Week two! From windows to siding.

I’m on a bit of a delayed posting schedule as I didn’t get the video finished between week two and week three, and now I’ve gone ahead and completed week three. I’m much farther along than the video below outlines. Ben’s part of the project is now over and I spent my third week working with a handyman I’ve hired for several projects in the last few years. We’ve completed most of the electric and framed out the sleeping and storage lofts as well as part of the interior bathroom wall. We’ve also moved the house out of the mud pit that it was stuck in, and it’s now parked on a paved driveway in a residential suburban neighborhood about 40 minutes from the mud pit. A much better spot in terms of accessibility, somewhat worse in terms of viral exposure and risk of theft.

None of that is covered in this video, though. Below, you can see us wrapping up the window install, installing trim, fascia, and soffit, putting in the door, and getting the siding up.

One observation worth sharing: I spent much of the time these videos capture sleeping in the woods, including carrying a 5 gallon igloo container up and down a hill to fill it at the spigot and then transport it to where our kitchen ended up. If I wanted hot water, I had to boil it, which I didn’t often bother to do. I’ve spent much of that same time thinking about and concocting various water storage and transport systems for ultimate install in my house. When I return to my RV, I have on-demand hot water at the tap.

I have noticed no material difference in my happiness between sleeping and working hard in the woods, carrying water up a hill every day, and my much more pampered (in comparison) existence back at Lost Valley. I’m spending a lot of time and energy working very, very hard to create my ideal place to relax. I am reminded of the parable of the Mexican fisherman.

In the background of my industrious summer, Covid-19 spreads across the world, claiming the lives of folks young and old. Despite my precautions, I await my turn, which feels inevitable given the amount of unavoidable mixing with society building a house requires. I wonder how hard it will hit, whether I’ll get “lucky” and be totally asymptomatic. Building this house has not been good for my health — my ability to feed myself a healthy, balanced diet has degraded slowly over the last month, both when I’m on the worksite and when I’m not. My systems for shopping and cooking have degraded as my life has been thrown into a constant transitory state. I’m on a bevy of medication I wasn’t on before, mostly allergy meds and the occasional Tylenol. Old injuries flare up and ride shotgun with new ones. My whole body aches. Building a house, especially at this breakneck pace, is not healthy for the body — though I continue to lose weight, to the point where others sometimes comment. I’ll take that.

At some point while up closer to Portland, my girlfriend and I attended a protest in Portland, dressed ready to rumble with the cops. My feelings on protests remain largely the same as they were when I wrote the piece that was recently published in Communities magazine about the climate protest I attended in September. (p. 47) They feel like a waste of time, though I think in other ways they are the only way that politicians suddenly realize that they do, indeed, serve at the pleasure of the people (and that human flesh is a weak and fragile thing, subject to the whims of the mob). So. I called my Congressmen. I donated to Don’t Shoot PDX. I downloaded the audio-book, “White Fragility” by Robin DiAngelo. My volunteer organization put out a statement and, as the education coordinator, I’ve taken tentative first steps to increasing the diversity in our presenter line-up, though we aren’t currently offering classes with any kind of regularity.

In one sense, these are the actions required of me as a white person with copious privilege in this moment in history, and if you’re a white person who has done nothing in the last month to address the systematic racism that you participate in just by breathing in the United States, you are wrong and you need to do better. On the other hand, I feel as though I am going down the list of actions needed to justify to myself and others that I have “done something.” In reality, I feel helpless and afraid. I have seen the results of war and revolution. What we have here, now, as bad as it is, is so, so much better than that.

On that cheerful note, a look at my second work week.