I know I need to explain, and I promise to do so soon.
For now, I’m just dropping the bomb.
I’ll be back to clean up the pieces later this week….
Here it goes:
Have you ever dreamed of place peaceful, private, safe, simply sustainable and attainable, beautiful and blissful, an off grid sanctuary tucked into the mountains along a wild river that symbiotically nurtures and nourishes as you tend lovingly to the land?
In the far, far north of California, there is a land that few know even exists. A land of wild mountains, untamed rivers and free spirits. A land of outlaws and outcasts or folks often just a little off kilter that somehow balance one another beautifully, caring for the land as they care for the community. It’s not the California you know. Most don’t know. We’d like to keep it that way. Safe to say, it’s a hidden gem, a secret treasure, a forgotten bit of paradise that feels so far away from all the stresses and pressures and problems that too many have come to think is how the world has come to be.
There is another way.
Nearly thirty years ago, by some serendipitous situation, I found it. Six years ago, I returned. It was like returning home, though a home neglected and in need of the blood, sweat and tears, dreams and vision, that Bob and I were able to pour into this place. We healed the land as we healed our hearts… and in the process of this symbiotic nurturing, Riverwind came to be, and we have been blessed to be a part of her story…
The story continues. It’s time for a new chapter. We have chosen to move on. It’s complicated. I’ll explain later. But for now, I share this.
Plant trees. Got a dozen in the ground on our fifth day here. Native aspen and baby blue spruce planted on the hill behind the outhouse. Just feels good to give back to the land, whether we are here to enjoy them, or someone else is.
Second thing is this. Get the garden in. Well, it’s not much of a garden. Eight feet by thirty inches. “What are you gonna grow?” our neighbors back in CA ask. “Radishes?” Not much else would fit in that space.
But I’m hoping it’s just enough space to fit in the plants I started and brought. A little kale (admittedly, the chickens “pruned” these plants rather severely). A few pepper plants, a zucchini, some herbs A half dozen tomato plants already laden with green fruit because they were born in raised in California. Don’t know if they’ll ever turn red, but a gals gotta do what a gals gotta do. And this gal grows things. And yes, maybe I’ll get a few radishes going because seems like you always can grown them.
Admittedly I’m missing the abundance of fresh veggies I was able to provide for us year round, but Bob reminds me: There were no fresh veggies when we moved to California either. There was no garden! These things take time.
You gotta start somewhere, so this is how we’re starting.
A chilly 33 degrees this morning, but chillier when I walk the dog at dawn down by the creek and spook off a couple of cow elk bedded in the frosty bunch grass.
Now the sun is up and our world is already warming. In this elevation, that sun is intense!
So is the elevation.
My nose bled last night (again) and this morning I have (another) headache. I’m surprised and disappointed to be having trouble adjusting to the elevation, after living at 1,500 feet in Northern California for the past six years. I think we’re at 10,200 feet here. I spent 17 years living year round at 9,800 feet and didn’t have trouble then. Does this additional 400 feet really make such a difference, or am I getting too soft and old to handle this?
~
Now that more is going on here –with both building and writing – I will try to post twice a week, Mondays and Fridays. It’s good discipline for me to finish my thoughts, as well as a challenge to honor and hone my craft. Plus it might keep my ramblings a little shorter each time. As always, my hope is that you will enjoy reading and seeing as much as I enjoy sharing with you. I’d really appreciate your feedback – please let me know.
Things shifted overnight from, “We got this,” to “Holy crap, are we gonna get this?”
We leave in one week.
So far, the stress hasn’t come from thinking about building a cabin from the ground up in one season (we’ll see how far we get), at an elevation of 10,000 feet, while tending to horses, chickens, dog, and garden (yes, I am bringing a “portable garden”) all the while spending the summer together in a 14 foot camper circa 1964 without running water or electricity but with an outhouse nearby, a bucket to bathe in, and as usual, no where near neighbors, pavement or cell phone service. That said, we are setting up a simple solar system just large enough to charge cordless tools and operate starlink from time to time. Our compromise at modern living.
What has been harder is preparing to leave this place behind.
That’s where our attentions and efforts have been. Mowing, weedwacking, weeding, watering, organizing, tidying, trying to get this place in a space that will safely hold its center in our absence. And still finding time to be with beloved friends and neighbors, the river, the wind, the air and essence and little bit of tended wild that is this wonderful place.
And of course… there is this. The garden. My baby.
For anyone who has ever tended to the land with nearly as much love as we gave to our children, you know what it’s like.
Seems like this baby is always the biggest user of my time. Sucks time away and I don’t even notice it’s disappeared until I wonder where the day has gone and why I am so hungry. But you know, they say it’s those kinds of things, those things that you totally lose yourself in, and lose track of time, that show you where your true passion lies. Gardening is one. Most anything outdoors, I guess. Working the horses, riding, hiking, and writing inspired by the wild…
It wasn’t always that way, and maybe that’s part of what makes it so endearing to me.
Here are a few “before” pictures Bob pulled up of this land, to share the perspective of space where the garden now grows.
This was a baby born in a painful birth of being scraped with a skid steer to clear the open slate.
That was nearly six years ago. Almost six years of watching her grow, spread her wings, and fly, deeply grounded. Six years of hauling a shit load of top soil from the other side of our land, mail ordered earthworms, innumerable bags of steer manure and organic amendments to get her growing, and shoveling manure every single day I was here. Keeping the poop in the loop, and the loop ever growing.
And now, see what a few years can do?
To her, I have given blood, sweat and tears. Lots of tears. I cried a lot when we first broke ground. “It will never work, it will never grow, it will never be beautiful,” I would cry to Bob quite regularly. As usual, he’d just patiently listen and watch as I got back to work. I am glad to say I was wrong.
She has provided for us in kind year round. For a couple with a primarily vegetable based diet, that’s something to be proud of. Yes, it means we eat simply and yes, it gets boring at times. Believe me, by March we’re usually pretty sick of old winter squash and bitter kale while we’re waiting for the new crops to outgrow the slugs after winter’s heavy rains.
I’m sitting there now, flip flops kicked off and toes thick in grass, listening to swallows chatter about their nesting box while swallowtail butterflies and hummingbirds dance around the profusion of brilliant colors just beginning to emerge for the season. And all the while this intoxicating fragrance of rose, oh! all these roses! gracefully bowing as they bend in abundance, most of which were started by sticks I stuck in the ground and trusted they would grow. They did. While meanwhile and always, this space is serenaded by the ever present hum of the river that wraps around this land.
Of all the work we did here, clearing, cleaning, caring, opening dry and dead and overgrown, trash strewn and fire damaged that was this land when we first arrived, the garden has grown to the crown jewel of the land.
Beside the roses, what I’m most enamored by is all the fruit trees we’ve gifted to the land: apples and pears, plum and persimmons, walnut and almond and fig. And most endearing to me are the peach trees started from seed. You see, four years ago, the Old Man gave me five pits. He had saved them ten years and handed them over with reverence. Told me they were the best peaches he ever had, so he planned on planting them some day. I gave it a try. Put those pits in a pot with some soil and set them out in the garden all winter and lo and behold, by spring, shoots shot up and last year, I picked the first peaches. A humble start, but worth it indeed. This year, those trees, though still somewhat small, are laden with fruit and bending to the weight of their juicy promise… which (don’t remind me, please!) I will not be here to enjoy. Funny things is, one of those peach trees looked a little different. Turns out it’s a nectarine. I love these little surprises in life.
One final breath out here in this little bit of paradise, then time to get back to work, loading the last of the lumber into the horse trailer that will carry a lot more than horses on this trip across the West.
A deep breath. With our departure just a week away, yes, it gets scary at times.
Scared? Yes. Change is always scary, isn’t it? Change of pace, change of place.
Change of heart?
Hopefully only a heart growing, expanding, unfurling like the roses surrounding me.
Mine is not a fearless heart.
I would rather it be a courageous heart.
For I would rather a heart that loves and cares and longs deeply enough that it knows what fear feels like, and chooses to love and care and long above that fear. I would rather a heart courageous enough to step forth into fear, like stepping into the stirrup and settling onto the back of a bronc.
And wouldn’t you know. The biggest tree that fell in the latest storm crushed a shed we built two years back.
A friend once told me I had the best luck of anyone she knew.
And the worst.
So Bob’s on the road and I’m trying to get stuff done while not tied to the mill (and kitchen) which feels like how my days have been spent the past few weeks.
Good news is he’s hauling this beautiful big load of lumber, a pretty impressive nine thousand plus pounds of beams and boards we milled, to our high-mountain-Colorado-one-day-will-be-home.
Me, I have big plans of my own. Tilling the garden and getting the last of the cover crop seeded before the next rains. Putting in a couple more rows of spring crops. And mowing the waaaaaaaay overgrown grass. With a simple push mower and somewhat steep hill, this kicks butt even when the grass is manageable. The lawn seeks revenge for neglect.
Of course it doesn’t turn out as planned. What does?
See, I was planning on cheating from my “no till” stance by getting the old Troy Build rototiller fired up. It’s about as old and a helluva lot heavier than me, but man is this a beast of burden and it gets the job done. Guess I’m gonna have to get that spading fork out after all (or wait for Bob to return if my ego allows) because after pulling, pulling, pulling only to realize it’s out of fuel, I pour in gas only to watch it pour out some tiny little hole I’d never seen before. After putting a coffee can underneath to catch that spill, I call Bob on the road.
“Turn the tank off,” he wisely advises. Duh. Mechanics are not my thing.
So I do. But then I can’t turn the rusty dial back on when I’m done doing some other procedures Bob talks me through to try an fix the beast. And then that shut off, well, it’s gonna be shut off for a while because the damn thing breaks.
Well, I did manage to get the spring crops in and mow before the rain, but the cover crop will have to wait.
In the meanwhile, I invite you to take a tour of the garden, humbly as it was yesterday without a fresh tilling, is today in the rains, and then bragging on how it was in the bounty of last summer if you care to see one of the reasons why it’s so hard for me to leave this place.
So that thing about place.
I finally figured this out. You probably did long ago. I’m slow. Slow living. Slow learning. Whatever.
Our place is where we belong.
It may be a physical place, person, community, a state to live in, a state of mind.
But here’s the thing:
It all comes down to connection.
Connection, as in joining, being a part, somehow linked, united or bound together.
Connection determines our place.
Connection defines where we belong.
Whatever we feel connected to – close friends, your place in community, the old family farm, a mountain, the sea, the school where you have been teaching for thirty years – these things give us a sense of belonging. Different for us all, and always changing at least a little bit because that’s how life goes, that sense of belonging that connection creates helps us feel stable, secure, grounded. And we all need that.
There’s also that thing about connection being intertwined with commitment, contribution and care. but let’s talk about that another time, because this already threatens to be way too long. That happens. Especially when Bob’s not around, the rains force me indoors, and I find myself talking to the dogs and my self way too much.
Okay, so here’s the interesting twist I’m finally figuring out. Connection with others (the “where ” and “with whom” we belong) begins by connecting with self.
You know. It’s that “home is inside” wisdom my old friend used to say.
No, it’s not selfish. It’s still means giving more than you take, because end of the day, what we do for others is still what matters most and gives us in return some sense of meaning (and yes, belonging). But it’s about making sure you have something to give to begin with. Starting with the basics. The foundation. Figuring where (and with whom) we feel safe, and can be ourselves. Where our soul feels nourished and nurtured. For me, that means my husband, our son, and a strong sense of solitude, spirit, simplicity, and the natural and animal world. It’s time writing, growing food, working with horses, and luckily, yes, even building! Because these things make my inside shine. They may not define me, but they do define that sense of place I’m trying to find.
You know the feeling. It’s that place, space or state where you lose sense of time and feel safe and have trouble leaving. The place you long for, where you long to be. It’s more of a feeling than a physical person or place. It’s that knowing we are where we are meant to be, doing what we’re meant to be doing. That is belonging. We all long to belong. All of us. We are hardwired to want to belong. And when we lack that belonging or feel we don’t, connection is broken, and we somehow feel broken too.
It’s that happy place.
For me, the physical place has changed and may continue to change, as long as it contains an element of rugged and wild. But the essence remains the same. Like my core nature. It’s what feeds me, and in kind, allows me to feed others even more.
With that, I am starting to see it need not be so much “where” we are, but “who” we are that allows us to figure out where we belong. And somewhere in the equation, to notice the difference between “belonging” and “clinging”. Clinging holds us down. Belonging allows us to soar in place. Not to hold on because of fear. But because of freedom.
Maya Angelou famously stated, “You only are free when you realize you belong no place — you belong every place — no place at all. The price is high. The reward is great”.
It sounds paradoxical, but I believe it’s all true.
Sometimes I wish I had a crystal ball or could read tea leaves or somehow figure out answers to those big pressing questions, the easy way. But life isn’t easy. And easy isn’t always good.
When people ask me, “Where are you from?” it feels like a trick question. I hesitate, look up and off to the left, and try to come up with a clever response. It’s complicated. Might be easier if someone asked, “What do you do?” (That sounds so 80s and 90s. Do people even say that anymore?). Can’t say I know how to answer that one too.
You know that expression about the apple not falling far from the tree, right? But that’s assuming the tree has solid roots. And what if it does not? If I stayed to close to my rootless tree, I’d still be in Jersey. Nothing wrong with that, just not where I was meant to be.
Surely I’m not the only one out there trying to figure this out.
The answers will be different for us all, but maybe the process is the same.
We gotta listen to our heart and soul.
We gotta listen with our heart and soul.
My research is based on life, living and learning to listen to the wisdom of that quiet heart and soul.
I don’t have the privilege of a college degree. I left high school at 16 and learned to make do, make up and do without.
I learned what’s real based on what I saw, heard and felt, NOT what I read or was told.
I am still learning.
As for place, this much I know. Finding my place has been the trip of my life.
I’m still not there.
On one hand, I long to belong to one place, to remain long enough to watch trees I plant grow big and fat and fruitful, to have it all built and done and be able to kick back and watch, tend, and care for lovingly, to sit on the front porch with a cup of coffee and my honey and look around with contentment and know we are finally done building and need to build no more.
On the other hand, I’m not ready to settle down and do the same thing year after year just yet. I’m curious. Adventurous, in a quiet, simple way. I want to experience and try and do more. Not big fancy elaborate things like trips around the world and luxuries that aren’t my thing. I want to know what it feels like to break ground and get to work and feel the pride of creating a family ranch that holds us – my self, my husband, our son, our pets and livestock, with gardens and trees (yes, I’m going to grow at 10,000 feet!). I want to be bundled up and see the expansive sunrise on Winter Solstice from the front deck we will build, or the summer sun rise as the full moon sets from the top of an unnamed mountain behind our ranch.
I know. I want a lot. Simple stuff, but a lot of it.
But most important, I want to be at that place of belonging that is not a place out there, but a space in here. Within me.
It doesn’t matter where I am. It matters who I am.
I am not the land.
There’s more to me than the mud on my boots and under my nails.
Though that is how I chose to live.
Here or there?
California? Colorado?
I won’t be losing either way.
Why can’t I have both?
Maybe I can. For now, that’s what I intend to do.
Here and there.
But of course, there is this. The cold hard reality of affording your dreams. Money. Geez, I hate talking about that. I have always believed I had enough (though my son can tell you stories of the poverty we lived with) and things just work out. Kinda. Sorta. More or less.
It always seems to work out. Not always as we plan. Sometimes even better.
In the meanwhile, as I try to figure out how to make this all work, I’ll work on finding that place inside. The place where I belong.
(looking back at the healthy forest surrounding our little bit of paradise – that little clearing in the center – here in the far north of California)
~
Contemplating slow living and the complexities of the simple life.
So much of that is based on making the most of what you have, and doing it yourself.
As in, if you want lumber for building…
You fall trees, skid them, clean the slash, load logs on the mill, saw them to size, stack them.
And then in this case… haul them from here to there.
California to Colorado.
Simple living, sounding somewhat complicated.
I’ll explain.
This is my first attempt at sharing a video on this blog. I want to show you what milling is like. However, it’s hard to hold a device in one hand AND crank the mill with the other. So I may have some figuring out to do. In the meanwhile, go ahead and say it: Cinematography is not my strong point.
Bob did a lot better. This is the video he took after I whined about how bad mine was.
~
So about the mill.
It’s slow, old, free and ours.
It was left behind at another “high and wild” property we once owned, just for a little while. Another fixer upper. That place was a little TOO high. At an elevation of 11,400 feet, turned out to be too much even for Bob and me. We got headaches, bloody noses, had trouble sleeping, got battered by the elements… but we did fix the place up nicely and flipped it.
And, bonus: we got this mill out of the deal.
Yeah, I know, it’s old. Go ahead and say it (Bob does all the time): too old! It’s crazy slow. You gotta crank the wheel for several minutes just to raise or lower the carriage that holds the blade, then crank some more to move the carriage as the blade inches it way through the wood. Crank again to raise it, crank it back to the beginning, then lather, rinse, repeat. It’s a lot of cranking and a helluva a test of patience. Apparently I have a lot, because even as the one doing all that cranking, every time Bob shows me pictures or starts talking about a new mill, I’m quick to shut him down.
“This is what we have,” I remind him (and myself). And though it’s slow, check it out: it works. We’ve used more modern mills. You know, those fancy ones with bells and whistles, flashing lights, keyboards, electronics or at least hydraulics that cost about as much as a mortgage. This one is gear and chain and crank drive, do your own measuring and your own math, and it was free. Simple. Slow living, slow milling, see what I mean?
Slow as it is, I love it. Yes, I love milling. I love the smell of the wood, and working out in the elements (most times). I love watching dead trees turn into valuable lumber. And I love working with my husband, which after twenty something years building together has brought us to that place of operating in relative wordlessness and this flow that feels almost like a dance. We know what needs to be done, move in unison, use hand signals, nods and knowing glances (and probably a few grunts) to converse. Slow and steady, it works for us.
Despite clothes, hair, and all parts of exposed (and somehow even covered) skin getting enrobed in sawdust every afternoon, the pride in making our own lumber from our own trees is a thrill for me. Maybe I’m an odd sort, but I’m in the right place.
And slow as the mill and the process is, it does work. Beautifully. We milled all the dimensional lumber for that “high and wild” remodel with this mill. There, a buddy milled all the logs for an entire cabin from the beetle kill trees on that land. When we moved from Colorado to California, we brought the mill with us and processed all the lumber for this remodel we’re living in now (you can see some of it HERE.). And maybe when we’re done milling here this spring, chances are we’ll move it back.
Here and now, because of that mill and the beetle killed timber on this land, the majority of materials for our upcoming build are free. (Oh and a big shout out of thanks to my sis and her man for the incredible windows we scored as they replaced theirs!) Beat that. Makes slow somehow okay that way.
The process starts with Bob doing most of the work you forget needs to be done before you even get to mill: falling trees, delimbing and clearing slash, skidding logs, loading them onto the mill. Then I get to do my magic.
I’m the (not necessarily) smooth operator of this old roaring beast, which entails a lot of cranking as I said: cranking her up and down and back and forth, moving the blade through the log with each pass. Sloooooowly. Like everything about this process. Yet… beautifully! At least it’s beautiful to me.
We’ve used it so long, done it so much, by now it’s muscle memory for me. I’m so used to the sound and feel I can do it with my eyes closed. And often I have to. Because when the wind blows my way, which often times it does, so does the sawdust.
And after almost every pass, there’s the joint effort of rolling the log on the mill, which involves a bunch of prying with peaveys and few grunts and groans, then carrying each board off to be sorted and stacked.
Board by board, beam by beam, slowly we’re amassing what we need to build a new home.
It’s exciting. Rewarding in so many ways. Not the least of which is that in the process of taking down trees to mill, we’re cleaning up our land. See, a lot of the doug fir is dying. Beetle kill. Not even close to devastating and depressing as it was back fifteen years or so ago in southern Colorado when we witnessed the demise of 90% of the blue spruce trees there. Year after year, mile after mile, mountain after mountain, a giant wave, gradual and all consuming, turned the hills from green to gray. All those trees, killed by a tiny beetle no bigger than a grain of rice.
Pine beetles, bark beetles, call them what you will. They’re in California too. Only here in Trinity County, at least on our land and the hills surrounding us here, it doesn’t feel devastating. It isn’t. See, here, when one tree dies, another spreads it wings and seems to take flight in the newfound open space. So as some of our doug fir die, the black oak, white oak, live oak, oregon ash, alder, dogwood and madrone already in place, open with the added air space and water that the crowding conifers otherwise devour. It feels somehow natural, normal, beautiful to witness this change over the past nearly six years we’ve been here, as parts of the land unfurls like a giant exhale, revealing the sky and a sense of spaciousness, and we watch as part of our land shifts from a conifer forest to a healthy oak grove. The diversity of species here is remarkable. You barely notice the loss of evergreens were it not for the low stumps left behind.
Thanks to these beetles, we have plenty of trees to build with.
Damn. After the devastation our Colorado mountains endured due to those little buggers, I never, ever thought I say something nice about them.
And so it goes: if you want lumber, fall trees, clear slash, etc. and then… haul to Colorado.
So about that part about hauling to Colorado…
Really?
Yes, really.
See, even after milling off the rotted two to three inches that many of these big trees often have around their girth, what we’re left with is a lot of lumber. Good lumber. Really good, and better than what we’d mill in Colorado. These dead doug fir have heavier, heartier wood than beetle kill blue spruce. Wood strong enough for framing, thick enough to stack for walls, and dense enough to hold heat inside the cabin they’ll one day be.
That’s what this work is all about now. Like mining for gold. Getting down to the good stuff. And this wood is good.
And here’s the thing. Time is of the essence. Sure it would be great to take our time and log and skid and peel and notch and slowly stack logs from our Colorado land where this house will be. And for our next project, that’s what we plan to do. (Yes, knowing us…)
But for now, for starters, for just getting a cabin built, quick and simple and safe and sound, lets be real. We won’t have that time this year. The only chance we have of getting this project done and having a roof over our head and solid structure to winter in (which in the high wild mountains of Colorado is a serious thing) is to do it this way – mill the lumber now, while we can, before the crunch of summer building begins. Or spend a lot of money we don’t have and hire some crew to do it all, wham bam.
Tempting as that sounds some times, that is not what we’ll do.
Slow and steady, we’ll get it done, by making the most of what we have. A lot of beetle killed trees and one old mill. And we’ll work around what we don’t have: time! Building a house from the ground up in the short season between the ground thawing (May) and the ground freezing again (October) – and building something solid and secure enough to winter in – is already a daunting project for a couple that some say have a few too many years behind them to be taking such a project on. Oh yeah, and in addition to the cabin… there’s getting the solar, septic, greenhouse, horse shelter, chicken coop and wood shed (full) done during that time frame as well.
Geez, when I think of all that, I wonder how the hell we’re going to get it done. I probably shouldn’t be sharing our plans as it’s not going to help with our mounting stress.
Just get to work and get it done and stop whining.
And all the while, try to have fun, find the magic and joy and awe all around, be good to each other, each and every day, no matter how slow it goes.
And really, that’s what we do.
So that was the part about “plans.” Haven’t even started sharing the part about “place.”
Guess I’ll save those deep thoughts for another day.
Gin Getz 
