Out in the Sticks

We’ve been living way out in the sticks for over a week now, in the southwestern corner of Alamance County, NC. Our house is a garage with a small apartment on the top floor. We don’t have indoor plumbing or indoor electricity or insulation or drywall yet. Despite all of that, our living conditions have improved from living in a 1971 singlewide trailer. That place was a dump. I don’t understand how it’s perfectly legal for us to live in a 33 year old van without wheels, but it’s not exactly legal for us to be living in our new home, because it hasn’t passed final inspection.

There are several reasons we aren’t living in a certified housing unit yet. Apparently, we’ve hired Larry and Curly to do our plumbing. We met Moe the other day. He’s our electrician. He’s nicer than you’d think. He probably bottles up his anger and takes it all out on the plumbers.

All of our stuff is piled up in the garage, and even though we need some of that stuff for day-to-day living, we have to make it look like we’re just keeping it there until we move in. One of our daily morning rituals is putting the bed away. We’ve been sleeping in the garage because it’s warmer down there at night. On the top floor, the attic vents let the cold air in, while the garage is pretty sealed off to the elements. It gets under 30 degrees some nights, which isn’t bad when you’re wearing layers and wool hats and sleeping under three heavy blankets. I’m just glad were down south. In the morning we have to fold up all the blankets and sheets and stack them to make it look like we just unloaded them from the truck. Then we toss the futon mattress on top of the couch.

All the makings for coffee is kept in a cardboard box, so in the morning we carry the box upstairs, take out the coffee, coffee maker, filters, sugar, spoon, then set everything on top of the box, plug the coffee maker into an extension cord which runs to our temporary power pole, pour some water from a gallon jug into the coffee maker, and make some coffee. When were done, we put everything away, and the box goes back into some inconspicuous corner of the garage.

We have a well but the well water has to be tested for all sorts of contamination before we can drink it. The well is like 630 feet deep so we probably don’t have to worry about pesticide and petroleum contamination, and the water is clear and tastes like new hose. We use it to wash dishes with. I shave with it too. For drinking water, we have a few gallon jugs we fill up at the farm Joann works at, where we also take showers when we can.

We don’t have television anymore. Our TV/VCR is now a videos only unit. Joann threw away the broken antenna that probably wouldn’t pick up any stations out in the sticks even if it did work. We drink beer and look at the stars for fun now, or sit around the fire pit and listen to some music. Friday night we cooked some chicken on our charcoal grill. The grill isn’t really made to radiate heat so I decided to make a fire pit the next day.

Before we came home from work Friday night we ate some Mexican food, so the first thing I did Saturday, before I built the fire pit, was build a crapper. We don’t have a toilet yet, because Larry and Curly are taking so long to set up the plumbing. So I went out into the woods with a shovel, found a spot behind the septic field, and dug a hole, two feet deep, piling the dirt up adjacent to it. We have nice, sandy soil, so it was easy to dig. Then I got a white plastic chair, and tried to cut a hole in the seat with a knife, but that didn’t work, so I went back to the garage and got my machete. I thought maybe a fast stabbing action into the chair, then a careful sawing maneuver would do the trick and give me a nice, round hole in the seat, so I stabbed the seat hard with the machete. Instead of creating a slit it busted out a huge chunk of the seat, so my idea of a nice, toilet-seat-like oval were done. So I just hacked some more chunks off with the machete which resulted in a messed up looking but efficient toilet.

Next I tested out the toilet and it worked fine, although the chair has handles on it and I can’t get the position I’m used to, but it doesn’t matter. Now we have an adequate pooper so we no longer have to run to the gas station or hold it until work. Instead of flushing I keep an old shovel back there and throw some dirt on it. It’s like an outhouse without the stink. I’m a little worried about privacy though because the neighboring cows can see me. I wash my hands with baby wipes.

We have cows all around us. They make some weird ass noises at night. We are out in the freakin’ sticks. Our neighbor has a rooster that crows in the morning. Most of the time the only sounds we hear are cows, dogs, crickets and the two mallards we have living in our pond. They say “quack, quack” when we get too close to their nest. Good. I’m tired of people noises. People make stupid noises that sound worse than farts smell.

After I made the crapper, it was time to make the fire pit. A good thing about our soil is the absence of rocks, so we had to walk through the woods down to the stream to find some rocks. So we went down with buckets. It was a nice sunny morning. We were having a good old time. Then we realized we each had to carry a hundred pound bucket of rocks from the stream all the way back to the house, about 400 fuckin yards. Then it was like tough-man competition.

“This farmin’ stuff is sure hard,” said Joann.

“Especially when you’re farming rocks,” said me.

“Ow,” we both said.

“Reeeeooonk,” said a cow.

“Quack quack,” said a duckie.

e, i, e, i, o.

I dug a small pit two inches deep in some particularly sandy soil close to the house. I put rocks around in a U shape. I learned that on the internet. The oxygen goes in through the broken part of the U. You need oxygen, fuel, and heat to make a fire. After we made the fire pit we gathered some fuel. You need three kinds of fuel – kindling, sticks, and logs. And beer. For kindling we have a ton of stuff with personal information on we need to get rid of, like old bank statements and credit card receipts, and all the proof of our high-dollar insider trading that bought us the joint in the first place, plus a bunch of sawdust. We have about 13 acres of woods with plenty of dried sticks and logs. We also like to keep a witch or two around if we want a real hot hellfire fire.

We sawed up some logs and I split small pieces with a hatchet. We only have a little hand saw and an old axe and hatchet. I bought a file at Lowe’s that day and sharpened the blades. I want to get a bigger saw and a maul and wedge so I can cut up some bigger logs. My hands hurt. I have sissy city boy hands. Na ah, my hands kick ass. They’re kinda calloused from guitar playing. Rah! Tough! Football!

Anyway, I positioned two flat rocks on either side of the pit, so I could set my grill on there and cook chicken, which is cheap as shit at the Liberty Food Lion. I crumpled a bunch of paper and threw it in there, then put some sticks on top of it in a crisscross pattern, then lit the paper with a Turbonegro match.

“Now that’s a fi-ah!” I said, imitating Eddie Murphy imitating his Uncle Gus at a cookout. “Y’onna eat? Y’onna eat?”

We waited until the fire died down to embers and threw the chicken on there. It took a while to cook but it ended up being the best chicken we ever ate. We wrapped peppers and onions in foil and threw that right down on top of the hot coals. Joann pulled up some lettuce and greens we still have growing in the field, which the deer amazingly didn’t eat. Our neighbor hunts on our land, so that might be helping.

We drank some beer and looked down at the fire and up at the stars. You can see Saturn in the Eastern sky, a little left of Orion. I have a telescope but the moon has been out so it hasn’t been dark enough to peek at the planets. There ain’t this many stars in the city sky. Looking at the fire under the stars clears up my head. Watching television under the ceiling makes my head all cuck-a-muck.

Sunday morning we cleared some thorn bushes with the machete and cut down a few smaller sourwood trees around the pond with the handsaw. The ducks quacked at me when I got too close to their nest. They were napping. Lazy ducks.

What else did we do this weekend? Put up our lobster mailbox. Damn right. Joann’s gramma got a lobster mailbox at a yard sale in Maine for 50 cents. She told us we didn’t have to put the claws and tail and pipe-cleaner antennae and eyeballs on it. I said hell yeah we do. So now we have a lobster mailbox.

We did Nathan’s hot dogs on sticks Sunday night. The best way you can cook a hot dog is over a campfire. Followed by grilling with charcoal. Followed by grilling with gas. Followed by boiling them. Followed by frying them. Followed by microwaving them. Followed by leaving them out in the sun all day. Sun dried hot dogs aren’t all they’re cracked up to be.

We didn’t catch the Steeler game at the Sport Bar but the Sports Bar is now ½ hour away, and we had to get up at five in the morning Monday. My car is broke so when Joann works at six in the morning at the market in Carrboro, I have to ride with her. So we didn’t want to get four hours of sleep. But we did catch the game on AM radio – two announcers on Westwood One. They were better than Phil Simms and John Madden and Dan Dierdorf but not as good as Bill Hillgrove and Myron Cope. We missed the exciting ending because we fell asleep in the garage.

We woke up at 5 and put the bed away, got dressed and got in the truck. The rooster crowed. We took off eastward for Carrboro, where we arrived shortly before 6 am. I took a little cat nap in the truck, then got on the first J bus at 6:30. The 6:30am J-Bus crowd isn’t too pretty - tired people going to crappy jobs and bums who’ve been out in the cold all night. The 6:30am J-Bus crowd looks like the any time of the day Greyhound Bus crowd. I didn’t look any better.

I got off the bus at a campus stop and walked to the undergraduate library that is open 24 hours. A geeky security guard asked me for my “One Card”.

“I have a library card.”

“Unfortunately we’re closed to the public for about 10 more minutes.”

“Okay, thanks,” I said and walked out.

“No trouble,” he said friendly.

I sat on a nearby bench and read a book. I needed to take a crap bad.

“Ding dong dang dong. Dong dang ding dang. Dang ding dong ding. Ding dong dang ding. Dong, dong, dong, dong, dong, dong, dong,” said the bell. That means it’s 7:00am. I made it to the library men’s room without crapping myself. I washed my hands. They were dirty from throwing dirt on the fire. They were scratched up from clearing thorns. They were sore from chopping and sawing wood. There was dirt under my fingernails. My hair was messed up and stunk like campfire. I washed my face. It was chapped from looking at a fire all night. I dried it with a brown paper towel. I was outside for every waking hour all weekend. Now it was time for me to be inside for 8 hours under fluorescent lighting and tiles.

After that I got some coffee at the dining hall and walked around campus looking for a good place to kill some time, finally settling on the grand steps of the School of Journalism building next to a large pillar and read some Tolstoy and drank my coffee. Students started filing in. Some of them sidelooked me.

Then it was time to go to work. I got to my building. As I was opening the door to my building, the bell said this: ““Ding dong dang dong. Dong dang ding dang. Dang ding dong ding. Ding dong dang ding. Dong, dong, dong, dong, dong, dong, dong, dong.”