Wednesday, September 01, 2010

Been So Busy I Could Fart A Textbook....


Or at least fill a page of blogger...




Good Lawd, I been busy!

Climbing trees, riding dem bikes and buildin' dem buildings...





A friend of mine- a builder- had a neighbor who lived in his woodshop for thirty years, made beautiful jewelry boxes and other crafty stuff, showered out back via an old-fashioned plumbing fixture and shit in the woods.





Well... he developed pancreatic cancer and was rushed to Portland several months back where he pulled through and was essentially sent home to get his house in order.





What he did was retire immediately and sent all of his woodworking machines off to auction so that he could hire my friend who, in turn, hired me and some others to "capture" a portion of his woodworking shop and turn it into a better dying situation than he had while he was living. We glommed on an addition out back that became a fancy bathtub and shower and included one of those Mother Earth News incinerating toilets that basically cooked your poop into ashes which you then emptied into your garden...





The inside of his woodshop became a small but well done apartment with new carpet and real heating.





It was all very surreal, looking back on this project, because you wanted to build things well but you knew it was all so very temporary, not to mention it all being glommed on to a funky old seventies hippy building...





Yesterday was my last day- it was also the day this fella got the news he has about six weeks to live...





Speaking of life, I did manage to climb my cedar tree to the top, and I did manage to do it on a cool breezy day with a "Hemp Festival" going on just down the road. So not only did I get to jostle around 140 feet off the ground in the wind, I got a nice whiff of burning grass and some great reggae music to climb to...





It could not have been a better end to a very hard tree to climb (if you don't cheat and use spikes on yer feet)...





My tree-climbing friend Charles (who climbed with spikes for the forest service- SOMEBODY has to go up there and pick those pine cones) told me casually, "the trouble with cedars is that their branches are all crumbly and they grow downward out of the tree..."





If you reached out and took the hand of a child and then looked at the attitude of your arm, that is about how a cedar branch looks as it comes out of the trunk. Everytime you get a line over a branch, it SLIDES outward and downward until it is so far out the branch it is useless to climb on. Remember, the further out on a branch your rope is, the more stress on the branch and the more likely it will break...





It's physics and you can't argue with physics.





He also happened to mention that he always had a seven foot PVC pole with a hook on one end for doing stuff in the tree he couldn't reach otherwise...





I made me a pole.





And then I solved the sparse and downward branch problem by noosing the tree trunk and using the pole to hoist up the noose at seven foot increments until I finally got an anchor in where the branches became thick enough to climb (about 75 feet up!). A tree is coarse enough that if you noose it with a rope, you can climb up the dangling part of the rope as your weight will tighten the noose around the tree...





It took me three visits after work to advance my anchor up to the level where I could climb in the branches.





"Why are you doing that?" the boys at work would ask me. "Because I'm stubborn, it's an adventure, and I'm doing it for Shirley..." is what I'd tell them.





I made it to the branches on a hot and still day with a large fire not ten miles away making the air all smoky and icky. "Not a good day to top out" I thought, and I set my anchor and rappeled down. I'm sure glad I waited for the weekend...





Speaking of weekends and pancreatic cancer victims and adventures...





I was talking to the dying fella about his bicycling, and he told me of a road that connected my road (well, the super far end of it) with a road called Little Greyback Road and I went looking for it and it sure is good to be back where I can make coffee and poop into water in a bowl...



I should know by now that "I wonder where this goes?" is a question that tends to lead to misery...



I followed a new road for seven miles only to find it ENDED and I had no water and very little daylight left. Nobody knew I was out there except the hungry cougars and the mean bears, and I flipped the bike on its head once trying to ride it down a hill I should have been walking it down...



What started out as a long day ride on a Sunday turned into SEVEN HOURS and me staggering home twenty minutes before I couldn't see a thing...



Remind me to go buy a light for my bike...



A month ago, I casually mentioned to a friend "I've been in Oregon quite awhile, now, and I haven't seen a rattlesnake..."



Well, I've seen six since I said that, including the one that trapped me up on the ridge...



"I haven't seen a hundred dollar bill rolling around in a parking lot since I've been in Oregon..."



Such is life...

5 comments:

Cheesy said...

Don't forget to get a light for your bike... dork! :o)

fairyhedgehog said...

It's like reading about another world. I love the photos.

meno said...

How about a headlamp for your head too?

Shrinky said...

Cougars, rattlesnakes and mean bears.. sheesh, get a light AND a shotgun, will 'ya? You sure have been busy since I last caught up with you. That poor guy, at least he can enjoy his final days in relative comfort now, eh? Great photo's (tho' I think you are nuts to be climbing sky-scraper trees for the hell of it)!

Jeannie said...

You are certainly on a different planet than I am - be sure to watch out for yourself - get those gadgets!