Sweetwater Days 08, Part 1

Due to the COVID 19 pandemic, Three Rivers College had taken a lot of days off already this year, so Annie felt lucky that her place of employment was still taking three days off for spring break.  I asked for, and received, two days vacation from my own job.  Even with Annie taking a day of her time to work on the dreaded income tax return, we were still going to have a four day weekend.

You guessed it; we were going to Sweetwater.

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In my spare time leading up to this trip to our cabin, I worked on a few things. 

Annie had found a wooden chair with a split seat a few years ago.  Now wooden chairs are surprisingly comfortable, but the temptation to use them for step ladders is way too much for some people to resist.  That often ends with the chair seat splitting under the climber’s weight.  Being used for a stepping stool wasn’t good for that chair, but it was good for us, as we got a chair to snuggle up to the narrow end of the table I had cut down on my last trip to the cabin.

Since we are going for a rustic decor at the cabin anyway, I didn’t have to be especially careful to make the chair repair neat and undetectable.  In the past I have repaired split seats with store-bought mending plates screwed to the bottom.  The problem with that method is that the screws can actually weaken the wood and make the chair prone to splitting again in the future, only now at the places where the screws have penetrated the wood.

Like I said, I wasn’t too worried how neat the repair looked, but more with how useable it was, so I used some non-foaming Gorilla Glue in the place where the seat split, then clamped it together.  Now, that might have held fine when it cured, but I wanted to make the repair stronger, so I cut a 1”x8” board into two shorter pieces and attached those to the bottom of the seat with the same glue.

I then turned the chair upside down and placed it atop a 5-gallon bucket so that the bottom (now top) of the seat was horizontal.  The clamp was holding the seat together and I placed some weight on the boards I had glued to the bottom to help the glue accomplish its mission.

It worked at least as well as I expected.

Heck, I’m sitting on it as I type this.

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Although I had bought a wooden soap dish for the bathroom sink that was in the cabin when we bought it, Annie had decided she wanted to replace the old sink with a newer one.  The cabin didn’t have a true kitchen when we bought it and Annie is not a huge fan of washing dishes in the creek.  I’m not either so, for the bathroom she bought a cabinet that has a sink big enough to wash dishes in.  Heck, it’s big enough to wash small children in it too.  That’s great, but there’s not enough countertop around the sink for the soap dish (the one I had purchased) to sit on.

That’s OK though, because I had another idea, and it would go very well with my rustic, outdoors-oriented decorating theme.

Many, many years ago, my Uncle Bob was the manager of Mountain Lake Hotel, the resort where they filmed the original Dirty Dancing movie.  So he and Aunt Betty took their kids (my cousins John and Lisa) up there to spend every summer for several years.

One summer John was exploring in the mountains around the hotel and found a deer skull someone had thrown out.  It was an antlered buck.  The deer had a perfectly formed left antler but had evidently injured the right one early in its growth.  That antler had four points just like its mate but was only about six inches long and deformed.

I traded John out of the skull and have hung onto it for the intervening 45 or so years.

Well, I ran across the old skull plate when I was searching my antler collection and later had an epiphany.  I could use it to make a perfect, rustic soap dish.

I procured a mussel shell of the appropriate size and mated it to the “good” antler using my Gorilla Glue (What else?).  Then I screwed the skull plate to an old piece of barn lumber.  I had broken the barn wood to the appropriate size by propping it on a straw bale and jumping on it.

Simple, yet effective.

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The week before that particular trip I was talking to Jesse, one of my coworkers, about Sweetwater and showed him pictures of some of my rustic decorating creations.  He must have been impressed because he said, “I’ve got some old antlers I’ll give you.”

He didn’t offer more details and didn’t sound very enthusiastic about the antlers he was offering to me, so I figured they were a couple fork-horns or six-pointers.  I thought I could probably use them for drawer handles or something so I expressed my appreciation but didn’t question him further.

If I’d known what they actually were I would have asked more questions…a lot more, and probably done a back-flip…

…or at least tried to.

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A couple nights later, Jesse came in to work and told me that he had brought the antlers for me and had left them in his car.  He said I could get them when I went out to my car when I got off the next morning.

Still not “getting it” I casually mentioned that he could bring them in when he went outside later that night to check on the area.

Well, it wasn’t long before my coworker went back outside.  When I heard the door open again I looked up and immediately got my mind blown.  Jesse was carrying a full set of caribou antlers…and they were trophy size too!

I admired the big mass of bone and commented on the big tops, long beams, and the double-shovels.  They were big and heavy.  Someone had cut the skull plate in half or they would not have even fit in my car!  Heck, it would have taken some maneuvering to get them through the door into the building!  That’s not an exaggeration either.

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I thought of different things I could make out of those big caribou antlers…but only for a second or two.  They were so beautiful and the skull plate had been cut pretty cleanly.  I could attach the plate to a board (yes, from the old barn) and glue it together using, what else – Gorilla Glue.  The completed creation would make an awesome decoration for the cabin at Sweetwater.  It would be great!

But I had more work to get ready before the four-day trip.  More about that in another post.

Sorry to make you wait, but I’m gonna do it anyway.

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