The wind

Mike and I got the tipi up by about 12:30. Three, four hours. It is not a job I could have done alone, it is not a job I would do again. Practice would make it easier, but 60 pounds of canvas along a 22 foot pole is hard. Even following instructions, which is also hard, at least for a couple of guys who think they know how everything should work just by looking at it.

Jon stopped by on his motorcycle and carved down the ends on the stitching sticks. Thankfully, he did not offer suggestions.

We didn’t have enough cord to tie all the stakes to the ground, but I knew I would be going to town later and could pick up some more.

Yesterday I went to the seed company and bought four large packages of a slow growing bunch grass. I hoped to plant it and let it grow a little thicker than some of the local fescues. After the tipi was up, Mike went over to move rock with the track hoe, and I spread the seed over the new drain field. The seed was light and flew gently in front of the spreader. Along with 8 oz. of wildflowers.

It isn’t going to be a lawn. Even though the girls would like a lawn, I made myself a promise 10 years ago when we moved out of the log house that I would never mow a lawn again. I haven’t so far. And the goal of this concrete and steel barn on an 80 acre ridge hill top is to not be pinned by household chores.

I put the seed down in a crisscross pattern to spread it evenly, and ran with the spreader when I mixed in the wildflower seed to get some coverage. Mike came over with the track hoe to “walk it in” to the dirt. The powdery dust flew up, I tried to water the soil a bit to keep the bit of wind from carrying the dust and seed away. Mike pointed out that wet dirt would just stick to the tracks of the hoe so I stopped.

At about 2:30 I took the spreader back to the rental store, Mike was going to call it a day, too. We had had a good week. The rough plumbing is in the mostly graded subloor, packed and ready for the concrete guy to come wire for the slab on Monday. The heating guy can come tie his radiant tube to the wire, then we can pour the slab, and start framing the walls. The septic is in. We have power, we have water. It has been a good three weeks, and next Thursday we take off to go race in Seattle.

I was still in town when the light breeze of earlier became a howling wind. There was a big build up of clouds over the mountains to the west, a storm surf of clouds held at bay by Mt. Jefferson and Mt. Washington, the Three Sisters. But though the clouds were pinned, the wind howled in, angry it seemed. It made the trailer shake and feel insubstantial.

It buffeted the tipi, but even without all the stakes, it held. Inside, the poles creaked against the rough rope. I quickly cut cord to finish tying stakes down, but with its respectful conical shape, the organic weight of canvas, the tipi seems impervious to the wind.

Not my drain field. When I walked out to move the sprinklers, my $80 of seed, two hours of spreading, and an hour of Mikes time pressing the seed down, were pretty much gone. The wind had taken the flour-like soil, the feather like seeds, off to my neighbor’s place, abraded the surface right down to the crust of the last watering.

At my frustrated suggestion, the girls and I lit the smudge stick that came with the tipi, I was hoping to perhaps buy us a little grace from the wind. It didn’t work, at least not yet. It was obvious hubris anyway. The ancestors could tell lighting the stick was a bribe, not thanks from a pure heart.