A GATHERED LIFE

July 15, 2019July 15, 2019

The Black Canyon of the Gunnison River and Sego Lilies

Black Canyon of the Gunnison from the north rim

Sitting on our deck, you can see the rim of the Black Canyon National Park. From this thirty-mile vista, the canyon appears as a ribbon that winds eastward. There is no clue of the chasm that separates the north and south rim. It can only be seen and experienced by looking head facing down standing on the edge and gazing down into the over 2000 foot deep canyon. At the bottom, the Gunnison River continues scouring through the black Precambrian gneiss and schist to form the canyon walls. The rock ages back 1.7 billion years. It is estimated that the river cut through the hard rock at the rate of about 1-inch every hundred years. For the last 2 to 3 million years the river has persistently cut the canyon to its present state. Even though an inch every hundred years seems impossibly slow to create anything, comparatively it is extraordinarily quick compared to most similar geological events. The swiftness of erosion is credited to the steep flow of the river, averaging a fall of 34 feet per mile through the canyon compared to the Grand Canyon’s average fall of 7.5 feet per mile.

The National Park Service has planted steel and wooden fences along the rim at selective lookouts. Not only do the fences frame some of the spectacular views of the canyon, but they give the acrophobicly challenged enough confidence to lean over the edge to experience the magnitude and depth of the canyon. It is called the black canyon because sunlight only hits the bottom at most points for only minutes a day, leaving the canyon walls and floor in shadow. Together with the dark grey bands of schist, the lower extremes of the canyon appear black. The whole experience of looking over the edge overwhelms me. I have been to the canyon many times. Each time I am filled with wonder and reverence. I sense the timelessness of the rock that formed in the early periods of the earth’s history, and the continuity of a river that has challenged that rock in its gravitational pursuit of the nearest ocean.

Black Canyon approached from the Ute Trail

I have hiked into the canyon from three different locations, all presenting glorious views framed with the changing seasonal colors of vegetation. The trails down into the canyon are steep and some are challenging. Experiencing the canyon from within is quite different from the rim vantage. Both are thrilling but the inside of the canyon evokes a sense of immediacy where the rim views are stunningly grand, not quite like the Grand Canyon, but in a way that is more accessible. The Grand Canyon seems to go on forever; the Black Canyon exhibits grandeur and depth at a scale that allows you to experience its majesty in a more digestible bit.

My most recent trip to the canyon’s north rim presented me with yet another gift of wonder. Because of an excessively wet spring and summer, the desert flora was in full bloom. Fields of purple mustard, orange globemallow, and scarlet Indian paintbrush contrasted against the fresh pale green of abundant new growth on the sagebrush and wild grasses. Delicate white sego lilies normally quite rare were abundant. The blossom’s colors contrasted against the deep green junipers, reddish-brown soils, the black and rust-colored basalt rocks scattered over the landscape. The scene seemed like an impressionistic painting. The flowers alone merited the short drive from my house to the canyon rim. Adding the canyon vistas engraved the day deep into my catalog of days that shore up my reverence for this beautiful and wondrously magnificent place that I call my home.

May 27, 2019May 27, 2019

How to Make Adobe Bricks

Thirty years ago, I had a vision to build an adobe house. For as long as I can remember, I wanted to build my own house. My fascination with adobe grew out of some casual exposure to adobe buildings in the San Francisco Bay area, along with a compelling search for a building process that had minimal environmental impacts. I studied home design, influenced greatly by A Pattern Language written by Christopher Alexander, Sara Ishikawa and Murray Silverstein. I also dove into a study of adobe and how to make bricks and build with them. Armed with an abundance of book learning, my wife Terrie and I packed our belongings into a 20-foot-long 1967 International box truck and left our suburban life in Marin County. We headed to a plot of land on the southern face of the Grand Mesa in Colorado, just outside the town of Cedaredge. We had two children in tow, Whitney (3), and Ben, under a year. We began the building phase of our life in the spring of 1990. Although versed in the theory and vocabulary of building, I lacked practical experience in nearly every aspect. Perhaps the largest disconnect between dream and reality was the scope of the project. We didn’t have an abundance of funds to finance our adventure, but what we lacked in both money and experience, we made up for with hard work, resourcefulness, and tenacity.

The first phase of building our adobe home was excavating and building the foundation. We hired a neighbor with a backhoe, who spent several weeks removing dirt and making trenches according to the footprint of our house that we staked into the ground. The removed dirt became our source of clay for the over 10,000 bricks which would eventually envelope our space. As soon as we broke ground, we began to test soil using the methods I had read about. We filled jars with a mixture of the tailings of our excavation and discovered that, with the exception of a few inches of loam, what lay below was clay mixed with an abundance of basalt rubble ranging in size for several inches to several feet in diameter. The first layer of clay was deep brownish red and very expansive. Further down in the earth the reddish clay gave way to caliche. The caliche seemed to work well in our experiments, though we had to add substantial amounts of sand to reduce the concentration of clay. Eventually we got to the point that we could determine the amount of sand we needed by the feel of the mud as we mixed.

Ardean (father) and Milton (brother) loading cart with adobe mud.

For three years we spent the late spring, summer, and fall, making and stacking our bricks into the walls. By the end of the third year we had a roof over head and migrated into our shell of a house from the Air Stream Trailer that we had called home. At the time of the move the window openings were covered with sheets of plastic and the doors were sheets of plywood. Even so, we reveled in the rustic space, spending the first winter huddled around the living room fireplace.

Recently our eldest daughter Whitney, following the path of her parents, has decided to build an adobe house for herself. At the same time, a friend has requested assistance in building an adobe house for his family. Stimulated by both these projects, I have revisited my years making bricks. Subsequent to finishing my home, I went on to build four more adobe homes, making the bricks for two of them. My memories start with pure magic of mixing clay, sand, and water together to make a timeless, durable, and beautify building material. The memory of lifting three hundred and fifty thousand pounds of dirt multiple times is staggering, but the pain felt in the shoulders and back after ten hours of shoveling and lift has all but faded. Only my arthritic knees bear witness to the strain on my body of heavy lifting decades later. We left the adobe bricks exposed in several walls in our home. I look at them and wonder, filled with awe at the simplicity of adobe, one of the oldest building materials aside from stone on earth. There are ruins that date back to 8300 BC with some buildings over 800 years old still used today!

As I revived memories, I have also had to recreate recipes and techniques. The internet provides a valuable resource describing many of the thousands of ways people have put mud together to build homes. At the time we built, books were the most readily available information technology. I was able to consult with a few experienced “adobeleiros”, but for in the end, I had to get my hands dirty to really learn.

Terrie and Margo (sister) cleaning bricks before standing them on end

Our process started with our excavation, which we sifted through a ½ screen made with hardware cloth stretched over a frame of 2 x 4’s. We then mixed the clay with sand and water in an old cement mixer. We had to bring the sand to our property to get a good mix of clay and sand that would not crack. We found that crusher fines, the waste product of rock crushing for gravel worked the best. After the mixture was thoroughly and evenly mixed, we dumped it onto a cart that we had made from the wheels and axels of an old Volkswagon. From the cart we poured the mud mix into our brick molds. We had two molds that each made three bricks. With the mix over the mold we pushed the mud into the corners of the mold, pressing to make sure there were no voids. Next, we screened the top of the mold with a trowel to level off the top. When both molds were filled, we lifted the molds off carefully jiggling them to release the bond between the wood and mud. We washed the molds in a barrel of water, then repeated the process. On a good day, with Terrie and I working, we could make 200 bricks.

The bricks laid in the sun over night to begin to harden and dry. The next day we would carefully stand the bricks on their ends to increase the exposed surface for more even drying. A day later the bricks were stiff enough to be moved to consolidate them to make room for more bricks. They were very fragile and remained standing on their sides for at least a week. After they were mostly dried, we stacked the bricks on pallets arranged around the building site. They usually dried for at least a month before we placed them in the wall using the same mud that we made the bricks with as mortar.

Occasionally family and friends came to experience the brick making. There were some who compared it to the Egyptian’s treatment of the Israelites from biblical times; most of our volunteer helpers captured the magic that I felt in transforming basic earth elements into architectural ones. The walls of our home contain the spirit and joy of those helpers and bring joy to me every time I rub my hands along their contoured earthen surfaces.

May 9, 2019May 10, 2019

Renovation

What secret things do the walls know after observing a family for three generations?

Not long ago, I spent the day removing wall coverings down to the frame of the kitchen in Frank and Jenny’s farm house. My first blog refers to this house as a place of gathering. The kitchen gave welcome to guest, strangers, laborers, and family who over the years sat around an oak claw-foot table visiting while eating pancakes made of coarsely ground wheat and sunflower seeds, or bread and green onions from the garden; sipping on hot coffee or Postum. If only the layers of wall paper could recount the stories it had heard.

Mitzi and Miriam, two of my sisters, and their husbands bought the house from my cousin Zar who made the first grand effort to preserve it after a period of partial abandonment. Zar lived the house for about a decade, refinishing and propping up where necessary. Cold, lonely winters finally drove him from its creaky floors and drooping walls. Mitzi and Miriam collaborated to spruce it up a little. Miriam and her husband bowed out after a few years leaving it all to Mitzi and Dale.

Over the past year they decided that there was enough history and beauty left in the house to confront the forces of nature which were vigorously reclaiming the edifice. Sandstone footings had held the it above ground for a century, but not at a consistent level. Part of the house had settled below the adjoining grade compromising its wooden parts. Mitzi and Dale decided to lift the house and add a basement to restore the foundation. At the same time, they rearranged interior walls to add space for more suitable bedrooms and bathrooms. Through the whole process, they managed to preserve the basic skeleton of the house, but all plaster and other wall finishes had to go; along with any secrets, conversations, quarrels, and adorations they preserved in their fibers.

As I took pieces of molding off the door frames, I would hand them to Mitzi to decide if it should be saved to use again. The amount of work necessary to reuse would have been prohibitive, but the thought was alluring. Once a noble but innominate pine in a nearby forest, it had been given a second life and soul through careful working and shaping, then silently served its proprietors for another hundred years. If only there was a way to extract all it had witnessed; the first draw of a smoothing plane, cutting to length, nailing in place, the dozens of coats of paint. And then the comings and goings of each person who had rubbed their hands along its surface as they leaned against or passed through the door frame, leaving traces of themselves. I didn’t cast off these sacred materials frivolously, nor did Mitzi. We handled them with reverence, offering thoughts of gratitude to how they had served and brought joy to us and our ancestors.

The question to save, preserve, reuse, or discard is fraught with contradictions. The artifacts of our past are laced with memory and sentiment. Some of them have value; often less that we imagine. They represent resources, some becoming scarce. The reasons to keep things are legion. Our spaces, our garages, closets, basements, storage units overflow. Many a time I have reveled in finding an obscure piece of hardware that I had stowed away years ago for some unforeseen emergency. When the finding and the emergency coincide, it seems to justify the hording and maintaining of clutter. If I were to consider the amount of time spent cataloging, storing, and moving those items from one storage location to another, I would shutter in thinking of the inefficiency of the enterprise.

I resonated with this poem by Mary Oliver:

When I moved from one house to another there were many things I had no room
for. What does one do? I rented a storage space. And filled it. Years passed.
Occasionally I went there and looked in,
but nothing happened, not a single
twinge of the heart.
As I grew older the things I cared
about grew fewer, but were more
important. So one day I undid the lock
and called the trash man. He took
everything.
I felt like the little donkey when
his burden is finally lifted. Things!
Burn them, burn them! Make a beautiful
fire! More room in your heart for love,
for the trees! For the birds who own
nothing-the reason they can fly.

I long to be free, to fly like a bird, but I also love to come home and peruse one of the thousand books in my library or go into my shop and use one of the hundreds of tools I have acquired to fix or build something. I am grateful that Mitzi and Dale are putting time and resources into preserving the old farm house. I am also grateful that they are able to release the pieces of that house that keep it tethered to the ground, so that it can fly and land in the hearts collecting story and experiences of another generation or two of its builder, Charles Brown, my great grandfather.

April 8, 2019May 10, 2019

APPLE CIDER

Twenty-eight pizzas, gyros, scones, three chocolate cakes, an empanada, chicken salad, garden salad, fruit salad, drinking chocolate, an apple pie, a hundred and six gallons of apple juice, and forty-one people; Marty, Terrie, Whitney, Hannah, Zack, Steve, Brian, Jerry, Louisa, ,Judy, Kaleb, Celia, Seth, Alana, Mack, Stephanie, Seaeh, Eliza, George, Liz, Sawyer, Cole, Jack, Georgia, Dave, Kaelyn, Keely, Kelsi, Melinda, Sara, Max, Jessica, Trevor, Izumi, Kylie, Garrett, Ashlee, Shea, Ricky, and a few unaccounted for. Not all one-hundred and six gallons of apple juice were consumed during the day, perhaps five or six gallons, but every drop was pressed from a truck load of apples gathered as part of the day’s ritual. From a strictly labor point of view, gathering a ton of apples and processing them along with preparing and staging three separate meals for a host of eager and hungry people is an ominous task. By the time my head hit the pillow I felt like I had participated in something grand. Yet the day was as close to a nirvanic joy as I can imagine. Watching the sweet apple nectar ooze between the oak slats of the apple press and slowly fill the catch bowl stirs me. Catching a cupful and drinking it is an experience everyone deserves to have.

I first remember tasting fresh apple juice as a teenager. My father would sometimes bring a gallon or two when it could be found at a local fruit stand. If he brought two home, one got stowed away to age for a few days, until it had a touch of fermented fizz. With fizz or not, I fell in love with the sweet juice.

While in college I had access to a decent wood shop, and with the guidance from a Mother Earth Magazine article, I gathered the materials and put together and apple cider press of my own. For many of the following years, the press would see occasional use, a modest yield of juice accompanied with good doses of fun and companionship.

The first fall after we moved to Cedaredge, over twenty-eight years ago, I saw home apple juice production on a completely different scale. A good friend of mine, Jerry, invited us to join their family for a Saturday of pressing apples. Delighted to relive some earlier memories, we showed up at their house ready to press a few gallons of juice and take a break from our regular house building routines. When we got to their house, there were no apples, just directions to meet them at a local orchard where we proceeded to fill the back of a small pickup truck with apples we gathered off the ground after the orchard had been harvested. Back at their home we spent the afternoon gorging on fresh apple juice, while taking turns turning the screw of the press, nearly identical to the one I had made a decade earlier. I have no idea how many gallon jugs we filled that day. I remember taking a few gallons home with me and drinking their contents over the next few weeks. For many years as fall became established we joined our friends in what became an annual fall apple cider ritual.

Eventually our friend Jerry and his family moved away. We carried on the ritual inviting a few friends and extended family members to join each year. It became a happy celebration of thanksgiving. As our children began moving away from home, it also became a time of reunion. The last several years our children have begun to bring their friends and cousins, and to our great joy the family that originally include us in their juicing party has moved back close enough to make an annual pilgrimage to press cider. Their children and their children’s children have become part of this tradition and celebration.

Early Saturday morning I recruited Hannah and the friends she had brought from Salt Lake City to split enough firewood to keep the pizza oven burning for the evenings feast. Then off to the orchard to pick up windfall and dropped apples. Hannah and her friends projected joy and anticipation as they filled the bed of the truck to overflowing in less than two hours. The gathering ending by making a dance video in the orchard rows. Once home, the apples were dumped on the grass. I showed everyone the various steps of pressing, including washing and cutting bad sections out of the apples, loading and finessing the grinder, pressing the apples, and then finally straining and filling the jugs. At this point the crew numbered in the teens. Sitting on chairs and overturned buckets, everyone picked a task suiting them, some retreated to the kitchen to assist Terrie in keeping everyone fed and preparing for the evenings feast. The mountain of apples shrank through the afternoon, while people worked, visited, and listened to music. The pressing site and the kitchen had a non-stop buzz of work for four or five hours. At this point Jerry and his extended family arrived with their loads of apples and stepped into the pressing operation. As the sun dropped behind the horizon and an evening fall chill settled in. the piles of apples had all been transformed into over a hundred gallons of juice.

Everyone retreated into the kitchen and living room, with the small children staking out the playroom. Under Terrie and Whitney’s direction an assembly line of pizza builders assembled exotic pizzas created with smoked salmon, pesto, poblano sauce, chorizo, fresh mozzarella, roasted peppers, roasted eggplant, pears, and fresh basil just to mention the basic ingredients. I slid the pizzas in and out of the oven until we were all too full. Then we ate cake and drank hot chocolate. And of course, throughout the day gallons of fresh delicious apple cider were consumed.

April 1, 2019April 8, 2019

Liberty, Idaho

One of the fond, if not defining memories of my childhood has root in sitting around an oak kitchen table listening to my grandparents visiting with relatives, near and distant, friends, neighbors, and even complete strangers on occasion. They lived in farmhouse in southern Idaho built by my great grandfather, Charles Houston Brown, who had been sent to farm and settle by Brigham Young in 1875.

Five generations of Charles Brown gathered at the Liberty farm house he built in the early 1900’s .

The farmhouse lies twenty miles north of Bear Lake in a town called Liberty. Although not ideal for farming due to a hostile sub climate, the Bear Lake Valley has a magnet of beauty and peace that anchored many of the descendants of those early settlers in place. I have always known and referred to my grandfather and grandmother by their first names, Frank and Jennie. A level of informality permeated their existence. I grew up in Salt Lake City, a three-hour drive from Liberty. During the summer months whenever the opportunity arose, I jumped at the chance to spend time on the farm. Often on those summer days, someone would arrive, unexpected, but welcome, bearing nothing more than stories and memories. They would come into the kitchen, sit around the table sipping coffee or Postum, reliving the past and accounting for the present. Mostly the talk centered around family, but often drifted into religion and politics. Frank and Jennie’s home was a gathering place. Simple, a wood stove for cooking and heating, hand braided rugs over a pine floor, but warm with hospitality.

Many of the visitors had spent time on the farm when they were children, remembering with fondness their adventures as I do now; catching frogs in the irrigation ditches, pitching hay, riding horses, cutting firewood, milking cows, feeding calves, eating fresh picked vegetables, drinking fresh milk, driving tractors, shooting ground squirrels… living a few days of life in a place that had few boundaries and fewer rules. I struggle to remember most of the stories I listened to, a few have been written down, but mostly I remember the feelings of acceptance, love, and peace; a gathering place where people came to remember and recharge while forgetting the press of the present. Fifty-five years have passed since those summer afternoon visits began to engrave my consciousness. Frank and Jennie remain only in memories, having passed away in 1975. Still, Liberty and the farmhouse have an amazing draw. Two generations later it remains a gathering place where friends, cousins, siblings, and children sit around the same oak table telling stories, playing games, trying to emulate the legacy that Frank and Jenny planted into our souls.

The idea of a using the theme “Gathered Life” to launch a lifestyle blog that describes the ideals that have guided many of the decisions that I have made in my life comes more as an afterthought or analysis that an original mission statement. Yet as I look back it fits well and easily incorporates into the way I have tried to live, what I enjoy most, and what I hope to accomplish by writing this blog on a regular basis. As I recall the stories that I have gathered over the years, starting with Liberty, but continuing over my lifetime. Most of my life experience has come from the encounters that I have had with other people. I have learned from their stories. They have stimulated or encouraged me to seek my own learning and experiences. Since it is impossible and often not wise to experience everything, learning from one another can be both efficient and smart. To this point I have had a rich life. I have traveled, I have met interesting people. My career has been interesting and varied. I feel like my story may be useful, interesting, and relevant to some people. Whether the reader wants to learn from my experience, share in my experience, or avoid the same experience, each has validity. I invite the reader to join as I tell stories from my past, and adventure into the future.

Gathered at the Maison de Terre for Mother’s Day Brunch

My wife, Terrie, and I have opened our home as a bed and breakfast. We have decided to call it Maison de Terre, French for house of earth. Terrie spent several years in France where she gathered a love for all things French, especially cuisine. We have built our home in part by gathering materials from the surrounding landscape: logs, adobe, and stone. It is a grand but informal house taking inspiration from places we have admired throughout the world including the French farmhouses, southwest adobe structures, and the home of Frank and Jennie in southern Idaho. Part of our motivation for running a bed and breakfast is economical, but deeper is our desire to gather and hear stories of people we have not yet had the chance to meet. We invite you to not only read about our adventures, but to join us at our table in our home.