Chapter 5

Not being much of a cook, I’d loaded up on mostly prepared meals, frozen dinners, and other items that didn’t take a lot of fancy cooking to prepare. When I woke up in the morning, it seemed my stomach wasn’t really all that appreciative of my prowess in the kitchen the previous evening. An Alka-Seltzer and three cups of coffee cured the problem.

I sat on the stairs of the RV and sipped on my third cup of coffee and watched the sunrise. There were a few high, thin clouds in the east, creating a glorious red/orange hue as the sun peeked over the horizon. I could also see a red-tailed hawk riding the air currents, looking for an early morning meal.

Serenity settled upon me sitting there, soaking into my soul and body. The stark beauty of it all captured me, lifted my spirit up, and let it soar, like the hawk circling in the sky above me. The rising sun cast its early morning shadows through the sagebrush, bringing to life a new day, creating a mosaic of shadows through the hills and brush. All around me, the land was vibrant, awash in the red tint of the morning sun. For the first time in a very long while, I felt something more than the routine of starting a new day. I’m not sure what I felt, as the sun cast its warmth upon my face; maybe contentment was the word I was looking for, maybe more than that. I wasn’t sure. I didn’t really know if I cared. It just was.

I drained the dregs from the cup, and with a sigh as the sun rose and the land around me greeted a new day, it was time to start mine.

Today, the plan was to take a good survey of my property. I needed to find a good spot to build the house. Since the first time I’d seen the sand hills, I’d immediately been reminded of how we had built ammunition bunkers while I was in the Navy. I wanted to use the same building technique to build this house. Essentially, most of the house would be buried inside a sand hill. This would do a number of things. It would keep the house warm in the winter; cool in the summer, and outside upkeep would be kept to a minimum. I needed to find the location of a hill facing south-east with a hill high enough to break the wind. I had not found anything approaching what I wanted on the one section I’d already looked at. Today I wanted to look at the other three sections.

When I started up the pickup, I noticed I was down to a quarter tank of fuel, so my survey was put on hold while I made a trip to town to fill up on diesel.

On the trip to Cope, I was thinking that I’d better talk to someone about having diesel delivered to my place. I couldn’t be driving to town every time I needed fuel. I was finding that there were a lot of things I hadn’t thought of.

The gas station in town was a combination store and service station. When I pulled up to the pump, there was an older gentleman pumping gas, so I asked him, “Is this self-serve or do I pump my own?”

“Just pump your own, old Marty’s too lazy to come out and do it fer ya.”

“Thanks, and if you don’t mind, can I ask you a question?”

“Sure, what you want to know?”

“Well, I just inherited a place outside of town and was wondering how a fellow goes about getting fuel delivered?”

“Hell, that’s no problem, just let Marty know when you go inside. He’s the agent for the gas company in this area. He can arrange for a scheduled delivery, even get a good-sized tank for you as well.”

I thanked the man and went inside to pay for the fuel. The old man was right; it didn’t take much discussion with Marty to arrange for a 500-gallon tank to be delivered and set up, and schedule a monthly delivery of diesel fuel. It’s a wonder what a thousand-dollar deposit check will do to ease things along.

When I returned to the farm, I found what I was looking for in a home site on the third section of my property, the one on the North-West corner. The hill was about a hundred and twenty feet high and ran southwest to northeast for about a quarter mile. There was a bench that jutted out from the side of the hill that sat in a small cul-de-sac. It was exactly what I wanted.

Since it was only about eleven o’clock, I decided to run over to Dwight’s place and see if I could grab JR. I needed to get some things started, and finding a way for JR to get back and forth to my place was a necessity. From the looks of Dwight’s farm, he surely wouldn’t have the extra cash for a pickup for JR. I also figured it was going to take some talking to get Dwight to listen to what I had to say. When I pulled into the farmyard, Dwight and JR were busy removing the disk from an old John Deere tractor.