Monday, May 29, 2006
07:11 p.m.
    You learn so much from the people you love. You learn about the golden rule, about unconditional acceptance, about taking the good times as well as the bad and building with them a foundation.

PROJECT #1 Building a Wall

Michele and Sam sitting on the partially-built wall.
    Living in a post-cold war era has clouded our minds, making us believe that all wall are all bad. And at times, it becomes apparent that in order for us to live on the land and shelter ourseves, that walls are not all that bad. Otherwise, we find we have to flatten out the land by any means possible, rather than simply live with the land or live into the land.
    Look at how areas are cleared for malls, suburban housing developments, industry and even landfill waste disposal. The land is stripped until it is flat, then replaced with fill and sod, usually using plants and materials from the next state and even across the country, rather than from local resources.

Johnny helps clear an area for the barn.
    In a moment of clarity, I had come to relize that I had done the same things, except on a much smaller scale. The house populates an area where brome hay and natural grass once grew, cattle grazed and wild animals roamed. The barn's area was cut out of a much larger area, creating a more than 8-foot “cut” into the hillside of clay, destroying another hay and grass area larger than 4800 square feet.

The barn, before the roof was finished
    We may cringe at this thought: I destroyed a natural area to erect a large metal building. There are and will be consequences, but consider the following:
    (1) Building the barn gave 5 days of work to 4 men from Oklahoma. They were paid and treated well.
    (2) My neighbors Larry and Carolin plant potatoes and onions in their garden, but had a lot of trouble the previous year because the soil was holding far too much water. The high clay content under the top soil also held enormous amounts of water, and their root plants became moldy and rotten before they could be harvested. And to boot, this happened in a dry year. When the area for the barn was cut out, this broke loose the aquifers, the water drained out (creating a big, sloppy mess for me), accidentally giving my neighbors an almost perfect spot to host a garden.
    (3) Once comleted, it is hoped that the barn will host an area to work on vehicles and machines, a woodshop, an office, storage space, an electronics workbench, and will hopefully all be heated and cooled by renewable or natural energy sources.

    In an area close to the house, the driveway was becoming unmanageable. Water was eating away the hillside, and gravel in the driveway would become covered by clay and silt. It became obvious that a retaining wall was in my future. Mother Nature's progress and her process of erosion was taking over all of the work I'd put in the past few years. And a retaining wall was not something I wanted to tackle alone.
    So last winter, when my friend Chad and I were staying with Michele out at Jackson, Wyoming (our annual snowmobile trip), one of our conversations drifted into some things that we needed to do this year.

Chad and Michele get lunch with me at Togwatdee Pass, Wyoming
High gas prices were making it difficult for Michele, since she makes a bi-annual cross-country trip from her summer home in Maine where she is a whitewater raft guide to her winter home in Wyoming where she teaches kids how to snowboard at Jackson Hole and back again in the summer.

Michele readies for a slope south of Jackson, Wyoming
    Apparently a symbiotic relationship was formed, since she needs a place in the middle of the country to break up the trip and stop to make some gas money, working at something that can be done in her “off seasons” of spring and fall. And I needed help, requiring somebody I could hire once or twice a year to help me catch up on some projects that creep up on a homeowner, especially one homeowner who spends so much time on the road, having to stop or give up on projects because there is just too little time between road jobs. Add to that I have a schedule that is almost entirely “on-call” and nothing gets done, ever. So when given the chance to have somebody who really wants to work, I took the chance that this probably could work out very well.
    The advantage of hiring someone who is really intelligent means several things. For one, intelligent people are easily bored (spending most of their lives trying to overcome this obstacle, often mistaking their smarts with awful labels lie “Attention Deficit Disorder” or “Attention Deficit Hyperactive Disorder” and further stupefy their smarts or the smarts of others by simply calling it “ADD” or “ADHD.” This is not only a complete insult to that person's intelligence, it is an insult to their very soul. I'd like to think of this ability to multitask (even when you aren't “trying” to multitask) as a way our species has evolved, rather than this being a disorder we've started to develop. When somebody sits eating breakfast, reading the paper, watching the morning news on TV, and singing to themselves, we call this amazing. And when a child can't sit still for 5 seconds, we call this “A.D.D.” Well, I call BULLSHIT on this one.
    Consider for a moment the caveman, and the many species before and after the caveman. For thousands of years, our species existed while having to make very few decisions. Now, even at a very young age, we are all forced to make more decisions in one day than the caveman made in an entire lifetime.
    We have adapted and evolved to the point where we can multitask up to hundreds and even thousands of decisions per day. They go far beyond the first decisions of the day, such as “Should I get up, or roll over in the fart sack and go back to sleep?”
    Driving down the road seems simple enough, but we set up our vehicles to do thousands of things at once, to go straight or turn, to adjust for the ever-changing landscape, to let us know when to refuel, even to automatically adjust the radio so music doesn not bare into your eardrums when you slow to a stop and your engine is suddenly making a lot less noise.
    I've come to find that being a landowner and homeowner is all about being a steward for the land. You do not own it, rather it owns you. It is an opportunity to constantly live in a state of multitasking, where gardens need to be planted and watered, where decks and trim need to be painted or touched up, where meals are prepared and bread broken, where spaces of comfort and relaxation need to be created and tended, where driveways and fences and even souls need mending.

A sign in Omaha points out that Michele is where the “fun” is at.
    After an almost week-long stint working for a client in Omaha,

Michele, Sam and crew in Omaha, Nebraska
Michele and I arrived home to Kansas and set out to build a retaining wall for the east side of the driveway. Up to this point, we spent a lot of time setting up live shots, waiting around, moving to another area of town for more live coverage, and at one point we even took part in a broad jump competition. And I won. Yay for me.
    While the work is never predictable in my line of work, I think that at this point, Michele had expected some type of routine by this point, and without that was starting to question any or all motives that I allegedly or did not allegedly have. So luckily, against her better judgement, she decided to stay.

CASE STUDY IN COMMUNICATION

Yes, it's a drawing of a cup of coffee. Pretty simple, right?
    I could wax poetic forever describing everything that Michele has taught me over the past few years and the past few weeks. And I hope that she learned a few things from me. And as an exercise, after we ate one night, I put this picture, or rather object forward. I'll ask you what I asked her. What is it?
    You might say, “It's a coffee cup.”
    And I might ask, “Is it? What is a coffee cup?”
    So you would respond with words like, “hot, liquid, ceramic mug, a drink made from beans picked and roasted and steeped, percolated or leeched with hot water, then placed into a handheld drinking vessel. O.K., you might not use a word like vessel. But you get the idea.
    So what about “pleasure, aroma, gathering, community, or even love?” What about “dirty water, gitters, or even BLECH!?”
    For those who do not enjoy coffee might say the latter. But when I think of coffee, I reminisce about being 12 and drinking coffee with older people at church, or better yet drinking coffee with my grandparents in their kitchen, sitting around with my great aunts and great uncles, knee-deep in kitchen table politics and other world issues and how they would run things, generally agreeing about the fact that things were much better back when people actually worked for a living. And I think and dream of the former, of pleasure and of the smells coming from my grandma's kitchen, and remembering the love and trust they would continually engender.

    Back at the wall, the creation of the wall and the creation of the metaphor for communication both find us with some work to be done.
    The lesson plans were simple, and made up a few pages, pictures and diagrams:
    (1) The first layer of blocks must be level.
    (2) The first layer of blocks must be dug and sunk in proportion to the amount of wall above the native soil, a foot underground for every 4 feet above native soil.
    (3) Turns and curves into or out of a hillside must be gradual, and step up or down in proportion to the block height (in our case, in 8” steps).
    (4) A perforated drain pipe must be placed behind the wall, just above level with the native soil, so water can drain from behind the wall.
    (5) Gravel must be placed behind the wall, giving water a way to leach down the back of the wall, into the perf pipe behind the wall, then exiting out the side of the wall.
    (6) The retaining wall rocks (in our case blocks) should come from a local source. Since Kansas is not known for good retaining wall rocks, only clay and sand and limestone, that means concrete was the best viable option at this time. *Some environmentalists would give me a “B” or “C” on this one because of the energy it takes to create concrete. And for that I would tell them to shove it up their bum. Besides, a lot of concrete used these days is recycled concrete, often called “urbanite.” Urbanite! Isn't that just the cutest thing ever? That's about as cute as a bowl full of puppies.

Bowl full of puppies courtesy Donna Kleppe
    So the first steps to building our wall required removing a 26' long, 2' wide, 2' deep patch of earth for the foundation to the wall. While this sounds easy, it was not. The earth was a mucky, wet, sticky clay that required knee-high rubber boots, transfer and spade shovels, a wheelbarrow, a scraper to scrape wet clay out of the wheelbarrow, several pairs of gloves (which were often washed or sprayed off due to unmanageable amounts of clay build-up), hats for the beating and unforgiving sun, an incredible amount of patience for each other and our situation, plenty of good food to give us energy, and even a few other projects to allow us to walk away and take our minds off the large wall being pieced together with 105-lb lego pieces.
    Soon after the beginning the project, before we had even met our desired depth, the question was posed (mostly in jest, I believe) that couldn't we do this with a backhoe or a skid steer, or some type of machine?
    Yes, I suppose. And instead of writing this message, as I am now, with a pad and pen, I could be doing this with a computer, on the internet. But like this wall, and this piece of work, the first draft is done by hand, with hand tools.
    So our lesson in communication at this point is that there are many ways to approach the act of communicating, just as there are many ways to approach the act of building a wall. Today I choose the pen and paper, accompanied by the bottomless cup of coffee. That day, we chose shovels and human energy, accompanied by a little attitude of piss and vinegar.
    Watching Michele and I break down the walls of perception and attempt to carry on a conversation must have been like watching sheep shit grass. For in the process of trying to figure out how to go about such a simple project, we both came to realize how important the journey is and how you must really bring yourself out of the past and the future and live completely in the moment, if you really expect to get anything done and not injure yourself in the process.
    Both of us are always living in the past, and wondering about the future. And it was haunting me for the first half of her visit and journey here in the midwest. After finishing a job in Sioux Falls, South Dakota, we sat down at a newly discovered German restaurant in Omaha to have a really long talk. Something was really bothering me, and she knew it and felt it, but I just couldn't put my thoughts around it enough to explain. I was stuck in that mucky clay we were digging for our foundation.
    All I could do to describe my feeling were to say that I had missed something, forgotten to do something, and possibly passed over some critical element and I couldn't put my finger on it. The conversation from her was drifting into how she had felt uncomfortable at times because she felt that I needed or wanted more from her than she was willing to give.
    That thought saddened and upset me, almost insulted me. How could I even think of asking someone who gave and gives so much of herself to ask or demand more from her?
    If I truly, honestly, even hopefully choose to live my life by the golden rule, then I can never ask anyone to give more than I could give more than I can give myself.
    My discomfort with missing something or forgetting something really had nothing to do with her discomfort about what she thought were my alleged motives, and yet they had everything to do with her discomfort.
    Had I been any other man on earth, I probably would have been upset that her mind was usually on Maine or Wyoming, and never here in Kansas, Iowa, Missouri, Nebraska or South Dakota. I may have also been upset that her mind is usually with other men in her life, especially those she dated or married, or knew by relationship or friendship. For most men to be reminded of this, is a constant reminder that you just simply don't stack up.
    Since I don't see myself as a fraction of a man, I would be insulted by all of this. But I've been described as 97% of a man, and fractions above or below this number. Figure that one out. I haven't been able to figure it out.
    Yet that missing percentage is the one crucial, undefinable (and yet imaginary) element you are told you are missing. And if you were only complete, you would receive some magical key to unlock a heart, a soul, a spirit.
    What seems to trump these elements may forever be a mystery. For it is not trust and love we engender in each other. It is also not the audience we give each other.
    Being and working with Michele is an amazing experience. She is intelligent and can usually figure out a better way of doing something. She works very hard and seldom complains, except to herself. But that constant reminder that things are better in Maine or better in Wyoming, and her stories of fondness of the times when she and this other person shirked and blew off their responsibility.
    In a moment of clarity, when communication had gone nowhere and was becoming difficult, I reached over and pinched her arm. And before I could pull it back, she smashed my hand with a slap. Had I pulled her from the past or the future? Why did she react so strongly at being pulled into the moment?
    If you want to experience an uncomfortable silence from somebody, do something as stupid as I just did. Pinch them, or throw dirt at them. Or, instead of something negative, try something positive so you can enjoy a moment of silence by cooking an awe-inspiring meal, bringing home a fancy dessert, or doing something special for somebody when they aren't looking, like leaving a whoopee cushion on their driver's seat that is only for them and only from you.
    Those are the moments of time we share where we create a space where we sit or stand together and try to better understand each other and the environment we live in and attempt to survive. And in those environments where we find we cannot survive, we realize that we must move on or it will be too late.
    At that point, we must try to live in the moment as best we can, leave behind all of the baggage of the past, ignore all of the hope and fears we have of the future. For living in the moment is to catch visions of a frog in mid-leap, or watch a bird slowly stream across the sky, and even place large, heavy stones to a place they will rest until the water and the wind wash them away.
    Stacking blocks, following the ground and the hillside is a task requiring patience and focus to keep from injuring yourself or others. And in the same way, establishing and keeping lines of communication open and working properly is just as difficult.
    So as our four elements come together and take shape; the blocks, the gravel, the fill dirt and the water drain pipe, a beautiful retaining wall pushes out of the earth, preparing to house and provide for almost 1,000 square feet of what was previously unusable and unstable ground where it was even difficult to get grass to grow.
    And on the last few days of her visit, Michele noted several times how the wall was beautiful. Was she talking about the wall, the conversation, the art of communication, questions with no answers, or maybe just a little bit of acceptance that yes, Maine and Wyoming are beautiful places, but so is Kansas. If it is, it is in part because of so many people like her who stop by and stay for a while and work to bring this time and this place and this moment just one step closer to paradise.
    Like so many people in her life, what I want most for Michele is for her to be happy. And yet, in another way, I hope that she remembers this time and moment and can find peace for a moment in slowing down to the speed of Kansas, then quickening up to the speed of commerce and industry, reminding her that the machine has not taken over for her, that the machine's presence has not replaced her, and that in the end, it is not the wall that I like, it is you that I like.
    Making up for over a century of creating machines to take away that part of man or that part of woman is not an easy task. We humans have become lazy and impatient. We either have everything done for us, or we don't like the way others work and we get machines to try to do the work ourself.
    We worked together for thousands of years, then created machines to do some of the work. And we never went back to doing the hand work, just made more machines to do the smaller work, or brought in a lower class of worker to do that work.
    By refusing to take back at least a little bit of that manual labor robs from us the simplest forms of cooperation and communication. And that simple, manual labor is the one thing we lack today.
    So the wall sits. It is incomplete, but the foundation is there. It is well beyond the stage where it will fall or be town down, rebuilt or replaced.

PROJECT #2 – Triple the size of the garden

Michele and Sam work the garden
    It came with a very welcome surprise that for the first time ever, Michele could go on a greenhouse shopping spree and buy whatever she wanted. The only limit was the time we had to do the planting. Six trees went in the ground, followed by a wagon full of ground cover, and another wagon full of strawberries, tomatoes and other assorted plants. It was all about hands, gardening tools, and a dream. And that dream is apparently a big dream when we hadn't stopped to eat first. A good rule of thumb for grocery shopping is that you shouldn't shop for food when you haven't eaten. And that goes for greenhouses, too. I bought way too many strawberries. It didn't help that the plants had berries on them.
    Never have I seen anyone so excited about cramming their hands into dirt. Never have I heard someone say so often, “What are you doing?” or suggest that what I was doing probably isn't the way it should be done, and watch this because this is the way you should do it. So I did my best to watch, listen and learn (because if you do something wrong, teachers make you do it all over again), and when she wasn't looking, I would often go back to the way I was doing things, with a few things she was trying to show me about shoving all that stuff into the ground.
    It was said about my friends Mark and Elaine that they were single for so long, they still can't garden together. And I think it may be true. Even with seperate plots of land in their backyard, they stand five feet apart, making comments about each other's area, starting water fights and chucking dirt at each other. Make no mistake, they are in love and care about each other very much. Yet if they cross the line in the garden, the terse words begin. When the other isn't looking, he stands up her wilting tomato plants or gives them some water. And she pulls weeds from his strawberry patch or picks a couple of vegetables before they rot on the vine or are captured by a rabbit or bird.
    When Michele was packed up and leaving, a few times she stopped and said simply, “Water my garden.” I know, and I will do my best.

PROJECT #3 – Wash, strip, sand and varnish front and back decks.
    One of the things missing from this property are personal spaces for people to enjoy, and they help to turn a house into a home. With personal and public spaces, they suggest to people to hang out, stay a while. Even if you aren't home, a comfy area at an entrance could even say, “relax and hang out a while, I might be back in a few minutes.”
    Now there are two places to hang out, the two porches. And only the front porch hosts an area for a couple of people to hang out, have food or drinks and watch the sunset. It still lacks a cushion to make sunset watching a little more comfy.
    In difference to working on the wall or in the garden, the decks provided a change of pace, yet also provide a lot of discomfort when working on them in the hot sun. The back deck will require a sun shade as well as a place to sit. And the sun shade will be unnecessary after five or six when the sun falls behind the house and shade covers the deck. This did not make for a comfortable working environment, since shade largely does not exist.
    Michele was amazing in the way she worked so hard in the elements to which she really hadn't fully adapted. Over 90-degree days, hot sun, wind and humidity create a hostile work environment, to which most would bow out in the middle of the day to work on something else in the basement, go for a siesta, watch a movie or go for ice cream and sit in some air conditioning for a while.
    Before we started these projects, and were stuck on a job in Omaha, Michele wanted to know her purpose, if she wasn't best needed by moving on to Kansas to work on things before I got home. Omaha was a strange situation. There was a lot of downtime, then work, then moving, then downtime, then the end of the day.

The crew listens to a shareholder we later interview for TV.
    The crew was a good crew, and in one time during the day, to pass the time between live shots at the top of each hour, we held a competition.

1st Annual Omaha broad jump competition
    The broad jump competition was not only a success, but we had many onlookers to our curious competition. We allowed anyone to jump who wanted to jump. And we marked everyone's jumps at the back of the heel with electrical and gaffer's tape.

Marking each jump with tape
    I know you want to know, so here's your answer. I won! Yay for me!

Look at that power! He won't be able to walk for a week!
    Aside from a little fun and games, the work environment wasn't always stellar. But we worked above the grave attitude often being pressed onto the crew, and I promised that once we got down to Kansas there would be a day of fun after each day of work. And that didn't apparently sit well, or at least I hadn't chosen the right words. The pace was set that she came here to work, and so I accepted that we would work, and hopefully I'd be able to talk her into a movie, or an occasional trip to town, or a party, or out for food or ice cream.
    And as the days wound down, she was upset with me that I couldn't communicate better to let her know that the lake was only a mile, or that there was usually a rope swing, or that she just might enjoy taking some time to walk down the road and listen to frogs or birds, or stop to pet and visit with the burros, the horses or the cows.
    As she gathered enough working hours, she started to loosen up, and didn't seem as worried about getting the decks or wall finished. We did finish the decks and finished planting the trees and the garden, and the wall is near completion. But in the last moments, the last night and the day she left, she considered that all of those things will be here again if or when she decides to come back. I have to remind myself of that all the time.
PROJECT #4 – Mowing and yard care

    There are a lot of hours spent mowing here in the midwest, no matter how big or small the yard. Luckily, both Michele and I enjoy mowing, because it splits that time in half.

Michele mows the yard, in style!
    Very little communication happens when you mow. You just have to mind not hitting each other, or running over objects that can shoot out the mower, or accidentally run over something you didn't want to mow, like part of the garden or over a garden snake or garden hose.
    Mowing is the act of grooming, a form of self-preservation of choosing to either grow your hair long or keep it short, according to your needs. I needed to keep the lawn short because people drive over it, and I don't want myself or them to hit something important. I also had to bring the cricket and grasshopper population down, and tall weeds rob the rest of the plants in a garden or yard of their water, too.
    When we look at our lawns, just as we look at each other, we can see where we've been driven over too much, where our grass is smashed down and not looking so hot, where we could use a little more water and maybe some extra care and maybe some seed. And environmental effects say so much about a person and a yard.
PROJECT #5 – Live the good life

Picture courtesy Michele Weigold
    At this point in my life, I have lived more time without people than with people. And people who really don't know me question how much I must be lonely, since I'm by myself all the time. But the truth is that I've never been lonely. I thoroughly enjoy my solitude. When I'm on the road, working with and visiting all of the people I know all over the country, there are times I can't wait to get home and quiet the dogs that are barking in my head. Kansas is one of the places that does that for me.

Michele floats to shore using the mast from her imaginary wrecked ship.
    When friends and family ask me about Michele, the questions usually dance along the lines of ownership. Is she your...? Or are you two...? And my answer is that she doesn't belong to me. She isn't my girlfriend, my fiance, or my wife. And though she does so much like my friend, I just can't place her there either. Michele just is. She exists like a child's imaginary friend, a type of unknown force or spirit. And she appeared this last month when I really needed somebody, not to take away some loneliness, or to be a part of my moral compass when I can't seem to get my head straight, rather this Peter Pan-like character who grabs that moral compass and spins it around a little, confusing my headings, shaking things up a little.
    It's hard to explain in words how much that time, that effort and that moment means to me. It is to say that she is not my soulmate, and yet she is the soulmate. She is not the woman of my dreams, and yet she is what dreams are made of.
    I will always hope that Michele would hold just a tiny part of this place and time in her mind and heart and remember it with fondness. But there is another thing I hoped to convey, in large part to remember a friend I lost last year. I always wanted the people I care about to know that when they drove up, walked in, or met up that they felt as if I was waiting for a long time to see you, that I missed you and couldn't wait for you to arrive. It is the best feeling in the world to know people feel that way about you, and is sometimes the hardest thing in the world to convey to somebody. The funny part is that it is so easy to pull off if you are honest and brave and true. To be on the other end of that welcoming is to think that you are somehow insignificant, yet you mean the world to another person.

Cowabunga, dude!
    And these are just a few things I learned this week.