Weather's finally fucking starting to come around. Snow's been off the ground for two weeks, ground's been mud for a week. Cold mornings, but the afternoons can be nice.
Everything left to do that I can't do on my own is waiting for the mud to harden. My timber guy is coming back, when he can do it without tearing the fuck out of the earth, to pick up the cleanup load that is currently scattered over my main building site. Huge chunks of trunk that weren't long enough to efficiently fill a log truck during the big work, limbs and branches, a huge mound of the detritus that was not premium salable material and hadn't been left on the remains of the forest floor.
At some point over the last few months that we've been the kind of local pals that so many Northmen cultivate, distant or peripheral to the Southern heart, I think he had a realization to the effect of "Holy shit, this crazy bastard really is doing it alone." I think it earned a great deal of respect from him, because he's showing it in a way that Northmen do, by giving me his labor.
Cleanup is a phase of labor in a logging job. Site preparation, clearing, removal, cleanup - these are the general divisions. Site preparation is, usually, whatever it takes to make sure big ass motherfucking trucks can get to where they need to go. Colloquially, this is called the "driveway" but in my case it was the installation of a roadbed into 50 year old forest, two hundred yards long and originating from the inside of a sharp horseshoe curve on a rural back road. I've talked about what an excellent job he did of that.
Cleanup is everything from "leave with the last log truck" to preparing for the arrival of construction and landscaping crews. When not specified up front, the former is the default.
Site preparation and cleanup are two hungry bodybuilders doing a Lady and the Tramp on a big long cartoon sandwich, except mine was not really that big and long to start with, so I decided to suck it up and commit to doing it with a chainsaw and a cart, because if nothing else it was a hell of a lot of firewood and there is still value in that, even if it meant spending the first year doing not much else.
At some point after he realized what I was getting into, he made a carefully offhand remark about cleanup. It was something like,
"Yeah, I won't be able to do much cleanup before winter gets here, I have a couple big jobs I have to get on and I don't think I can get those done and still have time to do that hydraulic work I was talking about. It'll have to be after mud season."
He saw me pause while I thought about what to say - I knew he wasn't trying to upsell me and I knew we hadn't specified any cleanup. As I was about to speak, he just said,
"It's on me. For a build site like this, it's on me."
"That's fuckin awesome" was the only thing I could have possibly said.
I been so god damn stir crazy waiting for the snow to go away and the mud to dry. I've been stockpiling materials and tools one day trip at a time. The other day I got so hungry for it I drove down for the pleasure of lighting as big a fire as I could fit in my hasty campsite fire pit, using a bunch of the wood that I spent a week with my brother laying down a year ahead. And then I alternated warming myself by the fire in the freezing morning and digging out and carrying the largest rocks I could find and manage by myself, to lay ahead for putting in a real fire pit.
I'm going to have a few weeks of human-scale time while I wait for the clearing, whereupon I must begin to measure and survey and arrange for the electric company to give me a way to run a shitty little stick welder, and await delivery of a tow-behind micro excavator. I'm just going to buy one of the damn things (RIP flush toilets this year), because it will pay for itself in the first week I use it, and there will be a use for it for the rest of my life.
Living under a tarp is okay if that's the kind of thing you're into, which I am once in a while, but it doesn't really feel like living somewhere. It just feels like you're staying there.
Some compromises become permanent. A shanty built today, for the urgency of today, is a pile of rubble in a generation without continuous labor and expense. And no labor or expense will ever cause it to rise above its base nature. I would likely be perfectly happy tinkering with the fucking thing until I die, but that isn't the object of the exercise. The object is to convert my labor directly into value for posterity, without falling through the pachinko machine of what Uncle Ted called The System.
I want to give the logs until this fall before I start to mill them for the timberframe. In the mean time, I will acquaint myself with the chainsaw mill by producing green timbers for the raised platform and camp kitchen, and tootling around with the micro excavator putting in the foundation for the timberframe, trenching for electric and septic, and building a propane bunker down at the edge of the driveway at the closest approach to the timberframe.
If I can get myself up to shitty mountain FOB standards, I can feel like I'm actually living there, which will let me take my time and do this right. I've decided that I'm going to put in a short raised platform for a 12'x20' expedition tent (a repurposed pop-up equipment shed), and a decent enough camp kitchen to comfortably produce an on-site BBQ party for my local friends and new neighbors.
And I'll be stacking up rocks. That micro-ex will let me move some big fucking honkers. Some day there will be a rock garden in this place that will have only been possible if someone had put down the rocks decades in advance. A monument of elemental granite, laid down by the titanic forces of the last ice age. Miles of ice creeping across the world, tearing apart mountains and scattering them across continents. A tiny ape moves them a few hundred feet, and some other tiny apes are amazed.
So the plan becomes finer grained. The timetables slip to accommodate. This is the nature of planning with due care. This is time I expected to be doing hard labor from wakeup to laydown, except for now a Northman with a fuckoff big machine is taking care of it for me.
As soon as I get a three or four day stretch of fair weather, suitable for my stinky old dog to rough it a night or two, I'm gonna get out there and start digging that firepit.