Doors of Deception, Or: On How to Live When You’re Not Locked Out

August 22nd, 2010 § 0

We had the great misfortune of leaving Cooter Hollow for what was to be a brief respite recently. This turned into a trip that ended with re-entry via sledgehammer and the consequential installation of a shiny new door. Because when one whines about not having nice things, and pines for improvements to the Cooter Hollow living situation, one is almost always talking about replacing the front fucking door.

So we have a nice new front door. Made of steel. Would you like to know what it enters unto? Because I don’t think we’ve talked about it yet. And doors that open onto the air are the stuff of Peter Greenaway movies, and we’re not that pretentious, so if you’re planning to live in any way approximating how we live (godspeed), here’s how you might bunker up on the cheap through a long winter and not freeze to death.

1> Buy a little camper. Bonus points if you’ve got one to sell, and are offloading it way after the summer camping season, and it looks beautiful at first glance, and you’ve got a couple of young desperate fools who’re trying to winter in a camper. Ours is sixteen feet, was lovingly cleaned and freshly papered and paneled throughout, and, once we towed it to the top of the mountain and settled into it, we discovered it sweat worse than a politician freshly busted for trawling the airport bathroom, and was moldier than a cow field. In other words, we wuz robbed. Swindled. Sold a pristinely polished turd. And so:

2> Peel off all cupboard doors, closet coverings, trim work, and anything else that conceals any of the camper’s guts. These things are relics of civilized life, and you’re no longer that. Plus, it’s a trick. A condensation trap. A perfect mold inoculation chamber. Death behind a closed door. Get rid of all of it. Realize you have been swindled a little, with this camper purchase, and that the republican bumper stickers should have tipped you off. Shrug it off; you’ve already dragged the camper to the top of a mountain using four wheelers and come-alongs; you’re so far beyond the event horizon that the swelling trombones of hollywood soundtrack music kicks in when you even think of trying to return it. So, instead, gather all of the doors and detritus outside and hack it up to bits, preferably with an axe. (This step it optional, but a lot of fun, and an effective proxy to the republican swindler.) Then, start a fire, and burn that shit. Yes, your closet’s contents, including all your intimates, will be exposed. You now live in a 16-foot trailer in the woods. You’ve given up any sense of decency. Embrace your immodesty as a newfound freedom.

3> Recall that camper trailers are generally designed to be pulled into the state park twice a year, plugged in, and used for a gentle weekend of hotdogs and badminton. Remind yourself that you plan to live in your camper for far longer than two days. Freak out over this fact, then get over it and prepare yourself for the winter. To stay warm, we (well, he, but I helped! By holding nails and things) built a rustic 9×9 square shed affixed to our camper, connecting it at the main trailer door. In this addition, he installed the smallest wood stove we could find, and we managed to stay more than warm all winter. We also used the space for storage and muddy boots, so that every last square foot in the camper could be amply shared by the fourteen people and two-dozen beasts dwelling here (only the barest exaggeration).

4> Even though we now have a woodstove capable of heating a baseball stadium, we’re not profligate people, and campers aren’t insulated. To help things here, we bought several sheets of pink insulating foam, several 4×8-foot pieces of OSB, and lots of wood glue, creating delicious insulation sandwiches, which we then used to skirt around the camper, which kept the wind from sweeping beneath it and hurling us into space.

5> Oh, by the way, while you’re tearing the guts out of your camper, it might make sense for you, as it did to us, to remove the convertible sofa/master bed from the place. We (he) built a permanent bed platform in its place, given that we’re sleeping here every night, and getting no use out of the sofa-ish components. The permanent bed frame sits a little higher, and opens up the space beneath for additional storage, as well as access to the plumbing and heating units. This access is needed, because these units will break sometimes. “Sometimes” should here be interpreted to mean “when you’re running late for something very important, or dehydrated and freezing to death, or otherwise least prepared for twenty gallons of water on the floor.” That it happens is inevitable; how you comport can earn you a Cooter Hollow iron-on badge.

6> When winter’s on the wane, you’ll notice the locals asserting that it was an easy one. They’ll likely even lament the years of six-foot snowdrifts and death-knell snowstorms. You will rightfully smirk at this. Your winter was tough, and these pussies would never have made it. Plus, you now have the firmest ass in the valley, and you still have a camper.

So there you have it. Dwelling, in a structure, albeit basic. While far from perfect, it includes a propane fridge, to keep things cold, and a basic stovetop (also propane) to warm them back up. You have walls, however threadbare, and lights, and heat, and a bookshelf, and a beautiful new front door that, if the key is lost, can be violently broken down in the middle of the night without anyone around to call the fuzz. Which, I know, sounds like an invitation to The Bad Guys to come and do the same, so dear Bad Guy, please know that our immodest little abode also contains firearms and people trained and willing to use them.

Flying Saucer Squash

August 1st, 2010 § 1

This is a Patty Pan squash. There are millions of them, or will be upon our return to Cooter Hollow after a brief escape to other secluded lands. I have no idea what to do with these things.

I am, by most accounts, a responsible neophyte, as far as the garden grows. There’s nothing pretty about it, and the only ‘design’ to it was hoeing up more-or-less straight lines between the rows.

Moreover, in general, I’m just smacked to the gobs at the thought of ‘decorative gourds.’ I have no idea what kind of mind it takes to plough, hoe, weed, hill, weed and till and weed and weed again for something that serves as a centerpiece in an elementary school thanksgiving diorama, but okay, let them eat radishes.

But I found these squash that resemble UFOs and nobody’s ever heard of them, and the conspiracist and obscurantist in me exchanged giant streetwise high-fives and I planted a whole package of them.

So, I have lots- what can I do with them? Will they make soup? Good raw? Roasted with maple syrup? Any ideas? They sure are pretty. And given what I think of pretty things, I hope whatever there is to do with them involves smashing them into a tasty paste.

Splitting Medusa’s Hairs

July 22nd, 2010 § 1

“No, we don’t need to borrow your log splitter.”

Log splitters are yuppie indulgences, I’d thought, against the founding principles of Cooter Hollow, I’d thought. Axes and splitting mauls, that’s what we need.

Of course, the reality of me with an axe involves knocking a log around, maybe peeling some bark off it, and giving the toenails a VERY close shave. And then, after about half an hour, maybe I’d get through the log, and leave the rest for S. For all my insistence, the biceps of my dreams just weren’t making their way into reality.

So, with a pile of unsplit firewood the size of a southern army, we borrowed the log splitter, towed it down the road in a great act of illegal bad banditry and hauled it up to Cooter Hollow.

A confession: I had never actually SEEN a wood splitter in action, but I had some idea, or so I thought, of how it worked. Based on looks alone (and not motion), there’s evidence of pistons, lots of sharp protuberant edges, and I had imagined some sort of mini-guillotine: explosions, violence, and the sort of carelessness that leads people turning up at their local pourhouse with their nubs of forgotten fingers newly stitched together.

But have you ever SEEN a log splitter in action? It’s graceful and elegant and rhythmic, and dare I say it, sexy? I dare: it’s sexy. And, for the love of the mythical creator of your choice, it takes three part-time days to split two years’ of wood into splinter-free perfection.

Which doesn’t mean I’d actually WANT one. There’s still a nag on my right shoulder whispering some nonsense about shortcuts and yupping out, but fortunately, my left hook is not bad, and I popped it it the nagging yap. Because our wood is split. Now to find the magical machine to stack it all.

You have to write a retraction

July 8th, 2010 § 0

- “You have to write a retraction on your blogh.”

- “Cripe. What’d I get wrong now?”

- “Well, your blogh needs a fact checker. The sprayer is only 16 gallons, and I’m pretty sure it’s not quite 500 meters to the frogpond.”

- “Really? You think that’s the sort of thing that will give readers a false idea of how to live like this?”

- “I just think you need to be accurate. Also, that note about the lower garden is just wrong. The lower garden’s water source couldn’t be mote reliable.”

- “The lower garden’s water source is a work of magic and I will write all about it in detail, on the blogh whose only reader is you. But it’s still essentially a bucket in a brook– it’s not quite turning on a tap. Plus, by the way, I bailed on that doctor’s appointment today, because the Lyme-like bullseyeish thing is gone.”

- “You see what I mean about auhenticity and facts? That last bit about the doctor wasn’t anywhere in our conversation yesterday. You’re making up these very words– these ones too! And these– they’ve never come out of my mouth.”

- “Then I suppose we’re all square on the retraction business?”

One cannot overestimate the value of appearing to dwell in a state of idiocy

July 7th, 2010 § 0

Or: how to keep your garden from dying of thirst when your nearest water source is a leechy pond 500m away through the woods and down a hill.

Cooter Hollow is host, more or less*, to two vegetable gardens this summer (* more on the second garden in a while). This, in itself, fairly ambitious. The fact that neither garden has a reliable source of running water elevates this from “ambitious” to “idiotic.” But I do idiotic better than just about anybody.

The upper garden (the smaller of the two, with not a whole lot of sun and not much cleared land, but enough for an asparagus patch, tomatoes, brussels sprouts, various greens and herbs and daily yums) is fed by the leechy pond, which is a trek. Before the MudDood came about, this was watered by filling old milk jugs and hauling them by hand. Which is so ballbreakingly grueling that I can’t even crack a joke, for fear you’ll forget to express deep pity for my ordeal.

But then the MudDood entered our lives, and then S. got clever and rigged me up a system.

You know, I’m pretty bright, as far as people go, but as a lifelong autodidact/autoidiot, there are admittedly these few gaping festering pustules in my areas of knowledge. Of these, a particularly infected one has to do with mechanical/electrical systems. My experience with this stuff is by proxy of fiction: the sausage-making machine in Olesha’s Envy, the mechanics of the Airship in Against the Day, Tesla’s creations as interpreted by Pynchon (again in AtD) or Auster (ergh) or Jacek Dukaj or jesus, just about anybody and damn, Tesla’s become a trope. Giant booknerd, pathetic engineer, but I know an awful lot of made-up shit about Tesla. Which didn’t really help in the effort of not killing our garden.

Fortunately, I’m shacked up with someone who pays attention to how things work even when they’re not made of pulp or pixels.

Here’s what he did (disclaimer: I’m sure I’ll get something wrong, then he’ll upbraid me, then I’ll hang my head and write a shameful correction post. Then he’ll accuse me of hyperbolics but still won’t issue an actual correction. So we’re going to pretend that this is right. And that the garden is growing in a field of Tesla coils.

Let’s try this again: here’s what he did.

He bought:

  • a FIMCO (made in USA!! Proudly!) fertilizer sprayer (17-gallon capacity)
  • a little pump of some water-sucking sort
  • a couple of battery clamps (connectors, maybe? Cables? Battery Cables, that must be it)

And we had:

  • a battery (the kind you buy at the auto parts store, not the kind you buy at the supermarket)
  • a spare chunk of pink insulating foam, or a similar floaty device
  • a good length of garden hose

You see where this is going? No? Thank god, because neither did I, really, and you just made my ego’s lips finally stop trembling. But the short of it is: fill the 17-gallon fertilizer tank with water from the leechy pond, hook the sprayer up to your battery, and go bring forth new vegetative life.

When you need to fill your tank, load it all on your MudDood, drive it to the leechy pond. Affix your floaty stuff to the little pump so that you can just chuck it in the pond and run the hose from the pump to the empty tank. Plug the pump into the battery and go catch frogs for ten minutes or so while it fills. Careful not to get any leeches on you.

Optional step: be really bad at figuring out how to use the MudDood’s elastic tie-downs with anything resembling efficacy, such that upon driving back to Cooter Hollow base camp, everything sloshes all over the place and the now full (heavy) tank smashes into the pump. The pump is unharmed, thanks to the foam insulation surrounding it, which itself is now in two pieces. Add this anecdote to an internet blogh so that you don’t have to tell your boyfriend about it while he’s out of town at work. Think about whether you have the tools or skills to fashion up another foam floaty. You just might. You’ve got plenty of foam, after all, and it’s just a square piece with a circle cut out, right? Couldn’t have taken him longer than ten minutes, right? Decide that there’s no way you’ll pull that off, especially now that you’ve posted it to an internet site where he’s just about the only reader. Cop the fuck out.

In any event, when I’m not busy breaking shit, it’s surprisingly elegant as far as these things go, doesn’t tax a water supply or use too much juice (we charge the battery with a solar charger, unless I forget to plug it in, at which point we do have to bring the generator into the murky picture), and as far as I know, the pump hasn’t sucked in any leeches yet. If it has, I don’t think crispy arugula is a preferred host, so I suppose they’d bake in the sun and become compost? S, however, is a leechless wonder who deserves to be preserved and regaled as a novelistic trope for the sheer fecundity of his inventiveness.

Checkered Passed

July 1st, 2010 § 0

S. has accused me of inflating some facts on this blogh, and suggested that I nip any creative license now if I’m indeed to create an accurate document of the development of Cooter Hollow. So, fact-straightening time: It was only 6 gallons of water that I had to hoof up the mountain all winter. Not 7.

In the continued interest of full disclosure, I should mention that for most of the winter, while I was hauling ONLY 6 gallons of water up the mountain on my back, through two feet of snow, in the dark, so that I might not die of thirst, he received his daily libations poured directly into his mouth from a golden chalice served from the freshly moisturized hands of a dozen nubile minions.

Maybe not? It’s possible I didn’t hear him properly when he told me about it. I mean, I was exhausted from hauling all that water, even if it was only six gallons, and my ears were likely pounding.

Gimme Shelter (One Point Ohhhh)

June 29th, 2010 § 0

We started, as most people stupid enough to move onto undeveloped land start, by pitching a two-person tent. Simple enough: it kept us from total waterlog, gave us room enough to breathe (only if we didn’t take DEEP breaths, though) and kept the bugs out (MOSTLY). But, a little-known secret: the ground is HARD, by god. And if you partook in any kind of pony mash before bed, unzipping it to get out for a middle-of-night pee is also HARD. And really keeping things dry? Also HARD.

Which is when I discovered that this is why people stay in little pup tents for a night or two at a time, and don’t live in them as permanent shelter.

So, we upgraded, to nylon parachute hammocks strung beneath a tarp. Which, I know, doesn’t seem like trading up, but think about it: they’re cozier on the back, fold up around you just as easily to keep the bugs out, and the worst thing after a night of homebrew is falling out of it on your way to vomit / piss in the woods / jump inside your mate’s hammock for a quick frolic.

That’s right. Sexy hammock frolic. It’s possible. If you can keep a good rhythm and have a sense of balance. Which, let’s face it, is all dependent on the half-life of your own particular booze window. I lied in the previous paragraph. My booze window is never more than an inch open. No sexy hammock frolic for me. Plus, I might share this with my mother some day, and as we all know, I’m a virgin.

Of course, the Wet Season arrived when we made this move (not to be confused with Black Fly Season, Mud Season, or Winter.) Which meant little time out from beneath the tarp. It also meant the second the sun would deign to rear its head, we’d hang everything out to dry and go play in the woods, only to have to rush back when the skies opened back up. But it gave us plenty of chance to read books. And practice keeping balance (AHEM).

We lived like this for three months, under the hammocks, until the arrival of the Cramper. That’s right. A Cramper. We’ve totally yupped out now. Stay tuned.

Cry Me a River

June 17th, 2010 § 1

Water for drinking and wash has been so far the most burdensome task at the Hollow, which means we have learned to get by being dehydrated and not smelling particularly well.

We have plenty of water around camp, in the form of the leechy frogpond and the many streams that leak cleanly into methane-aromaed mudbogs.  Either of these could be filtered, boiled, and perfectly potable, but given that they’re all located downhill from the living grounds at Cooter Hollow, the situation is gravitationally working against us.  And so, the winter was spent hauling our own water up the hill on foot, on our backs in a makeshift device comprised of a seven-gallon plastic tank strapped to the frame of an old military backpack.

Seven gallons of water on one’s back is not light stuff, much as you might think otherwise.  Don’t believe me?  Go buy seven gallons of milk and call me when you’re covered in it.

But it worked well, for the most part, and we developed steel-solid asses and those little back muscles that usually only appear on yoga yuppies.  However, when atop snowshoes and through a storm with visibility provided by headlamp and freezing to death prevented only by a thousand pairs of gloves, it was not the friendliest few months.  And we live in one of those places that sees a lot of snow.  Every day.  For months.  Many many months, that go on for about a hundred days each by my calendar, that kick our asses with their endlessness.  But we didn’t die of dehydration, as far as I know.

For a while, it seemed every trip to town was met with ostensibly quaint remarks from the locals on how mild the winter was, when there was Jackie-o nothing at all mild about heaving water this way.

Now, this winter there was at least one day a week when I felt like moving here was the worst decision we’ve ever made, but I can’t think of specific triggers that set me off.  Except this one.

This was a particularly long day that ended with a snowstorm of the fat, heavy kind that just adds twenty pounds to your already burdened heft, the kind that serves as quicksand to snowshoes.  If you’ve never lived in a part of the world where snowshoes are absolutely necessary, nor the places where you might encounter quicksand, then the appropriate metaphor for you might have to do with swimming through jell-o, which I hear saner people can relate to.

So there I am, trying my damnedest to slog up the hill, and finding that on this night, it was nowhere near good enough.  The steps were wet and sloggish, and I managed to take about twenty of them before I collapsed, back first, into the snowbank, feet buckled under me in a snowshoe entanglement.

Beached, with water holding me down, the morbidly obese snow keeping me there, and the snowshoes making sure I didn’t go anywhere.  I writhed and wriggled for a split second, and then reached some sort of zen calm with the tipped turtles I resembled.

I wasn’t budging, and thought it’d be as good of a death story as any, that maybe my body would turn up a thousand years later, after we’d wrecked the earth and all our evidence of being here, when civilization would have rebuilt itself to discover the evolutionary right turn left by me, the mountaintop species who carried their sundries on their back.  Maybe by then they’d have invented a better death story than “too lazy to upright herself on a snowy night.” Maybe my body would, by that time, be so badly preserved that they’d assumed I died in hand-to-hand combat, or maybe it’d be the snowshoes perceived as the weapon.

The ideas were getting more fantastical as my lips blued, but the calm of freezing to death never happened—eventually, I got too cold and found my way back to my feet and up the hill.  And our water situation now is considerably better:  we still tote it up in the jug, filling it where-ever we can get our mitts on a spigot, but it’s hauled up in the Muddood now, and poured into a 20-gallon holding tank for washwater, with a separate 6-gallon jug to house drinking water.  Which means we generally have enough to drink.  Except that leads to the problem of peeing, which is another day’s issue.

And just wait until I tell you how I water my garden.  It involves the frog-pond, leeches and all, and an aquarium pump.  There’s no shortage of suckage.  You’ll love it.