Chapter 4

Putting the first one together was a snap. The chain was already joined and ready to install. After it was set to go I fueled it, filled the bar oil tank, and headed out to select trees.

I paid closer attention to my selection than I normally would, since I was cutting trees close to the house. I wasn't worried about one falling on something and doing damage, except for making sure they didn't fall on me.

My main concern was the way things would look after the trees were gone. I wanted to end up with a park like feeling out here. If this was going to be home I wanted it to be as nice as possible around the place. It had been peaceful and relaxing sitting in the entrance this morning and watching the world come alive while I drank my coffee and tried to do the same. I didn't want to fuck that up.

After I had about sixteen, six or so inch diameter trees down, I was done with the saw. The limbing could be easily done with an axe or hatchet and cutting to length would be easy enough with a handsaw. It wouldn't hurt a thing to save alcohol and put off the time until I had to crank up my still.

The door wasn't my first project though. I needed a sawbuck to help handling the trees for cutting. They're a pain in the ass to cut with a handsaw if they're lying on the ground.

My foldable sawbuck was dead simple to make. I used a couple of deerspikes, half-inch by twelve-inch nails, as hinge pins and the remaining work was cutting four legs out of one tree and putting them together.

The door was even simpler though it took longer. My handy dandy Stanley tape rule told me just how long each stile needed to be so it fit the available space exactly. After that I only needed four rails to tie things together.

I used four twelve-inch barn-door hinges to hang it and the hardest part was evening off the cave entrance's rock face on one side so I could mount the hinges with lead anchors and lag bolts and still keep the them lined up so I wouldn't end up with a door that sagged on the far side.

Attaching a length of chain to the top hinge corner and the bottom no-hinge corner, I put them together with a turnbuckle so I could take up slack as things settled from the weight later. I was proud I'd thought of these accessories myself.

For supper that night I splurged and cut one of my Spam breakfast rations into small chunks and added it to my chili and beans. It wasn't going to run me short since it was already apparent game would be easy to come by.

One of the cooking lessons Rose had given me during our short but heavenly time together had been instructions for the technicalities and the general reasons for braising meat, so I wasn't hoarding the Spam in fear I'd end up with only tough meat to eat.

"You're going to be eating meat you have to kill yourself and you can't count on shooting aged heavy beef or veal every time. Pay attention to me and learn how to braise the tough stuff," she'd said, and I'd made sure to learn my lesson.

Anyway, after eating and washing the dishes I changed my chair's giant casters for more normal sized models and then sat out watching the night sky until I thought I'd be able to fall asleep as soon as I hit the bed.

The sky here was magnificent. With no light from earth to reflect against the also absent pollution it seemed I could see ten times as many stars as I'd ever been able to before. I was awed by the beauty of the cosmos and didn't even need Carl Sagan to ramble on about how special it was.

When I finally did hit the rack I was sawing logs right away. I even felt a little more secure with my door locked. When I woke the next morning I stirred up the fire, washed my face with my running water and took a leak in the drain hole. I figured the urine would drain away at once, but I'd keep my nose at attention to make sure.

I rewarded myself this morning with fried Spam, hot grits, and two fried eggs of the four dozen I'd brought. I even opened one of the bags of Camper's All Purpose Baking Mix Rose had made for me. She said all I had to do was mix it with water and bake it in the Dutch oven.

I even remembered the recipe she'd found on an Internet page:

8 Cups All Purpose Flour
1/2 Cup Powdered Milk
5 TBS Baking Powder
4 tsp Salt

I could use as much or as little as I wanted at one time and zip the plastic bag's closure on the rest to use later.

The six biscuits were good and they perked up my breakfast. They made me remember something I wanted to be sure and look for later though. Honey. Rose had raved that honey was nature's perfect food and she thoroughly researched equipment and techniques needed for gathering it.

It was surprising it could be done with so little special stuff. The main thing needed besides a hood is a bee smoker. You load it with natural combustibles, which will smolder in low oxygen conditions, and the small bellows gives you a shot of smoke when wanted. Of course you repeat as needed. For some reason smoke calms honey bees and keeps them very tranquil while you fuck with their hive.

There was even a special size bit for my brace. It was for drilling a hole near the bottom of the hollow tree to drain honey and the hole it made fit some special wooden faucets to install so I could turn the honey on and off. I was looking forward to trying it all on a bee tree if I could find one, but I wasn't looking forward to being stung if it didn't work as advertised.

There was no honey today though and there wouldn't be any until I made a discovery. Still, breakfast was good, even if I did cook it myself. Hell, it was the first bread I'd ever cooked and that part worked out fine.

My electrical system was up for assembly today. It was completely Rose's idea and I'd felt it was senseless to start with. Rose had nearly worn the Internet out researching it though. Her main complaint was web pages which evangelized energy conservation, but furnished no real information.

I can still remember her saying, "They're a bunch of pie in the sky ditzes, wailing and bemoaning the wonder of nature while they use a blow-dryer half an hour every morning and don't actually know shit about what it takes to get electricity from wind.

"They remind me of Al Gore trying to tell everyone else to conserve while his own home is a black hole for disappearing energy. His house uses more power than a small town."

The little rant let me know to keep my mouth shut for anything except that sounds great when she laid out my new energy policy.

Of course she was right. We'd already tried out the small wind turbine generators she ordered. They were small so she insisted on two. They both worked great back home in East Texas and if the wind I'd felt up on the plateau was any indicator I was going to have plenty of electricity.

The things were much smaller than I'd have thought and it all worked by magic, or at least automatically. All I had to do was top a nearby tree up on the upper plateau and mount one. The blades were only five feet long and it didn't weigh nearly as much as it looked like it should. The spool of cable weighed more.

After putting on my tree climbing gear I packed the equipment to the plateau on my dolly, found a suitably large oak near the edge and started climbing. I trimmed limbs with my rigger's axe mostly, some of them needed a handsaw and of course I used the handsaw to top it at about twenty-five feet.

The strong mount was designed to clamp around a pole's top and worked fine on a topped tree. There were attachments to add guy wires but supposedly they weren't needed unless the pole was forty or more feet tall. Putting the blades back on it was the biggest pain and that wasn't even much bother.

I made the cable connections, climbed down, buried the cable out to the edge of the plateau, and then unrolled it until it hit the ground near my cave's entrance. I even had a shit load of cable left over.

Back at the ranch I had to spend some time attaching clamps to keep the cable out of the way of the door and also to route it into unused spaces inside. The trickiest part was filling the two massive high-tech twelve-volt batteries with acid. There was an inverter and a voltage regulator to install, but most of that was by the numbers from the instruction manual. And there was light, or electricity so far.

The batteries were fully charged already and were operable after the acid was added. I installed a small florescent light fixture, turned it on, and now we had light, and plenty of it. Of course Rose had made sure I had the correct cords, plugs, and adapters for everything.

After I assembled my knock down desk I set up the special computer she'd had built for this trip and accessed the information she paid someone to gather and load into it.

She'd gone on and on about terabyte drives and DVDs and so on, but I'd mostly tuned it out. She showed me exactly how to look things up and how to play MP3s and that was all I wanted to know.

Hellfire, it might be nice to have Willie and Jerry Jeff sing me to sleep. Having Chris Ledoux sing asking the first woman I found here "What You Gonna Do With A Cowboy?" might be fun too. She sure as hell wouldn't be able to hide me from her friends.