A New Start

Here we are at our 5 acre place in the Methow Valley of Washington State.  It's been over two months since we drove the big U-Haul truck from Salem, Oregon, where we'd lived for 25 years.  The time has flown since we've been here and we have been busy, but I wanted to tell you all of our trip and arrival before I get into other things in future blogs.

We had a great send off from Salem.  Some of our neighbors, former neighbors and co-workers hosted a variety of get togethers.  Thanks so much everyone. Our friends, Linda and Jeff, gave us a great, little dinner party with Merideth and Ken, on the last evening in Salem.  Great food, great company and lots of congratulatory, bon voyage toasts.  Steve hit the wall early after a 12 hour day of heaving lifting loading the truck with everything we owned, except for a few things that wouldn't fit and an hour and half of help from some Willamette students. We left the things that wouldn't fit in the truck in our lovely neighbors' house and basement,  while they were away visiting their relatives.  Thank you Mark and Gill.  I hope you've found places and uses for those things.  Steve headed home at 9 and was asleep in no time.

I stayed on at the dinner, urged on by good stories and a wide variety of spirits from our generous host.  It was midnight before Ken and Merideth drove me home, but it was a wonderful time that I will not soon forget.

The next morning Steve was up at 5, very fresh and wired to get on the road.  I was up an hour later, with six hours of sleep and pretty hung over but happy.  My adrenaline kicked in.  With the help of some Ibuprophen, I loaded our car with house plants, art work and our bags.  We drove away before 7.

Steve took his first corner with the big truck a block from the house in front of the neighboring high school, with me following behind.  I learned from watching that turn that the long wheel span of the truck makes the back end turn tighter than the front, causing the back wheel to run up onto the curb, or whatever was on that side.  I made a mental note to warn Steve about at our next stop.

The truck was really overloaded.  It was packed to the roof and had lots of heavy oak furniture, 32 large ceramic pots, dozens of boxes of books and most of Steve's wood-working equipment and tools.  It turned out to be tough to handle the truck in that condition, especially as Steve tried to make his way through a heavy Gorge wind.  Just our luck.  I was blithely following behind the big truck, in our Subaru Forester, NPR on the radio, houseplants piled in the passenger seat and on the floor next to me with a few friendly sprigs jostling my ear, lost in a post-party daydream.  Just follow the big truck.

We stopped every couple of hours, mostly because the truck needed more gas. Those gas bills were pretty sobering.  On we drove, across the bridge at Biggs and up the steep climb on Hwy 97, out of the Gorge and toward Goldendale, and then over another pass to Yakima.  I saw smoke erupt from the truck as Steve shifted gears on the first climb.  I flashed my lights, honked my horn and swerved into the oncoming lane to get his attention, to no avail.  He was riveted on the road ahead and controlling the lurching wheel with his favorite tunes on the headset.  After a while the smoke cleared up and didn't come back, so I settled back into my revery.

At the far side of Yakima we stopped for gas and the restroom.  The county road we were pulling out onto had no shoulder and a 6 foot deep ditch. As Steve made the turn the back, right set of wheels (dual wheels) rolled out into thin air a good 18 inches from the pavement!  I only had time to suck in a horrified breath, see the truck sway toward the ditch, imagine it rolling that way and remembered that the only thing our insurance would not cover would be a stupid accident like this.  Everything we owned would be lost.  But the truck was soooo overloaded that it counter-balanced on the remaining wheels and swung back onto the road with a bounce as Steve completed the turn and continued down the road.  He never noticed.  At the next stop, he was shocked to hear what happened.  The rest of his turns were nice and wide.

We made it to our place near Winthrop in about 9 hours.  Not bad really, considering the slower pace of the truck.  We were tired, to say the least, but very happy to have come to our new mountain home. Our new neighbors, Kathy and Jim, came out to great us.  What could be better!

The next morning we got up early and began to unload.  By 9:30 everything but the heavy stuff was out of the truck.  Steve was going in high gear. By 10, Tyler and Tanner, two local high school guys we hired, came over to help us with that.  They were young and skinny, but so strong.  They got it done in 30 minutes and were on their way.  They had beat the Willamette football players we hired to load the truck by a good hour!

When we arrived at the house we had 6 inches of snow on the ground.  A week later it was all gone except for a drift on the north side of the house that we used to cool a batch of homebrew and a batch of kombucha.  To our horror, the melting snow exposed a quarter acre of cobble rock rubble that was left from last fall's new drainfield  excavation, covering half of what was to be our new garden.  The rest of the back yard was thick turf where the garden needed to be and denuded sandy soil where the lawn needed to be.   We had our work cut out for us.

The kitchen needs a complete remodel.  It hasn't been touched since 1984.  All the original appliances.  No bookshelves for our hundreds of books.  Old carpeting, bad paint.  The double car garage/shop has a ceiling of slumping insulation bats, mismatched plywood walls and the original overhead door, in rickety, drafty shape.   This time we decided to do it right.  Instead of working on the project of the moment, and not looking ahead to the full, final vision, as we did over 15 years of remodeling at our Salem house, we would prepare what we needed to get the rest of the work done, the shop, and build the future framework of the garden, before we planted anything and before we started to work on the house.  What a concept!  You would think two professional planners would have figured this out sooner.  But hindsight is 20-20.  After two months of hard work, we are getting major steps of that work done.

 It is good, honest, hard work and that is what we need right now.  We need to put our hands and backs to work again.

Our shack

So, we are gradually rebuilding and revitalizing this place.  We've named it Rockchuck Ranch.  Our motto is "practicing farming on a micro-scale"...but we are also building the place up in every sense...the house, the outbuildings, the fence, the garden and orchard, the pastures, our health, and social and creative lives.  We call it Rockchuck Ranch because this is serious post-glacial country with cobble rocks galore, of every size....and in honor of the large local rodent more often called a marmot, who makes it's home in the rocky ditches and banks.  The locals call them rockchucks...and rockchucks we are becoming... digging, moving and rearranging cobbles in every task on the ranch. How many rocks can a rockchuck chuck....

And, of coure, we are learning as we go.  We've done some of what needs to be done here before, but not all in one concerted effort.  So here we go...thought this blog would at least provide you all with some entertainment...watching our trials, errors and accomplishments...and showing you life at Rockchuck Ranch.

PS:  I am a novice blogger.  Wish I had a 14 year old around who could coach me.  But hopefully this blog site should improve as I become more familiar with using it.  I hope you like it.  Please send me your views.  Kate