Mountain House of Rock and Wood

Lovely images come forth in my mind of the home I am in the process of building. A spacious, warm, loving environment for family and friends from near and far to come visit, spend time, relax, dig the West Virginia back country and share our lives and experiences. This thought excites me the most. I picture my big mountain house of wood and rock, built from the land around it, with a steady stream of loved ones flowing through throughout the year. That is what I want. That is what I desire more than anything else in my life I think. I truly feel like I am home and I want to take care of this place, treat it right and share it with my dear ones.

The summer cabin I am living in and working on right now should be completely finished in a couple of years. At least that is the time I’m thinking and hoping it will take. With the wages I earn working as a chef I am able to buy materials and it may take that long to be able to pay for everything. The work I am doing myself with my friend and neighbor Curt’s invaluable help. But when it’s done it will be paid for! Then I will begin the process again on a proper house and when that is finished the cabin will open up (as well as rooms and living space in the new house) for friends and family to visit on a more regular basis. I see meals shared on a big table in the late summer evening of vegetables, fruits, meats, cheeses…grown, raised and fixed right there on the farm. I smell campfires at night. I hear the telling stories. I see beautiful faces of friends illuminated by the fire. Huge Christmas feasts with a house overflowing with friends, family and love.

So tonight as I sit here at my desk with the lamps burning and the wood stove glowing red from the heat of roasting logs, Muddy Waters on the stereo, the hound dog stretched out on a fleece blanket next to the stove, tonight it may just be me and Rudy down here in the holler but I know others will be arriving shortly in the scheme of things. Won’t you pull up a chair, kick up your feet and have some laughs with me on the porch? Later I’ll take ya frog giggin’!

Things I must earn

And there are those nights when I am driving to the store with my hound dog sitting there in the cab of the truck with me, and the darkness all around, the road bumping and looping and whirling around mountain bends, snow beginning to fall. The blower is on blasting the dash and windshield with hot air, melting the ice crystals and burning the moisture off the glass. Again I am listening to the Big Dog radio station out of Beckley and that same high school sports announcer again, this time calling the Woodrow Wilson Flying Eagles Varsity Boy’s Basketball game. The announcer’s voice takes me once again. My childhood in Raleigh County blossoms forth in my mind’s eye again. I attended the games at the Raleigh County Armory with my parents and my sister Julie. My sister Beth was a cheerleader so she would be down next to the court jumping and cheering and smiling a lot. I’d get permission from my parents to run around the hallways with other boys my age sometimes. It was a real treat to go out to the games. Dad always bought us a coke and some popcorn. During halftime my sister and the other cheerleaders would throw out little small plastic basketballs with the Flying Eagle logo and a sponsorship from The Raleigh County Bank where my mother worked as a teller. Outside in the cold winter nights of my early youth frost was building up on the little league baseball fields just outside the armory. Beyond the baseball diamonds cow pastures stretched into the whispering darkness towards distant mountain ridges.

I recall hearing Queen’s We Will Rock You/We Are the Champions being played loud over the PA system and the smell of popcorn and soda pop. The cheer of the crowd and the loud boos when the home crowd didn’t agree with a call. Afterwards we would file out of the arena and into the cold lamp lit night. Tiny snowflakes would cascade down in columns of bright white lamp light. All of the cars in the lot would be covered in snow. Every single one of them! It was such a thing of beauty. Especially those first few moments…before anyone arrived at their cars, when the blanket of gathering snow was at its purest and most pristine, no footprints yet, maybe two lonely car tracks leaving out from someone who exited the game early. I can hear the sounds of windshields being scraped, motors starting and idling, a radio blasting rock into the silence. I can see puffs of smoke from the exhausts of the automobiles huddled in the cold. I’d huddle in the backseat with my sisters and we’d snuggle with each other to get warm. Dad would drive and mom sat in the passenger seat and they talked about the game and talked to Beth about it since she was down by the court most of the game. I never, not once in my life, ever felt scared for even a second in the car with my dad behind the wheel. It never even occurred to me that there might be some kind of danger with the condition of the roads and all. My dad was an excellent driver. Truly he was one of the greats. He knew his vehicle inside and out and was one with it on the road.

All of this flashes by in my 38 year old noggin’ as I navigate the four wheel drive down increasingly snow-covered roads with one arm around my dog Rudy and the other wrapped on top of the steering wheel. Insouciantly I pilot the truck down the same roads my father used to drive me down and I feel connection in the night, connection to the Holy Spirit of eternal mystery. And my mind rests for a moment of reverie on the true nature of T I M E : Things I must earn.

Things I must earn.

The Pilgrim's Path

I have a pot of green tea steeping in the kitchen. I’ll only be a minute. Things echo off the darkness. The cabin is still and quiet in the night. I can hear and feel both the fire in the fireplace and the fire in the wood stove across the big room. They’ve both been going for days now, constantly burning, embers flaming and then waning with every descendant load of wood that gets added. Did I mention how quiet it is? It is mind-shatteringly quiet here. The hillsides are barren of leaves and undergrowth, bluish white snow carpets the midnight Appalachian Mountains. There is a red hound dog asleep on the bed. Her legs and arms are outstretched as if in mid run. Occasionally she will have a fit in her sleep, dreaming of chasing deer I imagine, and her legs and arms will twitch and jerk and she will begin to talk and howl in her dream.

Well I made it here. Moved up here in late May of last year and writing this as of January of 2011. It was a bit of stunt to pull for sure. Even for me. I’d lain really low for six years and licked my wounds after having to come to terms with my alcoholism and drug addiction. I’d just buried my dear father and off I go and decide to move once again to the farm in West Virginia. There was definitely more than a bit of grandiosity to it. But there always was in the past too. My mind has a real love of grandiosity. Anyway, the difference this time has been being a man instead of a boy. I really can’t put it any better or simpler than that. My heart has shifted significantly over the past several years. I’ve grown and there’s no sense denying it…I’ve aged.

I haven’t been listening to music much here at the cabin. I prefer the silence. I listen to the fire burning, the crackle of wood in the flames, the creaking of the old cabin, the wind howling on the window panes and through the fluted trees. I can literally hear

the snow melt, the drip drip drip off the roof top, the sound of slushy week-old snow under boot. I’ve long admired the pace of nature, the rhythms of the natural world. I’ve always sought to get connected. All my life I’ve wanted to live here on this farm so I could be close to nature, so I could learn from it. I’ve learned the ways of the cities of the world. It’s not for me. It never was for me. But I played along. I chased it. I thought I’d find happiness behind the wheel of the latest new thing all the while knowing what my heart truly desired was ancient wilderness.

Is it in fact feasible and possible to live a different kind of life? The kind of life I’ve always dreamed of living. Well, I’m finding out right now. Once the grandiosity of the Big Move wore off it was down to brass tacks and daily living in a 40+ year old summer cabin with often dodgy utilities. And it’s been a crash course in country living for this suburban boy ever since. This place is already marking me up, claiming me as one of its own once again. In all honesty, I fit right in here. I’ve been reconnected to my tribe, the hard-working blue collar people of southern West Virginia. From them I arose into life and to them I now return. I left when I was twelve years old, a neat bookend to my childhood, a closing of the door on that wondrous time of life and the opening of another door into the whacked out mania of puberty and adolescence. Then of course young adulthood with its own dramas and comedies…and now…middle age.

My past has been full of more twists and turns than these mountain roads I now drive daily. And everything, all the minutiae of my personal path and journey has led to this dead end road down in the holler. This is truly the end of one long and winding road for me. I’ve not made it through the winter yet but I know I will. I won’t be run off like I was those other times. This time will stick. I’m making a home here, a base, a pastoral life. Everything I’ve learned up to this point is golden, every experience, every failure, every struggle, and every disappointment. They are all like money in the bank. Things I thought I’d never be able to understand are now just common knowledge to me, no big deal in the Grand Scheme of things. The seasons shift, the heavy snows and icy throes of winter will blend into the muddy rains and pale green longings of Spring which will ease almost imperceptibly into the bright neon green leafy glory of a warm summer, that then slowly fades as the light recedes, leaves fall, temperatures drop…and the snow comes again.

And I’ll be here, living, watching, learning, growing…listening. Just a pilgrim on his path.

My Soaring Heart

There are so many things that I haven’t written about. Most things really. I’ve not even begun to scratch the surface. These days I’ve been feeling that more and more of the artifice surrounding me has been falling off, peeling away. I feel like I’ve always been fairly self-aware but lately I feel like I am truly beginning to find myself. I guess it took me a good while to realize I was lost! For example on Friday nights this Autumn I would find myself on Dunns Road in Mercer County driving home from work and listening on the radio to the broadcast of Woodrow Wilson High School’s football games. That is the high school that both of my older sisters went to in Beckley, WV. It’s the school I would have attended had my family remained in WV. It’s the school where my childhood friends had their high school experiences and education. The same man calls the games on the radio that called them when I was a little boy. The Flying Eagles are still playing their home games at Van Meter Stadium in the neighborhood where I grew up. I remember attending every game with my parents because my oldest sister was a cheerleader. I remember my parents’ friends coming over on Friday nights and leaving their car at our house and all of us walking up to the game. I remember falling leaves and laughing. I remember the swarms of bats that would swoop around the enormous stadium lights. I remember playing under the bleachers. I remember shivering in the cold. I remember the halftime shows and walking to the concession stand and running into friends from school on the cinder track that encircled the playing field.

And I sat there in the seat of my truck churning up the mountainside listening to this man bring all of that back to me. And I mused about what my life might have been like had I remained in WV. And the past, my history, my myth skips by in my mind’s eye like a dream. Memories of being young, of being a teenager in Irmo, of being a young adult in Columbia, of being a married student in Vermont, of being a young chef in NM, the rise, the crash, the burn, the adventures, the sadness and joy, the failures and triumphs…

And I see my father’s smiling face as I drive. I hear his laugh. I remember him taking me down to the woods on one of those autumn game nights in Beckley when he presented me with my first gun, a .410 shotgun and feeling his arms wrap around me as we held the gun, pulled back the hammer and fired buckshot into the open field with twilight mountains looking on. I remember him waking me up early one Saturday morning for the first day of squirrel season and sitting in the passenger seat of his Bronco as he navigated the twists and turns of highway 19 towards the Farm. I remember stopping at Ray’s Bait and Tackle and buying shells. I remember sitting on the mountainside at the Farm and scanning the trees for fluffy tailed squirrels. I remember looking at my dad in his hunting gear, a Marlboro dangling from his lips.

In a moment I am there and then I am here. I am that boy and then I am this man. I am by his side looking up at him and then I am here, alone, just another man with his skull rattling with thoughts, images, emotions, memory, tides of electrical current coursing along my optic nerve.

And as lonesome as I get, as solitary as this life is that I’ve chosen for myself my heart still overflows with love, my wounded heart, my cracked and scarred heart, my empathetic heart, my heart aflame, passionate, wondrous, bewildered, never jaded, never cynical, my soaring heart, my grateful heart, my father’s heart, my son’s heart, my brother’s heart, my heart that rests in my chest but often longs to break free the bones, lift away from the flesh, my flying heart, love in the darkness, light and free, unburdened and rising, rising, rising…

December update

I’ve been living up here at The Farm for six months now. A bit of a milestone. Good point to look back and take stock. Things are going pretty well thus far. I’ve a lot to be thankful for. I haven’t written a blog in a good while it seems. Been busy with all kinds of projects and working at the resort and everything. The cabin is coming along. I’m doing as much as I can with the time and money I have available. The vision is very, very clear now as far as the cabin goes. It’s going to take some time to complete though. I have to prioritize. The most pressing projects are those that will make the cabin warmer. I installed a hardwood floor that is more for aesthetics than anything else though. I found the old floor depressing and I’ll be spending a lot of time indoors over the cold months so I decided to go ahead with its installation. The layout of cash wasn’t that big so it wasn’t a big deal. Cost me about $300 which seems like a bargain considering the warm, cozy ambiance it creates. The wood burning stove has been a huge success. I had to remove the electric heaters to install the flooring so the wood stove is the only source of heat right now and it’s working great. As long as I keep it burning of course! Burning a wood stove is a real craft. I’m getting better at it. When I lived here 15 years ago I had another wood stove that was a unit that fit into the fireplace and used the brick chimney as an exhaust. It worked well but didn’t put out near as much heat as the one I have now that sits out in the open room. As much work as I’ve done so far on winterizing the cabin there is still that much more to do. There are cracks and seams all over the place where cold air seeps in (and warm air creeps out.) The next phase is going to be installing the final 3 large picture windows on the front of the house and then putting up dry wall on the 3 walls of the main room and trimming the windows. These things will help a great deal in minimizing any air leaks. Somewhere in between I also need to either 1) fix the door jambs to the 2 outside doors so they are airtight or 2) replace the two outside doors with brand new doors with modern seals built in. I’m leaning to the latter. That will cost a pretty penny. I haven’t even priced doors yet. I’ve been reluctant to because I don’t want to get discouraged. And it will be somewhat of a project because I will have to demo out the door frames, widen them and build new frames for the doors to go into. (The current doors are not standard size.) So many things! The plumbing is still pretty crappy but I’m not going to bitch about it because at least the water is running and the hot water heater is working. I’ve decided to save up and hire someone to replace the entire septic tank system and redo the plumbing from the outside in. I’m also considering hooking on to the city water line which has now reached our property line high up on the mountainside. All these things need to get done before I can realistically move ahead with remodeling the kitchen and bathroom/bedroom.

With all these projects ahead of me it can sometimes get overwhelming. But I remind myself of how far I’ve come. Hell, I’ve already taken the biggest step of all and that was moving up here in the first damn place! I’m taking it all one day at a time, getting done what I can and not worrying too much about the pace of things. Ever since my father’s death in March the most important thing to me has been LIVING. Just showing up for my life everyday, counting my blessings, maintaining an awareness of the NOW, being present in my breath, my life, my moments. Because really…what else is there?

Good night bitches.

I just got back inside the cabin at 12am after hanging out in the cold woods with my neighbor Curt. He was sitting in his truck in a wide open meadow listening to music, smoking a joint and drinking coffee. I pulled up on my four wheeler under the stars and spiraling night sky. We talked shit for a while and then took off in his pickup for a joy ride along the river and through the fields of his farm. So I just got back and built a fire. It’s beginning to get cold at night here. Every night it gets down into the 30’s. There is a forecast for snow this weekend. Tomorrow I start working in the kitchen at the Bluestone Dining Room at Pipestem. This past weekend we shut down Mountain Creek for the season. I’ve had the past two days off of work and I haven’t done a damn thing. Not a single productive thing I shit you not. I took multiple naps, ate food, built fires, surfed the internet, and watched television. I haven’t left the farm in two days. Visiting with Curt moments ago in the field was the first time I’ve seen another person in two days.

I’m feeling kinda weird tonight but less weird than I have for the past two days. A serious case of lethargy came upon me and I couldn’t get motivated to do ANYTHING. I keep telling myself that it’s alright, it’s okay. I needed a little break but still I’m getting down on myself for being so lazy and unproductive. It really doesn’t matter though cause come tomorrow morning I will have plenty to do once again.

I’m in the headspace right now where I’m pretty much giving up on women. Fuck it. Fuck you. I’ll remain alone. Good night bitches.

Wood Splitting Meditation