Buddy Blog

At the beginning of July, so many people came in to town that I nearly stopped working on the house for about a week just to visit. Before my work-to-do-conscious caught up to me, however, a dozen such visitors came out to labor on a beautiful Saturday and refueled my vim.
One of them, JoAnna Ellingsen wrote about her experience before returning to Columbia where she's been teaching high school in a small town. She is moving into a new life in the big city of Bogota now. Here's what she wrote:

Big Bay House Building July 2009

I wasn’t sure if I should even go. The $250 car I bought last summer had a slow leak in the front right tire, and the starter was getting iffier and iffier. I knew the house was tucked in pretty deep on the way to Big Bay, and I wasn’t sure that I could get cell reception if I got stuck. Or lost. Mike drew me a map, on the back of an envelope at the bar the night before, but even with my faith in his topographical skills, the map gave little assurance that I could get there… I get lost with even the best map. I got lost once on the beach. I don’t need to tell you that a beach is a straight shoot. Water on one side, land on the other. You can only go one of two ways. Yet, in looking for…damn, I don’t even remember who or what, but in looking, I got lost and couldn’t figure out where to go… but I DID have cell reception and could call someone for directions even though all I needed was a simple go right or go left… Anyway, the point is, I just wasn’t sure if I should go.

But I did.

But first, I took a bath in Lake Superior. Molly said that even though the waves were pretty big and it wasn’t more than 65 degrees outside, the lake should be warm, and it would be a great day for bringing the shampoo down to the beach. So we did… The wind hadn’t blown as much of the illustrious warm top water into shore as Molls had expected, but we soldiered through the slightly painful wading to the ankles… to the knees… to the hips… and finally the 1, 2, 3-first dunk under. I let out a screech when I came back up, but lathered up anyway knowing there would only be two or three more dunks to go before I could say that I got clean in the greatest of all great lakes on such a beautiful, windy, white- capped day…

So I dried off and headed for Big Bay in just my bathing suit with clothes in the backseat to change into…I was already an hour late, and this wasn’t Colombia.

The map was good, and right where it said I should, I turned off the main road, and then off the smaller road, and then off of that. I went over what Mike called a bridge, but was really just planks of wood allowing passage over a little creek.

I got out of my car and put my jeans on as I stood between my car door and seat. Mike saw me and pointed the way to the huge beautiful house they were building…As I walked in, I heard banging hammers and saw people laying flooring… I felt a little like a stranger… everyone there seemed like they had been working on that house since the beginning of time, or at least just the get-go… everyone seemed to know what they were doing… EVERYONE had a carpenter’s belt… I was just glad I remembered socks and shoes…like I said, I wasn’t sure I should have gone…

Mike gave me the tour through the bones of the body of the place built for bodies and bones, and I smiled the whole time—more at the flashbacks I had of him playing trombone in 10th grade- super imposed on his 33 year-old self directing construction—than at the vision he had of the house… not that the vision wasn’t good—great really—it’s just that I have always had a hard time seeing things that aren’t really existing yet, and an easier time seeing things that haven’t been there for a long, long time… So I was there to pound a nail or two and I made it clear that that was my intention. I was set up with Rachel, a woman of obvious strength whom I had met the night before when this nail-pounding plan was just an idea… Of course, Rachel had a carpenter’s belt. She seemed like a goddamned house-building goddess. Mike’s wife and my friend, Erica introduced us, and as we checked my tires to make sure they were okay, I learned she was one of those crazy energy healers. I had had an ear-ache for a while and half-heartedly asked if she could fix it. Saying nothing, she put her hand to the side of my face and brushed something away. She continued to touch and brush like that, occasionally picking something out of the air and discarding it like a nit. Listen, I don’t spend much time in vans. I'm tethered to my cell phone, and I’m more than occasionally not politically correct. I dig folk music, but don't listen to it much, except for Mike’s, and I leave the lights on when I leave home because I don’t give a good goddamn about the universe when I’m coming home to a dark house. I’m much more afraid of the dark than I am concerned for saving the planet. While I love my many hippie friends, and often envy their days and ways, it is sure that I will choose Prada over patchouli any day of the week and that my love affair with sequins and stillettos will likely be the most lasting relationship of my life. With that said, I didn’t disbelieve what Rachel said she could do, but I certainly wasn’t planning to be surprised. Hence the term surprise I guess… Rachel pulled the pain out of my ear like it was on the end of a string. Erica teared up. I really didn’t know what to do. One minute I had a pain in my ear, and the next, I didn’t. It was that simple. Then she was done. And there was work to do. Mike explained to the two-man crew of Rachel and me about the physics of freezing water below a house and his ideas about how to circumvent it. There was something about insulating the ground, or was it the house? Insulating something, with something, which involved digging and shielding with wood and then something else… Rachel was set on copper… and Mike thought… and shook his head about expense…but then, as she would continue to do for the rest of the day, Rachel insisted that cooper could be done… Mike didn’t fight her… he liked the idea, and shucks, maybe the price of copper would go down like pork bellies. After Mike’s beautiful rendition of what seemed like an almost comical impression of his dad teaching about whatever he teaches at the university, he finished his discussion of subterranean insulation. Then he passed me a can of spray foam insulation and let the games begin. Rachel and I sprayed cracks and then checked my tires again while we waited for the foam to dry. Then we nailed boards and then cut more boards to fit – her with her hippy handsaw—that chick is a master with a handsaw… Anyway… we built something… and from what I understand, it will buried under thousands of pounds of iron-enriched red soil, but, I’m here to tell you, we built it, goddamnit, we built it. Then, after some chatting and beer we settled down for a dinner of the best black bean burritos I’ve ever eaten in my life. Erica was a nervous homemaker in her home that wasn’t even finished yet. It was almost as though she thought we were surprised that she hadn’t called in for uniformed help to serve the hors d’oeuvres… I could relate to that feeling… no matter how much we deny the need to be Mrs. Cleaver, there’s something in every American girl that wants to don a lacy apron and pearls and smile as though making a dinner for people is as simple and relaxing as fanning oneself on the beach… but she came out shining as we all devoured her cooking and went up for seconds… I remember discussing child psychology and how to make very small children stop being loud without saying NO! But then someone just turned to the child banging the pot with a spoon and said NO! And it worked. I wonder how many times that theory has been proposed, agreed upon and debunked in the same breath… And then I had to leave. I hugged the children and my new friend Rachel. I hugged Mike. I teared up with Erica as I hugged her goodbye. I wasn’t going farther or for longer than any other time I had left, but we were both feeling this time more than before…maybe it’s just that as we mirror each other in our thirty-something faces, she and I are both struck lately by the feeling and amazement of old friends and are both just a little more than a little disturbed by how time is screeching past us as the notches on the doorpost climb… I drove off to find Brook… home from pennsylvania… her new home… and I teared up again entering the Sloan-Beauregard Compound as another wave of memories threw me over my sail again.