Burn pile

Cool, a few downpours (low 40s)

Ah, the burn pile. It’s a fifteen-foot mound next to the parking lot, made of branches, benches, doors, two-by-fours, signs, bridges, blackberry brambles, English ivy pullings, and anything else someone thought should disappear but shouldn’t be thrown in the garbage. I’m a frequent contributor to the burn pile. In fact, just yesterday, I added an entire bridge to its heap. And today we started to burn some of it down.

It’s not as much fun as you might think. You don’t just get to light the pile and watch it go up. You light a little fire somewhere nearby, and then add to it, always taking care to keep the pile reined in so it doesn’t get too big. It sounds nice—you’d think you just get to sit around and add stuff every once in awhile—but it also gets rather hot. It’s hot enough that tonight my face looks sunburned. It’s hot enough that your breathing gets constricted. It’s hot enough that your clothes, drenched from a downpour, dry within a minute if you’re standing close enough.

I’d say we burned about a third of the pile today, in the eight hours we spent up there, getting muddy and soaked and hot and muggy. It was fun, and I think we’ll do it again tomorrow. Hurrah for getting a midwinter tan, eh?

Rats

This morning, when I hopped into the truck and turned the key, I received from my sweet little vehicle a very unwelcome sound: Click… click… and silence. I was stunned. We’ve been so close, that truck and I have; it was a rough moment. But after some more tries, and some strategically applied gas, I was off. I figured I ought to drive down the road to recharge the battery or whatever. I don’t actually know anything about cars or batteries or anything like that; I just assume you should drive the truck after getting it to start.

So, with just a few minutes until the service project, I buckled up and started down the road. Everything was great—I was even enjoying the morning—until out of the corner of my eye, I saw something move. In my efforts to focus on the road, I only caught a glimpse, but it looked an awful lot like a worm, slithering up into the space behind the glove compartment.

I thought I must have imagined it. What kind of stupid worm would make a home in a warm, dry Toyota? But then, as the worm climbed further up, a mighty kerfuffle began under the dash, and there was squeaking, and rustling, and all-out upset.

So, in the middle of the road, I slammed on the brakes and got out of the truck. Why? I don’t know. I thought maybe the occupant of my truck was going to eat me or something. I paced around the truck awhile, looked at my clock, and realized I had to be back. So I drove back, gingerly stealing glances at the glove box, and only heard a few more squeaks from the creature.

I can’t believe there’s a rat in my truck. Look, fellas. You’re in all the buildings I work on. You’ve lived in my house. I find your dessicated friends too often for comfort. But really? In my vehicle? Come on. If they move into my own car, they’re toast.

Demolishing the bridge today was fun. We also dammed a creek, and dug a ditch. Good times were had.

Thirty-seven broken

Cool, rained all day (40-ish)

Sometimes I wonder about the aesthetic standards to which I hold camp. When I’m walking around, I notice a lot of stuff I would change if I had the skill. The roof of our most renowned structure, Toby's, is leaking, a lot, in a steady stream onto the floor. The bathroom in Kiwanis Lodge grows a dark, thick layer of mold every winter. The logs outside the office area, placed there to prevent people from parking on the grass, have fallen in and look terrible. But these are my aesthetic concerns. Some people probably wouldn’t notice them. But I think we can all, regardless of our aesthetic preferences, agree that broken windows are bad things to have around camp. So today, after chatting with Carlo about the window situation, I set out around camp to inventory.

A few hours later, I counted them up: We have thirty-seven broken windows. This, in a camp that has mostly open-air buildings. It’s pretty crazy. My guess is that we’ll repair maybe… ten.

During all this walking between buildings today, I observed that it rained all day. Usually there’s that little lull in the rain, where the clouds gather their thoughts, take a deep breath, and get ready to go again, but today did not have lulls. It poured. It poured onto the buildings, a little bit into the buildings, made puddles all over the road, made mud slide everywhere, and put me in a crabby mood. I ate a lot of cookies tonight to make up for it.

Tomorrow I’ll be using kid help to dam a stream and demolish a bridge. I'm excited.

Weekend!

Cool, damp (high 30s)

Goodness, I am worn out. Today, when I announced to the service project kids that I intended for them to carry river rocks from place to place, a few of them smiled and seemed willing to help, and a few of them threw little fits. It was pretty awesome. Sometimes they’re so good, and other times they remind me that I need to make sure to frame all projects extremely well to avoid upset.

On the plus side, we got a bunch of stuff done. One project in particular involved hoisting a very heavy cement thing, and that was a good team-builder. I’m sore.

And that is that. Weekend!

The smell of death

Cool, a little less rainy (40-ish)

Ah, the irony of writing about smells just a little while ago. Now I have the most wretched smell of all to report, and—cue the gloomy music—it’s in my own cabin.

When I walked in a few days ago, I noticed it smelled a little funny. I figured this had to do with being shut up and uninhabited for a few weeks, and let it go. But the smell persisted. It got much worse as I walked into the bathroom, where it almost knocked me over with its nastiness. I thought at first it might be sewer gas, but now I don’t think so. It’s not a particularly nauseating smell or anything; it doesn’t make me want to puke, but it does have a dull grossness to it, that seeps into every breath and kind of gets in my mouth and makes me worry. I’ve sleuthed a little to see if I can find it, and I’ve narrowed it down to the area between the water heater and the bathroom door, but I haven’t found anything.

I think it must be a dead rodent dispatched by the poison I put out for such furry villains before I left for the holidays. Yes, I know, that would make the smell my fault. I think it must have gone a little something like this: The rodent noticed I was gone. It let out a little squeak that sounded suspiciously like “Yippee!” and commenced running around the house. On its third lap it discovered a bar of tasty food, and ate a bit. Full up, it staggered over to the softest thing it could find—my bed—and made a little nest. After a nice night’s sleep, it felt a little funny, and decided to eat some more, whereupon it continued to feel funny, and crawled up into the new ceiling to die.

Whatever happened, I feel kind of bad, but also kind of pissed off, because now the smell wafts into my living room, and even woke me up last night with its power. I wish I could describe it to you, but I can’t get much beyond the fact that it’s just kind of gross, and pervasive. It gets worse the longer you smell it, and if you breathe with your mouth open, it gets on your tongue and makes you make icky faces.

Carlo and I put up some plastic in my bathroom today. Slanty is coming along nicely, and I can honestly say I feel comfortable in here tonight, sitting on the couch next to the fire, curled up in a blanket, especially if I hold up some tea to my nose whenever the smell of death wafts over.

Chestnuts

Cool, rainy (40-ish)

Last night, after I blogged, I did a little yoga, flossed and brushed my teeth, talked to Marc, and turned off the lights. Then I pulled down the covers on my bed, preparing to hop in. The bed looked so inviting, with its nice down comforter, covered by blanket and sleeping bag, and its warm flannel sheets underneath. Anyway, I pulled down the covers, and what should I find, but a lovely little bed within a bed, a circle of fuzzy white fabric, dotted with mouse turds, just under the pillow. It might have been cute, or sweet, except for its being in my bed. I of course promptly removed the domicile.

Anyway, today my boss left. She’s moving across the country, and this provoked all sorts of emotions in me. She was a good boss, and I liked her vision for camp—i.e. get rid of the junk, tighten things up a little, and work hard—and I’m not sure where things will go in her absence. It’s hard to imagine someone else doing a better job. I suppose someone else will do a different job. After she left, we shut off the water to her house, and I antifroze her toilet. Then I swept up in there, just kind of looking around, smelling the smelly candles that she also smelled like, and I was sad. I was sad for her, leaving this beautiful house in these beautiful woods, and I was sad for the continuity of things. What we need is someone with a grand vision, someone who will stick it out for as long as it takes to make things great. I don’t blame her at all for leaving; I think she’s absolutely doing the right thing for her life. It’s still hard to see her go.

When I walked down to the river this afternoon, I found lots and lots of otter tracks. That made me feel better.

I planned rather poorly for this week, meaning I don’t really have much food out here. Well, that’s not true. I’ve got plenty of food; it’s just all plain pasta and canned soup. So tonight I thought I’d try making the chestnuts I bought a month ago. I called around to find out how to roast them over an open fire, and finally Marc got back to me. He read from the Settlement Cookbook (The Way to a Man’s Heart) that you just cut slits in the nuts, stick them in a pan, and toss them with half a teaspoon of butter, until the butter melts. Then you stick the whole thing in an unheated oven. Um, really? That seemed kind of dubious to me. Is thirty seconds long enough to pre-cook chestnuts or something? So I did it, and lo and behold, the chestnuts weren’t at all cooked. Maybe it didn’t work because there’s no man’s heart around.

Then I resumed my phone odyssey to find out, and my parents called from Trader Joe’s with the instructions from a chestnut package. They’ve just now beeped (having been roasted in the oven for twenty minutes) and I can’t wait to try them.

It’s been a good, if unproductive, evening. The Iowa Caucuses took place, and I listened to NPR for hours. I love political races. I love analysis. It was fantastic. I also reorganized the cabin. It looks kind of dumb, but it’s different, and maybe tomorrow night I’ll change it up some more.

First day of work of the new year. Woo.

Cool, rainy (40-ish)

It was a pretty iconic day back at work. Like millions of Oregonians, I woke up in the dark, listened to the drenching rain outside, and thought, “Awesome. There goes vacation.” And that was pretty much the day, in a nutshell: It poured all day, I did boring stuff, and I found a few dead things. I spent some time daydreaming about geocaching and playing Marc’s Sims game on the PSP. I sorted screws and washers in the Stink Shack, a building you could have mistaken for a walk-in freezer, only smellier.

It is, of course, good to be back. There’s excitement in driving down the road into camp, ready to see the changes. There’s something nice about walking into Slanty with laundry in hand, smelling campfire and rodent piss. And there’s even something good about organizing the warehouse so it won’t look so terrible.

The warehouse is a wreck. First off, it’s got hideous molding yellow siding on the outside, and the only natural light inside comes from atrociously dirty skylights, which, in addition to providing almost no light, leak. And then everywhere—every surface of this probably 2000-square-foot building—is covered in junk. Today I tackled some shelves, on which I found bricks, old electrical transformers, a too-heavy meat slicer, hazard signs, taillights for a truck we no longer have, hubcaps, screws, caulk, rock salt, hardened cement, ancient handwashing liquid, several tools I didn’t recognize, and a dead bat (pictured below).


It’s very satisfying to clean a corner of a building, don’t get me wrong. But when you don’t know what to chuck and what Carlo will miss, it’s tough going. I am positive we will never use most of the things I find, clean up, and re-shelve; if we really want, oh, say, an electrical transformer, we’ll go buy something that hasn’t been chewed on, and is a little more modern than 1930. But Carlo thinks (sometimes rightly) that these things are cool, and therefore they must stay.

If we were running a museum, that would be awesome. But what happens is that we keep stuff, and stuff accumulates, and then rats start to live in it, and then they get into the good stuff too, and then everything is trashed, and you can’t even find the stuff you use. For someone who loves order, this is a bit of a problem.

Tomorrow I want to start and patrol the burn pile. Yeah.