Another Beautiful Day in Paradise
CANYON CREEK FARMS wasn’t always a farm. David’s Portuguese grandparents bought the land in 1936 after the previous owner defaulted on his property taxes. At the time, David’s mother, Lorelei, the youngest of the three Moniz sisters, was about nine years old. The five of them settled into the tiny old wooden house that was already there, at the top of a ridge overlooking a grassy meadow to the east and natural peat bog beyond.
The property had been clear-cut back in the 1920s. When the Moniz family arrived, there were not many trees here. Now, more than eighty years later, there are so many trees that it’s difficult to imagine the farm without them. Something like thirty-three of our forty acres are wooded, with a mix of several kinds of fir, red alder, cedar, cottonwood, maple and even a few madrone trees. I didn’t realize how much of our property — about a third — is down in a canyon until I saw an aerial photo. On the west side of the road, the land drops off, steeply in places, down three hundred feet to Canyon Creek. Since the runoff from both of our ponds goes downhill to the creek, we realized that there is excellent potential for hydroelectric power.
Speaking of power, our farm has none. Our property is two miles off the electrical grid; that is, we don’t have full-time electricity. Our house is about two miles up the hill from our nearest neighbor and the end of the utility grid. Frankly, even if we had the money (approximately $100,000; this is not a misprint) to connect to the grid, we would still choose to keep things as they are. As I write this, we are almost finished installing the direct-current (DC) part of our new solar electric system, everything, that is to say, except for the actual house wiring. This system is designed to provide all the power we need for the house, a fully equipped power tool shop and eventually a guest house. For now, though, the house runs on propane and is quite comfortable. We have hot water, a gas refrigerator/freezer, a gas stove and oven and gas lamps on the walls. Two wood stoves provide our heat about eight months of the year. And I love the fact that we have three guest rooms.
In fact, this house, which David’s grandfather built in the late 1940s, is larger than the one we lived in in Seattle before we moved here in 2006. It’s a wonderful house, built to be fire-resistant (we’re surrounded by many, many acres of woods in a fairly dry climate) as well as to withstand mountain weather, including the windstorms and snowfall that pummel us each winter. Naturally we have an abundant supply of wood for fuel; the fir and alder especially make beautiful firewood. Considering the size of the house (about 2,300 square feet), it’s amazing how well the two wood stoves heat it. Of course, we may not always be as excited as we are now to be cutting, hauling, splitting and stacking so many cords of firewood every year. It’s a lot of work. But we love this place.
Our first year here, 2006, was spent mainly in transition. How I came to hate that word, along with the phrase, “It’s only temporary.” The sale of our house in Seattle wasn’t due to close until early November that year, so we spread out the moving process somewhat. Also, the house we were moving into needed lots of work to make it livable, once the longtime tenant moved out. Junk had to be hauled out and disposed of. New appliances and wood stoves had to be researched, bought, shipped and installed. One room at a time, I emptied, cleaned and repainted the house. I bought and installed shades and insulating curtains. Chose new handles for the kitchen cupboards (they previously had none). I even located an authentic Hoosier cabinet, something I’d dreamed of but nearly gave up on finding in this part of the country. Over the next few months, as we went back and forth from Seattle, our new home became truly ours.
One of the big projects that first summer was replacing the old propane tank, a 400-gallon above-ground eyesore. Mostly for safety reasons, David wanted an underground tank, so we bought a 1,000-gallon model. We had decided on the location, on a west-facing slope about 50 feet away from the southwest corner of the house. Call us nutty, but we decided from the get-go to dig the hole ourselves, by hand. Uh-huh. You heard right. Not with a backhoe, not hiring anyone. By hand, with mattocks and shovels. This hole, by the way, needed to be 17 feet long, 6 feet deep and 6 feet wide. That doesn’t sound so bad, does it? Well, it wasn’t really, but we did encounter a couple of challenges. (We were also motivated by being told that it was impossible to dig such a hole by hand.)
First of all, we began digging this hole in August, and the weather was, predictably, hot and dry. The ground was correspondingly dry and hard. In addition, the first couple of feet down from the surface were a tangled mass of roots: salal, Oregon grape, thimbleberries, young fir and maple trees, and probably a few others. I noticed a funny thing: David somehow found he needed to be in Seattle frequently during the early part of the excavation, leaving me to dig most of this difficult top layer. Coincidence? Probably not, but no matter. The workout was great, and I discovered that I really liked using the mattock.
As the digging progressed, and the hole got deeper, we found we worked well in tandem, trading off every few minutes. I would descend with mattock in hand, and for a few minutes I’d whack away, busting up the hard rocky soil. Then I’d take a breather and get some water (it was hot) while David went in with a shovel and heaved out the loosened dirt. The deeper we went, the harder it was to fling the dirt out of the hole, so I was happy to have David do that part. Somehow it seemed easier for me to swing the mattock, perhaps because I wasn’t as strong in the upper body.
We worked on that project off and on for roughly two weeks. David especially liked bringing out the boom box and playing Broadway music: the soundtrack to Oklahoma! and the wonderful Cole Porter music of Anything Goes were our favorites to dig by. At last, the day came to install the tank. Terry, the very nice man who came to install it, stood at the edge of the hole and gazed at it a while, shaking his head gently. Finally he turned to us and said kindly, “You guys are crazy.”
Terry later asked me to e-mail him a photo of the hole; apparently his colleagues didn’t believe it when he told them about us digging the hole by hand.
Nonetheless, the job was done. Flush with confidence and a sense of well-being after the two-week marathon workout, I felt ready to start digging a root cellar. However, the reality of the approaching fall and cold weather prevailed. The house was mostly in good shape by that time, so we turned our attention to getting in a supply of firewood for the winter.
It’s beautiful here, peaceful and quiet. Since our property is at the end of the road, and our house is about half a mile in from the gate, we have no traffic anywhere near us. Occasionally a bright orange Coast Guard helicopter (David calls them the Coasties) or some other aircraft flies over, but more often the only thing flying overhead is a wild bird. From every window, we see trees and grass and sky. It’s lovely to walk down the road to open the gate, with the sun streaming through acres of trees. If you stop and listen, you’ll hear the chatter of Canyon Creek far below. Or was that the wind in the trees? It doesn’t matter. It’s an amazing place, whether you call it a farm or something else. We own it, we love it, and every day when we get up, it’s another beautiful day in paradise.