Triumph of the Pears

   Pumpkin Hill  overlooks Cayuga Lake  at the widest point,  and the  lake  reflects an extra dose of sun …. along with a lot of wind … so the  thin, hill-top soil is parched in summer. 
  The Cayuga  Indians probably never tried to plant up here,  preferring the lower, gentler slopes where the soil is thicker, the growing season longer, and water close at hand.

   The  Pumpkin Hill  section was awarded   to one of Washington's generals and was sold on down to a  family from Connecticuit : the Morgans, who traveled  up here by oxcart, possibly unaware until they cleared the land,  of just how thin the  glacier-scraped hill-top soil was. 

      The clearing method that most white settlers used was roughly the same as Sullivan's men used to destroy the Indian orchards around the village below……which itself was was not all that different from the method the Indians had used to prepare a wooded area  for a  ten year planting cycle before leaving it to the deer and berries :  Slash and burn.
     But  the   clearing methods of the white settlers  were the most destructive and didn't include moving on every  ten years to  let the soil come back. 

 In the first year the homesteaders typically  girdled the trees to kill them and let in the light.
        When the trees were dead and dry, some would be hewn for barn and house building, but most would be burnt to charcoal.  
    No doubt some charcoal was reserved for the local forges and   kilns, but the majority was burnt and reduced even further….into  potash, which they shipped down lake and canal along the line of migration to older homesteads that , five or ten years earlier in the history of expansion,  had   burnt  and sold off their own biomass to yet older settlements. 




 

 The  Morgan family traveled by Oxcart from Conneticuit to Pumpkin Hill,   probably without having seen the soil they were betting on.  
  In the early years,  after rolling the stones off the fields and onto their foundations,   the Morgans plowed the ground and planted wheat. 
    But the plowed    fields became like broken pottery in the hot Summers, and the soil got  thinner with each season….even with the addition of potash imported from newer homesteads up the route of migration. 



    
   The farm didn't prosper long.    The Morgan boys  one by one moved on down into Aurora, started the masons, and got into politics.  In the eighteen twenties,  the Morgan son who had become a Senator  sold the homestead on down to others   who tried poor-soil crops like potatoes, and then  beans, then table grapes.  

   The last owner of the intact farm planted many acres of    Red Pines that he planned to sell as Christmas trees to send his kids to college.
     In the nineteen seventies, the original house of the  homestead burnt down.

      The plantation pines are now ship-mast size.  
    Much  of the old cleaerd land is hay meadow or cattle range, much second-growth timber.  Most of the hill top and West slope is public hunting land that has not been mowed in many years, and which the state stocks  with pen-raised pheasants  …  which the Coyotes eat most of.   Coyotes, Deer and Turkeys  thrive.
   The four acre remnant of the homestead  where the old home was and Dog's Plot now is,  has  been mowed  only with paths, aisles, and small clearings for the last fifteen or twenty years.    Honeysuckle, Dogwoods, Wild Roses and Brambles are well established.  Buckthorns have  come up, grown old  and died.
 
      In the meantime,   the stumps of the Cayuga  village Pear victims of General Sullivan had  long ago  sent roots traveling  and sprouting;  the sprouts had become trees that flowered and set seed,     climbing the slopes through generations and evolving a local variety with root systems suited to the thin clay of the glacier-scraped lake basin.   Over the same period,  the fruits themselves reverted to  round and smaller forms, like the ancestral pears of the Caucus mountains  before  European and Asian Pears went their separate ways.   
  


      When I first moved here,  I busted through the hardpan clay, added soil, and planted a couple of dozen fruit trees, including Pears, which my research showed would be most tolerant of the clay, the poor drainage, and the periods of dehydration we have up here.
    I hardly noticed the naturalized Pear trees that spire up through the invasive Buckthorns of Dog's Plot, beating the Ash, Hickory, and Oak out of the woods, into the open … because the naturalized trees were thorny and the fruits     mostly small, round, green, bitter,  and hard to distinguish form some kind of crab apple.
   I went through a couple Summers pumping the  well dry  twice a day trying to get the new tree root systems established….before I realized that the "Crab Apples"  were actually Pears, and it occurred to me that  I could take advantage of the evolved and established Pears….by simply grafting cultivated varieties onto them.    So I did.



   I have been colonizing the Pears for five or six years now.  Or eight.

 
     
By next Spring anyway, I will have about a hundred and fifty  trees here grafted and growing a dozen varieties of European and Asian Pears…  some trees already twelve or sixteen feet tall, headed for the sky.  I prune out the center and spread the leading limbs.

 

    The late frosts of last Spring prevented fruiting  and left the trees to hyper-vegetate instead…which means they should fruit extra heavily next  Spring. 
   By  late summer….. if we don't have another double frost and hail disaster….or the lake doesn't rise six-hundred feet,    I should be overwhelmed with pears.
   I'll put some out by the road for you.
         Take a basket of them nd leave five bucks in the cash box. 
               Thanks.


                 

Sex, Trees, and the Single Parent

      The one Fig tree in  the Dog's Plot  orchard moves into the house each Winter with its   companion plant Aloe.  I occasionally harvest a few figs from the planter, but of course the Fig and the Aloe don't mate with one another….. and in fact,  Fig trees are peculiar in that each one has  sex only with itself:   the fruits develop from ingrown flowers that never open.  So,  to reproduce or recreate, the Fig tree "frigs" itself, if you will;  and you can't.
        The offspring  of a  figsexual union will be identical to the  bisexual, self-polinating parent:  a clone.
   But most  trees and people  are born of two parents, who together  had  four parents,  who had sixteen…. and so on.  As a result of having so many gene contributors, we may not even resemble either parent, but more like a mixture of the two and their general forebears, or random throwbacks to the originalbears,  including occasional freak characteristics,  creating totally newbears.

  Plant the seed of most any  Pear,  Apple, or other fruit tree…. and nobody knows what you'll get….maybe  even a genetic mutation which enables your  tree to produce apples  that looks like strawberries and  taste like bananas.     
    Yet  the seed of this tree will be just as unpredictable as that from any tree.  You will need a method other than sex to produce another Strawbannana  tree.




    Some trees can clone themselves through various forms of non-sexual reproduction.   Some, like Locust trees, send up sprouts from  traveling roots.  Apple trees will sometimes take root where bent branches touch the ground….especially if you  bury the elbow.   The resulting trees are called "Gypsies".   " Layering"  is what horticulturalists call the process  when done deliberately.  You could try  layering  your Strawbannana.

     Or…  you might  whittle a wedge on one end of a Strawbannana Apple twig, and stick it into a split Apple sapling stump, hoping for the twig and root-stock to fuse……..which may well happen if   you line up the green growing layers,  if you seal the exposed parts, if the critters don't get to it, and if a few more ifs.  "Cleft Grafting",  we call it.


  

   Romans developed grafting……. or maybe they stole it from the Greeks …. and  perpetuated dozens of Pear mutations by grafting.
    Then, through the dark ages after the fall of the Roman Empire, this practice was carried on  behind cloister walls by the churchmen of Rome.  And now there may be some thought in the Vatican along the lines reproducing  priests by similar means.  Heaven knows,  medical grafters can already  attach a severed finger to the middle of your forehead.

   Be that as it may, during the sixteen hundreds   fruit varieties traveled  as grafted root stock  and rooted cuttings, through the Christian empire  into the Americas.
    French Jesuit missionaries  branching down from Canada  brought their own varieties of Apples, Cherries, Peaches, and Pears to their missions on Cayuga lake and to the Cayuga Village downhill from us at Dog's Plot.
  A hundred years on, when the Cayugas were living in European-style, stick- framed houses,    growing all these foreign fruit varieties, and maybe even  broccoli,  at peace with the English who were at war with the colonists …Washington's men marched through here, burned the village, destroyed the field crops, and cut down the orchards.
   That was the end of  those  Sweet Cherries and Peaches.
        But Apples and Pears - Pears, in particular - sprout well from stumps.
    

The Hands

 
     This my great, great grandfather Charles Drury,  with his wife -  my great great grandmother,  her daughter in law  - my great grandmother, and my grandmother - the baby, Vera Drury,  photographed by  my great grandfather - Dr. Charles Drury of Natural Bridge.
     Somewhere there is another photo of the great great old man  seated in front of his family, in the Boston rocker which you see sitting empty on the right side of this photo;  his hands   closest of all family members to the camera, appearing huge,  gripping his knees like gnarling cedar roots on rock,  looking  as if they, THE HANDS themselves, were largely responsible for sending his three sons to medical school,  freeing the old fellow to  travel organizing farm granges, to farm out his cows, to become a bee keeper, and rock in the chair, growing the long white beard.

     When the old man was gone, the   Boston Rocker  went to the Dr. Drury home in Natural Bridge,  where  I lived as a child.
 When we moved to Ithaca in 1949, we brought the chair along.
   In transit, or  maybe in rocking horse use at Edgewood Place, the chair got broken enough that it was stowed in the basement to await repairs. 
        We also kept our firewood  in the basement.
          One day my brother went down cellar for kindling and , finding none but seeing  the busted chair, he split himself an armload, and  emerged  with it from the cellar: to the mortification of our mother at the stove.
   That was the only time I ever saw Mama Dot cry.

    We kept the chair, a bundle of nineteen pieces in the cellar, for fifty years or so.
  In the nineteen nineties, my niece Liz Sticker who was then a carpenter for my Natural Bone Builders, rebuilt  the chair, and my daughter Mnetha has painted it a couple of times since.  Liz has it now.  Maybe she has the hands photo too.  I won't need it though:  I'm  actually getting the  hands.

These Trees

  

     It was a Godawful year for fruits on this hill: with early heat, then late frosts,  hail later on,  followed by a long summer  drought... all perfectly ordered as if by a  Godman Bully.

   The Cherries straightened up after the heavy snow, but few flowers and fruits made it through the
hail.     My best Plum flowered so heavily it looked like it was still covered with snow...but then  brown knots of fungus   swelled  all over the branches, so I had to cut the tree back to little more than a coat rack.  

    When you add to that a wayward  raccoon and wayward mink that  wiped out all but one of my chicken flock,   I might be tempted to just raise mice and cats.
      But my Pear orchard here at Dog's Plot is going to be all right.
 Very few pears this year, and  trees here  lost most of their fuit, but the trees themselves are going to flourish.
Pears originated in the extreme conditions of mountain Asia,  and ever since the French Jesuit Missionaries brought them here..... a couple hundred year before White settlement.....  have been evolving and adapting to the local clay .  

  


      The Jesuits  had been in Canada ever since well before the Mayflower pilgrims  showed up on the East coast..and they  also had fingers into Iroquois country  south of  Lake Ontario,  including two missions at native settlements on Cayuga Lake.   And where the Jesuits went, they took their gardens with them.

     The village now aappropriately called  Aurora is in a deep valley with a ridge to the east
that makes the morning last hours  longer than if you live up here on the hill where the sky is big,
the geese scrape by just overhead,  and the West wind blows the pumpkins around. The village was known as Deawendote, or Village of the Constant Dawn before the Jesuits arrived, later as Chonodote (which maybe somebody can tell me the meaning of) and then called  Peachtown by the soldiers who chopped down the orchards there.   In the mild climate at lake level the Cayugas planted   not only their own  three sister vegetables,   but also French vegetables and trees.     For all we know, the Cayuga  may have been growing Broccoli and Arugula here. 
     But it IS known that the Jesuits brought Peaches, Cherries, Apples and Pears to Deawendote, which around then became known as Chonodote,     
     
         After two hundred years of   constant-dawn and advancing garden culture,  the Cayugas, who were by then living in wood frame houses like the French and English,   chose the loyalist side in our war between the Anglos;   so  General Sullivan's troops, ordered by Washington, and led by William Butler, marched up and down along the Finger Lakes, slashing and burning Iroquois villages.

   
    There were no  Broccoli survivors at Chonodote, nor did most of those non native fruit trees persist,  but the Pears are all around us. 
   If you cut down a pear tree, it will sprout dozens of little clone Pear trees from
the stump .   Quick-growing, short-lived brush and perenials   come up first on brunt and abandoned land, but Pears have plenty of time,  rise like church spires and then spread white flower crowns.....flowering and fruiting year after year, the seedlings  creeping up the slopes.

    Even in regularly mowed hayfields,  gnarly  old gnome pears, kept to four or six inches tall, but with deep root systems,  are ready to take over when we give up mowing.  Pears can live for hundreds of years.  Pears can wait.
  
      Dog's Plot had not been mowed for five or ten years before I arrived.   For the first few years, I planted fruit trees  and didn't even notice the  pears, or if I did, thought they were crab apples.  The naturalalized Pears devolve from the cultivated varieties and tend to be small, round, and even bitter. 
           But in the last few years I have transformed most of  them with grafting.

     

William Again

   Trying to hang on to our family home after my parents died,  I decided to turn the house into  a Bed and Breakfast.  There were a lot of delays and obstacles on the way to eventual failure of the enterprise, and my imaginary brother William was one of them.
  While we were redoing the bathrooms,  the old claw-foot tub stood in the middle of the living room for several weeks.  One morning  I came downstairs and discovered my sometime brother William in the tub..... just waking up, squinting his face and rubbing his head with his knuckles.         
             When we were kids, William and I   shared a bedroom at Edgewood Place,  but he had spent more nights in that   tub than in his own bed.  Full of water too.  A normal child would have drowned.   
     I didn't know how long it had been since I last saw  him, where he had been, or what he was doing back at Edgewood Place again,  but I was not all that happy to see my mystery brother just then, and  I did know  he wouldn't be capable of speech for five or ten minutes yet;  so   I went to the kitchen and made coffee.        

    

          William isn't my real brother.  We never even knew where he came from:  he just appeared   in the garden  with our dog Binker one day.
   I was five years old.   It was Spring of   1949 and we were getting ready to move from Lewis County to Ithaca so dad could teach at Cornell.
    I went to the the bay window  just as my father came  in the driveway and my mother went out to  meet him.  I think we must have all seen the strange boy in the garden at once.
       His big dirty face was only high as Binker's  head, and he held on to her collar, as if he were using her to climb out of the ground.
  My mother and father walked slowly toward the boy, as if he might sink back into the ground if they were too abrupt.  
   They stopped few yards from him for what seemed like a long time, talking at him I suppose, and finally Dad took Binker by the collar and led her toward the back door,   the  boy twaddling along side . 
     I tried to hold the door shut when they came up the steps, but   Dad growled "BOY" through the door, and I stepped aside.           
                  The boy was barefooted;  His hair and skin and clothing seemed to be all  about the same  uncolor, except for around his mouth which me must have put in the creek to drink.   Mom and Dad led Binker, boy attached, right up to the bath room.   I followed, well behind, and watched from the upstairs hall.
       He had   freakishly short, slightly curved legs like the jaws of pliers. His   his toenails brown  and curled.                                I didn't like anything about the situation.  I called Binker  to me, and we
went downstairs.
     

   William came fairly clean, but he never stayed that way long, and he didn't  talk for  many months.  His first words, or at least the first we heard, were song lyrics he picked up from the radio.  Goodnight Irene, which he sang, not to well, with some attempted yodeling, which he must have picked up from the Hank Williams,  but never mastered.
      Whether  his underdeveloped legs were  result of   a Thalidomide poisioning,   inbreeding  , or just a chance mutation, we will never know.  I suppose he wasn't too well liked at home anyway, and imagine he must have lived in somebody's attic or cellar, or in a brush pile  behind the outhouse for most of his life before he came to us. 
       Well, we were the Warrens, and we were going to treat him justly, so  the move  down to Ithaca was delayed while Dad tried to discover who the boy was, and where he belonged.
      In the meantime Mom , us kids, and the boy went up to Lake Bonaparte.         
         He and I  didn't always play well together. 
    It started with  us earnestly stalking one another around the island, and developed into scrambles, chases,  climbs,  swimming,  and wrestling, all of which and William was better at that me.
     Very quickly   I grew to admire and resent him equally.
      William would sometimes stay out in the water into the evening.  Mom would call him in and ring the camp bell, but there was no controlling William. Thinking of him out there on the water as I lay safe in bed, I felt   deep aloneness.

     I a few weeks of poking around, Dad could not  establish William's identity,  so he took on guardianship for the mean time,  and it was a long mean time.   Mom and Dad named him William,  for no reason I know of except that there were no other Williams around, and  the name Bonaparte, they pulled from the lake because it was handy, but it was appropriate enough 
    
          William was totally at home on Loon Island  but never so in Ithaca .    During the first years  there, mostly speachless he didn't go to school and mostly went out  only at night,  like a cat.
     Sometimes   I locked the doors when he was out, but he would just go up a tree and in at the third floor.

            
        
                     
    At Lake Bonaparte William would sometimes be gone for days at a time.  He was obviously able to take care of himself and    Mom and Dad couldn't keep William in, so they grew to tolerate his wanderings.    And they couldn't adopt a child who didn't officialy exist, but they did everything they could for William. One of those things was to pay for a hormone therapy which  our  doctor suggested might help restart the  development of William's attenuated legs.
       What the primitive hormone therapy of that time actually  did, was it grew only his Privates.    This  has complicated his life in ways you can  imagine for your self.        
      
                  
          I took the coffee  to William ; still in the tub, in which he immediately spilled half the coffee,   then  he slurped down the remaining half  as fast as he could, so he could finish it before he spilled it again.
              I poured him some more.
        William told me that he had been up North since last I saw him, and he only planned to stay in Ithaca for a season.  He  wanted to dip into the money economy briefly, to save up for   a bus ticket to Wyoming where he knows some horses.   Horses and William are a Minataur, if you have ever seen them.  Not many horses around Ithaca, where he mostly wears his sheet rock stillts to be normal, and used to borrow my bike to ride out of town.  The spring loaded sheet rock stilts work very very well for him on the bike.  I wished he had his own bike, but everytime he gets one, usually free one way another, it gets stolen from him.
       William has no locks, has nothing to lock anything too, and manages to get past locks when he encounters them..  He had slept the night before in my my new garden shed, and washed up in the  watergarden.      It was a nice little shed, he let me know.   
   

            
       Yes thank you, That little shed was built by me and roofed with carefully selected river slates, lapped and bedded in mortar.  The prettiest roof I ever did.
      That shed's like something a garden Gnome would live in, William said.
           Did I know about the  big Estates in old England that  would sometimes actually hire actors to live in the garden and  impersonate   hermits or   Gnomes?      
      I thinkWilliam's old girlfriend Gee had told him about this.  Gee  seemed sometimes to have believed that he really WAS a gnome.      Without his shin stilts, he  could just about pass for a Gnome or maybe a Troll, and he would have no shame about exploiting that. 
              So he  said  I should hire him to be his garden Gnome.
             As a Gnome, he could help direct guests trying to park here, or he could just act like he or the guests were invisible or imaginary.  The latter would be more realistic, but either way,   he would be good for business, he said.
      Well,  no  way did I want Billy Bonaparte Crotchsniffer as  a greeter for Edgewood Place Bed and Breakfast. 

       I suggested that, instead, he move over to Bridge House, where he often enough holed up anyway.  He could start his own funky Bed and Breakfast, dress like a Goblin , serve worms for breakfast and do whatever he wanted to do.   
    I  said he could have the family bathtub he was now spilling coffee in, if he would help me move it over there to Bridge House
         He said O.K.




  Bridge House, as you might know, is an old, and mostly disused, stone building incorporated in a bridge over a little gorge near the Cornell Campus.  It has six or eight dank rooms in its two  abutments,  and  a dark history of private occupancy, a raunchy one of fraternity use, and a decadence under university ownership.  Link Here to Blog on Bridge House 
    It was already pretty much unused when we were kids and used to sneak around the fences to play in there. 
   For a long time it was used only by Cornell Plantations to  keep dormant plants.  
 William has always used it as one of his hoveling places, and has often shared it with racoons, which all seem to know him like a big man on campus, even when he has been away for months.

           Steve Gilbert and William and I got that tub around the fence and in there without dropping it into the gorge, which  partly did happen,  but we had a safety rope run through the drain hole and Steve grabbed it just in time.
       I hadn't been serious telling William to make a B and B ofr it, but he showed up at the house again the next week and had me help him set up a web page like one I had for Edgewood place.   He took to the computer pretty fast, like it was the magic slate he used to love,   and every few days he would come back late at night to tweak   his Bridge House Ivy Gothic Inn web site.      Link Here
     I am pretty sure that the only guests at Bridge House Ivy Gothic Inn were the raccoons, a LOT of raccoons, and the occasional young women  William brought there to bed.    
       It is unusual for raccoons to tolerate even one other, unrelated raccoon  in the neighborhood, but William somehow difused that instinct, or maybe it was the influence of the T.V.  Or the fridge.
   He got hold of an old T.V   and a dorm room size  fridge and a single clip up light,  which he powered though  two hundred feed of extension cords snaking through the woods under the leaves to an outdoor outlet on a frat house back side which they let him plug into .... probably because of some special mushrooms he provided the   boys from the woods. 
  The T.V.  signal  came through a rabbit ears  ariel he had mounted on the bridge tower.  Much of the time this brought in only one station and whatever happend on screen, it was always snowing there.  Sometimes it  was only voices in the snow, sometimes just a blind white rush, but he left it on all the time, and usually there were at least a few coons  watching it.  
     And watching him. The racoons   learned to open and to sometimes  close the refrigerator.  They  would  take things out of it and put things in it.  Frogs,  sandwich ends, crusts, and pizza-stained cardboard,  even shiny objects not particularly in need of refrigeration. 
      The end to that domestic arrangement came when a  young woman, a graduate student whom William brought home for bed and breakfast, was so awed by the uncharacteristic sociability and learned human skills of the raccoons,  and maybe so strangely taken with William  ( as women of a certain sort often are) that she was determined to do a study of interspecies socialization involving him and the raccoons, and proposed  to make it her masters thesis topic.
   That spooked the shit out of William.
      He was out of there. William told me about it when he stopped by on his way up north for a month or so maybe.



  
  
Edgewood Bed and Breakfast failed to support itself, as I warned you would happen.  It was doomed.  Local bankers had looked at me with real horror when I requested a couple hundred thousand dollars for renovations.  So I had taken out a sub prime loan with CountryWide and it turned out that  the guests couldn't cover the nine point six percent interest.   
      It was heart breaking, but at least I wasn't being driven out because I was being bombarded by the Syrian Airforce.  I moved a lot of my family stuff and books to attics and barns of friends.  My dog Deerdra and I stayed with my friend Alan Pike for a while, and gradually moved up the lake to my daughter's four acres on Pumpkin hill where I began grafting an orchard , dug half a dozen garden plots, and started  a flock of chickens.
       It was because of the chickens that I  had to go looking for William again.
      I had ordered twenty straight-run day-old chicks,  which means half were likely to be hen chicks, half males.
       But in April, at due time, the box arrived and the hatchery had included ten extra males, which according to the invoice, was  to increase the thermal mass of the package so as to keep the chicks from chilling. 
            So, as it became evident about six weeks later, I had twelve hens and eighteen roosters. 
   The natural solution to the imbalance and to the superfluity of roosters on an egg farm, is to eat the roosters, preferabally at about six weeks of age, when they are only beginning to get cocky and are mostly as big as they will ever be. 
   Although I will eat my neighbors chicken,   I did not intend to eat my own, and besides that, I was convinced from my reading and contemplations that there was a natural function for roosters in a flock: scouting for food, protecting the hens and so on;  and I was determined that my roosters would have every chance to fulfill themselves. 
       I was right about roosters having a function.... and my roosters sure did fulfill themselves, but not without a lot of strife and brawling, sometimes involving me. 
       It is not natural or practical for a flock of twelve hens to be tended by eighteen roosters, and I might have realized that, but I was determined to make it work.  So I went looking for William.
         He had spent   two or three years as a kid living on our Sammy's Roostosterone farm in Florida and getting gangbanged by her Roosters, who probably saw him as a punk competitor.  He learned pretty well how to deal with roosters.
       At the time of my need  I didn't even know for sure if William in the county or up North, or out West for   that matter,  so I asked around and put my friends on the lookout, and then Deerdra dog and I cruised the greenways gorge verges and some of the mushroom hotspots we share, because just then the Chantrells were fruiting pretty good and he would likely be, have been, or be about to appear at one of those places.   I lurked around like that, until Igot a call from Tim Dietrich, saying he had gone out to  his barn with Cooper to play Ping Pong and found William was there reading books I had stored there.  William sometimes camped in Tim's barn so he could read the old  family National Geographics I had  there.  Tim said that right then, William was playing ping pong with Cooper.  When without his stillts, he plays standing on the table....it is allowed him there...but it isnt fair because he about always wins that way, and he uses two paddles.    Show me where it says you can't play with two paddles, he says.  He will play for hours.  I told Tim to keep him there, keep loosing to him, and I drove in..
        It was surprisingly  easy to convince William that he wanted to come and live with chickens again,  He rode back with me that  day.

  
     It is not too clear to what degree, in the time he was at Dog's Plot , he tamed and trained the roosters, and to what degree they just naturally matured through their group adolecense, and got relieved of a few whom I killed because they insisted on attacking me, guests or grandchildren.
          O.K.  I couldn't have managed without him.     
       Early on during his stay here, even before he built his escape ark, William was coming in at night to play on my I Book and mess around in the kitchen while I slept, or  the same while I was away on a roof.  I myself got very little writing done during that period, but , after fooling around with his Bridge House site and adding a food section there,, William started the blog you have here.  He is the one who named it and this place Dog's Plot, though he and the dogs have been gone for a while now.
   He may be up North, probably not Great Slave Lake, he may be in Wyoming, he could even
be out west wrangling chickens on movie sets, but it seems likely as anything that he is back at Bridge House again.

The Day the Roof Fell Off

            In the seventies, when I was  regularly  underestimating roof jobs and paying myself  poorly or not at all,  it occurred to me that I could help the cash flow by writing  instructive articles   about things  I knew  from hard experience.  After all, writing should be the one thing I ought to be able to make a little money at;  I have Master of Fine  Arts in Creative writing.    I mean......I actually taught the course at Cornell called "Writing from Experience."  Give me a frigging break.
   So I wrote  about building a rough-sawed  camp lodge for my brother on an Adirondack lake Island       Mother Earth News bought the story, flew my brother up from Kentucky with his grand daughter, and sent a team  to  photograph us in Ithaca, then    edited, and published "Rough Home Building" as the cover story of her twenty-fifth anniversary issue. 
   See me and my brother Herb,  photo-shopped onto a snapshot of my mother and sister on the porch  of the   Round Island camp.  

 But then,  I open the mag and....... Yikes! Mother had fucked with the story! 
 She had removed the part about a dramatic little accident, that shouldn't be forgotten if I am ever going to learn anything in this life, and anyway, literary justice demands that it be restored.

     The Round Island is round around and round over the top, lumpy with bedrock    right at the surface or just a foot or two under the pine duff. 
 We had  dragged stone  on log rails from the talus slope behind the site, and laid up three rows of three stone piers from the bedrock, to support three cobbled beams to carry the building.
 
 

The unfortunate event came when we had   had the second floor walls up.
         
            we nailed up twelve foot post  at each end of the building and one in the middle supporting   against which we nailed one by six board running on edge 
          
    
       The generator was running and  my niece   Liz Sticker was making the plumb cuts on a chop saw outside.    Jon Morse was  cutting the bird's mouths to fit over the top plate of the wall, and then  and handing the finished rafters  up to David Morgan , who served them to me. I was up on the tall step ladder, head and shoulders above the ridge board, on which I  had marked X's  where I would nail each, plumb-cut rafter head. 
 It was fine up there above the ridge board, as if I were much  higher even.
          I nailed  through the ridge board into the plumb face, as David Morgan toe-nailed at the bird's mouth. on              
      We had half a dozen rafters up on the West side and more than that on the East.  We were moving right along.   Woopie!  Rocking and Rolling, as we say.  But, I had  fallen behind in adding collar ties to truss up the rafters.
         We   had six or eight pairs up, and a few more on the East......whenn the nails began to squeal and  rafters to slide.
         David Morgan came up between rafters,  or rather the rafters came down around instead of on  him;  Jon Morse knew it was going to happen anyway, or least that is what he told me when I ran into him at Cayuga Lumber last week,  said he  had  run out from below when he heard the first squealing of nails,  and Liz was safe at the saw.
        I was there standing on the step ladder untlouched,  still, and above it all, like somebody totally out of the body on the operating table where something awful is happening.
    in my head, it was so quiet I could have heard ashes drop.      
       
         

I don't know how long before  I came down the ladder .  Quite likely someone had to call my name.   I don't remember a thing anybody said.  Maybe nothing was said.    It was clear enough what we had to do.
         .
    Not ALL the rafters had fallen: maybe only  a dozen; and only three or four were hopelessly shattered.   
  We started denailing the  usable rafters,  and cutting new ones;   and by quitting time we were back where we had been just before the avalanche,  but with good collar ties on every set of rafters.
    The next day we got the rafters all up and were ready  to start the roof sheathing.
     Framing is  the   exciting part of building, the basic shape of what's to come is formed so fast.  If you framed it, the sturcture is often more beautiful in its bones than it ever will be again.
     When the framers have arrived at the highest point of the building they traditionally   tie a small tree or branch to that highest point.     
    The day the roof fell, we forgot to do that.
     

  what that moment at the top of the ladder keeps bringing to mind another incident,  years ago in Ithaca.
  I was driving  behind a guy who was riding a on a bicycle on Stewart Ave.  He hit a brick or someting that sent him and his bike flying .  His bike landed on its side, and he landed on his feet....running.
     He kept running and was still running when I passed him. 
            I often wonder, what happened to that guy.  Did he just keep on running?
        But the thing I need to remember, is to keep the diagonal bracing up to date; bang on those collar ties as I go.  And I don't do much of that anymore, so I guess that's why I'am telling you.

   

My Pal the Dalai Lama

       Dalai Lama Makes Surprise Landing,  with Another  Flash Festival of Peace and Music

The Ithaca Festival, the Grass Roots Festival, The Patchy Valley Fog Festival, and well advertised events like that are fine, but my buddy the Dali Lama    comes unannounced, though not always by air and sometimes drops in just to have breakfast with Gene Toby, whose son used to work for me  and designed the main North American Tibetan  monastary on the hill opposite Cornell.  

      The Dali told Gene at breakfast one day that one thing he often missed in the West, was being where chickens wander in and out of the conversation.    
   So Gene brought the Dali to my place the next time, and it is almost a regular thing now.....if three times in five years is a regular thing. 
       We drink mint tea, and sit in my yard jabbering  with the chickens.

       It's weird how the flies love that guy.  He suffers them mostly like little children and if they get too crazy  he shoos them away like they were puppies.
           One time there was a fly that wouldn't shoo and DID want a piece of his nose. 
Would you believe he ATE that fly!?  Put out his tongue....the fly lit on it.....and was gone.
         
        Nothing left but that Cheshire cat grin.     
         And then he says his doctors told him that, because of his personal health situation, he needs to either eat nails or have some meat in his diet. 
   'I try to keep a balance, "  he says.  "One nail, one fly."

      I'll tell you one thing: he's a nut.... but he fucking cracks me up!