Though it’s been almost three years now, I remember clearly how strange it felt the first morning I walked out the back door at Second Chance Ranch and saw a 40-foot motorhome in the driveway. We’d brought Ernie home the day before, and he was an unfamiliar sight in a familiar place.
I had that same strange feeling again today, seeing our 40-foot cabin outside the door of the RV.
Graceland’s delivery driver called me early yesterday morning as he was loading the structure onto his trailer in West Plains, Missouri, then gave me another call when he was “five minutes out.” (It ended up being 15 minutes. Such are the roads ’round here.) I met the caravan, which included two pilot vehicles, at the bottom of The Mountain.
The driver accepted my offer to scout our road with me in the Ranger before bringing the cabin up. (I’d done a pre-run earlier, assessing the surface after heavy rain overnight.) Seeing firsthand what he’d soon face sobered him, and rightly so.
I returned to the homesite. Deb’s cousin and our next-door neighbor went back down the road on his quad to take pictures.
The one-ton tow vehicle had to resort to “granny low” to pull the cabin up the 17% grade, the driver later reporting that he could manage only 3mph. The rig rounded the bend and came to a stop just north of our driveway.
That ended up being the last forward progress we’d see for quite a while.
I knew that the final turn onto the homesite would be the trickiest part of the operation, and I’d cleared as much room as I could for that big swing. After several tries, it was obvious that truck and trailer weren’t gonna make it.
During one cringe-inducing back-up maneuver, the driver’s spotter wasn’t spotting. A corner of the cabin’s roof caught a tree in the woods across the road and pulled up the sheet metal. I had to employ my pole saw to remove offending limbs, and then (with the help of our Cajun neighbor, who’d come up The Mountain to lend a hand) I used my Stihl saw to fell the entire tree before the rig could move again.
Ultimately, the driver decided to unload the cabin on the road and bring it up the driveway with his “mule.” That turned out to be futile, too, at least by itself — only with the aid of his spotter’s Tahoe, chained to the front of the cabin and pulling, was the mule able to push the load up the grade.
Finally, after an hours-long wrestling match, our cabin was where we could jockey it into place.
(For the record, the ridge of the structure ducked just under our sagging power line, with six or eight inches to spare. Had it been on the trailer behind the truck, it wouldn’t have made it.)
When the pad was finished a couple of weeks ago, we’d painted two spots on the gravel, essentially marking where the back corners of the cabin would be. We didn’t intend for the marks to fix a precise location, only angle and orientation. The way we hoped it’d go yesterday would be to steer the cabin toward the marks, see how we felt about it, and keep tweaking it ’til we were satisfied.
And that — limited only by the ability of the mule to extricate itself once the position was set — is exactly what we did.
At that point the difficult work was done and the manual labor began — stacking blocks under the runners, leveling the structure and making sure that doors and windows opened and closed properly. There were 24 stacks in all, each of which was three to five concrete blocks.
Six-and-a-half hours after it began, it was done. The two-man crew left for their next job. Deb and I drove into town and celebrated at Crooked Creek Pub.
Honestly, by then I was too tired to truly enjoy good beer and good pizza. And when we got back to the fifth-wheel, I slept like a junked car.
Maybe the best part of the long day was the support of our neighbors. Three were here with us, helping, and there would’ve been a fourth if he wasn’t out-of-state visiting family.
We love it here.
In the light of day this morning, we took stock of the newest addition to our Home on The Mountain. The cabin intrudes on the driveway some, and will extend farther once we add a porch, but it shouldn’t be a problem.
There’s two or three feet of pass-through room between the end walls of the structure and the edge of the excavated site — not very much. We may (or may not) be able to increase that (by digging).
Something that never was part of our vision was a “back yard.” Placement of the cabin, however, gave us one — a surprisingly spacious area that begs for a patio with a fire pit.
We’re thrilled about where our cabin landed. Now we can contemplate possibilities earnestly.
Once we’d finished our morning coffee today, Deb and I swept out the interior. Then we took advantage of our surplus concrete blocks (we had a whole bunch left over) to build a set of temporary steps at each door.
We still have 30 blocks sitting on a pallet across the driveway. We could return them to Lowe’s, but they might come in handy someday. We’ll keep ’em.
Speaking of pallets, the blocks we did use left behind three empties. I hauled them down to the lower level and leaned them against a tree. Soon they’ll be employed to hold stacked cordwood off the ground.
Deb and I spent much of the rest of the day sitting around the cabin, blue-sky dreaming about where we’ll go from here. In all the months we’ve been striving, this is as tangible as it’s ever been.
At last, shit’s gettin’ real.
Take care of yourselves, Patriots. Stay calm. Stay sharp. Stay free.
#WiseUp #LibertyOrDeath #Ungovernable
#LetsGoBrandon #FJB