Dear Friends,

A lot has happened since my last post… 8 months ago! I left you with that uninspiring photograph of our new well casing sticking up out of the ground – and actually that’s one thing that has not happened… still no pump in the well. We’re still fetching water from the neighbor’s place, three 5-gallon potable water totes at a time. That’s OK for a long weekend, but I’ve been out here for going on two months now. That water fetching arrangement is really getting old. 

That’s right, the pandemic has placed me here up in Modoc for the last two months and, at this point, for the foreseeable future. Flight instruction, my main source of income, is not considered an “essential activity.” Nor can it be done 6 feet apart. My work at NDNU continues for the moment, earning me just enough to disqualify me from receiving unemployment, but all teaching is happening online so… here I am up at Owl Creek in Modoc.

And here is the shed being adorned with internet equipment. None of the internet providers you’ve ever heard of services the remote areas of Surprise Valley. Here, we have Dirk Net. Dirk Net is literally a guy named Dirk who runs a network. In fact, this guy in the picture is Dirk. Everyone here in Surprise Valley, unless they live right in the thriving metropolis of Cedarville (population 514) relies on Dirk Net. And if I was going to teach my classes online from here, I needed to rely on Dirk Net too.

Like so many people, the pandemic has thrown me into transition, or accelerated a transition already under way. My plan was to work for three more years, build the hermitage here at Owl Creek, then find ways to make that into a sustaining last-thing career, providing retreats for people who need to re-connect with the natural world and with themselves… serving as a refuge for over-stressed urbanites who just need space to breathe and remember who they are… all on a donation basis following the Buddhist concept of “dana” – get what you need, pay what you can. It was a beautiful idea, but the coronavirus has taken away the income I need to pay for it. 

But maybe flight instruction is not the way I’m supposed to pay for this vision. Maybe it’s supposed to happen a different way. 

Transitioning in response to change is on a lot of people’s minds these days, so I thought I might as well write about that. My experience is just one of many… but how to approach it constructively? Change thrust upon a person in this way is a major disrupter of life. But sometimes, not always but sometimes, disruption has a positive role to play in forcing us to set aside what’s become too comfortable, too assumed. 

For a while, we see it as a temporary disruption of a status quo we rely on, as in: “Oh my god, I can’t do flight instruction and flight instruction is how I pay to build the hermitage.” At this stage, we don’t even recognize it as a situation that might be prompting us to consider transition. 

But when seen as a temporary disruption, the longer it goes on the more damage it does: “I haven’t flown in two months… we’re not going to be able to build the bath house this year.” We still might not recognize it as a changed situation prompting us to consider transition… we just see it as increasingly urgent, damaging, and stressful.

Then at some point you begin to realize that some key assumptions might have been wrong from the beginning… this disruption has no end-date, it doesn’t even have a clear end-scenario. Maybe, you realize, it’s not temporary. And this moment when you realize the disruption might not be temporary can go a number of ways: “This is a disaster… there’s no way to complete this hermitage project without my flight instruction income. I’ll just be out here with a shed and a trailer forever, fetching water 15 gallons at a time, and never make my retreat vision a reality.” That’s one way it can go. And I’m sure I’m like a lot of other people when I say I’ve had my moments of letting it go this way. Maybe everyone experiencing financial losses from the lockdown has had similar moments of despair.

But giving in to despair is not transitioning. Giving in to despair is holding onto a suddenly-outdated version of reality in which some aspect of our past life is no longer viable. We can mourn its loss, but we also need to look for opportunities to move forward without it. Maybe even move in a better direction. Who knows… maybe it was preventing us from doing something even more satisfying. Why are we still holding onto it?: “Why do I assume flight instruction is the only way to pay for the hermitage? Yes, it’s what I know. And yes, it’s what I’m comfortable with. But maybe there are other things I know, not well enough to rely on them, not even well enough to be comfortable promoting them, but maybe well enough to give them a try.” 

So that’s where I’m at. Accepting that flight instruction might not happen for months, or ever. Trying to be open to recognizing opportunities that might have been sitting on the sidelines. I haven’t found them yet, just saying I’m trying to be open. If you have any brilliant ideas for me, please send them my way. And if you’re still reading, it’s probably because you’ve also found this lockdown situation stressful and can relate to what I’m saying. Either that or you’re my mom and are de facto obligated to read every word. So, for everyone still reading who is not my mom, I encourage you to also step back and look for opportunities to develop some of your under-recognized skills and talents, maybe even look for opportunities to respond to this disruption we call lockdown with a constructive and life-enhancing transition. 

And on that note, I’ll switch gears and end this post on a more positive note with some photos of what’s developed here at Owl Creek since my last update so many months ago.

I left off with getting the well drilled. That was an exciting development to be sure, but 8 months later I’m even more excited that we might soon have our solar pump and a hose bib and we’ll be able to actually get water out of it. Only when the sun shines, but it’s a step. Thanks to the virus, we’ll likely have to wait until next year to build the pump house that will contain the storage tank that will give us water 24x7.

We bushwhacked out to what we think is almost the southwest corner of the property. It’s up into the mountain a bit and probably slightly over the ridge behind where we took this picture from. Along the way, we passed some enormous old juniper trees. We decided if we make a path out to the mountain, we’ll called it Avenue of the Giant Junipers… or something like that.

 

Amy, Faria and Sunny came out for a visit. I took almost no pictures at all from that trip, but Faria took some wonderful ones which I’ll try to link to. I did take one picture – and if it weren’t for this, no-one would believe what happened that night. Poor Amy was sleeping in the trailer when something rustling around on the deck woke her up. At first, she just tapped against the side of the trailer to shoo it away, but then she looked out the window and saw a black bear right there on the deck. The deck is only a few feet wide and the walls of the trailer are only about an inch thick, so you can imagine how close she was to him. 

Well, we’d given her an alarm bell to ring in case she needed anything, but ringing it would have required her to open the door, and, she thought, if we heard it we would just come running… right toward the bear. She decided not to ring the alarm. 

In the morning, we traced the bear’s path from the trailer deck, to a bucket of ashes he pawed through, over to the compost pile (he didn’t seem to like celery), then out along the potty path, where he apparently stopped to bite into our pump bottle of hand soap, rub his nose against the dirt, and then walk over to take a big whiff of our roll of toilet paper, leaving us this final evidence, despite no paw prints at all, that he had come for a visit. How big is a bear whose nose is just about 2-1/2 inches tall? Who knows. Hopefully he has moved on back to the forest. Amy should feel privileged, though… only one other neighbor was visited by this bear and Amy was the only one in the valley to actually see it with her own eyes.

The potty path in winter, a little while after sunset when the remaining light on the snow is still this lovely purple color. This is about the darkest point at which I personally will still walk out to the potty, which is buried behind sagebrushes for privacy. Having had the bear incident, I now feel totally justified in not wanting to be out there in the dark!

Another walk to search for the elusive edges of the property

The creek broke its banks pretty thoroughly this year, which is great for us because it created a small wetland area near the orchard. We are located along the Pacific Flyway and this year, we’ve had more geese and some ducks take up temporary residence, tempted by this wetland. 

In March, Joel and I took a trip to Paris to visit my friend Caroline. Here’s Joel walking through the catacombs.

We’d both been working long hours for months at that point, tickets were about $350 each and we had a place to stay. It seemed like a great, inexpensive break. What could possibly go wrong?

What indeed… halfway through our trip, we heard the news that Italy had locked down the entire country in an effort to contain the coronavirus. Oh my god, we thought, that’s crazy. That could never happen in the United States.  A couple days later, we read the announcement that flights from Europe to the US would cease three days before we were due to return. We need to leave,  I said – today, now! And we set about trying to move up our return. Caroline and her husband drove us to the airport that afternoon, bags in hand, but this scene at the United desk was not inspiring to say the least. 

We owe a lot of gratitude to a helpful United phone agent who stuck with us that evening until she’d found us a way home. Over dinner, we listened to President Macron’s address to the nation outlining the beginning of France’s lockdown restrictions… incredible, we said. It couldn’t happen in America that the government would limit people’s freedom of movement like that.

We came home to a self-quarantine scenario, lucky to have humorous housemates like Joe here who were brave enough to bring us food and supplies. 

And then, of course, every couple of days brought more amazing, unprecedented measures – the Bay Area shelter-in-place, and finally the state-wide shelter-in-place. 

If we’re going to shelter in place, we decided, let’s do it in Modoc. And once again it was, We need to leave, now. Or, as Joel likes to tell it, I shoved some food in his mouth and said, Eat this – we’re leaving in 15 minutes. This was before they clarified that you don’t get to choose where you shelter in place, or that we wouldn’t be able to travel back and forth easily to alternate between sheltering in Modoc or in the Bay Area. And, of course, it was at that point only supposed to be for about two weeks. Now it’s been almost two months and still no real end in sight. Modoc, however, is a great place to be if you have to shelter in place, since the population is sparse to start with and we’ve had no cases of the virus in the county. Here we are arriving at the property early the next morning. I haven’t been home since.

Thinking the lockdown would only last a couple of weeks (a temporary disruption, as reflected on above), we set to work making our time up here useful by starting on our next project – the energy shed. This is where our solar PV system batteries and controller will live and we want to get that system installed later this year, right? So let’s go. Joel being the talented and industrious man he is, and me being a willing helper, it only took a couple of days to complete the foundation, shell and roof, complete with a rolling barn door courtesy of our Greenwave house-mate Barb.

Meanwhile, we also got reacquainted with our local herd of deer… 

and set up this stove my friend Aaron gave me for my birthday last year…

We missed the company of "Tarp Man" - the unintended scarecrow that was the stove all winter.

At some point along the way, Allie started sitting at the table with us in the evenings. Not every day, but you know…

With the energy shed done (minus siding, which is pending a delivery of rough sawn lumber from the local mill), and our building permit in hand, it was time to turn our attention to the bath house. At this point, we might have been starting to move into stage two of the process I reflected on above… the original two weeks of lockdown were almost up – what would happen? If my self-employment work of flight training was still banned into April, with not a penny of all this government assistance coming my way, I was going to be in some serious financial difficulty. 

But our wonderful neighbor Ed was willing to let us borrow his small bulldozer for free, so we decided to go ahead and get started with the parts of that job that are mostly labor with minimal materials cost to pay for. Here’s Ed giving Joel a lesson on starting and operating his little old dozer that’s probably as old as I am.

And it’s arrival at our build site that afternoon. Aaron was also at the property for a while and together we prepared the site for its final flattening with this cute red machine. Allie supervises.

Allie joined us for rests by the creek on this bench made from a fallen juniper tree.

I attended my first branding. Really makes you appreciate where your meat comes from.

We started using the outdoor oven to bake pizzas.

Allie really likes home-made pizzas baked on apple wood.

In between projects, we (mostly Joel) started building a covered straw bale garden… in case this virus thing got really crazy and we needed to grow our own food supply.

And we watched the spring blossoms both come and go on the apple trees... almost the end of April now and still wondering when I’ll be able to get back to work, but also really enjoying this opportunity to connect so deeply with the growing homestead here at Owl Creek.