Rain… and Campsites… Yeah, yeah, I know, you want me to hurry up and get to the alien abduction. Secure your tinfurl hat and read on, I’ll get there.
John: We’ve made two trips since our last post… one weekend right after another. We have a goal, a time sensitive one. Since my boneheaded move to break my foot, I’m less capable of completing the needed tasks to move forward. I decided to reach out to friends and family and ask them up for a weekend of labor. Everyone loves a barn raising in the sense that a group is assembled for a couple of common causes; the completion of work, and the fellowship of those who hold a common thread. OK, so there is a party planned, and the cover charge is clearing some land.
I had to set a date, so Katie and I conferred with the calendar and chose in weekend in August. The plan is to have a small group of chainsaw wielding drunkards do a little work before imbibing. I don’t mean to falsely claim things about good folk, but I have a certain effect on people. As my mother often claims “John Thomas, you’re going to drive me to drink!”
Katie: We have definitely had our fair share of challenges the past two months. Dealing with injuries over Independence day (I sprained my wrist, John had to top me and break his foot), John’s breaks going out on his truck (yeah, he was driving when it happened), and more rain than you could possibly shake a stick at (if I could have shook a magic wand and said stop raining, I would have). We had hoped to complete our first tent platform during our week long stay, but injuries had gotten in the way. We were both over-joyed to have at least cleared the path for our driveway project to move forward (get what I did there…cleared the path, he he). So we decided to switch gears and focus on the platform, so our future party-goers had a comfortable place to set up their tents. Okay, maybe my stubborn determination had kicked in a little, have I ever built a platform? Nope. Is it going to look like a lopsided Doctor Seuss nightmare? Possibly!
John: During our Independence Day week vacation, we had purchased materials for the tent platform. Before my wreck, we had stacked the materials neatly by the clearing. Sadly, the job was never started. Before our trip up the first weekend, Katie exclaimed “I’m going to build the platform.” Well, what can a guy say to that type of motivation? She may have asked for a plan to follow, so I laid things out as best I could and hobbled to the jobsite to take my rightful place as “supervisor”… yeah, that title was mentioned with just a pinch of sarcasm.
Katie: The first weekend, I was bound and determined that we were going to complete the platform in one fell swoop. No problem, Dr Seuss, here I come! We woke up Saturday morning, and we had our ritual of morning coffee. The ritual mostly involves one of us saying “Do you need more coffee, sweetheart”? When the other half lovingly answers yes, the response is always the same “Good, me too, make some”! (Thanks for teaching us this, Eugene) We always have great intentions of having a few pots of coffee, then starting immediately. Each and every time, our plans are always foiled by repeated games of candy crush (John) and vigorous reading (Katie). Needless to say, we had a later start than either of us had intended. This time, we did have an excuse, it was once again raining, making all things slippery and muddy (like how I justify this…I did look over at our rain coats several times in-between chapters).
John: If you’ve read any comments I’ve written about Katie, you’ll have a pretty good idea of what kind of gal she is. It was her eagerness to jump in and help on the chicken coop build that sold me on our life together. And by “help”, I don’t mean she’d hold a board for me, or grab more screws out of the box… she wanted a 50/50 deal. She wanted to work, and she wanted to learn. I don’t know that I’ve had a better student, and I can say with certainty, that I’ve never had a better partner. So, she said she was committed, and her actions proved it. By the time we had to leave for home, we had the rim joist set, and two of the vertical poles in place.
Katie: The most time-consuming part of this project was undoubtedly the preparation of the poles. After the rim joists were set, John and I worked on the second stage together, skinning the bark off of the poles. It is definitely much easier to skin the bark off of a freshly cut pine tree. Unfortunately for us, some of these had been sitting for awhile, as we had cut them down during our driveway widening extravaganza. John then used my pink chainsaw to start cutting sections out on two sides of the poles to use as joints. He then finished squaring them out with his axe, bowsaw and chisel, until they were nice and flush for attaching to the rim joists. Placing them and pluming them up was an arduous process, they were extremely heavy. But, as Larry the Cable guy always says, we “get er done”.
Sunday it again rained on and off, but we successfully placed two of the six poles. Before we knew it, Sunday afternoon had arrived and it was time to pack up and go. With the jeep packed to the gills and the beagle in tow, we headed out. Sometimes we stop at a great salad bar (emphasis on the bar part) about half-way home for a bite to eat and a drink. Some of the customers gave me a funny look. I excused myself to hit the ladies room to see why I was getting strange stares. Yup, I had black pine sap covering my arms and my face…it was everywhere. I just shrugged my shoulders and thought, it was a fantastic weekend.
John: The second trip up was beginning to feel very much like the first; It rained almost all day Saturday. By Saturday afternoon, we were feeling the cabin fever set in. To stave off the inevitable boredom, we headed into town for a wild night. We dined on good food, enjoyed great beverages, and then things got really wild!… we headed to the Shopko and we each picked out a brand new pair of reading glasses. Hey, I promised stories, not necessarily “salacious” stories.
Katie: The previous weekend, I had this weird feeling of foreboding. When my sweet man would ask me why I had these strange looks on my face, I couldn’t really explain it. A few times out of the corner of my eye, I kept seeing flashes of white. When I turned my head, nothing was there. It continued on and off that weekend, but I just blew it off thinking it was fireflies. The following weekend, we were once again enjoying our morning coffee ritual (okay, it lasted most of the day because of the rain) of candy crushing and book reading, and John had a weird deja-vu moment. He also couldn’t really explain why he was feeling that way, so we again, just blew it off.
It was chilly during the day, so we decided to stoke the fire before we went into town for our party-fest. While we were gone, the rain ended and it began to warm up. At bedtime, we decided not to stoke the fire. When I am up north, my sleeping habits change. I am literally dead to the world. I think it is because it is so peaceful at our land. Don’t get me wrong, we work our butts off while we are there, but I am still so relaxed that I have absolutely no issues sawing laws. It pretty much takes an act of god to wake me up, or at least John shaking me awake.
John: Hot, like Iraq 2006 HOT… that’s the best way to describe the cabin when I awoke at 12:30 AM. It was well over 100 degrees inside, and the fire was going full tilt. Yeah, I found it odd, but I figured my sleeping wife got chilled, and decided to fill the wood stove. I closed the damper on the stove, opened the cabin door, and every window to the place. It wasn’t cooling down fast enough so I lit a cigarette and sat down on a chair in the cool night air of the screen porch. As I sat, alone with my thoughts and the lack of sounds in the woods, I thought “This is why people who get abducted by aliens always live out in the middle of nowhere… ET could come rolling in on some stellar version of a straight piped Harley, and no one would ever know.” I finished my smoke, and crawled back into bed next to Katie and the beagle.
As I lay in bed, I thought I heard a noise outside the cabin. I raised my head off the pillow, and for a second, I saw four dim lights outside the screen porch… They were about the right height to be taken for a head lamp on a person looking into the cabin. The lights were arranged in a diamond pattern, roughly three to four inches across… too wide for a head lamp. As I tried to recall where I placed my pistol, I shook my head to wake up in the same manor as someone pinching themselves to make sure they were awake. At that instant, the lights were gone, and I came to two conclusions; I was dreaming, and I need to cut back on the amount of Redbull that I put in my vodka.
Katie: Since our contractor had started our driveway, we weren’t able to drive the jeep down to the cabin. Instead we parked at the top of the dirveway, and hauled all of our gear down with the ATV and a trailer. So, there I was, sawing my proverbial logs, when John woke me up at 4:30 in the morning. He was already dressed and had a look of deep concern on his face. He said to my groggy self “Do you hear that, Katie? Your jeep alarm is going off”. It took me a few seconds to shake the sleepiness out of my brain to digest what he was saying to me. I got out of bed, dressed, and he slapped my gun into my hands. He told me that he was going to take the ATV up the driveway to check it out and if I heard gunshots, to come up there. So, there I was, half awake, staring out at the pitch black night, watching only the headlights of the ATV drive away. Then I thought to myself, “what the hell, how am I supposed to get to where he is at, there is only one ATV and it’s pitch back outside”. God knows I can barely walk on a flat surface, let alone stumble my way in the darkness on the torn up muddy road.
John: When I arrived at the Jeep, I did a quick sweep of the area, then focused on the vehicle. Doors were still locked, windows in tact, tools still inside. I looked for new tracks in the muddy road, but found nothing. After a moment, the alarm shut off, and I listened for movement of anything that may have set it off. As I sat, just a few feet away, not a sound was heard, until once again, the alarm started blaring. I wasn’t touching the jeep, but it sure as hell went off. It was about this time that I realized I had forgotten the car keys back at the cabin. So with the alarm honking away, I motored back to grab them. I explained to Katie that I thought ]we were experiencing and electrical fault, but would know more in a moment. I returned to the jeep, gained access, checked things over, and found that the dash indicator was signaling “rear gate ajar”. It wouldn’t shut off no mater what I did. The gate was closed and latched, no doubt, but that light wouldn’t go out. The air was thick with fog. Like pea soup humidity. I concluded that the latch switch was going bad, and the moisture in the air had short circuited it, causing a false alarm. I left the Jeep unlocked, and returned to the cabin to give the “All Clear.”
Katie: John finally arrived back at the cabin and announced that all was safe and sound. Then he announced it was coffee time. Great, we will definitely be able to get an early start to the day this time! So, again, after our morning coffee rituals, we set out at 7:30 in the morning to finish the platform. The day turned out to be a hot one, in the 80’s. Even though we had plenty of shade in the woods, we were both sweating like mad. I’ve told John it’s no wonder people who homestead up here are skinny, every time we are here, I feel like I get more than a good workout.
Sami the Beagle loves to lay in the woods by us while we are working. Sometimes she will run around sniffing things and chasing chipmunks, but overall she does a really good job by sticking very close to us. In the early afternoon, I heard coyotes begin to howl, which was a little unusual. All of our previous experience at the land, they reserved their communications to the nighttime. They sounded like they were a little to close for comfort. 
It had me concerned enough to ask John if he would take our beloved puppers back to the cabin for safety. After awhile, he hobbled back down, with his rifle in tow, just in case they wandered too close to where we were.
Not too long after that we saw the dark clouds roll in, and the rumble of what appeared to be a strong storm in the making. We scrambled to pack up the tools and get them to back to storage before the rain hit. We almost made it, but at the end of putting the tools away, it started pouring. It felt like ice cycles hitting us, the raindrops were so cold. After we made it back to the safety of our cabin, the lightning started. Let me tell you folks, it was close. As we saw the strikes and heard the booms, our little cabin was shaking. I thought about our tin roof, and our little cabin, I was worried that if the lightening struck us, we would be goners. Thankfully, it was uneventful…good thing we have really large trees surrounding us.
It was pretty late in the afternoon when the rain ended, but we were both so determined that we weren’t leaving the project unfinished, we set back out to complete the platform. We had all of the main poles placed, so now it was time to start decking it. The work passed relatively quickly, since we didn’t have to cut the majority of the planks. 
With all of the planks placed, we worked in tandem, screwing all of the boards down. It took a nearly two more hours, but we finally finished it! We hurried to pack up and scrambled to leave, since it was already 7:30 in the evening. It takes us a solid three and a half hours to drive home without any stops. We resigned ourselves that we were going to both be tired for our day jobs come Monday morning.
After one really weird weekend, Katie and I packed, cleaned up, and headed for home. We plan to make a “clean-up” trip before the big weekend. We’ll organize a bit, flag some trees, and make a plan of where to put everyone. Oh! Our exciting news? Our neighbor finally sold his property… to a guy who lived just minutes from our Elk River home. Our new neighbor is planning on homesteading the place, which means he’s making certain improvements that will affect us. One of which, we had planned to do in a few years, but because of the cost savings of a combined effort, the timeline has accelerated… It looks as though we will be having on-grid power installed to our future home site by winter. It was a tough choice for us to make, but it will never be cheaper, so we are pulling the trigger on the next phase. (Get it? “Phase”… I’m so punny.)
Oh, and if you’re wondering… we’re pretty sure we were not abducted by aliens. Well, if we were, neither of us noticed any side effects from possible experimentation. So there’s that. Remember, keep your pistol close, your damper closed, and the car keys in your pocket. We’ll write again soon. Stay tuned!
***UPDATE*** as we were getting ready to post the latest addition, we were informed that our driveway has been completed!!! we’ll post photo’s on our Facebook page soon!!! One step closer to offering you an opportunity to join us for a weekend of fun!!!
John and Katie