Ah, the joys of rural living. Fresh air, sunshine, peace and quiet. Well, one out of three ain't bad I suppose. That being the fresh air. This is, after all, OREGON IN WINTER. So while those at higher elevations or more northerly latitudes are enjoying the snowfall, we are DROWNING in the Willamette Valley, people. Literally.
So a couple days ago, my husband and I took a drive up toward Silver Falls in the evening to see the snowfall. He and Kate had driven that way two hours earlier and had to turn back because it wasn't plowed and pretty deep. I thought surely it was plowed by then. So up we went. ABout 500 feet higher than where I live there is a magic line where the white starts. It is that clear cut a demarcation. It had been precipitating for a couple days, reports of winter storms abounding in the Pacific NW, and that anticipatory excitement of maybe getting snowed in for a day was making itself felt all around. But by then, it was pouring rain at our elevation.
We reached the usual snowline, and while it was still raining and my car said 38 degrees, there was over a foot deep slush on the road, and only our side was plowed. So far so good. About 500 more feet of elevation changed things a lot. It was now over a foot of snow on the road, and neither side was plowed. And it was dark. And my trusty little all-wheel-drive Subaru was starting to struggle a little. A little further on and it became clear we had to turn around, which was easier said than done. Thankfully we WERE in the Subaru and not Bubba, so we could just turn around in the middle of the road, which was still tricky given the propensity to go some other direction than the one you intended in all the mooshy snow.
So that was night before last. What a difference 24 hours makes. Like about 15 degrees warmer and monsoon season. It was like the 40 days and 40 nights around here, and I was beginning to wish I had an Ark. Naturally it was my day on call. Naturally I got called. Naturally it was the middle of the night, blowing 40 MPH, and pouring rain like all bloody hell. To make it that much more delicious, the phone service was behaving as if I lived in a third world country. The patient I was called about had a distinct problem, I was trying to consult by phone with a specialist in Portland, and got disconnected no less than four times. On both my cell and land lines. So finally I headed into the hospital, only to get to the bottom of my driveway and encounter the LAKE that used to be the lovely little gravel road on which I live. It had been accumulating there when I got home a few hours earlier, but was by then distinctly worse. Like, I had no driveway. Just a drive into a lake, with a dropoff into a culvert lurking in there somewhere on either side. So I backed up, turned around (thank you AWD for getting me through the mud in a circle) and went back for Bubba. More ground clearance seemed like a profoundly good idea.
The water was up to my wheelwells. I got through, but nervously due to some horrific reports earlier in the evening of cars being sucked into culverts and disappearing. I decided to stay the night at the hospital and tackle the return trip in the daylight. I was reeeaaaallllly looking forward to a relaxing day off. Well, forget that. As I was on my way home, Kate called. You know you really do not want to have a conversation that begins "I just thought I ought to let you know this before you got home", or "We have a bit of a situation here", and you know damn well you don't want a conversation that begins with both. Sigh.
The situation was water in the basement. A lot of water. Alllll over the basement. Not good. We had carpet in the basement. And furniture. And a sewing and crafts area with fabrics, paper, paints, all sort of stuff. And a furnace, water heater, and washer and dryer. With electricity. ELECTRICITY. And WATER. Are you getting this??
When I got home and went down there, there was a lot of noise. Not a good noise. A noise like a small waterfall. It WAS a small waterfall, coming right through the wall of my basement and splashing on the floor, or onto the lake that used to be the floor. About 7 discrete leaks on one wall and one on the adjacent wall of the corner behind my utility sink and water heater. Where I could not get a bucket in. Time to think creatively. So off I ran to the hospital, where they graciously produced an under-butt drape with a pouch and a drain hose, which I planned to affix to the wall and catch the water. Great plan. Didn't work worth anything.
Next plan, hydraulic cement. I followed the instructions to the letter, and this was advertised to "set under water in five minutes" and to work on "active water leaks." Well, apparently not THIS active. Well before the five minutes were up the plug fell apart in my hands and the water began streaming out from under it. Damn.
Enter the world's best next-door neighbors. You CANNOT SURVIVE in the country without neighbors. Preferably neighbors who know a great deal more than you do about almost everything, are full of applied skills, and willing to employ them on your behalf. In this case, it was two trucks, three guys, shovels and picks, and in the blink of an eye a trench around my house draining an impressive quantity of water away from the house and into the driveway.
While we are not yet dry here, the waterfall is no longer shooting out from the wall at a 90 degree angle, and is approaching a dribble as we speak. Yes, we will have a rather nasty cleanup, and it IS supposed to rain for the next week. So there may be some more joy and rapture in our immediate future.
But I am not ready to abandon ship. I have a sump pump, borrowed from one of my partners (which is a whole nuther story as they say - how is it that men just inherently know how to drag out a gas powered thing that has sat fallow for 20 years, take things off and put things on, checking spark plugs for sparking and carburetors and chokes and all those things and magically making it start? Thankfully he was willing to do this on his lunch hour), I have a large tub of hydraulic cement which might work a lot better when it isn't fighting Little Niagara, and I am armed with the attitude that this is life on the farm. Sometimes crap is coming your way. Get a shovel.
Thursday, January 19, 2012
Sunday, January 15, 2012
Of Men and Mushrooms
I remember being a kid who was, always and perpetually, horse-obsessed. When I was about 4, I began pestering my parents for a horse, for a farm, for living in the country. My dad used to tell me "I'll get a horse for my grandchildren." I think I understand now that they would really love to have given me that, but it was not within their reach. I know this because I am now the parent who didn't manage to give her kids that experience until they weren't kids any more.
When I was in residency training, I promised my youngest daughter - the only one still living at home by then - that if I just got through it we would live in the country, wherever we ended up, and she could have whatever animals she wanted (within reason - I did have to put the hammer down on an elephant). I PROMISED her. And did not deliver until she had graduated high school.
But here we are, on a farm, with animals. So my other kids all came for their holiday visit and saw the farm for the first time. I was really curious how they would respond to it, whether they would love it or hate it or not care two figs about any of it. And like a kid with a new toy, I could not wait to show it to them. I insisted my husband was not allowed to take my son who arrived first on a tour of the property, he had to wait and let me take him. This is the son who has never (unlike his brother or younger sister) been horse crazy or expressed a desire to get back to nature. The son who has traveled Europe, seen great cities, worked in research in Germany and graduated with a degree in engineering. I did NOT expect him to be particularly impressed. Hah. After years of academic drudgery he had started wanting to get more connected to things, the earth, whatever, and to do real work with his hands. Hey, I am ALL for this, I have a lot of real work that needs doing, so I was down with that plan.
Four days later his siblings arrived, my oldest daughter, son-in-law, and youngest son. A couple days later the engineer's best friend arrived. We suddenly had a very full house. It was insane. And I loved it. Not the mud, exponentially increased quantities of trash and recyclables, or reduced frig space from all the exotic beers, but the pandemonium of MY KIDS filling my house and my farm.
Each in their turn got the walk through the pastures, shown how to feed the various animals, shown the orchard, and then up to the upper field to tromp around and see the view. And each in their turn found their response to the farm. My oldest daughter took her camera and found lots to photograph (which she does rather brilliantly much of the time). My engineer and his friend - who studied mycology in college and was a horticulture major - became obsessed with finding and identifying all the mushroom species on the place. I had NOOOO idea how many fungi I had around here. My kitchen table looked like a science lab - multiple plates and trays with carefully laid out mushrooms with overturned glass bowls on top of them to try and capture the spores and help in their ID. I got them a book on mushroom species of the Northwest. And prayed an awful lot that they were neither eating nor smoking any of them.
My youngest, the one who is dying to live "off the grid" and who has always been obsessed with anything having a motor and a key, couldn't wait to learn to drive the tractor. Then he very helpfully jumped right in and despite the rain cleared out the stumps, old bits of this and that, and debris behind the woodshed so I could put a chicken house there. My older son (the engineer/mushroom hunter) had been giving me no little amount of grief for driving my diesel-burning, pollution-belching farm implement to do things like move hay, which he (being considerably more buff than I) could just do manually. So it cracked me up no end to look out as my other son finished up his clearing project to see the two of them taking off up the firelanes headed for the upper field - on the evil machine. When they could have walked. Boys are such - BOYS.
Gradually they left for home, leaving my engineer here for another week. Two days before he left, I came home one night and found him up near the garden in the fading light. I called out to him to ask what he was doing. "Digging." Digging what pray tell, in the near dark? "A hole." Well, that was highly illuminating, but whatever. The next night I came home to find out he had come into the house requesting an extension cord and Christmas lights. Apparently he plopped an entire string of lights in a big wad down on the ground to provide light so that he could keep digging, knowing he left the next day and wanting to finish. Finish WHAT??? Just digging.
So the morning of his last day here, I went out in the daylight to see what it was. He was inordinately proud of it. It was a good 2 feet deep, square, a good 6 feet on a side. A gigantic - hole. With an island in the middle, about 2 feet square. And all that excavated dirt had been piled up on 2 sides and crowned with beer bottles. It was rather elegant. And hysterical. So this is what happens when a large strong male with energy to burn is turned loose with a shovel and no restrictions. When my husband asked me why I thought he had dug the hole, I said "Because he didn't get to do it when he was ten."
I love having this place. I hate that I didn't get to have it for my kids when they were growing up. Except that they are still growing up, and hopefully one day their kids will play here, but in the meantime THEY are getting to PLAY. Some of their play is work - my son did rake up a lot of debris from the filbert orchard and planted 14 blueberry bushes - and a lot of the work seems like play to them. This might not last, but then again - I am considerably more "grown up" than any of them and I still delight in the work of my hands (and back, and knees, and all those other things that hurt) around this farm.
This, my dears, is living.
When I was in residency training, I promised my youngest daughter - the only one still living at home by then - that if I just got through it we would live in the country, wherever we ended up, and she could have whatever animals she wanted (within reason - I did have to put the hammer down on an elephant). I PROMISED her. And did not deliver until she had graduated high school.
But here we are, on a farm, with animals. So my other kids all came for their holiday visit and saw the farm for the first time. I was really curious how they would respond to it, whether they would love it or hate it or not care two figs about any of it. And like a kid with a new toy, I could not wait to show it to them. I insisted my husband was not allowed to take my son who arrived first on a tour of the property, he had to wait and let me take him. This is the son who has never (unlike his brother or younger sister) been horse crazy or expressed a desire to get back to nature. The son who has traveled Europe, seen great cities, worked in research in Germany and graduated with a degree in engineering. I did NOT expect him to be particularly impressed. Hah. After years of academic drudgery he had started wanting to get more connected to things, the earth, whatever, and to do real work with his hands. Hey, I am ALL for this, I have a lot of real work that needs doing, so I was down with that plan.
Four days later his siblings arrived, my oldest daughter, son-in-law, and youngest son. A couple days later the engineer's best friend arrived. We suddenly had a very full house. It was insane. And I loved it. Not the mud, exponentially increased quantities of trash and recyclables, or reduced frig space from all the exotic beers, but the pandemonium of MY KIDS filling my house and my farm.
Each in their turn got the walk through the pastures, shown how to feed the various animals, shown the orchard, and then up to the upper field to tromp around and see the view. And each in their turn found their response to the farm. My oldest daughter took her camera and found lots to photograph (which she does rather brilliantly much of the time). My engineer and his friend - who studied mycology in college and was a horticulture major - became obsessed with finding and identifying all the mushroom species on the place. I had NOOOO idea how many fungi I had around here. My kitchen table looked like a science lab - multiple plates and trays with carefully laid out mushrooms with overturned glass bowls on top of them to try and capture the spores and help in their ID. I got them a book on mushroom species of the Northwest. And prayed an awful lot that they were neither eating nor smoking any of them.
My youngest, the one who is dying to live "off the grid" and who has always been obsessed with anything having a motor and a key, couldn't wait to learn to drive the tractor. Then he very helpfully jumped right in and despite the rain cleared out the stumps, old bits of this and that, and debris behind the woodshed so I could put a chicken house there. My older son (the engineer/mushroom hunter) had been giving me no little amount of grief for driving my diesel-burning, pollution-belching farm implement to do things like move hay, which he (being considerably more buff than I) could just do manually. So it cracked me up no end to look out as my other son finished up his clearing project to see the two of them taking off up the firelanes headed for the upper field - on the evil machine. When they could have walked. Boys are such - BOYS.
Gradually they left for home, leaving my engineer here for another week. Two days before he left, I came home one night and found him up near the garden in the fading light. I called out to him to ask what he was doing. "Digging." Digging what pray tell, in the near dark? "A hole." Well, that was highly illuminating, but whatever. The next night I came home to find out he had come into the house requesting an extension cord and Christmas lights. Apparently he plopped an entire string of lights in a big wad down on the ground to provide light so that he could keep digging, knowing he left the next day and wanting to finish. Finish WHAT??? Just digging.
So the morning of his last day here, I went out in the daylight to see what it was. He was inordinately proud of it. It was a good 2 feet deep, square, a good 6 feet on a side. A gigantic - hole. With an island in the middle, about 2 feet square. And all that excavated dirt had been piled up on 2 sides and crowned with beer bottles. It was rather elegant. And hysterical. So this is what happens when a large strong male with energy to burn is turned loose with a shovel and no restrictions. When my husband asked me why I thought he had dug the hole, I said "Because he didn't get to do it when he was ten."
I love having this place. I hate that I didn't get to have it for my kids when they were growing up. Except that they are still growing up, and hopefully one day their kids will play here, but in the meantime THEY are getting to PLAY. Some of their play is work - my son did rake up a lot of debris from the filbert orchard and planted 14 blueberry bushes - and a lot of the work seems like play to them. This might not last, but then again - I am considerably more "grown up" than any of them and I still delight in the work of my hands (and back, and knees, and all those other things that hurt) around this farm.
This, my dears, is living.
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