I Dust Off the Time Machine

Hey sports fans! I welcome you back. I have once again had a visitor from a new foreign country (the UK), but I must report, with great sadness, that my ratings have fallen from their lofty highs. I had a meeting with the network executives, and they have decided that people just don't identify with a temporary hermitage. So, to that end, I invite you on a journey through time, back to the beginning of Chez DuBrock. Back in those days it was but a simple trapper cabin perched bucolically between Nowhere and Purgatory. Relax your mind and we will travel backwards together....

Here we see the original structure on this property. It was built sometime around the birth of Jesus by a fellow named Joe Buck. His visits were limited to the wintertime, when he could trap the various and assorted furry things that spend their time out here. He was pretty damn good at making log cabins, and I must say this is a fine example. My dad once shot a bear in the FACE through a window of this cabin. This isn't hyperbole either. He actually did. So don't try and sneak up on him through a window. It won't work out. The only issue is that you must cross this to get to it:

I can hear you simple souls saying "Well, that looks like a lovely place to walk!", but you must consider that what Sancho is standing on is ice, and in the summertime, it is a horrible, swilling swamp full of voracious mosquitoes. When my family first started coming here during the year of my birth, Stump and I had to be carried across stretches of water by people in chest waders. The water, food, and anything else anybody might need to survive were similarly treated. When things weren't being carried across the swamp, they were trucked in this garden cart from the main road, which survived many a long season of abuse.

This humble log cabin built by Joe Buck served as base of operations until I was 12. I don't know if I was actually twelve, but I think all the years of manual labor has led to some repression, so it could have been earlier. We built a road into our property with some machines that I will introduce you to at a later date, and then moved to this fine example of rococo architecture provided (through some intermediaries), by the Alyeska Pipeline, where it used to serve as a warm up shack for their workers.

It was a huge step up, let me assure you. It had a stove and an oven, but even more importantly, beds for the children! We didn't have to sleep on the floor anymore, which I thought was just great. It is still just a one room hut, and we would be woken by the horrible screeching of my father's hand driven coffee grinder every morning, but an improvement. It sits in a really great clearing with some birch trees and a great view of the Crystalline Hills, which you can see behind it in the picture. I must add that clearing was done by the family, and to this day I have horrific arthritis from the years I spent raking a dirt patch before the grass finally took over. On top of it all there was no workman's comp. Shameful.

I remember being little and walking to someplace completely random in the forest where my old man had a square marked our with string, and he proclaimed "This is where we will have our house!" Even at my tender young age I'm sure I snickered and thought, "You crazy old water buffalo, that can't happen." But lo and behold! Before too long I was renewing my arthritic suffering with more raking. A whole new clearing was created, and we set to work building a colossal straw house. First we had a test building, known affectionately as "The Storage Shed". The name has a poetic connotation of beauty, with an undertone of functionality. Much like naming a ship the Queen Mary.

Then it was time for the big show, and we built this bigass house in the middle of nowhere. This is an early picture, taken before it was painted yellow.

I think Winston Churchill described our experience best when he said "If I hadn't drank a pint of brandy with breakfast, that goddamn chickenwire would have made me murder several people with a rusty crescent wrench by noon." In case you haven't built a straw house before, the ENTIRE thing has to be wrapped in chickenwire, inside and out. If you have never dealt with chickenwire, then you might as well be Marie Antoinette reading the Communist Manifesto. Chickenwire wasn't the only hurdle to be encountered during construction, but I don't feel like breaking down into tears by describing any further. Never mind, though, because we finished! When I was nineteen (after 3ish years of construction) the house was all done. And we had one helluva party. Everyone who went has never seen its equal, and I don't think anybody ever will.

In conclusion I add a hilarious picture of Sancho I took last night.

 And a photo especially for the Old Man. The sun still doesn't get high enough in the sky to get over the house, but late in the day it swings around the side and gets those panels. Yahoo!