Expensive Lessons

On Saturday November 2nd 2024, I came up to the island, with what I thought was a rational compulsion to spend the presidential election as close a foreign border as I could get. I thought getting a few friends to spend the week with me would be an easy sell, but no one bit, so I headed up alone. I had been up here a few weeks before, when the early-October mornings were cold but manageable, the days in the low 60's, and my friend Frank was here fixing part of the roof and building new stairs to the cabin.  Two weeks later, the house was colder than the outside temperatures, and it smelled stale and dank with the windows closed. The crusty, electricity-guzzling, 40-year old refrigerator hummed a funeral dirge that echoed through the house. My ex’s things were still here, exiled into 2 rooms and the entire cabin, radioactive with fresh memories. My belongings were still in boxes in other rooms, and though I didn’t want to put them back on a U-Haul, I didn’t dare unpack a thing. That night, I slept on a mattress on the floor, fully clothed. I planned to spend the next week copywriting and attending school online, towing a space heater with me from room to room. How bad could it be?

I was on the 1:30 ferry back to Anacortes the next afternoon.

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In twelve months, while the legal and social contours of our country roil and shift and America is becoming a foreign concept, something closer to healing or integration is taking shape here. Notably, the parts of the house I occupy are unrecognizable from how they first looked and felt. There are rugs on the floor and places to sit, lamps, a stereo, a bed in a bed frame, and books on bookshelves. Maybe most important of all, the new wood stove is not only heating the house but, in my mind, drying out its bones.

Eric and Kate, friends from the East Coast, came up for the last week of October. We cleaned, unpacked, and organized. From The Orcas Island Exchange, our local mashup of the Island dump and Goodwill, we found brand new cordless blinds and an old but operational circular saw, and all of the materials we needed to turn heavy comforters into heat-insulating curtains. Eric took over the water-diversion project, hooking up downspouts with y-connectors, and getting water from both sides of the house to drain down the slope at the northeast end of the property, rather than under the house.  We hooked up our first rain barrel, on the southeast end.  On a rainy day, a ten foot long span of new gutter can collect well over ten gallons, demonstrating that rainwater collection is viable for irrigation, if not a potential backup for a water system.

A week later, Portland/Tacoma friends came up for rain, wind, and a surprise sunny day that wasn't in the forecast. It is so valuable to have this place seen by news sets of eyes that know me and can track my circuitous thought processes, ideate with me, and gently lower me back into the cradle of reality when necessary. Bath house = Good idea! Opening up the house and shrinking the square footage by taking out half of the ceilings = Huh!

All of this progress hasn't stemmed the tide of learning expensive lessons, the latest of which involves buying high end electric oven for a "steal" only to spend the same amount as the purchase price ($400) on an erratic, under-the-table electrician, who's left me no closer to baking off a batch of ginger molasses cookies. Long story short, I learned after purchasing (dumb) that I needed to install a new plug, pull new wire to accommodate a 240v appliance, and reroute the connection to another switch. The pathway from the panel to the oven under the house is less-than-clear (a lot of "What Were They Thinking?" uttered over the course of 3 unproductive days). The guy I hired might know electrical but, to put it one way, lacked patience or a methodology to his approach. To put it another way, he was a hot mess, and I learned the all important lesson to never hire someone without asking around. If you can't find someone to recommend your unlicensed electrician, chances are there's a reason for that. This is the anatomy of an expensive lesson: not asking the right questions, not doing your homework, and moving ahead at full speed hoping that velocity will make up for a lack of planning.

Could I have lived a full, satisfying life without learning about amperage, wire gauges, and NEMA 14-30 plugs? Or died without knowing exactly how a gravity fed septic system works? I could have gone my entire life without ever knowing a thing about tansy ragwort, its two year lifecycle, and the angle you need to take when you plunge your Grampa's Weeder into its core to ensure you get the entire root ball out in one tug. Yes to all of those things, but not here on Orcas Island. More expensive lessons are a guarantee, but how else does one acquire priceless wisdom?

If you're enjoying Bucolia and would like to support my writing and the grand project of restoring this property, consider a paid subscription! As of now, none of my writing will be paywalled, but that may change in the future. And if you know anyone who would enjoy reading this, please spread the word.