August Ansel - Shadow Road

Tomorrow we lay the sills then finally begin raising the walls. I might just burn the damned tent when we’re done.

September 30, 2038

The whole summer is gone. Can’t wrap my head around it.

We moved into our home almost two weeks ago, and the whole Webb clan came for a two-day housewarming party. Quite a gig. With Merry’s help, Sarah had baked for days—cinnamon rolls, apple muffins, and a blackberry pie. That’s a feat with the new baby, Lissy, more or less attached to her 24/7. Most of the time we hoard sugar like misers, so I almost felt drunk after gorging on treats. Jaimes and I are both itching to get lessons on woodstove cooking. We’ve been going at it in a half-assed experimental way, meaning we eat a lot of things that are scorched or partly raw.

And hey, speaking of drunk: Brandon brought a pint of moonshine to the bash. He makes beer and a type of homemade mead, too, but with everything else they carried in, he decided a little pint of white lightning was enough to make a celebration. My aching head concurred.

Being inside our own walls is a pleasure I can’t begin to explain. It’s still rough as hell, of course, but it’s up and it’s ours—walls, roof, and doors. The to-do list? Infinite, I guess.

Jaimee is a different person. Our time on the road getting here was way harder than expected, and I really thought she’d lost sight of the goal somewhere along the way. By the time we hit Sacramento she’d almost stopped eating—so skinny she was swimming in her clothes. Now though, she’s back to her brilliant self, all kinetic energy and exploding ideas. The Jaimes I fell in love with.

All the days and hours we plotted this move, back when we were still stuck in Southern California, seem like a million years ago. When we first met, I thought she was a little nuts—all she wanted in life was to get out of the U.S., escape, get off the grid in New Hemings. I didn’t care, though. Being with her was like holding onto the tail of a comet. In those early days I would have agreed to anything just to keep her in my bed. Then I caught her vision like a virus. I told her that once, that she’d infected me, and she gave me a smile—the one that gets me hard in about three seconds—and she said, Yeah Tommy. I got you, didn’t I. She did. Got me good.

Yep, it was a great housewarming party—we ate and danced and drank and played tipsy games of Scrabble. The weather was amazing and the kids hiked all over the hills and swam in the river. Merry made a huge wreath of oak leaves for the front door, which got Jaimee all choked up. She sat there staring at it with her hand clapped over her mouth, not able to speak. Poor Merry started to look at her mom, like maybe she’d done something wrong, but Jaimee grabbed her into a bear hug and thanked her—which made everyone smile and trade awkward looks.

Super emotional isn’t Jaimee, normally. Truth is, she’d had a miscarriage two weeks before, really early days, and her hormones were whacked. On the second morning of the Webb’s visit, I found her out at the spring, sitting alone. She waved when she saw me, but I could see she’d done some hard crying. Watching Sarah nurse the baby was getting to her, she said. We hadn’t told Brandon and Sarah about the pregnancy, and Jaimee was adamant that we not say anything. She didn’t want Sarah to be self-conscious or put a damper on the celebration. I felt useless to help—kept offering hugs until she finally pushed me away and told me to fuck off. She was smiling though.

January 5, 2039

Happy new year—first such observance in our place, be it ever so humble.

Can’t see the clock, but it’s early, a little after five, I think. Sitting in our kitchen, listening to the fire in the woodstove, sipping a big old cup of tea. Really glad to have a stretch of quiet time to update this record, because we’ve had some adventures I want to jot down while I have the chance. Likely to be a long story. J is in the loft, still snoozing under about six blankets. Cold! We actually got snow. Man, that was the best way to start our first full year on the land. According to locals—the ones the Webbs have gotten chatty with when they’re in town—snow’s a rare treat. Maybe once a year it’ll get cold enough to drop a couple of inches and stick. When I looked out a few minutes ago, that snow and a chubby moon over the valley made the view from our loft a postcard—one that’ll never get sent, and who cares? It’s ours.

We’ve switched gears to work mostly on inside stuff until it warms up a little. As always, our to-do list is massive, and we keep busy. Jaimee and I were both raised with the usual material orgasm under the Christmas tree (especially her) and neither of us have any desire to replicate that. But when the winter solstice gets close, it’s impossible not to have a feeling of reverence and renewal—the light returns! So, on Christmas Eve, we got super restless and decided to take a rare trip into town, just the two of us. For once, we weren’t on a mission for supplies, just fighting a little cabin fever. Once we got down to the highway, we thumbed a ride into Arcata and had a great time cruising the plaza, enjoying the lights, drinking hot chocolate and looking into shop windows at the piles of stuff we absolutely don’t need—haha. Fun distraction. But the cool thing that happened wasn’t until we were on our way home.

On the return, we were having a harder time hitching a ride and did a lot of walking. We decided to cut across from the highway to the old road. When we got there, Jaimee saw what looked like a construction site in the distance. It was the opposite direction from where we were going (isn’t it always??), but I didn’t want to put the brakes on such a fun day. And holy crap, I should have known better than to argue my wife’s instincts. She found us some treasures.

There was a teardown in progress on a big wedge-shaped lot. The sign said it was the future home of a mini-storage. Heavy equipment was parked around the place, and all that big stuff driving over the property had compacted most of the lot down to bare dirt. A couple of outbuildings had been reduced to piles of broken lumber. One of the piles had to have been a barn—it was massive. There weren’t any fences up, so we poked around a little, hoping to maybe salvage some usable pieces of timber. Original construction in Humboldt used a ton of old-growth redwood, gorgeous stuff that lasts pretty much forever. The demolitions had already been seriously picked over—nothing left but a lot of wet kindling that wasn’t worth the effort to haul up onto our hill. What hadn’t been torn down yet, though, was the house itself, and that’s where we seriously lucked out.

It was a decrepit Victorian, no doubt gorgeous in its day. Sections of the hand-milled gingerbread trim and siding had been stripped, and sheets of visqueen covered bare rectangles where the second-story windows used to be. The contractor was obviously taking time on the dismantle. Jaimee started scoping the place out like it was Fort Knox and damned if she didn’t find a little side door unlocked. We tiptoed in but were definitely alone. The interior was a sorry wreck, mildewed and moth-eaten. There were giant holes in the floors and walls we had to shimmy past, trying not to break a leg. Over the decades, people make a million modifications to these old places—most of them ugly and haphazard.

God knows how long since actual humans lived there. The only signs of life inside were animal shit, sheets of nasty cobwebs, and the overpowering stink of mice. The back of my neck was crawling, but Jaimes wanted to see upstairs. I pointed out that we could already see into the overhead rooms through holes in the ceiling. When we reached the stairs, though, I was shocked at how solid they were. Not a single riser broken or missing and the banister was almost perfect—banged up, heavy layers of paint peeling and moldy, but essentially sound.