Chapter 7

I sat in the lawn chair, lost in the beauty of the sunrise. For the past two months, I had established a routine of taking my first cup of coffee outside while the sun rose over the eastern horizon. I had moved the RV to the site where I was building the house, and the view to the east provided a dramatic backdrop, with the sun peeking over the top of the hill south and east of where it sat.

I also had a better understanding of my neighbors, Dwight in particular. Many mornings over breakfast at the restaurant in Cope, I had sat with Dwight and some of the other farmers and had come to understand the difficulty of trying to farm in such an arid and desolate location.

The plains of Eastern Colorado are essentially a desert. Unless a farm happens to have access to water for irrigation, crops are limited to those that are sown in the fall and will be ready for harvest the following summer. These dry-land crops are heavily dependent upon snowfall in the winter. A dry winter will kill a crop faster than anything else. No amount of spring rain will help; wheat, oats, and barley need to set roots over the winter or they simply will not produce well. Most farmers would also plant alfalfa in springtime, in hopes that there would be enough spring and summer rain to grow to maturity. It was a gamble that if won, would pay off handsomely, as the cost of feeding cattle over the winter would be much less. If the rain didn’t come, they would have to buy fodder, and that could be an expensive proposition.

I had come to have a great deal of respect for the people who lived here. The blood of their pioneer ancestors flowed strongly in their veins. It was a hard life out here: windy, dry, and most of all lonely. But, somehow, they persevered; there was no doubt in my mind that my neighbors were a hardy people. I also admitted to myself that I had changed also. I was becoming a different person. I also thought that maybe this is what Uncle Cecil intended all along.

As the sky changed from the red hue of the sunrise to the clear blue of another cloudless day, I tipped my cup and drank the last of the coffee.

“It’s time I get my ass in gear. JR will be here before long,” I said to myself, as I pulled myself out of the lawn chair and slowly walked towards the RV.

As I dressed for the day, I thought of all that had happened the past few months.

Moving three hundred tons of sand had taken longer than I expected. The building site had to be cleared and leveled over a much larger area than I had originally envisioned. The sand kept blowing off of the hillside through the cut at the top of the hill, and it seemed that half of what we had moved the day before would have drifted back onto the clearing. Finally, Dwight suggested we erect a temporary drift fence, and after we had put it in place, it seemed to solve the problem.

When we reached bedrock and cleared all of the sand, there was a rather large difference in the height needed to reach a level foundation. To maintain level for the floor, there was a difference of almost two feet; this would mean that one side would have to have much higher concrete piers to achieve a level foundation.

The second week after I’d moved the RV, the utility company had made the electric connection to the distribution box, and the phone company completed their installation soon after. It had only taken George two days to run a trench the half mile to my place and hook up a temporary connection for the electricity and phone. He would have to come back and finish the job after we had roughed out the dome.