By Bob Small
The grass crunched under my boots that first morning as I strode, coffee cup cradled in hand, toward a tipped-over 55-gallon drum, nay woodstove, to start the day’s work on the Kitchen. Everyone’s breath, as they huddled around the warmth, exhaled as tiny white clouds into the chill air, a far cry from summer’s Hot August Sear, when a a cup of coffee is never necessary to warm your hands, and your breath only betrays you if you haven’t brushed your teeth before heading to the breakfast table. In late Fall, unlike summer, each day on the Ranch starts as a three-layer day: a jacket over a long-sleeved shirt over a T-shirt…

In order to get a jumpstart on implementing Proposition 7 on the recent California ballot of initiatives, Kent was able to FaceTime Helios, COO of the Governing Board of Daylight Savings Time since forever, petitioning the ancient god in real time to grant a waiver so Camp did not have to set the clocks back to Standard Time until the Kitchen Project is complete.

At the Ranch, light time is the right time to work, regardless of clocktime. And the work crew is used to starting at 8:00 am summertime time so, Kent reasoned, just call real-world 7:00 o’clock 8:00 o’clock at the Ranch and leave the clocks alone. Everyone will know it’s quittin’ time when the damp chill returns to the worksite around 5:00, or is it 4:00 ?? Either which way or time, it’s too cold to work… And, though Kent liked Dolly Parton’s movie “9 to 5”,  old Helios refused to approve that work schedule, citing abstruse sections of the California Labor Code. So now light time, not clocktime, is work time until the Kitchen Project is complete.

Just as a mosquito is drawn to a baby’s soft skin, our work crew is magnetically attracted to the warmth of the woodstove to get the chill out of their bones and to start the blood flowing for these two long-anticipated days dedicated to an old-fashioned barn raising of sorts, this time to erect the first posts and beam that will form the base for the trusses holding up the spectacular new roof over the dining platform, a construct composed solely of trees harvested from the property of the Bar 717 Ranch.

The home-town reaping served two purposes: 1] to thin out some of the dense forest growth in a effort to slow down the spread of potential future wildfires and 2] a sort of farm-to-table, forest-to-kitchen approach to making improvements on your own land from your own resources (the Camp Trinity Way)…

It was a big chore ahead, to be sure, and one that would take some trial and error, some inventive approaches, to figure how best to accomplish the task of transforming the first of all the big logs into the start of a roof. Campers, staff, and alums had stripped the bark off these trees over the last couple years so each post or beam candidate gleamed a clean, ivory-yellow hue, reminiscent of the magnificent lobby of the Old Faithful Inn at Yellowstone…

And these logs were a hefty challenge, 13” to 15” in diameter at the base and 16 or more feet in length, each probably outweighing two bull elk in Rut… and every one had to be “delicately” trimmed and shaped with a chainsaw to the proper length for a post or a beam and then hewn and notched so that the posts cradled the beams precisely and the beams nestled against each other cozily, like a kid’s set of Lincoln Logs…

Around 9:30 each morning, the sun sent the first of its piercing rays over Totem Pole Hill onto the project and an hour later, layer-one jackets were coming off as the air warmed. An hour later, layer-two long-sleeved shirts were peeled off as the work intensity picked up and the day turned downright balmy… T-shirts ruled for much of the rest of the day as the weather was perfect for working outdoors… No rain and no rainbows on this visit so we worked uninterrupted to make sure these huge logs were sized and carved to the perfect proportions.

A major mistake would render one precious log into an expensive piece of firewood… an eventuality none of us wanted to be responsible for, let alone free-labor Bob.

Without a cook staff on site, the lunchbreak sent us all scrambling for our own creations, from a ham and cheese sammy to a hot dog handwich to PB&Js… We had cleaned out the summer leftovers a long time ago and we were on our own now, our only a desire to satisfy our hunger rather than preparing an elaborate,well-balanced mid-day repast.

 

One day I copped some time after lunch (rest hour ?) and took my pup Poly on a stroll over to Grassy Flats Creek where yellow leaves of the Maple trees almost completely obscured the little rill from view, but the gurgle persisted, and we spent a half hour or so splashing from one side to the other as we walked upstream, taking a few pix…

Birds flirted and sang merrily overhead as Poly searched in vain for a squirrel to chase up a tree. Fall was in full bloom here with a gazillion fallen leaves and desiccated walnuts carpeting The Avenue outside the Craft Shop as we headed back to our worksite…

That night after dinner, as Poly and I walked around in the bright light of the half-full moon, I wondered why it isn’t called a half moon instead of a quarter moon… It looked half full, not yet gibbous waxing as it would be a few says later, but it’s called a quarter moon… in the first quarter of its monthly sojourn across our sky, I guess… Why, then, isn’t Half Moon Bay called Quarter Moon Bay? Doesn’t it have the same shape when viewed from the Space Station as the quarter moon does from Camp ? Hmmmm… One of life’s many mysteries, which I don’t think we can blame on Obama…

 

And adding to the celestial mystery that chilly night was the halo of thin cirrus clouds fully encircling the half full, quarter moon, with a phenomenon know as a Moon Dog, which, according to folklore, portends rain… I could not explain to Poly why such a celestial spectacle mooched its moniker from her canine species, but we sure hope those folks of folklore are right this time… the forests and hills thirst for rain to squelch the fire danger and to tame the fires, which have mercilessly ravaged so much of northern California this year.

The next day while the work crew I had attached myself to was busy raising the roof, another crew was digging trenches and installing the pipes from the newly buried kitchen septic tanks to the new leach field under Gates Gables lawn… Ironically, this is known as a Sanitary Sewer system…

In my mind, a sewer system is anything but “sanitary,” but I guess, compared to tossing waste out the windows onto the ground below in Medieval times or the “semi-open” system I saw outside the library in Ephesus, Turkey, today’s sewers are comparatively “sanitary.” Still, a euphemism, in my mind…

That second day I was at Camp and the last work day before we all went our separate ways for the Thanksgiving Holiday, we raised and lowered the posts and beam a few times, grinding, trimming, sanding, and fine tuning the fit of the three protagonists of our little drama until we had it all just right.

Midafternoon as the chill was returning to the worksite and most of us donned our long sleeves again, all three massive chess pieces were lifted a final time into place and secured with long bolts through the foundation plates on the concrete pillars and with 16” screws through the beam down into the posts at either end…

…the posts were “log-perfectly” vertical and the beam “log-perfectly” horizontal to a floor that has yet to be laid…

Beam #1 of four was secure, with the other three queued in line for their turn after the Thanksgiving break.

We all agreed that it was a “perfect” way to end the week.

 

And as we put all the tools away for a week’s rest and gathered the wood scraps and sawdust to toss into the BBQ pit for a massive bonfire that night, we heard the call of the wild…. a prolonged gobble-gobble-gobble “Hasta la vista, baby”, from the rafter of wild turkeys foraging up on the hill by the rifle range, wishing us safe travels and reminding us that their domesticated, corn-fed brother Tom down in the Small Animal pens would be much meatier and tastier on Thursday than his genetic mismatches scrounging for food around the rocky hills of the Bar 717 Ranch.

Tom, free-labor Bob , and the Ranch work crew wish you a Happy Thanksgiving, celebrating with friends and family, thankful for what we have, humbled by the tragedies our state is undergoing, and hopeful for a brighter future ahead.
Give Thanks…