When I left Columbus, Ohio for Hawaii three years ago, I knew I was leaving behind some great people and a nice place to live -- at least it was nice during much of the year. I can’t say I’ve missed the weather in the winter or summer, but otherwise, I miss Ohio, specifically Columbus, quite a bit. Given I have not been back for more than a few days since I left, I wanted to spend some time catching up with friends and climbing in the Red River Gorge.
My original plan was to fly into Columbus, where my friend Joe and I would meet up and drive to Kentucky for a week. This plan immediately failed. Upon arrival in Columbus, Joe called to tell me that he wasn’t going to make it into town until Friday at the latest (three days after our intended departure to the Red). I wasn’t too upset since it gave me time to get some extra work done and visit lots of people. I spent most of my time catching up with everyone, realizing what a great place it was to work, and finding out what has been going on.
By Friday it became clear that Joe was not going to make it back, demonstrating that it really does no good to plan. Our original plan was to work on the cabin that Joe is building on our jointly owned land.
The jointly owned land is a long story in itself, but the short version is that we own 13 +/- acres of land in Wolfe County, Kentucky just south of the Natural Bridge State Park and very close to the Daniel Boone National Forest. We are also very close to Miguel’s Pizza for those of you who know the climbing scene. Our land is known as “the old Bush” property to the locals and to everyone else as “Joe’s property.” My own possession is overshadowed by Joes’ extroverted nature and the fact that I live in Hawaii.
[Joe a year ago on the land]
[Our bridge made by Ben and Joe]
Joe and I have co-owned the land for something like 6 years now and my last trip to Kentucky (on memorial day a few years ago) was to get Joe put on the deed, since for a variety of reasons, he wasn’t originally on it. The deed itself isn’t very helpful in establishing the boundaries of our land. One marker is a “large rock” and we are not actually sure which large rock this might be. Mostly this doesn’t seem to matter, though our neighbor is the evil land developer in the area who may try to encroach on our land, assuming we knew where it started. None of the boundaries in this part of Kentucky are all that clear and let’s be honest, it is all stolen land anyway.
When we originally purchased the land (Joe, myself and my now ex-husband Jim), there was an abandoned house and a trailer home on the property. We had deemed these uninhabitable, though indeed for some months a homeless guy named Eugene was living in the trailer and “helping” us deconstruct the house, which we were doing with hammers, crow bars and the help of locals who would come by and take anything of value. Eugene’s biggest contribution to the deconstruction project was to get drunk one night and light the thing on fire, which was evidently very exciting for the local fire department, since the house was still hooked up to the electrical grid when it burned.
Fortunately for us, the house burned to the ground. After that, we thought it might be a good idea for Eugene to make himself scarce, given the fact he was technically an arsonist, and in his absence, we tore down the uninhabitable trailer he had been inhabiting. That trailer, in good Kentucky fashion, had a bathroom pipe that drained directly into the small creek that crosses our land, which turns out to be the Middle Fork of the Red River. Also, the bathroom didn’t actually work because the toilet had been ripped out years ago.
[Middle Fork]
For the first few years of ownership of the land, we spent a lot of time hauling gravel around in a wheelbarrow making flat camping sites with the idea that we would have a camp ground. It goes without saying that to establish something like this would require someone to actually want to run a campground, but why let this get in the way? It generally kept us busy when it was otherwise too horrible to climb. Then Jim and I constructed a shed that had a sod roof that never actually grew. The shed was a great storage unit until it got broken into and over the course of a couple weeks, everything got stolen out of it. After that it just stood empty until Joe took it upon himself to tear the entire thing down, an act I still don’t understand, but which he claims has to do with the fact it was too close to the road and so it was too visible to possible thieves.
In response to the theft of all our stuff out of the shed, we did put up a gate. This gate has been functioning for the last couple years.
[Our gate: made from the cinder block foundation from the house and some of the 2x4s.]
At some point a few years ago, Joe also decided to begin building a cabin. This cabin is currently under construction far from the road and it will be hidden in the trees during the times of year when the trees will hide it. I’ve suggested that Joe paint a camouflage mural so that it will blend in during the rest of the year. My other idea was a snake pit, but Joe is afraid of snakes. To get to the cabin you have to walk up the hill along this single track path. It is a lot of work to haul stuff up and down from the cabin site, so maybe it will keep people from ultimately stealing everything we eventually put in the cabin.
I have been given periodic updates on the progress of the cabin, which is somewhat slow because the cabin is being built with a combination of wood Joe has purchased from a local hardware store and stuff he is getting off Craig’s list. The plans are a bit fluid as well, given the whole Craig’s list philosophy and the fact you can’t really frame in windows until you know what type of windows you are going to get. This past weekend, he finally settled on the height of the second story loft, though we did debate the fact that I thought a 7 foot ceiling was too short for the first floor – it would make it too much like an above ground Hobbit house.
So, back to the trip -- I was going to the Red with or without Joe, and so I called him and asked his honest assessment of the possibility he would make it at all. He assured me that he would fly into Columbus on Saturday and drive down Sunday, then stay for the rest of the week. Based upon this information, I drove down with my friend Hal, also a climber, current Otterbein geology professor, and cabin-construction helper. We took his car so Joe would have something to drive himself and then I would ride back with Joe.
The weekend was great – the first sunny nice weather since I had been there, and it was wonderful fun to get on the steep, overhanging rocks. Also, it demonstrated how much I am out of shape. We actually slept on the floor of the cabin since a temporary roof had been constructed over the frame (still no doors or windows framed in), which kept us dry during the night. Come Sunday, though, Joe was still not back in Columbus, but assured me that he would be getting on a plane Monday morning.
Instead of going back to Columbus with Hal, I headed to Lexington with my friends Shannon and Julie who were incredibly hospitable in letting me stay with them, especially since Monday turned into Tuesday, which turned into Wednesday. Yes, it wasn’t until Wednesday afternoon that Joe finally made it to Kentucky – a day before we needed to leave to head back to Columbus. However, despite the fact this was clearly not my original plan, it did work out rather well – I was able to climb with Shannon on Tuesday, where she was a great rope gun, given that it was pouring rain all day and we had to stay on really overhanging stuff I couldn’t really climb.
So, finally, Joe picked me up in Lexington on Wednesday where I was only a bit stressed from having been abandoned without a car or a clear way back to Ohio for several days. I like having an exit strategy at all times. We drove to the land and put in a few hours of work on the cabin – which involved hauling this truss up to the top of the ten foot framed in part of the cabin with a rope. The cabin is being constructed with a set of battery-operated power tools, a hammer, a saw, and a rope. When Joe needs a ladder he just nails a board into the frame.
We both were climbing up and down the frame, but mostly Joe went up. My job was primarily to hand him stuff from the ground and stand around saying things like, “I don’t’ think this is going to work.” Also, I had to haul on the rope at different times for different purposes.
Our first problem was that the truss we had just raised to be part of the roof was not square with the other truss that was already up there. At least an hour of trying to force it to align ensued, which included lots of hammering on it, attaching the rope to it, more hammering, and then finally, attaching the rope to a tree, and using a giant stick to twist the rope tight to get the beam into alignment. Of course, there was much hammering during this. Also, it bears noting that by “align,” I mean that Joe would sometimes hold the level up to his eye and hold it at the appropriate angle.
Anyway, the truss eventually bowed to Joe’s will and then we were off to dinner at our friend’s Russ and Renee who live in a beautiful off the grid house in the gorge. Russ has wisely stayed away from our construction project, but willingly gives Joe advice on what not to do. Their house is a picture of what homes can be. Ours won’t look anything like it, but we will have, according to Joe, a bathroom with walls made out of living bamboo. It is a new kind of living outhouse, still to be grown.
Our week of cabin building and climbing had been condensed down into a few hours over the course of Wednesday night through Friday morning. We climbed all day Thursday and then worked on the cabin again that night in an effort to get the second and much larger truss up onto the frame. This involved using the temporary roof beams, some blocks of wood nailed onto them, the rope, and Joe standing on top again while I pulled on the rope. My job also consisted of saying things like, “we need a ladder,” or, “we need a scaffolding” or, “we need something to hoist this with,” while holding the truss up on its temporary runway while Joe pulled on it from the top of the wall. Eventually, this truss too was in place, demonstrating that Joe is the McGyvor of construction work. Getting the second truss up took up the last remaining daylight hours, so we finalized the temporary roof and put all the tin back on it in the morning. Then we build the final truss, which even Joe acknowledged was too heavy for the two of us to lift.
[Joe didn't actually let me USE the big hammer.]
It is always sad to leave the gorge, but this time even more so since I don’t know when I get to come back again. I got to spend one last night in Columbus, where my friend Lisa hosted a great pizza party and then it was off to Seattle to get a car and begin the drive to San Francisco where I will attend a conference for a few days before getting back to the climbing part of the vacation. Given that conferences are boring and driving is only slightly less boring than conferences, my next installment will hopefully be at some point well after that.
So far, the themes for the trip include, try to avoid too much planning fails and also, no matter where you go, it is going to rain.
1 comment:
you are crazy. but i dig it
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