chapter 16
I used to live at Porcupine Meadows. That’s right across the highway from Ginty’s but there’s not much left of the place now. I used to visit Larry Lovering, the artist, when he was alive. He had his tea leaves told a number of times by Ginty.
Ginty was a very welcoming person. The house was unbelievably cluttered. There wasn’t even enough room to put a cup down; you had to hold it. One time I didn’t drink all my tea—guess I wasn’t thirsty or something. But Ginty told me to drink a bit more then she read the leaves. She didn’t tell me how she knew what the tea leaves said but she forecast a bad time with lots of tears. I don’t want to go into the details but she was amazingly accurate.
—Sandi Giovanelli
So once again I was faced with the overwhelming chore of building a house. This was to be my sixth. Some I had constructed with logs, others were frame. The first four had been off road; there had been no way to drive heavy machinery to the site so a large portion of those buildings was made from materials gleaned from the surrounding forest. For the first and last of them, I had been lucky to have had help with the heavy lifting and, in the case of number four, some of the construction, but the middle two cabins I had erected completely alone. The fifth building was the cabin I now inhabited. I had received a great deal of help with that one, but the biggest saving in time was because of the road. Materials could therefore be dragged or delivered to the door.
I had lived in all these buildings for various periods of time and had sorted out the design of the living space to my satisfaction, given the limits of the topography, my physical strength, and money. The only changes in the layout of the last three cabins were minor ones. I knew exactly how I wanted to orient the building for the views and how I wanted the light to fall in a room (I am an early morning person and love to face the hint of dawn coming into the sky). I was also happy with the placement of the stove, and how it and both sleeping and seating areas could be located in relation to the door (the latter being the most likely cause of drafts). I had sorted out the width and height of the counters (but had never yet ironed out all the bumps regarding storage space: there was never enough!).
However, I had never built anything below ground before. It was time I had a warmer floor, and a cool space so that vegetables would keep better in summer and not freeze if I went away in the winter. And, if I could ever figure out a water supply, I wanted plumbing. For this absolutely last dwelling I would ever make, I was going to have a basement.
I had heard good things about polystyrene insulated basements. The ads made it sound as easy as building Lego. A man in Nimpo Lake had put one together and I went to look at it. The blocks were dirty white with the texture of fluffy white foam. They were hollow, like breeze blocks, and cement was poured into them. Conventional concrete basements needed heavy plywood framing that would have to be removed once the concrete had set. Any insulation would have to be added later. These blocks stayed in place and provided insulation at the same time. They did not appear to be a lot more expensive than conventional basements. I was worried about their chemical properties but polystyrene, I learned, does not emit formaldehyde, contrary to my fears.
I started to draw plans for a basement on a scrap of paper but then realized I should have measured the blocks while I was in Nimpo to see exactly how big to make it. I googled the blocks and several sites came up, but none told me how big the L-shaped corner pieces were. I phoned a builders’ supply store in Williams Lake. A lot of business has to be done by phone on the Chilcotin; very few business people, even in Williams Lake, use the internet. I asked about the size of the corner block. “You’ll have to speak to Brian,” said the woman. “He gets in at eleven: I’ll get him to call you right away.” I phoned again at 11:20. Repeated the question. “Hang on,” said the woman, and clunked the phone down. I wait. And wait. A man picks the phone up: “Is anyone there? Who do you wish to speak to?” “Brian.” “Maybe I can help you.” I repeated the question. “You’ll have to ask Brian that.” Clunk. I wait. Another man. “How can I help you?” “I need to speak to Brian.” “I am Brian.” “What size are the polystyrene corner blocks?” “Haven’t the faintest idea!” “Don’t you have specifications somewhere?” “Probably. But I’d have to look them up. You just have to tell us what size your basement is going to be and we’ll order the blocks.” Trouble is, I didn’t know what size the basement was going to be until I knew the size of the blocks. This was the first indication I had that working with materials and skills outside my experience was not going to be as straightforward as I had hoped.
Brian did tell me that they did not sell a lot of these things and I might like to try True North Ventures at 150 Mile House. This company was owned by Bev and Ward Haskins; they were a family business and proved to be excellent to deal with. Bev was the office person. She was not only efficient—she also used the internet! I emailed her a plan and she got back to me with a quote within hours. It appeared, however, that the blocks were not all I would need. There was rebar and anchor bolts and a plate and plastic ties, tape, a foam gun with two cartridges of foam, a damp course, and some kind of waterproofing for the outside of the basement. I would also need a network of framing to support the bocks while the concrete was poured. It was obviously not quite as easy as the people selling the stuff online had made out. A few days later I drove into town and paid a deposit for the blocks. I ordered plywood for the floor and some long two-by-eights for the plates. I picked up the smaller bits and pieces: “How far apart should the anchor bolts be?” I asked the woman behind the counter in the builders’ supply store. She shrugged her shoulders; fortunately—very fortunately—a building contractor was standing next to me and he supplied the answer: “Seven feet.” It seemed like an odd measurement but I went with it and calculated how many I needed. I had to buy nuts and washers for them, too.
It was by now the middle of April. The large pond had lost its ice and the small one was half open. Tiny tips of green were showing among the winter-faded sedges in the marshes. It was time to contact local excavator operators. There were two of them. Some people recommended one, some the other. I was trying to get both of them to come by and give me a quote. The digging contractor whom I thought I would go with suggested it was a good idea to hire a carpenter to put the basement together. If it was not done right, the concrete might burst the blocks during pouring. I asked him if he knew of anyone and he recommended a man south of Tatla Lake. However, this carpenter reckoned the job would be too small for him to want to bother to come all that way (over an hour’s commute), and he told me to get hold of Mike Witt. Mike lived only twenty minutes down the road. He drove into the yard a few days later. Average height, late thirties, round face, cowboy hat and wraparound shades that reflected the world in deep ultramarine. He seemed a pleasant person, he was an experienced carpenter and he had done one of these types of basements before. “You’ll need all sorts of extra two-by-fours and two-by-sixes for the supports and also a scaffolding to stand on when we pour.” I pointed at the pile of lumber salvaged from the barn. “We’ll have to do the footings first, let them set up, then build the walls on top.” I mentioned the digging contractor who, in a roundabout way, had led me to him. “Well I prefer to use the other one, Len Lamothe. I do a lot of work with him. His best driver is a good buddy of mine. He charges more per hour than the other man but he has a much bigger Cat so works faster.” So I phoned Len. “Should be able to get there by next week,” he said. He didn’t come and I phoned again. “I’m just waiting for parts,” he said. (Where have I heard that before?) “Besides,” he continued, “I was digging with my small excavator the other day, trying to get stumps out, and the ground was still frozen.” The knoll where I wanted to build had been naked of snow and blasted by the sun for weeks so I did not think there would be much problem there. “Should be ready by the end of the month,” he assured me.
On May 4, a pickup truck drove into the yard beside the cabin. A couple of spotted, short-haired hounds moved restlessly in the back. A lean man wearing a cowboy hat and with a red bandana tied around his neck climbed out. He was a slimmer version, but he reminded me of pictures I’d seen of Tom Mix. “The excavator is here,” he said in a soft voice. “It’s being unloaded at the turnoff to your house site.” No warning, no phone call, they just arrived. The driver was Henry. He would have to walk the Cat to the site as the road was still squishy in places and, until Henry had reworked it, there was nowhere for Len’s big rig to turn around. The machine clanked along with a massive squeal of tracks. Mike was already there (they had obviously phoned him). I had marked the site with a can of spray marker I had bought especially for the job—except it ran out halfway round and I had to finish the marking with flagging tape. The basement was to be L-shaped. The hole had to be dug about one and a half metres bigger all round than the building was going to be.
Digging the basement hole. Mike Witt is standing in the bottom.
The digging operation was impressive. The bucket was as big as a bathtub but Henry was as accurate with it as an archeologist wielding a teaspoon. The soil was pale grey silt all the way. No hardpan, no water. Two huge mounds of dry, silvery earth began to grow on either side of the hole. Mike had borrowed a transit from Len so he could measure the exact depth. He stood in the hole and peered into the eyepiece. He held up a hand to Henry, with his fingers two centimetres apart. Henry put down the bucket and effortlessly picked up exactly two centimetres of dirt all along the bottom of the hole.
Some of the dirt was used to build up a road that would make a loop so that there would be a turnaround in the yard. I had cut the trees out during the winter. That took up the rest of Henry’s day; the next was a Sunday and on the Monday he would work on the appalling mess that Gin’s “escavator” had made. Until that was fixed, trucks delivering building supplies and cement would not be able to reach the site.
I had talked to the men about digging a drain field and a possible shallow well. If we struck water, they could dig the channel for that, too. Henry’s boss, Len, said he could witch for water, but where he had built his new house they’d had to drill fifty-one metres! I was talking to Henry about it in one of the brief moments when he was not working. “I can do a bit of witching,” he said. “I usually use two wires like straightened-out coat hangers with a right-angled handle at one end. They cross over if the water is there.”
I’d never heard about that method of dowsing. In any case, wasn’t witching something that only Other People could do? The only tool I had heard of was a forked willow stick and I’d tried that where Vodka attempted to dig for a well with his little “escavator” but had had no reaction. But of course, there was no water there.
I possessed only one coat hanger (which I guess is a good indication as to the status of my wardrobe), but of telegraph wire I had many kilometres—woven into fences, rolled onto two rotten drums, and simply discarded in tangled heaps. I picked up a hammer and a rock—the latter to use as an anvil—and flattened the wire until I could bend and break off two pieces. Each was a bit longer than my arm. I bent about fifteen centimetres at right angles at one end of each to use as handles. I held my hands in front of my chest, the wires pointing ahead like two pistols in a High Noon showdown. I was close to the cabin and I took a few steps away from the door. The wires started to waver toward each other. I was goggle-eyed. I took a few more steps and the wires swung apart again. I went back and forth and got an identical result every time I crossed the same place. This was fantastically exciting. But how to determine the depth?
About a year before, in the spring, I had made an amazing discovery. I had learned that it was possible to divine all manner of health issues with a pendulum. The only thing I had known about pendulums before that was that they hung at the bottom of clocks. I had never imagined that they could be used as dowsing tools.
Ever since I had been diagnosed with food sensitivities and fibromyalgia I had been cruising the net for possible solutions. I tried diets and supplements and self-hypnosis, and was still making periodic visits to a nutritionist. The first intimation I had that there something potentially helpful out there was due to an accident. During that preceding winter I had been working on the illustrations for A Mountain Year and I wanted to draw a picture of an immature salamander, which is called an eft. I googled it and the sites that came up could not have been further removed from baby amphibians. Their EFT was in capital letters and stood for Emotional Freedom Technique. The idea was to tap eyebrows and collar bones and other parts of your body in sequence, with your fingers, to get rid of inexplicable illnesses and stresses. Was this ever weird. However, I had thought the nutritionist had been just as peculiar when she had muscle-tested me for food by having me try to resist when she pulled on my leg, and her diagnoses had worked. The places that you tapped were actually acupuncture points. It was a technique, I learned later, that was used by a number of Energy Medicine practices and, because there were no needles involved, it was sometimes called acupressure. Within a short time I was hooked. I was convinced that all my aches and pains and food sensitivities were psychosomatic and if only I could find the right trigger, I would be cured. I religiously tapped my way through two months, often several times a day, with absolutely no effect whatsoever.
On one of the EFT sites, however, there was a reference to a Dr. Barbara Mallory who wrote about pendulum divining. I am not really sure why I looked at her website. Idleness, or perhaps serendipity—who can say? So many of these activities are touted by people who look as though they are straight off a Hollywood film set. I had no time for all these airy fairies, but on the pendulum page there was a picture of a rather grim woman, no longer young, who did not look at all airy fairy. For all that, she was doing some very strange things. She was holding the forefinger of one hand horizontally under her nose, like a moustache, while the forefinger of the other was stuffed in her belly button. It was apparently part of an acupressure routine to make sure your “batteries were in the right way round.” Nothing ventured . . . I did as the woman instructed, and then made a pendulum out of a piece of string and a washer, which was the first suitable weight that came to hand. I held it in front of an apple, which I knew I could eat. The washer started to swing, apparently all by itself. I was dumfounded. I held it in front of a bottle of vinegar, which was something I could no longer eat because of the sulphites in it. Slowly the pendulum changed direction and was now swinging the other way. I could not believe that this was happening. I tried about thirty different foods. Most results were the same as had been determined by the nutritionist, but she was five hours’ drive away from Ginty Creek and even harder to get to when I was up in the mountains. The pendulum was right in my hand. And it cost nothing!
I have now been using this amazing tool for four years. I never travel anywhere without it. I check every item in a supermarket, and every meal served in a restaurant. I get some funny looks—and even annoyance, as happened at one health food store when I refused to purchase a supplement the owner was recommending. He was even madder when I tried to convince another customer (whom I knew) that the supplement wasn’t for her. (She took the store owner’s advice: I realized I was going to have to be a bit more tactful about all this!)
Later, with the help of the pendulum, I made another huge discovery. It was in a book called Energy Medicine by Donna Eden and was an acupressure exercise to get rid of food sensitivities. Using the Yes/No answers the pendulum gave me, I was able to go successfully through the routine. Now I can eat anything except chemicals, particularly preservatives: basically, this means absolutely no processed food—which is actually quite difficult to avoid. I had thought I was eating healthily before, but I now realize that the quantity of chemicals that I had been consuming on a regular basis was mind blowing. Some of the preservatives are even found in organic food.
“Ginty was into that sort of thing,” said Leslie Lamb while I was using the pendulum to check out the lunch she gave me. “What do you mean?” I asked. “She read tea leaves and stuff.” Tea leaves, surely, were hardly in the same class as pendulums—or were they? (Tea leaf-reading is still something that I have never explored.)
I wondered if the pendulum could help determine the depth of the water that the witching rods had found in front of the cabin. I stood on the most likely spot and asked the pendulum if it knew how deep the water was. Slowly it began to describe a clockwise circle, which for me meant Yes. Was it more than three metres? An anticlockwise circle indicated No. Was it more than one metre? Yes. By narrowing the distances I determined it was about one and a half metres below ground level. Then I thought to ask if it was good water. No. That was a surprise. Was it contaminated? No. Did it have too much iron? Yes. (This is a common problem on the Chilcotin.) I tried another spot near the Packrat Palace. The depth was apparently two and a half metres but the supply was also too full of iron. As I walked the half kilometre up the field to the building site I was getting all sorts of readings. I realized that the wires must be very sensitive and be picking up every little trickle. It was spring, too: even allowing for the snowless winter and very dry spring, the soil would be as wet as it would get at any time of the year.
I started to get quite a strong reading close to the new basement and I asked Henry if he could have a go to confirm my findings. He walked over the spot and the wires moved for him. “There’s something there,” he said cautiously. When Henry had gone, I walked back and forth all over the knoll. I traced a seeming flow of water several paces wide that appeared to run right under the knoll and split on the slope leading toward the pond. The larger branch looked the most promising. The underground stream (if that’s what it was) ran directly below the basement hole and, according to the way I read the pendulum, it was only two and a half metres down at that point. A well in the basement would mean that it wouldn’t freeze, but if we dug down and it was a gusher we might end up with a swimming pool. I had phoned a well driller in Williams Lake and it seemed that I did not just need water; I needed something called hydrostatic pressure. This would enable the water to rise partway up the pipe and it has to do that otherwise it would be impossible to pump it.
Maybe the pendulum could give me some answers. It said there was no hydrostatic pressure in the basement but there was some at the bottom of the mound near the pond. “Is there any hardpan?” I asked. Yes. By asking, “Is it more than five metres?” “More than three metres?” and so on, I determined it was four metres below me. Is the water running on top of the hardpan? Yes.
I walked up early on the Monday morning to find that Mike had just pulled into the yard. Right along the new loop road, on top of the Caterpillar tracks that laced the silvery grey silt, was a set of large grizzly paw prints. “See that big toe?” said Mike, who was a bear hunter as well as a carpenter. “That shows it’s a big old boar.” The grizzly had walked up the road past the trailer, across the knoll where the kitchen window would be and then down toward the pond.
Henry’s excavator could reach down six metres. It would take him only a few minutes to dig a trial hole four metres deep at the spot I had chosen. This was tremendously exciting. If I could predict the depth of water accurately, I could make a fortune! Henry clanked his machine around to the bottom of the mound (I had cut out a rough road down there to give access to an area I had cleared for a garden). Mike and I stood and watched with bated breath. Shovel by shovel, the hole deepened. Exactly four metres down, as predicted, the bucket grated against a layer of hardpan— the soil was dustbowl dry. Of water there was not even a hint. It was a long time later that someone suggested there might be two layers of hardpan. I tried to remember the exact wording of my questions. Had I in fact asked about the depth of the water or the first layer of hardpan? The opportunity to try the questions again has not come up. When I had the time, the ground was saturated with heavy rains. Anyway, I wouldn’t be able to afford the well driller and all the pumps and pipes and pressure tanks until I had sold the mountain business. The idea of having a well would have to be deferred.
Henry next tackled my new road, widening it and rebuilding the ditches. The existing culvert worked fine, but another area would obviously need some kind of drainage. “I’ll just put in a log culvert for now,” Henry said. He dug a channel across the road, cut down several dead pines and laid them in it, then shovelled the dirt back on top. It was in a shady spot and the soil was still full of ice crystals—this was May 7. These thawed and made a horrible soupy mess for a day or two, but now at last the road could be used by heavier vehicles. The first was courtesy of Beeline—one of the freight companies that ply the Chilcotin—who brought the plywood and lumber I had ordered from the builders’ supply store when I was last in town. The driver had also brought a couple of things I hadn’t ordered, and had missed out on a couple of things I had. This is one of the joys of living out on the Chilcotin. The other joy is the freight costs. Beeline charged $600 for their delivery (but nothing for the returned, unwanted items: they would bill the supply yard for that). The polystyrene blocks were next. Bev and Ward were wonderful. Even though they were on the far side of Williams Lake, they charged only $400 to bring them to the door.
The first wwoofer I had that spring was a waste of time. He had been ambivalent about coming and I decided I could afford it and offered to pay him $100 a day plus keep. He had billed himself as a machinist who was good with tools and who was cruising around looking for a career change. When I met him I could not understand why he had come to the Chilcotin. He was a city boy with city aspirations who arrived in a city car. He pulled out cigarettes and I asked him to please not smoke inside anywhere and to be extra careful as everything was so dry. “That’s okay,” he replied. “I’m almost out of cigarettes anyway.” I told him it was a forty-minute drive to the nearest store. “Oh,” he said airily, “I can manage perfectly well without them.” I set him to work ripping some of the timber out of the barn I had pulled down earlier that spring, and he accomplished a lot on his first day. On the second he asked for the afternoon off. He needed to go to the store. He came back with cigarettes and junk food. I feed the volunteers well, but I refuse to buy junk food. On day three I would have had him continue with the barn but, as the blocks were due to arrive, a good job to start while we waited at the building site was walling-in the outhouse. Kelsey and I had built the frame and a scrap metal roof in the fall, and the heavy green tarp had been draped around the walls in case a lot of snow drifted into the hole. This new wwoofer might have been a good machinist, but his skills did not run to hand-held carpentry tools. I had to redo most of what he attempted. He was useless at driving the monster Chevy pickup truck, too. He had no clue as to how to back it. (He’d probably never driven a standard before.) He was also, I was beginning to suspect, one of those males who had a hard time accepting that a woman could do those kinds of things better than he could.
Ward Haskins arrived with the huge piles of polystyrene blocks and the rebar. The wwoofer helped him unload them with a sour expression on his face. The next day was the Monday when Henry dug the well. The wwoofer knew this was going to happen and he knew of my great excitement; he never even bothered to come out of the trailer. How could anybody not be interested in digging for a well? After the non-event, I went over to the trailer and told the wwoofer I didn’t like his attitude and he might as well leave. He was stunned that I would criticize him. He was gone within an hour. On the whole I have been lucky with my wwoofers: this one was an exception.
In this account I have organized the building stages into a narrative that flows logically, but of course it wasn’t like that. I would learn a bit about one thing, order whatever was necessary, then learn something else about another stage entirely, which necessitated changing the first order. The phone was in the cabin, a ten-minute walk each way from the building site. I was constantly going back and forth. Some people could be called first thing in the morning, others could not be reached until the business day started. Still others were best contacted at night. Most people had answering machines, but I did not. “Best times to get me are between six and eight, morning or evening,” I told everyone, but few bothered to return my calls. I felt like one of those jugglers with spinning plates on poles. One would be just about ready to fall off and I would have to run and set it spinning again. Meanwhile another was about to collapse.
The problem that made all this so complicated was the timing. We had not been able to do the digging and road work until the ice went out of the ground. I wanted to be in the mountains by the end of May, but Mike had even less time. He was due to guide a ten-day bear hunt in Vanderhoof and was leaving on May 17, which was in less than two weeks’ time. He would be ready to work again on June 4 but for me that would be too late. I could delay my return to the mountains a little, but I was expecting people by the middle of June and it would take at least a week to clean the resort properly. All the mattress covers and blankets had to be washed (by hand); floors, ceilings and shelves needed to be scrubbed (in three cabins); and there were usually mice. Before Mike left he had to build the footings, let them set up, and then erect the walls, supports and scaffolding. And there was the small matter of buying concrete.
This proved to be the biggest headache of all. I now found out that I had to deal with something else: road restrictions. I had seen the notices occasionally on the highway but thought nothing of them. Now I learned they were put on every spring until the ice was properly out of the ground. Before they were lifted, heavy vehicles could carry only a partial load. I phoned the road services. They didn’t know when the restrictions would be taken off: June sometime, they figured. I phoned a concrete company in Williams Lake. “It’s usually in June sometime,” they confirmed.
A local man had recently started a business to supply concrete. Mike seemed to think his product would be great for the footings but not fine enough for the walls. I phoned the local man several times before I spoke to him (I’d left messages on his answering machine but he didn’t call back). He wasn’t going to get his concrete truck on the road until after the restrictions were lifted. I would have to use the company in town. Their concrete price per yard was the same as the local man’s, but they charged an extra $800 road time. For each truck. There ended up being four of them altogether. The road time cost more than the concrete.
Some people apparently pour the walls and footings of these insulated block walls at the same time, but the risk of blowout was increased. The first—useless—wwoofer had gone and the second had not yet arrived, so Mike brought along his girlfriend Leslie and her long-time buddy Aileen (pronounced Eileen) to help. I knew both girls slightly: I first met Aileen when she was about eight and living at the Precipice. Her dad is a logger; the family used to spend the summers in the trailer I had bought. When I met them, they were caretaking the Precipice ranch for the winter. Aileen had two younger siblings and another on the way. The two eldest children, both girls, were going to school in Anahim. They would stay with friends for the week and be fetched home for the weekend. I visited Dave and Rosemary that Christmas and got a ride back home with the kids. Their dad had built a sled with two seats that he could tow behind the snowmobile. He had welded skimpy pipe walls on either side. The contraption had no shocks and was flung about with abandon. It was a crashing, forty-minute ride to get down to the bottom of the valley. I was sure the sled was going to flip a number of times. I hung on for dear life and was bruised black and blue when I got to the bottom. The two little girls made this trip quite stoically twice a week.
For Christmas, Aileen received a sort of Barbie horse. It was pink plastic with glitter in its white mane and tail. It had accessories such as saddles that you could put on and take off. Aileen is in her twenties now and she is still horse mad. She is short, but one tough little body. She is always smiling and an incredibly hard worker. Leslie is much quieter. Her parents are guide outfitters and operate horseback tours in the Rainbows, one of the volcanic ranges north of the highway. Both girls wrangle for them in the summer.
The concrete truck operator who was to pour the footings put together a chute and was able to put most of the concrete where it was wanted. Some had to be moved with a wheelbarrow. It was Leslie who told me to pat the top of the cement to make it smooth; simply trying to smear it around was not enough. Patting it brought the water to the surface. The Harkises had lent us a rebar bender. Mike cut short pieces and bent them at right angles; one part lay horizontally in the wet concrete, the other stuck upright; it would help tie the standing wall to the footings.
It would be a couple of days before the footings were firm enough to do the next stage so I asked Mike if he wanted paying up to date. He drove me round to the cabin. I had always walked back and forth along the trail up the fields, and no one had used the road for several days. There had been the merest skiff of rain, just a sprinkle that was now completely dry, but it had left a surface on the road as clean as a blank page. A mamma black bear had walked along one vehicle rut, two second-year cubs along the other. Their prints were perfectly fresh and formed in every detail. The cubs had trotted back and forth a bit but Mamma had plodded steadily on. We followed the tracks through the open gate. We drove closer and closer to the cabin and I wondered if we would see the bears at the building, but at the last moment the road turns right and the bear tracks continued straight on: they were heading toward the remains of the bull.
After a couple of days, Mike started to put the blocks together. A young volunteer named Katrina had arrived by then. She had planned on staying a while but had received a job offer she could not refuse so would be able to work for only a few days. This was a pity; she was not all that skilled but she learned fast and she was a hard worker. The blocks looked startlingly white in the sunshine; Mike was forced to wear his shades. The design of the blocks was quite intriguing. Not only did they slot together neatly, but crosspieces inside held snaps for rebar. Everything had to be tied together with the kind of plastic ties that are ridged on one side, which you can wrench tight but cannot undo. That was my job. Mike lent me a pair of pliers to yank on them. One time the pliers slipped and the handle whanged into my forehead and gave me a huge knot above the eye. It didn’t hurt too much after the initial shock but must have been quite impressive because I could see Mike stealing a glance at it once in a while. I was lucky I didn’t break my glasses; I was also lucky I didn’t drop the pliers into the wall. It was several layers deep at that point. What with the crosspieces, the rebar and the ties, there was a spider’s web of structure inside and it would have been impossible to fish anything out.
The next thing to concern us was the weather. All winter and spring it had been dry, dry, dry, but the little sprinkle of rain a few days before had turned the new part of the road to grease. A heavy downpour would be a disaster. Heavy rain was the forecast for pouring day.
The pumper truck.
While we were finishing off the blocks, Mike casually mentioned we would need the pumper truck. I was under the impression that we wouldn’t. I had visualized us all standing on the scaffolding with long poles shoving the concrete down into the walls. The chute was not going to reach to every corner of the walls and it would be a nightmare trying to wheelbarrow it on planks two metres above the ground. I wasn’t entirely sure what a pumper truck was. Nor had I any idea if we would be able to get one at such short notice. I ran down to the phone. The woman in the office of the concrete business would not be able to tell me until the evening. I explained the phone situation and the kind lady gave me her home number so I wouldn’t have to rush down again before they closed. It was suppertime when I called her: the pumper truck would indeed be available. They, too, were concerned about the forecast and my potentially sloppy road. I was to phone and give a weather report at 8:00 a.m.
It was clear and windy out here but dumping rain in Williams Lake the following morning. It would take them four hours to drive the distance (they would be slower than a car because of the long hills out of Williams Lake). Would the weather hold? Mike brought Leslie, Aileen and a friend of Mike’s from Tatla Lake, Doug McMann. Doug was a builder and carpenter who had quite a lot of experience in pouring concrete.
Pouring the concrete into the polystyrene blocks.
When the pumper truck was set up for business, it looked like some weird extraterrestrial vehicle. It extended two great insect legs, one on either side, and then sent up an enormously long elephant’s trunk way up above the trees and down toward the walls. A cement truck was latched on, like a mating aphid; everything was controlled by a boxful of knobs that was slung around the operator’s neck so that he could walk about and push the buttons at the level of his waist. He and Doug and Mike got onto the scaffold, the clip was taken off the elephant’s trunk, and grey aggregate coursed into the walls. Mike had me and Katrina bang the outsides of the walls with a hammer cushioned by a piece of two-by-four to make sure the concrete settled. At the last, Mike popped in the anchor bolts, leaving several centimetres sticking out of the top of the wall.
There was a yard of concrete left over. “Where do you want it?” the pumper truck driver asked. I had prepared a spot in the garden for just this eventuality: I had plans to build an outdoor stone bread oven, and any leftover concrete would provide a useful base. I had built a wooden frame out of old scraps of lumber and rebar. Even the long elephant’s trunk could not reach that far, however, and the pumper truck would not be able to drive down my steep rough road. I had cleaned the pickup box of dirt and woodchips and asked if they could dump it there. The driver laughed. “If we put all that concrete in that truck,” he said, “you’ll never move it again.” I remembered when the drum that revolves on the back of a concrete truck fell off along Highway 20 years ago. The concrete set in it before anyone could move it and then it was then too heavy to shift. It was there for half a decade. Someone had written Sputnik 1 on it in large black letters, and indeed it did look very like the kind of early space capsules that used to be parachuted into the sea.
I had no desire to have a rock-solid green Chevy truck as a yard ornament. “Make up your mind,” said the driver. “Every minute of this delay is costing you money.” I threw down a tarp and got him to dump the cement onto it. He kindly put in a bit more retardant first and stirred it around. The men and Leslie left, and Aileen, Katrina and I shovelled that stuff into the wheelbarrow and the pickup and took it load by load down to the garden. It was monstrously heavy and I did not think we would be able to move it all before it set but we did—just. It was stiffening up dramatically as we shovelled the last of it into the wooden frame.
And the next day, the promised rain came. It absolutely poured. I sank to my ankles in the silt on the new road. I had to put down planks just so that I could walk to the outhouse. It was the first substantial precipitation we had received since the previous fall. Talk about timing. It would have been several days before the road would have been fit for the heavy vehicle to use, and Mike would have been away on his bear-hunting trip by then.
Len, the owner of the digger, said I would need to wait for at least ten days before they could do the backfill. Even with the bracing inside, the concrete would not be strong enough until then to tolerate the weight of the dirt. In the meantime I should also get the floor joists up as they would help to strengthen the walls.
First, Kristina and I fastened on the plates. We laid a foam damp course, then drilled holes in the two-by-eights and slipped them over the anchor bolts. We now had a wooden sill to which we could attach the building. When time permitted between the other jobs, I had been preparing floor joists out of a mixture of logs and rafters salvaged from the barn. Using several short logs as rollers, I pulled them to the site. Kristina helped for one day but then she had to leave and I continued to work alone. It was a bit of a fiddle getting the joists across the wide ditch around the walls. The weather stayed gloomy and one morning wet snow fell. This was already the beginning of June. The building site was filthy with mud and extremely slippery, even when I had the scaffold to stand on, and that was rarely in the right place so I was constantly climbing up and down. The fibromyalgia was dragging me down. Everything ached. I really did not have the physical capability to do this kind of thing any more.
Then my chainsaw wiped out. I had finished the joists but not yet put the plywood on. Len and Henry came back to do the backfill and dig a drain field. (We had remembered to put pipes through the basement walls where the plumbing, if it ever happened, was to take place.) It wasn’t a very big drain field, as it was for grey water only. I would eventually have a compost toilet so no sewage would be involved. Pipes outside the building had to be buried two metres deep to be sure of avoiding the frost. “How long do you think a drain field like that will last?” I asked. Henry gave me a little grin. “If you don’t have a water supply, it’ll last a very long time,” he said.
Dennis and Katie toasting the completion of the subfloor.
Finally the remains of the two heaps of dirt were removed and used to fill a dip in the road. What a terrible mess everything looked. “It’ll soon grow over,” the men said. But it wouldn’t, or at any rate, not in my lifetime. The dirt on the knoll by my cabin had been exposed twenty years ago and only scattered tufts of grass and pigweed grew on it. The soft, duffy pine needle carpet scattered with clumps of soopollalie and juniper was gone forever. But the guys had done a good job at a reasonable price. The big Caterpillar excavator clanked away.
I was desperate to get into the mountains but I had to cover the hole before I left. If we had a wet summer, I would have a swimming pool by the end of it. Enter Katie and Dennis. They are the owners of the house I usually stay in when I visit the Bella Coola Valley. They had now officially retired and were planning on spending the whole summer at Stuie. Retired! Wouldn’t it be lovely. Katie and Dennis were my age exactly. I was now working as hard as at any time in my life. Katie and Dennis camped for the night and helped me put the plywood on in the morning. We toasted our work with peppermint tea. A quick trip to Williams Lake followed, to get the saw fixed and buy supplies for the summer. I was staggering with exhaustion when I flew to my mountain resort.