Chapter 63 Coming Home - from my book Changes

Chapter 63

Coming Home

After three weeks at Trackerschool, including The Vision Quest class, Scout Class, and Ancient Scout class, it was time to go home to Oregon where my family was still working on our Snail Shell house in the woods.  I was pleasantly surprised to see that my husband and son had almost finished the cob floor in the kitchen area.  That was a lot to do, without me there to boss them around, LOL.

One of my goals with the Snail Shell House was to make something as primitive as I could and still have it function well enough to allow us to be comfortable.

We used clay from the ground, sand from the river purchased from the store down the mountain, straw from the feed store, and water from the rest stop just north of Cottage Grove.  Mix that all up in the right combination, and you get “cob” for sculpting your house.

My sister introduced me to the book, “The Hand Sculpted House,” and I used that as my handbook for making my own little primitive house.

We still did not have running water, or a typical modern toilet.  We used a 5 gallon bucket with a toilet seat on it as our bathroom, and added some sawdust each time we used it.  That had to be dumped whenever it got full, onto a special compost pile, which gradually shrank over time with the weather.  The marvelous thing about that little toilet was that it did not stink!  The sawdust covered any potential smell.

We went to the lake almost every day to swim when the weather got hot and we got tired.  That was our daily rinse off, but to wash our hair with shampoo, we used the rain barrels that caught the rain water.

We had very little mosquito problems as we kept the rain barrels free of mosquito larva using strainers.  Any we might have missed, the bats took care of by eating them mid flight.

The bats were fun to watch when they first came out each evening.  Their little black bodies silently darting around above our heads.  They looked kind of jerky and awkward, but they could move with precision, catching any stray mosquitos as we sat around our little cooking fire, under the two story overhang.  I really miss that.

In the kitchen we installed shelves, counters, and a sink.  We also installed plumbing through the cob floor, to send the dish water from the sink, through the drain, and down the hill into the woods.

The main thing I really don’t miss is having to haul all our water in from the rest stop to our little primitive home.  I’ll tell you what, we really learned to conserve that water!  When I go back to live there some day, I will create a great water catching system, and a greenhouse down below, so that dish water can be sent there for irrigation all year long.

Urbanite was a new term I learned while working on my primitive house.  Urbanite is broken up concrete that is considered waste material from demolition sites, and often used as fill material since it does not decompose, and acts like rock.  I started noticing it here and there and learned to use it as building material.  My family and I scavenged it where ever we could and filled our old red 1988 f-250 beater truck with it, over and over, hauling it home to create the foundation for the cob walls of the Snail Shell House.

We put in stairs from the kitchen to the middle level by cobbing in half log segments to serve as steps.

Funny story about Marshal and I cutting a log in half … There was a thick, long log we harvested by the creek that had been blown down during the hurricane that came through the winter before.  The log was so thick and heavy we couldn’t haul it with the truck, so Marshal and I took turns using the chainsaw to cut it in half lengthwise.  It took us at least an hour and a half; much longer than we anticipated, which didn’t make sense since I had just put on a new chain and I knew it was sharp.  Finally, we took the chain saw in to the repair shop to complain and see why it wasn’t cutting well.  There was a long line of men waiting for service there at the repair shop and they let me go ahead of them since I just had a quick question.  When the owner of the store took a look at my chainsaw, he said I had the chain on backwards.  No wonder it took so long to cut that log.  No wonder it smelled like burning wood instead of sawdust.  We all had a good laugh, and one of the men even whispered to me that he had done that once too.  Kind of him to admit that so I wouldn’t feel quite so silly.