Sweetwater Days 02

Annie and I drove toward northwest Arkansas with a truckload of stuff.  We were headed toward Sweetwater and a couple partial days full of hard work and a little relaxation.  Among the tools, water jugs, and overnight bags, Annie had nestled the little grill from our fire pit at home, and an ice chest with our food, including something a little more appetizing than hotdogs to be cooked over the open fire in the stone fire ring I’d built the week before. 

Oh, and there were a couple of brand-new tools that had never been used.  This trip, I was going to join the ranks of such revered Renaissance artists as da Vinci, Michelangelo and Raphael.

I was about to become a stone-carver.

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Annie and I have been together long enough that even a long trip passes with a lot of pleasant conversation, including a liberal sprinkling of light-hearted chiding.  I thoroughly enjoy being around her.  She seems to tolerate me pretty well too.

So, after a short four-hour drive, we turned in to the access road, eager to get out and stretch our legs once we pulled up to the cabin.

We didn’t get to wait that long.

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The pickup bounced and jounced down the rough, rutted “driveway” until we rounded a slight curve and were brought up short by a tree that had fallen across it during a recent storm.  Maybe there was a bit of macho swagger in my step as I climbed out of the cab and went around to pull my chainsaw out of its place in the packed bed of the truck.  I was soon glad that Ann hadn’t noticed my manly strutting as I checked the gas and oil in the motor and yanked the starter rope a few times before I realized I had forgotten to prime the saw.  Now I had a flooded engine that wouldn’t start, and the dark clouds that had been threatening rain for the last hour were starting to drip.

My mind raced with thoughts.  What could I do to keep from having to sit out a rainstorm in the cab of the pickup with a wife who was currently less than impressed with my chances of keeping my man-card?

OK, maybe my mind wasn’t actually racing, more like walking fast with thoughts.

One quick option would be to use the truck to break off limbs until the remainder of the tree was light enough to drag off to the side.  And it was a good option too, except that I remembered at that moment that I had taken the bucket containing Dad’s old logging chain off the truck in the process of loading…and forgotten to load it back on.

Dang!

Oh, well, there was the tow strap I always kept on hand for emergencies.  It just might be strong enough to do the job.

Except I couldn’t find it either.

Dang again!

In my search for the tow strap, I found a couple tie-down straps and decided to try them.  They were fairly cheap and easily replaced if they broke…which they did.

My grip on my man-card was getting tenuous.

The tree looked somewhat rotten so I should have been able to make short work of the limbs…if I’d had found the tow strap.  Luckily, the axe we’d brought with us the week before was an extra one, so I’d made the fortuitous decision to leave it at the cabin when we’d left for home.

I asked Annie to walk to the cabin and bring back the axe while I busied myself tossing the small broken limbs and branches off the side of the road.  She made it back just as I was finishing that part of the deal.  I took the axe and checked the blade, which wasn’t quite as dull as I expected it to be, since our boys had been the last to use it, and they have a tendency to try to chop rocks sometimes.

Annie stepped back as I warmed up with a few easy chops before digging in to attack the wood the way my dad had taught me to use an axe.  My muscles quickly fell into the groove and each bite of the axe threw up chips even as I realized that the tree was more solid than I’d thought (and hoped) it would be.  Nevertheless, despite old lungs that reminded me how out of shape I was, the limbs were soon reduced to carrying size, and the last of the tree was pulled off the side of the road.

My machismo was safe, my man-card renewed.

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The rain had decided to hold off long enough for me to finish with the tree and we were able to make it to the cabin, back the pickup up to the steps, and unload it before a gentle rain began to fall. 

Oh, and in the process of unloading, I had found the tow strap, packed neatly away under a pile of stuff.

Dang it one more time.

Annie and I were able to settle into our comfortable rocking chairs (No old-folks jokes please.) for a breather before the precipitation began to…uh, precipitate.  I heard a hummingbird fly past the feeder Ann had hung the week before and noticed that the feeder hadn’t been quite emptied since we’d left.  Annie refilled it while sitting in her rocker and I snapped a photo at a perfect time to make it look like she was taking a break with a refreshing drink…of hummingbird nectar.

With the soft sound of rain falling on the tin roof of the cabin, it was tempting to grab a quick nap, but the little hummer came back…with reinforcements.  Three of the tiny birds zipped and dove.  One would grab a quick sip before another chased it away from the feeder.  I was reminded once more that, like people, hummingbirds could accomplish a lot more if they would just get along.  After all, there were three birds and four flowery ports.  Heck, four birds could drink in peace if they would spend less time trying to defend “their” feeder.  All they had to do was share and everyone could relax and pig-out happily.

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The rain didn’t last long before it slowed to a very sparse sprinkle.

I had a couple blue seven-gallon jugs I’d recently acquired and took them downhill to fill them from the creek.    Then there was that long climb back up to the bathroom inside the cabin.  Now, theoretically, two seven-gallon jugs only hold two gallons each more than the five-gallon buckets I’d used the week before.  However, there was no sloshing and spilling so the whole fourteen gallons, all 112 pounds of it, made the whole trip…and a short, fat, old guy carried it.

Now, I used to squat over 400 pounds, but that was with two legs.  Each steep uphill (or up-steps) stride was the equivalent of a one-legged squat with 112 pounds.

That’s all the excuses I can come up with for how much it wore me out, so I hope it will do.  Wait a minute, I forgot to mention that I’ve had surgery on both knees and my left one is bone-on-bone.

Anyway, it reminded me quite well that I needed to install running water in the cabin.

When I finished hauling water I grabbed my two new tools.  A short four-pound hand sledge hammer and a chisel.  Oh, and not just any chisel, this one was a stone-mason’s chisel.  For the first time in my life, I was going to carve stone.

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I had noticed that the spring formed a little pool about two inches deep, which grew shallower on the down-stream side.  The water had to flow over the bedrock before it could resume its downward journey. As I’ve said before, if you dam a spring and the walls are too high, there is a chance you can cause the spring to back up and find a new, easier outlet.  You may end up with a dam containing nothing…and a dead spring.  If I was going to capture the spring I wanted to get the outflow to run down a pipe without any “hills” it had to climb.  The best, least risky option I had was to chisel out a channel big enough to put in a pipe that could capture all of the spring’s flow.

Each swing of the hammer caused the chisel to carve out a tiny amount of rock but, hey, it was carving out the rock.  There I sat, legs spread and leaning over, looking like some fat, pale white toad banging away at the chisel.  It took me probably three or four hours to carve a channel two-inches deep and about three wide.  The water flowed through it freely.  The result of my work may not remind anyone of Michelangelo’s David, but it was beautiful to me.

Heck, I think Michelangelo probably took more than four hours to get good enough to carve David.

Just saying.

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Carving done and backside numb from sitting in the cold water for hours, I happily got up (slo-o-o-owly) and climbed up to the porch where Annie had prepared a meal for both of us to enjoy.  Oh, the food was delicious, but it was made all the more enjoyable because we could both sit down and relax after an afternoon of hard work.  While I had been doing my imitation of da Vinci, Annie had been chopping away at the weeds and trees that had grown up since the property was dozed prior to going on the market.  She had made a lot of progress, not only cutting saplings down, but picking up bags of trash that had accumulated, probably since the property was first claimed.

So, yes, we deserved the rest.

After a while Annie commented that she was going to go down to the little pool where I collected water and clean up so that she could sleep more comfortably.  She waded into the cold pool enthusiastically…until the water reached above her knees, then loudly proclaimed, “I think I can wash off just fine without going in any deeper.”  She quickly finished her ablutions and toweled off before heading back to the cabin.

Unlike my delicate wife I, being the macho man that I am, got all the way into the deepest part of the pool and squatted down to wash off completely.  I’m just glad Annie couldn’t hear my un-macho exclamations as I knelt in the frigid water.

It didn’t take me very long to finish bathing either.

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My lovely wife and I sat in our rockers as darkness settled in, then went inside for some sleep.

The night proved to be longer than expected.  Despite the almost complete silence (except for a gentle rain and forest night sounds) neither of us seemed to be able to fall into a deep sleep.  We both got up several times to try to find something to make the night more restful.  I went out onto the porch to get rid of some of the water I had accumulated while trying to replace all the sweat I’d lost during the day.  It was so dark out there that the little pile of wood I’d accumulated while clearing the spring took on the outline of a brooding black bear.

Annie had discovered the reason she was unable to sleep.  My poor wife spent quite some time that night in the bathroom.

I must have dozed off for a while because I woke up the next morning to find Annie outside trying to poke the fire back to life, and the bear I’d seen in the darkness which had transmogrified back into a wood pile.

I used some wood from the bear…uh, pile, to rekindle the fire.  It was soon blazing.  Annie set-to frying a meal of bacon and eggs.  Because the air was so sodden you could almost wring it out, and the sky looked like it wanted to rain on us again, Annie didn’t wait for the fire to die down to coals, but cooked over the open flame, which left me with a (hopefully) nourishing meal of crispy eggs and bacon that was half rubbery, half crunchy, and half, uh, charcoal.

It was delicious. 

Oh, did you like my math?

After breakfast we enjoyed some coffee while sitting on the porch, discussing what we would do on our next visit.

Then we got up and started loading the truck for our trip back to southeast Missouri.

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Annie decided she needed to make one more trip to the bathroom before we headed out.  After a while, she told me, “Those big, blue jugs are too heavy for me to pick up and pour.”

Being the ever-chivalrous husband that I am, I volunteered to “flush it” for her.  I lifted the toilet lid and bent to lift the jug.  As it gurgled and the toilet’s contents started their first, slow, circles, I looked up at my sweet wife of 37 years and said, “and they told us all the romance would be gone once we’d been married this long.”

Annie laughed and agreed.

In retrospect, I wonder if her laughter was more in agreement with my joke, or in knowing she had already shared her stomach bug with me.  Yep, I got to enjoy it the next day.

We headed toward Malden, happy about the idea of getting a hot shower, and even more happy about the progress we had made on our trip to Sweetwater.

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