Mensch tracht, Gott lacht.
(Man plans, God laughs.)
—Yiddish proverb
Finalizing the purchase details with Dick and Jean takes two minutes, four signatures, four handshakes, and two Kat hugs. Dick closes the agreement with, “Now remember, if you kids ever have trouble making your payment, just come talk to us. We like you guys. Things happen. So if you have a problem, you just come talk to us.” This is not an empty offer. He means it. Dick means everything he says — you know straight up where you stand with him.
But before we can legally close we need to wade through murky “legal title” waters. The St. Paul lawyer we hire to do the title search — a process to ensure the land has clear title from its first owner up to the most recent — eventually gives up. “You better hire a local guy who knows how to negotiate the land mines up there,” he mutters.
The first call from our second lawyer, our North Shore lawyer, starts with, “You know, no one really owns land in the United States . . . ,” words that have the unmistakable stickiness of red tape. The land is entangled in an Act of Congress dated February 26, 1857, a year before Minnesota was admitted into the Union. Our forefathers — wisely, but with no sensitivity to the fact it would cost us, Spike and Kat Carlsen, a chunk in lawyers’ fees 150 years later — set aside “sections numbered sixteen and thirty-six in every township of public lands in said state,” to “be granted to said state for the use of schools.” In short, the state could build a school on those sections or sell them to pay for schools. Our land sat firmly within section thirty-six. It seems ridiculous that ownership is in question after a century and a half, but lawyers deal with the ridiculous for a living. It finally takes verification from the Bureau of Land Management in Springfield, Virginia, to clear up that part of the title.
The lawyer wades through the forty-two entries in the Abstract of Title — a skinny booklet logging all the transactions, subdivisions, and permits connected to our parcel of land. He finds no delinquent taxes, judgments, or indications of hazardous wastes. He finds easements for the telephone and power companies and the highway department — all perfectly normal and all nipping around the heels of the notion that no one really owns land in the United States.
There are more fits and starts. The abstract gets lost in transit between the big-city and small-city lawyers. They have to track down a descendant of a previous owner out in Montana to sign some release papers. Finally the title is clear enough to make the transaction official. We take the next step — getting permits to build.
Obtaining a permit to build a house in some areas can be as painful as yanking a fishhook out of your eyelid. Every community has a different legal maze to negotiate. In most cases you initiate the process by submitting a complete set of blueprints to the local building department. These plans illustrate and specify details right down to the thickness of the roof sheathing and length of the fasteners used to secure it. It shows detailed cutaway sections of walls — working through drywall, vapor barrier, insulation, framing and sheathing materials, house wrap, siding, and exterior finish. There are various views that look like the hand of God has taken the roof off or used a large circular saw to cut through the center of the house to reveal its innards. There are often separate plumbing, electrical, and HVAC (heating, ventilation, and air conditioning) plans.
Once an inspector okays the plans, you purchase a building permit; the cost is contingent on the size and value of the structure. The permit for a typical $200,000 new structure in a typical community is about a grand — and as the value of your project rises, so does the price of the permit.
In most communities you need to have the work inspected at various stages. There’s a footing inspection to make sure the concrete footings you’re about to pour are on your property, deep enough, and on solid, undisturbed earth. You need a rough framing inspection to make sure the studs, joists, and rafters are beefy enough, numerous enough, and secured according to plan; that the plumber hasn’t cut a 6-inch hole through an 8-inch joist. You need a plumbing inspection to verify there are no leaks and everything is vented and flowing in the right direction. You need an insulation inspection — a step instituted during the 1980s energy crisis — to make sure the fiberglass and vapor barrier are installed right. In some micromanaged areas you even need a “drywall fastener” inspection to ensure you use the right nails or screws and that they’re spaced properly.
And you need a final inspection to make sure the stair railings are installed at the right height (34 to 38 inches above the nose of the tread, please), the firewall between garage and house is the right thickness (5⁄8-inch drywall so a garage fire won’t spread as fast), and all the bedrooms have egress windows (a minimum of a 20 by 24-inch clear opening, within 44 inches of the floor, so the average firefighter with an average air tank on his or her back can crawl in to rescue the average occupant). Plus lots more.
Some communities take purity of design a step further with “protective covenants” — an extra layer of rules imposed to maintain a certain look. Some developments have minimum square-footage requirements and mandate triple garages, a way of saying, “No boats, rusted teenagers’ cars, or lawn tractors in the driveway, pul-l-l-l-lease!” Some communities specify a limited palette of colors from which you may choose to paint the exterior of your home. One quaint community, Seaside, in the Florida Panhandle, has covenants dictating all houses have front porches and white picket fences, of which no two can be the same on the same street. Kat and I stayed at a bed-and-breakfast in a community that dictated that every house look at least 200 years old from the outside. At least one snooty community has a protective covenant that limits the number of dogs or cats a household can have to two.
My impression is that Oma Tupa — perched along Lake Superior, abutting state property and in the heart of vacationland — will be infested with covenants, permit requirements, and inspections. When I call the county offices, I’m told not only are there no protective covenants, there’s no building inspector. We need only a “Land Use” permit. When I ask what that involves, the clerk says, “Well, you give Walt a call, ya stomp around the land with him to make sure everything fits, and then he gives you a permit.”
It sounds easy, and is. The Land Use application is one and a half pages long — microscopic by bureaucratic standards. The other papers Walt brings list a few sensible requirements. There needs to be a “perc test” — to make sure the wastewater can percolate adequately into the ground — before installing the septic system. Our septic system has to be 50 feet from our well to minimize the chance that bacteria will leach into the groundwater. We’re so unsure of our financial wherewithal that we sign a “sewage treatment system exemption,” which gives us the right to use a portable toilet for the first year.
If the Building Codes Gods were to select just one regulation to enforce, the one I would lobby for hardest would be the septic regulations. Cabins used to be different animals. Not that long ago waste management meant putting a match to your garbage on a calm day, pest control involved picking up your shotgun, and sewage systems looked an awful lot like a shovel and a Sears catalog. Cabins were just a dot here and there along the lakeshore, and not that frequently visited. Sewage disposal wasn’t much of an issue. Mother Nature had plenty of give.
But then shacks that used to be seasonal cabins became year-round lake homes, and more and more dots appeared on the maps, and with the dots came people, and with the people came their sewage. Even those cabins that had advanced beyond the outhouse stage often had no more than a holding tank with an overflow pipe shooting into the lake.
Lake Waverly, where my folks had their cabin, literally turned green over the course of a few years from all the nitrates that slunk from toilet to lake. That, combined with the fertilizer people applied to their lawns— lawns that sloped down to the lake — made the lake unswimmable, unboatable, and, eventually, unfishable because of the proliferation of algae and seaweed and lack of oxygen. It required sewer lines, a waste treatment facility, a ginormous federal grant, and years for the lake to recover. It’s still recovering. I’m all for tip-top shape septic systems.
There are vague property setback requirements. Our dwelling needs to be 20 feet from the property lines on either side, 35 feet from the highway right-of-way, and 65 feet from the “vegetation line” of Lake Superior. We can’t pry a good definition of vegetation line from anyone. Does it mean 65 feet from the closest living plant along the shoreline? Does it mean from the biggest permanent plant, like a tree? Does lichen count? Was this 65 feet as the crow flies or as the land slopes? When I press one official by telling him we want to build as close to the lake as possible, he looks at me with a wry grin and says, “Yeah, well, that’s why most people buy lakeshore. I doubt anyone’s ever gonna go down there with a tape measure.” We soon discover the area favors a “don’t ask, don’t tell” philosophy. As long as you aren’t blatant about things, as long as you don’t piss off your neighbors, as long as you’re respectful, reasonable, and responsible, it’s okay.
We close on the land in August. To me that seems enough work for the year; we should ponder design, schedule, and finances over the winter. Kat has other ideas. She sees no reason we shouldn’t get the driveway in now, so we can dive and drive right in come spring.
This is one of the areas where Kat and I are different. I’m inclined to dawdle in matters of planning. Kat, on the other hand, just sprints. If I’m coal powered, Kat is nuclear. She has what physicists call “a vast storehouse of potential energy.” It’s a power source not apparent on the surface, an energy with a complicated source, an energy that’s seemingly inexhaustible. So the land, that to my way of thinking was to lie sleepy and fallow over the winter, is given a hotfoot.
Bradley builds the driveway. The task requires hauling in twenty truckloads of fill — 300 tons more or less — to create a level ribbon of driveway as it crawls diagonally down the embankment. It requires dumping a load, smoothing it with the dozer, compacting it, moving 10 feet down the newly created ramp, then repeating this process. He hauls in truckloads of boulders weighing up to five tons each, to stabilize the edge of the driveway. I ride along with him to pick up one load, and when we get to the top of the driveway, he turns to me and raises the hair on the back of my neck by growling, “Hey, why don’t you back ’er down?” We’re awed by Bradley and his machines, and their ability to turn what was an unwalkable slope into a drivable driveway.
Things snowball according to the “as long as” principle. It only makes sense for Bradley to dig a 4-foot-deep trench along the driveway as long as he’s there so the power and phone companies can drop their underground lines in. And as long as he’s at the bottom of the hill, we might as well have him put the septic system in. And as long as he’s still there he might as well clear a little spot for the cabin. And as long as we have a power cable running down the hill, we might as well mount a meter and outlet on a pole and have the power company hook us up to the grid, right? And as long as the land is cleared and there is a driveway and electricity, well, gosh, maybe we should have a load of lumber delivered so we’d be all set to go in the spring. Well, sheeee-it, as long as that lumber is there, we might as well start on that cabin, eh?
I celebrate the near-completion of the driveway by doing the “I love my Toyota” jump (even though the truck is a Dodge).
Kat and I aren’t hard-core environmentalists — we aren’t out there marking every anthill and seedling to protect them during excavation. We don’t apologize to each tree as we rev up the chain saw. But we do intend to tread gently on the land. We use yellow ribbons to mark the trees we want Bradley to take out when he clears the small section for the cabin. There aren’t many; we want trees tightly surrounding the cabin and the sound of rustling leaves. Bradley takes out the ones we mark — plus another dozen. “Yah, they may look nice, but wait until one crashes through your skylight in an ice storm.”
Bradley is excavator, land planner, and fortune-teller rolled into one. When I ask him to dump a load of boulders so I can build a retaining wall along the back of the cabin, he just builds it. I wanted artsy-fartsy, aesthetically stacked rocks; Brad wanted done. Besides, his idea of a “boulder” differed drastically from mine. In my mind they were bowling ball–size stones I could stack by hand. In Bradley’s mind (and dump truck) they were the size of Tyrannosaurus rex skulls. Again he’s right; what would have taken me a week and a five-gallon bucket of Advil to build he built in an hour. The wall isn’t something you’ll see in Landscaping Today, but it’ll hold back a glacier when the next ice age comes.
We want the septic on the south side of the cabin, but Bradley puts it on the north. “Won’t be in your way when you decide to add on.” Again he’s right. We would have lost all flexibility.
Bradley makes other executive decisions when it comes to the septic. Septic systems have two main parts: The first is a 1,500-gallon or larger concrete holding tank into which everything — dishwater, bodily waste, shower water, contact lenses — drains. Inside that tank the solids settle to the bottom and are aptly named “sludge.” Solids constitute a small amount of what goes into the tank, and bacterial action decomposes things even further. At the end of the day — actually, the end of the year — there isn’t much sludge. Grease, oil, and fats rise to the top of the tank to create the scum layer. Every year or two the “honey truck” comes and pumps out the sludge, scum, and effluent in between.
The second part of the system consists of a leach field — a series of perforated pipes and gravel-filled trenches where the fluids from the tank flow, eventually to percolate into the ground and evaporate. The entire system runs on gravity, no batteries required. The size of a septic system is based on the number of bedrooms in a home; the more occupants, the more waste. On the septic permit they don’t ask you how much you eat, the size of your bladder, or how many showers you take a day. They want number of bedrooms.
In sandy or well-drained soils a contractor digs a few trenches, fills them with gravel, installs a few hundred feet of perforated plastic pipe and connects this labyrinth to the holding tank. There are pipes sticking up here and there for cleaning the system out. The fluids mosey through the field and dissipate. But the more clay or solid rock in an area, the harder it is for the fluids to dissipate. And in really rocky and clayey areas you need to actually create an area of porous ground by bringing in mounds of gravel and sand. This system is, no surprise, called a mound system. Many, many dwellings along the North Shore have one, and they can be wickedly expensive. The thrill of owning one is on par with the thrill of buying new tires or getting a hip replacement — no one notices, but they’re a necessity.
The final decision as to what type and size of leach field to install — conventional or mound — rests on the results of the percolation or “perc” test, which determines how quickly fluids can percolate, or soak, into the soil. The test involves a fairly archaic procedure. The contractor bores a series of holes, fills them with water to a specified depth, then times how long it takes the water to dissipate. Fast is good. The results of this test determine the size and type of leach field you need to install.
Brad’s wife is certified to conduct these tests. She and Bradley spent what I could only imagine to be a pastoral afternoon, digging holes around our 3 acres and doing perc tests. About 100 feet behind and above the cabin they find soil that drains like a colander. The only thing this location has going against it is gravity, since it’s uphill from the cabin. This principle of physics could be defied by installing a pump in the tank that would lift the fluids to the area. A $900 pump could save us the extra five to ten grand a mound system would cost us.
Good-draining soil in that neck of the woods is unheard of. This is God’s hand slipping a stack of one-hundred-dollar bills into our mythical bank account. Later we surmise this is no act of God but rather a long-ago act of the highway department. The old highway, built from tons and tons of good-percolating sand and gravel that had been hauled in, ran right close to this miraculous leach field. You gotta grab good luck when it sails by.
A septic tank without water is an unemployed septic tank. So we begin pondering the aquatic half of the equation. The obvious approach is to drill a well. But having asked around, we discover it’s an iffy proposition, with a high probability of striking brackish water. In our area three quadrillion gallons of fresh water may be sitting 100 feet beyond us, but drill 200 feet down and we’ll most likely tap into an aquifer or “lens” of salty water, two billion years in the making; part of what geologists call the Canadian Shield. But it’s worth talking to a driller or two to make an informed decision.
One driller hops out of the cab of his truck brandishing a wishbone-shaped birch branch. “It’s a witching stick,” he explains. The skeptic in me looms large as he holds the two legs of the stick tightly in his hands and begins walking around. The skeptic in me starts stomping up and down when the free end of the stick rotates and points straight down.
“There’s your water,” he says with absolute certainty, marking the spot with his hat.
Aaah, now the Brooklyn Bridge I purchased can have water running under it.
The curious side of me asks him if I can try his stick. I grasp the two legs as tightly as I can and start witching at a point 20 feet away from his “there’s-your-water” spot. At the exact point he’s marked, the stick begins to point downward. I give the stick my antisupernatural death grip. It’s unstoppable. I walk around the area again — this time with my eyes shut to eliminate the chance that a brain fart is in command. Once more the tip churns downward. Hmm.
Turns out, even some of the most high-tech, million-dollar drilling rigs have a willow branch in the toolbox to dowse for water. In the ’60s the U. S. Marines tried dowsing to locate tunnels and weapons stashes in Vietnam, and in 1986 when thirty soldiers were buried in an avalanche during a NATO exercise, Norwegian soldiers broke out the divining rods.
But the driller didn’t need a witching stick to point out the overhead high-voltage transmission lines we’d need to move to get the drilling rig down the driveway or the rock we’d need to dynamite to get a trench deep enough to bury the waterline to the cabin. His divining rod couldn’t tell us how deep down the water was and whether or not it would be brackish. No divining rod was required to determine our checkbook was no gusher.
We need running water but want something more sophisticated than Kat and me running to get it. So we look toward a sure source — the lake. If we could get a waterline from point A to point B we know we’d never be out of water. We’ll need to make that decision soon, but right now we’re more excited about making sawdust.