On Finding Home - part 1

I grew up in a “semi-remote” cabin in Juneau, Alaska. When my parents bought the lot, the home was a pan-abode cabin – essentially a Lincoln-Log cabin big enough to live in. Barely. My father designed and built a timber-frame home in its place, every log, brick, nail, and window packed up from the beach and our trusty 14' Lund skiff. This skiff, a quarter-mile beach at low tide, or a half-mile walk over the hill and through the woods were our connection to the road system, the first and last part of any journey.

From the age of six until I moved out after high school, my home was tucked out of sight and mind, hidden in the Tongass National Forest, perched over the Inside Passages of the Pacific Ocean into Southeast Alaska. Neighborhood children were scarce, and the few playmates I had in the area tended, like me, to be happy fishing for Dolly Varden and flounders from the beach, using mussels as bait; mixing elixirs and poisons both imaginary and potentially expectorant; adventuring amongst the rocks, looking for treasures – or any interesting flotsam.

I spent many a dark night feeling my way over the hill, my youthful imagination making the most of every shadow and crack in the forest around me. At times on all fours, feeling amongst the moss and rotting stumps for the void, the emptiness of the trail, wishing time and again that I had an extra flashlight, or that I had changed the batteries in the dead one I grasped like a club, ready to respond to a bear in my face as best as I could. (The nose is the softest, easiest hit on a bear, with the best likelihood of resulting in the bear's departure.) One night, with six inches of heavy, wet snow on the ground, it took over an hour for my mother, sister, our next-door neighbor, and I to find our way home in this manner, calling to one another in the dark when we found what we thought was the path, or when we needed to feel our way back to each other.

Nightmares of our tiny skiff being swamped or capsized were not always terrors experienced from the comfort of bed. At as young as eight, my chores could include taking the boat to give a parent or a guest a ride to or from the road when the water was calm. The water was not always calm, and I was not eight for long. My experience grew, and my luck saved me on several occasions, such as when I realized just feet from a jetty of rocks that I was much too close to shore, going full speed in the dark. Or when the waves stood up just past our beach, crashing over the stern of the boat even as the bow rose over the crest of the wave ahead, unable to get far enough up the wave to escape the trough into which the outboard seemed to pull, a sucking feeling in my heart as I knew that the ocean was on the brink of swallowing me into its churning embrace.

In such experiences, I learned without thinking about the lesson – I had to get home. There was no other option. Crawl on all fours, feel your way blind through a forest, turn the boat into the wind. Find home.

With many years of used-up-luck and slowly earned experience behind me, I now find myself searching for home once more. This time, I seek not a home I've found before, but a new abode for heart and soul. The journey seems more perilous without a destination, and with no idea what paths might lead me there; but as in my early years, make it home I must, or live on the road as I seek.

“Home is where the heart is”, though perhaps tired and worn, is also tried and true, an adage for the ages akin to the Golden Rule in both simplicity and longevity. As I ponder the roads ahead, feeling loss and separation as I am sundered from my community, my friends and family, I return to this thought. Rejoicing in the moment, in each sunrise and the opportunities of the new world in each new day, I remember that NOW is when and where I am, and that the only home I truly need is the space in which I find myself in that given instant. I can find solace in the air I breathe, the food I eat, the nutrients and energy flowing and cycling within and through me. I can love those I love from afar, remembering their voices, faces, and hearts. The soil beneath my feet will change as I move over the land, but in letting go of roots I can find myself a citizen of a larger community, a part of a world beyond any horizon. Moving into stillness, and finding stillness in motion: even as I seek a place to put down new roots, I carry my connections and find that distance does not sunder friendships or love. Experience will always change us, and our luck may run out or grow thin, but our history supports us, tying us together as we weave the here-and-now.

I laugh to myself as I write these words, my personal mantra of many years resounding in my mind if not ringing in my ears. I have believed this since I wrote it, nearly two decades ago in Salt Lake City, but perhaps I am only now learning how right I was when I first intoned:

nutrients cycle and energy flows,

here we are, what is:

let's go!

I have not found home yet, but I carry it in my being, and know it holds me in its safe embrace, whatever path my feet may tread.

Namaste.

Time to Tinker

Over the last few days, Jess and I have stepped away from work on Velda, our Wonderbus and future home, and have returned to our love of making toys. Colorful bears are multiplying in the living room while dragons breed in the garage, but diving into tinkering is not without its learning experiences.

Although she's sewn dozens of bears out of her quilt scraps, it's been a while since Jess has assembled a teddy...so in her first attempt Wednesday, she fabricated three left arms before a right. That hiccup passed, and she brought a beautiful little pastel-flower bear into being yesterday, with one right and one left arm, and a matching set of legs. Its ears are cushy-soft micro-pillows that beg to be squished, and I envy whoever gets to lay their head on this teddy.*

I spent most of Wednesday learning about my new (almost) all-in-one tool, a Shop Smith Mark V. Especially how to adjust the band saw so that it wouldn't throw the band off and/or break it. Cutting the “blanks” (the rough-draft toy: no sanding, no holes, just the basic shape) for two new dragon toys took almost all day. For comparison, in the past I've managed to cut them out in about 20 minutes each with my jig saw, although the cuts aren't as clean and the tight corners aren't as tight as they are with the band saw. My DeWalt cordless jig saw can only cut approximately one-and-a-quarter toy blanks from 3/4” wood on one battery charge, so it just isn't a practical tool for the entire process. Be that as it may, I learned a lot about my Shop Smith, and got a lot of experience replacing and adjusting the band saw blade.

Thursday, I sanded. Which is in and of itself a simple process: apply friction, remove unwanted material. Of course, when you're dealing with tiny little crevices and trying to remove any possibility of splinters or roughness, things get...complicated. Let's just say that I've been struggling with figuring out what tools will best accomplish my goal of sanding nooks and crannies, and although I haven't had a stroke of inspiration which panned out yet, I've had lots of ideas and have attempted to make most of them work. With the result that I hand-sand the crevices and hard-to-reach bits with custom-folded/wadded/twisted sandpaper. Keeping it Old School. Sandpaper, fingers, elbow grease. (An aside: although I heard the term many times as a youth, it wasn't until late in middle school that I realized that “elbow grease” wasn't something you bought at a hardware store, but a metaphor).

After setting aside several mastadons and panthers which involved unforeseen complications in design, I finished six dragons, each of which had evolved from its own piece of wood in a different way, even though I'd only used two templates for their body types. Each sanded at least three times, with the final round by hand (everywhere, crevices or no). With the toys ready for oiling and wheels, I did my obligatory round of quality control:

Now, I'm not going to mimic a two-year-old and throw my toys across the room or jump up and down on them, but I do expect my product to meet a reasonable level of durability requirements, so slapping them together to get the dust off is a perfectly acceptable way for me to break my own toys. And break my toys I did. Every. Single. One.

In retrospect, I may be asking more of my toys than is reasonable. I gave a prototype to my three-year-old godson in August, and he still hasn't broken it (although his younger brother broke another toy within about two minutes of receiving it, hence the “mastadons aren't ready yet” situation). But no, I thought that a 185-lb 38-year-old slamming toys together would be an appropriate test of the forces that a child might exert on them, and broke every last one of them. The little wings and twisted tails which gave the dragons a taste of whimsy all gave flight, leaving shards and stumps where their fragile grandeur had once been.

So Friday (today, by the time I post this), I'll spend the day re-designing my flock and getting ready to send it out into The Holidays. The good news is, I've learned something new this week. Lots of new things, actually. Many of them have to do with the structural integrity of wood along its grain line. Adjusting my process and checking for weak points before final sanding is another lesson which will come in handy in the future. Humility and Patience were in there too, and Humor was chortling from the sidelines all day long as I struggled to sand the detailed curves of tail and wing, all destined to fly off in their own directions and all, ultimately, to the scrap bin.

Between Jess' extra bear arms and my extraneous wings and tails, it's looking a little like an abattoir around here. But it's also looking like a wonderful menagerie of wood and fabric: rotund little bears; scraps of quilts bursting in color; the scent of cedar, pine, hemlock; dragons, mastadons, and panthers vying for completion amid piles of wooden wheels ready to trundle them into the world.

Strong wings and fierce cuddles, my friends.

*I have used special (i.e. $$$) ergonomic/chiropractic pillows for neck support for over twenty years, and have trouble finding a pillow that can support my neck and head appropriately in both side- and back-sleeping positions. I have used the (very squished) bear below as a pillow for the last year, and have never had a pillow provide such fantastic neck support. Notably, he's also stood up to weekly machine washings and dryings without complaint – or pulled stitches.

Helooooo Michigan!

We just woke up after a second night in Adrian, Michigan, yesterday having been a more-than-successful day of shopping for random RV parts. We planned our trip here to visit the physical site of an ebay store run by a fantastically charismatic man who has run any number (really, ANY number) of family businesses. A former motel, with seven barns, acres of bins of holding tanks, and who-knows-what-else tucked into every nook and cranny of a property which is perhaps still an auxiliary fire department as well as Hoyt & Flynn, CPAs, Madison Central Wholesale is an amazing amalgam of the last 50 years. The grounds are as confusing as that last sentence, but we walked out with new water and gray-water tanks, a ladder, folding stairs, and an odd-shaped window for a reasonable price. The 800-mile drive here wouldn't have made much sense just for the savings on these items, but at $120-160 shipping for each window, and 10 windows (plus a lot of other stuff) on our list, it didn't make sense to NOT come pick everything up ourselves.

And then, the day before we left Wisconsin to come here, I found Tri-State Surplus. With windows $20 less than our original destination, as well as a selection of refurbished refrigerators and stoves (shipping: $250-$400 each) that were priced around 1/3 of the retail price, we managed to fill our trailer with appliances and windows for $2500 - more than I had planned on spending, but way more stuff for Velda than I had hoped to find on this trip. We spent the day driving back and forth between Adrian and Hudson, first pricing and then purchasing and packing our finds. Unpacking the truck is going to be like a giant tarp-wrapped Christmas morning.

Jess pondering how to pack

Rather than head back through Gary, Indiana and Chicago, Illinois and their attendant heavy traffic, we're going to take a slightly longer route north through Michigan and back to Wisconsin via the Upper Peninsula. I've been finding the mid-west to be much more beautiful than I expected, and although I constantly miss having mountains on the horizon (or in my face), the rolling hills, small farms, and forests of this part of the world are gorgeous. And now I get to drive through a whole new part of the world, see two new Great Lakes (Huron and Michigan), and see terrain that passes for mountainous in the relative topographic calm between the Rockies and Appalachians! 

On the road again

Work on Velda is progressing, with nearly all of the wires for lights, speakers, emergency exits, alarms, etc. pulled back to "the box": next step removing as much as possible so that we can make sense of what's left. One frequent poster on skoolie.net (a fantastic resource for those engaged in school bus to RV conversions) suggested that we simply weld the door shut and forget about the mess behind it.

We had Insulation Plus, a local insulation contractor, cut metal panels to replace the doors we're removing and all of the windows that will be replaced with insulated RV windows, and spent the last couple of days prepping and painting them. Of course, we ran out of paint and had to get more before we could put the final coat on, and by then the weather had turned and wasn't conducive to painting outside any more. 

I also took advantage of those 65-degree days to clean the old caulking out of seams in the roof (with special attention to the one seam which leaked every time it rained), re-caulk them, and paint the roof. I'm not really very cool about heights, but Velda is so wide, and relatively flat on top, that I didn't feel nervous at all - although I went barefoot to ensure the best possible traction.

Which brings us to the next step: getting the windows that will go in said panels. And the water tanks, refrigerator, stove, awning, seats, steps...all that fun stuff. So we're hitting the road again this afternoon, headed to Adrian and Hudson, Michigan to visit two stores that sell such things. The 800-mile (one-way) trip might seem excessive, but with shipping prices of $100-400 per item, and over twenty items on our list, it makes sense to go get everything ourselves.

Tonight we'll stay in Madison with a close friend of Jess' and her husband, the incredibly talented Michael Riverun. The next day we cross Illinois, Indiana, and Ohio before heading north into Michigan: four states I've never been in before! We managed to get the last hotel room in Adrian for tomorrow night; it's Parent's Weekend at Adrian College and there is a state-wide x-country meet this weekend twenty minutes from Adrian, so it's going to be an interesting scene at the hotel. 

I haven't heard much to make me excited about the scenery along the way (Gary, Indiana), but it will be good to be back on the road, and having all the various parts on-hand for our re-build will be a huge step forward. 

Until next time: drive safe and have fun!

Ben