If you all keep your fingers crossed, we may be able to move back into our cabin within the month. We've been remodeling the place that we call "Coyote" since May, and never dreamed that the project would take this long. But it seems fitting that the work, begun with such energy in the blooming spring, would wind down slowly in these short days. All of my projects seem to be following this cyclical trajectory. More brooding, less doing.
The Coyote renovation was supposed to be a simple and inexpensive project (everyone who has ever gone through a remodel, laugh). The cabin was one room, 472 square feet, with electricity but no indoor plumbing. Hose bibs, sink and shower outside, outhouse that liked to lean to the east and afforded a marvelous view of the hills and small valley that comprise our neighborhood. We lived there and loved it, but the 65-80mph winter winds made the walls and windows shake and pulled at the roof in a threatening fashion. The sun had badly weathered the western and southern walls. We had to do something.
You probably have some personal experience with plans that develop so much momentum that you can barely keep up. Maybe you've been run over by some of your grand schemes. I know I have. Ideas and intentions can deviously pile up and multiply until they form such an impenetrable mass of the "obviously good" and the "should" and the "unavoidable," that you are locked in, compelled to complete them all. Mix in a love of beautiful spaces and design with a healthy dose of that American "we can do it" spirit and some wishful thinking, and there is our Coyote remodel story in a nutshell.
We wanted to create a comfortable, beautiful place, green in construction and operation, a place compatible with the desert. We did our research, fine tuned our use of passive solar strategies for heating and cooling, bought a composting toilet, installed low-E windows, clay plastered the interior walls, put on a metal roof. We plotted the reuse, rather than the replacement, of materials and fixtures. But I mostly think about the digging and what it means.
The desert is rocky and Coyote is a rocky place. A very rocky place. The original builders carved a space out of the stony side of a small hill and created a flat pad for the cabin, so it perches over the valley, small and snug (now). The place is literally built on a rock, and we had a lot of digging to do. Digging to create slabs for the new bath house and the two studios that will remain future projects for now. Digging to put the electrical wires for these buildings underground. Digging to install a simple gray water system, and more digging to replace the old propane lines for the stove. All of this digging requires patience, perseverance, a strong back and arms, and as we discovered, a jack hammer, bobcat, and backhoe. A lot of machines digging up huge rocks that quickly left a huge pit where a small trench was intended. When the machinery left in a cloud of dust and diesel fuel, we looked around at what we had wrought in the name of minimal impact with considerable regret.
"Where there is a will, there is a way," people often say, an invitation to ingenuity. But once we focus on how to do something, the question of whether or not it should be done is rarely raised. And once we have the means to do something, we easily imagine that we have the right to do it as well.The damage that we do takes many forms and it is a product of culture as much as tools. A man with a machine and inadequate culture, Wendell Berry writes, is a pestilence. One thing our culture should teach us is the proper use of the place we occupy and respect for the limits naturally imposed.
We create our spaces and places, and ourselves, from the materials of the earth, which are fuel for the imagination as well as the physical matter of walls and windows. Gaston Bachelard connects the earth, and rocks in particular, with "reveries of will." Rock he says, is a great moralist. Rock is an image of courage and of stability, and work with rock, against the inherent resistance of rock, reconnects temperament with character, the will with the dream of what can be created.
Bachelard is interested in transformation, in the psychological effect of actively engaging with the material world. Given our relative mental and emotional distance, day to day, from the concreteness of the physical world, it might do many of us a world of good to spend an afternoon with a shovel and pick. But would we learn what matters from matter, as Bachelard suggests? Do we have the collective patience and humility, and will? Do I?
I don't regret the digging, the efforts to save water, energy, and the view, largely because we've succeeded in our dream of the small and sustainable, goals we judge to be worthy of hard work, and that give concrete form to our protest against a culture of excess. The completion of the projects that required these holes was its own kind of repair, and hours with a shovel slowly masks the visible signs of upset. The desert tortoise who likes the shade on the east side of the cabin continued to visit throughout the summer. The creosote bushes and cactus that we hovered over and protected from machine operators who thought, to varying degrees, that we were nuts, seem happy in the recent winter rains. The sun still rises, followed by the moon and stars. But damage was done and we savor every sign of the earth's resilience and forgiveness.
I hope, to paraphrase Berry, that if we have made a lasting flaw in the face of the earth, that it was for a lasting good.
“It's all a question of story. We are in trouble just now because we do not have a good story. We are in between stories. The old story, the account of how the world came to be and how we fit into it is no longer effective....Our challenge is to create...a new sense of what it means to be human.” ---Thomas Berry
