Early in October, I spent a week at Bar 717 Ranch helping with the new kitchen construction project… I was somewhat shocked that Monday morning as I strode up the rain-dampened driveway past the office and immediately noticed that the old dining platform floor and fireplace had disappeared, totally demolished, evaporated since my last visit during Alumni Camp, not a footprint remaining. I would soon discover that bare dirt and sole-sucking mud were to be our construction surfaces for the week ahead.

Also gone was the tent structure from Gates Gable lawn which had provided shade for the Summer of ‘18 Eating Area, and the Dish House was being dismantled by handyman Mike Benthien. No turning back now… Barring the unexpected, the project will be ready for campers by June…

Fall had just begun to bring a change of color to the oaks though the maples will yellow a month or so…

Ripe apples were still falling from the trees, and you could almost hear the plea of the succulent red cherry tomatoes begging to be plucked from their vines in the garden below the road.

The weather was mostly perfect for working outdoors, though a couple afternoons featured rain showers followed by rainbows then more sprinkles and more rainbows…

Whenever I’m at Camp during the off season it seems that, as it rains in the afternoon, rainbows inevitably arch over Barn Hill… I’ve been wondering if we should rename the Camp to celebrate this phenomenon…

For those Bar 717 Alumni who have never visited when the hills aren’t crawling with campers and counselors, you have missed a treat… Waking up in the morning to the raucous cacophony of starlings and jays in the trees above the Girls’ Area instead of chatter of kids’ voices adds a new dimension, and fending for yourself at meal time takes some planning. I felt lucky this visit because the Camp cooks were still doing extended duty: shutting down Gates Gables Kitchen for the winter by clearing the freezers of frozen summer leftovers and then warming them up for lunch for our work crew of a dozen or so…

All week the lunch bell rang as usual, summoning us to the repetitious, but not monotonous, menu of meatloaf sandwiches, salads (featuring succulent red cherry tomatoes from the vines in the garden below the road), and ham hocks and beans… Mmmmmm…. perfect fuel to fire the engines for the afternoon ahead, and not a complaint was heard from the hungry constructors…. not that Tara or Dana would have given a hoot anyway. And nary a scrap was left for the pigs !!

Two big projects were being worked on while I was at Camp: 1] preparing and hanging the huge new windows upstairs and in the new bakery, where it will be a dream come true for any baker to knead, crank up the Hobart, and wield a rolling pin to form cookies, cakes, and breads in a room with such a view

and 2] building the forms for the flatwork and for the pillars that will support the pole trusses for the roof over the eating platform.

Friday morning the cement truck was scheduled to arrive from Redding at 11:00 a.m. with 9½ yards of restless concrete so, starting Monday, our forming crew of four had to hustle every day to finish the flatwork forming as well as to cut and assemble the 2” x 10” x 20” pieces for the six pillars and stack them four-high atop each other, three pillars on either side of the building block foundation for the new fireplace, which had been erected a couple weeks prior.

Jean and Nick had shed their summertime roles as Program Specialists and morphed into Civil Engineers, repeatedly staring into the surveying scope to make certain that the top of each form was perfectly in line with the others and at exactly the proper height

while Ranch Manager Geoff, added Construction Foreman to his titles, making certain that his flunky, “free-labor” Bob, did not foul things up beyond rescue as the various pieces for each pillar form were assembled and secured in their proper positions, a jigsaw puzzle of sorts, but one of the simplest, in theory, to assemble and with the biggest pieces ever.

The alignment of the pillar bases was rendered all the more tricky due to the fact that we had kind of a floating target because the final dining platform floor has not yet been poured so measurements and adjustments had to be made from pencil marks on the foundation wall of the new kitchen, hoping that we were measuring each time off the correct pencil scratch on the concrete.

When all was deemed perfect, Nick and Jean stepped away from their line levels and surveying equipment, donned welders masks, and grabbed a torch to fuse the hand-crafted bases for the posts to the rebar cages inside the forms.

All the while Kent circled about, rendering advice when necessary, consulting the architectural renderings, pitching in where needed, approving the work that had been done, and planning for tomorrow.

While all this was going on outdoors Hannah Holiday, a Camp counselor last summer, and her friend and former camper Lauren Heusler worked carefully inside

to prepare each of the new custom Sierra Pacific windows for installation: first disassembling all the hardware cranks, latches, and hinges then applying a couple coats of polyurethane preservative over the beautiful, clear grain wood frames before reattaching all the hardware

so Rich, Joey, and Chris could install them into the framed openings.

Again, “free-labor” Bob was called upon to help heft the heavy panes into place. By the week’s end many of the windows were shimmed and secured to the framing, waiting for wallboard and trim …and free-labor Bob hadn’t broken anything.

One afternoon during a rainy “rest hour”I decided to take my little puppy Poly for a ride to check out the the newest piglets in the Small Animal area

and then headed down toward the Swimming Hole for a looksee. Our trip was abruptly terminated when we were confronted by an intransigent Red Beast planted squarely in the middle of the road at the Homestead, insinuating none too subtly that he might just as soon put a large dent in the hood and radiator of my aging but dependable white Suburban as yield the roadway to an interloper.

He was, perhaps, suspicious of our intent while clear on his intent to protect his harem grazing calmly behind him. Since this Red Bull was no pop energy drink, discretion seemed the better option so Poly suggested that I reverse course and go back for another look at the piglets. The Swimming Hole visit could wait for another day; it was too cold to swim anyway.

Friday early-morning brought a flurry of last-minute activity to the worksite, checking, rechecking, triple checking to make sure everything was ready for Showtime, and, just as a rooster down Barn Hill loudly cock-a-doodle-do-ed 11:00 o’clock, a Shasta Redi-Mix behemoth chugged up the driveway and lowered its chute.

Minutes later concrete began sloshing into the flatwork forms on the east side of the kitchen, and the fun had begun. Ten minutes later the truck lumbered into position near the pizza over, and we started filling the forms for the pillars and the cavities in the blocks that will support the fireplace.

The whole crew sprang into action, remembering that “Many Hands Make Light Work”

Hannah, Lauren, Jean, Nick, Geoff, Mike, Joey, Chris, Kent,

and, of course, free-labor Bob, who doubled as Project Photographer so he didn’t have to get his hands too messy (remember: too many cooks spoil the ham hocks and beans).

Nine and a half yards spun out of the drum in just about an hour, and the big truck headed back to Redding. We only had to mix a few more bags of concrete by hand to finish filling a couple of the cavities in the fireplace blocks and, finally, to smooth out paw prints Poly wanted to leave as a forever reminder of her assistance in the project.

The lunch bell rang one last time about 1:00 as the concrete began to set, and we all sat down to meatloaf sandwiches and ham hocks and beans for the fifth straight day… Mmmmmm… This day for dessert, however, a batch of brownies that had been discovered that morning hidden deep in the freezer put icing on the cake, so to speak, until the next batch comes out of the new bakery in July 2019.