well, come on over and flip your penis out for comparison purposes then!”

That is not an option at the best of times (of which there are precious few in life and most of them are in Asia). ‘D’ is 6 feet 8 inches tall if he is a foot. This is not the best of times. There will be no flippin’ dicks around here, I tell her. “And I am not showing my chainsaw either. Same thing!”

She laughs again but ‘D’ knows. He says, “C’mon, T. A man has to do his own chainsaw. I was wrong to offer. We better leave him in peace.”

Mercifully, they leave me to butcher myself with a dull chainsaw in ‘piece’. In the circumstances, it was the decent thing to do.

Logging ops interrupted for the day. It’s Book Club! All the women down tools, up aprons and grab bottles of wine for the latest gathering of rural bibliophiles. Up to Maurelle Island this time, by way of Surge Narrows, various docks and pick-up points – all in small boats. The flotilla is accumulating as I write and soon a babbling gaggle of 15+ will be hiking up the hosts trail for a good time in the afternoon sun.

‘Course the book will be some kind of bleak misery depicting the slow death of a crippled child born in Calcutta during the First World war and having to live in a culvert all their life. Or, perhaps, a 400 page exposé on the death of the Whistler sled dogs as experienced by Elsi, the only dog to not die (she just knew something was amiss and hid under the porch). Author: Margaret Atwood, of course. These gals thrive on that stuff!

“Ooh, I heard of this great book! Blind Inuit children stricken with leprosy are sexually abused by the Post office but they struggle to lead an ordinary life by bonding with the seals and whales like their ancestors!”

“I heard of this other great book where some woman lived thirty years disguised as a man working in a steel mill in Philadelphia as their union leader. She had two children she had to raise in secret so that no one knew while still practicing Tibetan Buddhism and teaching Yoga.”

In an odd sort of way, these books share similar themes: Men are stupid, bad, really bad, evil, violent, addicted, absent or gay. Sometimes all of the above. If only the latter (gay), they become the heroine’s best friend even though they die of AIDs half way through the book. If the men fall into any of the other categories, they go to prison, sit in a state of addled stupor, die or leave.

Women, of course, are the victims of outrageous misfortune, evil men and Residential Schools. But they are essentially unvanquishable, outliving the pedophiles, rapists, supervisors, landlords and boyfriends that made their lives miserable. Then they write a book. I am pretty sure we spell them, W-O-M-A-N.

Slight exception: it seems father’s can be all of the above and still be loved at the end. Stipulation: they can be loved only at the end and only if the end is mercifully short (this exception is primarily for literary purposes) – it is a common enough theme that I am encouraged about my own future family relations with Sally improving with age.)

The guys out here will soon have ‘Woodworking Shop’. We’ll probably gather on book club Sundays, hopefully with some lunch prepared by our wives and stand around looking at our feet and mumbling about ‘building boats someday. Maybe’. There might be as many as three of us. A crowd. Bert might succumb to the social pressure and start talking politics. If so, then, and if it is not raining, we’ll go home early and wonder what the hell all that was about?

It’s a great life, isn’t it?

That description (last post) requires a bit of elaboration. Cars don’t shrink. But space within them can. Especially if you fill the space up yourself. Continuously.

So, that might be a partial answer right there; as I continue to personally expand (like the universe), I occupy more space. Ergo, when I enter a fixed space, the fixed space has less space available for other things. Logical. I am part of the problem. Quel suprise!

But it is not just me. Sal, of course, is not expanding like the Milky Way that is me but she is remaining her original (17 year old) size. So she is not the problem. But she is a taker-of-space, consistent as she might be. There are the dogs, of course. They average another ‘Sal’ in weight and volume but another Sal and Dave in space requirements (although we have, at times, encroached on their space to a point of absurdity; Megan more than once riding on Sal’s lap!).

But the real culprit is our lack of a garage. That means that the car carries tools, ropes, blankets, water containers, electronics of various types, maps, books, telephone books, flashlights, spare changes of clothing including shoes and sometimes, a spare battery. And a spare tire.

I carry some spare oil in the engine compartment along with some antifreeze and windshield cleaner. There is the ‘jack’. We usually have ‘jumper cables’. There is the tow-hitch that lives ‘inside’ the car so as not to be stolen. And we have the dog toys, of course, jammed into the front-seat back pockets along with a towel, the windscreen wiper, Armor All and ‘wipes’.

And that is the car when it is ’empty’.

When we leave the house to go somewhere in the storage-shed-on-wheels-we-now-call-the-car, we fill it up some more, naturally. Firstly, with the aforementioned life-forms some of whom are also sentient. Then their ‘personal bags’, purses, phones, walkie-talkies and VHFs, computers, traveling bag, dog parephenalia, lunch, thermos, water bottles and, if traveling in the winter, more clothes, some extra tools and occasionally the chainsaw (for fallen trees). Whew!

If we are going for more than the day, we also bring luggage, gifts, wine, food and dog food at the very least.

And then we bring in the empty totes and coolers for the shopping that will take place on the trip. They are space occupiers empty or full (so we fill them going out and coming back. Different stuff, tho). And we may have the garbage, the recyclables and the other ‘take-backs’ (items that need to be returned to stores, friends, movie stores, libraries and various waste management bins).

NOW we are ready to shop!

And people don’t think we need an SUV! Truth: we need a 5 ton step van with four wheel drive and air conditioning, freezers, roof racks and a diesel engine. A footman or swamper would be a nice addition.

Plus a winch!

I can’t believe how much I rely on venting my spleen on the blog. This blog. It’s like a respite for me, for sure, but also a habitual one. Like a coffee break. It’s a mental thing (in both senses of the word). And I seem to need it.

For the last few days I have been ‘off’ the blog except when I went to use Sal’s access. I kept thinking, “I’ll just re-load this, delete that, upgrade such and such and scan for other things. Should work.”. All to no avail. Hours of frustration. And it felt like I was letting people down.

It’s silly, of course. I am not disappointing anyone. I know that. A blog is just a blog. But a kiss is just a kiss, a sigh is just a sigh and well, who knows what kind of movie this may turn into, eh? Casablanca 2? Two Flew Into the Cuckoo’s Nest? Diary of a Mad Handyman? Oceans Two?

Anyway, I am back. Reloaded an old version of Firefox and things fell back into place.

Today was a town day. Shopped and schlepped a few hundred pounds up and down slippery slopes, packed it all into the ever-shrinking Pathfinder and raced for the ferry at the end of the day as if we had an appointment or something. Inventing stress.

Everything is pretty do-able, really. It is that last 150 feet of stairs, barnacles, seaweed and gravity that is the hard part (I am sooooooooooo far behind on my lower funicular and everything will be fine once that is in).

Yesterday we got logs. Yep. That’d be more logs to those of you who have been keeping up. We found two big ol’ firs along the beach and we peaveyed them into the water after I had cut them into manageable lengths. We then slowly towed the seven pieces back to the lagoon. Took an hour of towing to go one long mile (with the current is a short mile. We were running against it). We’ll easily finish up the wood rows with that and have a couple of bits left over. Our shed runneth over. A full woodshed is truly like ‘money in the bank’.

There’s more. But it’ll wait. Good to be back.

I think I am corrupted. At least my computer is. Can’t get on the (%$!*@ blog! This is being written from Sal’s. She’s able to access MY blog. But I can’t! I mean, I know everyone likes her better but this is ridiculous! Now my computer prefers Sal!?

But that’s the least of it……..Seems I am regarded as a bit odd in the eyes of the neighbours these days anyway. And that is some standard to violate, believe me!

I have always asserted that I am normal and sane. In fact, I asserted that even when acting somewhat eccentric in the moment. The rationale: ‘people who don’t act a bit abnormal now and then aren’t normal!’

The argument has it’s weaknesses. I admit that. I may be demonstrating one as I write this. Ya see, I have a bad case of winches (sounds a bit like a skin disease, don’t you think?). It should be so simple. No, I have winches. Literally. And it is a bit embarrassing.

I have my main funicular winch. Then I have my secondary funicular winch. Plus I have the ol’ ‘pull-toy’, the chainsaw winch that no longer works. I also have the Xmas winch, the one I just used to haul logs this week. It was great!

But, it looks weird and I wasn’t sure it was going to be all that great so I went looking for another (words I remember hearing once from an old girlfriend when she dumped me for another. She was talking about me!).

Anyway, I found one. It looked good. I made an offer. He said no. So, I kept looking. Found another and sent my friend to go see it. He liked it and bought it for me. In the meantime – while the friend was awy – the other guy called back and said, “I’ll take it, after all.”

So, I bought that one at the same time my friend was buying me the other one.

Now I have winches up the ying yang. Five tons of winches up the yin yang, and that is just counting the marvelous Marpole Mohawk Bulldog winch that garners admiring glances from all the old guys around here.

The other one is no puffter, either. “Got yer winch — it looks like a “ballbreaker.” Glad I’m not planning on dragging around what you want to play with!!!. That guy runs a tugboat. Honest!

Other guys: “Great winch! Use ’em on the government wharves. Ya can still get parts f’er them babies. Ol’ Beebe in Seattle copied them, ya know. Great winch. Pretty sure I got one back in an old shed someplace. One on the beach in front of Gary’s ya know. Great winch. Bit rusty, tho.”

“Wow! You got one? Gary’s beach has one?! These puppies are hard to find. Aren’t they?”

“Nah. Not really. Hard to find ’cause no one is lookin’ too hard for ’em eh? I mean, there all over but they weigh a hunert pounds and waddya going to use them for, anyway? An anchor? Hah hah hah!”

“No. Going to pull up logs. Get an electric motor and pull up logs. You know?”

“Thought you had a winch that just did that?”

“Yeah, well, I got me another. Seemed like good insurance.”

“Pretty strange, Dave. Guy’s gotta working winch and gets one he don’t need. Sounds a bit odd to me.”

Yeah, well, let me tell you about the third one I just got yesterday.”

A man has to be known for something and, it seems I am well on my way to making a name for myself in the old winch market. Kinda odd, don’t ya think?

I have some heavy batteries to get up the hill and the winch had worked quite well on the wood gathering so it was time to employ the highline once again for the big 8-Ds. I was looking forward to it.

Each battery weighs 150 pounds and there are three to come up and 8 to go down (I am swapping out some new for old). The plan was to load the batteries in Sal’s boat (it draws the least water) and float the little ‘barge’ under the highline at high tide. High tide is at noon today.

Then we’d use the big ol’ swatch of fishing net I scavenged a year or so ago to bundle the puppies up and haul ém up the hill using the winch. The hard part was going to be the two of us on Sal’s tiny boat balancing like ballerinas while we loaded the net with 450 pounds of lead and acid. I was looking forward to that, too.

Sal weighs 125 pounds. Her outboard another 150. The batteries 450 and there is maybe 50 pounds extra in ‘stuff’ on the boat as well. Her little eleven foot, shallow Whaler was carrying close to 800 pounds and did not have a lot of freeboard showing as she made her way carefully into the lagoon.

Well, noon came and went and the batteries went back to the dock. We didn’t get them up. Damn tide was about six inches too low! ‘Course you could say that the batteries made the boat draw an extra six inches so that the boat was too low! Either way, we couldn’t get in close enough to use the highline, the winch or our remaining-but-fading back muscles.

Still, all in all, it was a good day. We finished up the wood (always bits and pieces and, of course, stacking) and pulled up crap and junk and let other junk and crap go down. Lots of heavy lifting and moving of ‘stuff’. Sal hates a messy yard.

And no matter how you ‘cut it’ this wood is neat and well stacked! I have never seen a tighter stack job. You can see why we came up a row short – it is because the rows there are are so tight!

Lindsay-from-Chicago did it with Dave-from-Chicago’s chopping.

When I say, ‘finished up the wood’, what I mean is: we aren’t finished yet. We finished what we had collected in logs-in-the-lagoon but we are still one row short of a full deck in the wood shed. That means three more 12 foot logs, maybe four have to be found, captured, wrangled and processed. But there is no doubt; we have enough in for the year. The pressure is off. The extra row is really just that – extra. I will have plenty of time to find the logs, haul them up, cut ém in to rounds and split them while Sally stacks some day in the future.

Or, maybe………….we do have some guests coming later this year…………hmmmmmmmmmmm…….

Well, not really. I am done, tho. D-o-n-e! All logs up. All cut into rounds. Finito! Thank God! But Dave is still chopping and Lindsay is still stacking so we are not quite done yet. We will likely end up a bit short of a full load (don’t say it!) and may go get one or two more logs to ‘top up’ later. But, for now, I am done like burnt toast and so we will quit for lunch!

I am sitting down now. Lunch is over. It was very nice. Writing the blog contribution today is a welcome respite from wrangling logs and listening to the howl of the chainsaw. The bed looks good, too.

Whack! Thunk! Whack! Thunk! I just looked out the window and Lindsay is practicing her best Paulette Bunyan impression. She’s back at chopping! Lindsay is young, strong, healthy and has good timing but the wood is tough and good technique only comes with practice. She hasn’t had much. So there are more swings and effort required to get through a round. Doesn’t seem to deter her, tho. She is definitely not done! Whack! Thunk!

The Orcas came back today. At lunch. That’s nice. Not often do you get to see whales two days in a row. The pod was 7 or more strong and this time heading North. It is always a treat to see wildlife and, for some reason, the bigger the better. And these guys are big.

Hmmmmmmm…..(same window)…Dave is sitting, too. He looks done. I understand completely. After awhile, it feels like it will never end. Every time he split a round, I rolled two more up to the pile. The more the pile was split and carted away for stacking, the more it grew. It can be dispiriting. He looks a bit dispirited.

Lindsay looks determined. We will definitely get the wood in this year. Lindsay will see to that!

I have to ask…………..where have you gone? The weather is good and that means more outside time. I know that. The days are longer and that means less computer time. I know that, too. But, was it something I said about winches? Last three posts – not so much as a ‘peep’ from the gallery. Is describing wood gathering dull? Hmmmmmmm…………I suppose it is, now that I think about it. Sorry.

Good day. Lots of wood in. We are 1/3 of the way to full. Dave is a chopping machine! I only have to cut rounds with the chainsaw and I have to go pretty steady to keep him supplied.

And Lindsay is some kind of stacking genius. Really. I swear this woman has a unique ‘spatial ordering’ skill that allows her to ‘finely’ stack wood better than 99.9% of the population. We are stacking – easily – an extra 10% per row. That means: In a ten row wood-house, we will have eleven rows (almost an extra month of burning). The wood fits like jigsaw pieces. It is marvelous. Weird. But marvelous.

After a hard five hour day, the ladies went down to the lagoon to gather up dinner. 30 oysters, a whole mess of mussels and a bucket o’ clams! The clams are for later. A clam chowder may be in the offing.

While this was happening, I trimmed the dogs and bought a new winch from Craigslist. The dogs lost a bag full of hair and still look like dogs that need a trim. Damn.

How the hell I am going to get a 100 pound winch from Powell River is beyond me. But it will happen.

I may also buy another old, rusty one in Victoria. I am on a winch kick. It happens at log gathering time.

And then the Orcas came!

We all went to the deck to watch a pod go by. Pretty neat.

A few minutes later our friends on the Columbia lll steamed by. The Columbia lll is a beautifully restored old yacht that takes groups on wilderness and kayak ventures up and around our area. Google Mothership Adventures, The Columbia lll. Definitely a voyage worth considering for anyone wanting a closer look at this part of the world. Ross and Fern do a phenomenal job. They are very popular and getting a booking is not always easy.

Think about it.

Today: more of the same. Hard to get too much of a good thing. Impossible to get too much wood chopped and stacked.