New Life in the Woods

All the weather forecasts were warning about freezing temperatures and snow for this weekend. Friday morning started with some light, fat flakes of snow. Within twenty minutes it had turned to a mixture of snow and rain, and pretty soon all the snow on the ground had melted, but it continued to go back and forth all day and later that day some very small hail fell.

That evening a small disaster hit. Smoke started pouring out of the chimney at the top where it meets the pipe that goes through the roof. The wood stove had been letting out a lot of smoke whenever I opened the door for a day or so, but it does that sometimes when the wind blows a certain way, when it is very cold, or for reasons I haven’t fully grasped yet, so I hadn’t been too worried about it. Now, though, the house was filling up with smoke and my eyes were burning. I quickly piled the wood from the fire in my ash bucket, carried it outside, and tossed it on the gravel driveway. Then I went back inside and opened the windows upstairs and the doors downstairs. Pretty soon it was cleared out inside but cold. It was not a chimney fire, thankfully, because the smoke stopped when I removed the burning coals from the wood stove. But it was dark, so there was nothing I could do about it until Saturday.

I spent a cold night downstairs with my electric heater and wrapped in my sleeping bag and some blankets. I had a hard time sleeping, and when I did fall asleep I ended up sleeping late. When I woke up I checked my email and found one from Susan, the owner, saying that she was driving up that day for an overnight visit!

So, I spent a few chilly hours tidying up a bit here and there in and around the house and then got to work on the chimney problem.

The weather was mostly clear Saturday… cloudy but no rain. I took apart a bunch of the old scaffolding I had used to repair the plumbing and built two ladders out of it. One to reach the roof from the deck, and another to reach the chimney on the roof. The roof is too steep to walk on securely, so I needed something up there to keep me from sliding off.

Once I had those made I carried them through the house and out to the deck where I put them in place. Then I secured them to the deck and to each other as best I could. Light was starting to fail as I finished all this, so, grabbing a screwdriver, I climbed up to check out the vent at the top of the chimney and see what the problem was. I had thought I would need the screwdriver to take it apart, but the cause of the problem was obvious. The vents around the top of the chimney were encrusted with thick layers of soot and ash. It had built up to the point where the vents were almost completely closed off. I used the screwdriver to clear them out, and climbed back down. Feeling sure that this was the cause of the problem, I started a new fire and it worked just fine. Still, it was clear that we would need to “sweep” the chimney, or hire someone to do it.

Late Saturday Susan showed up at the main house and stayed up there overnight. Today I took her on a tour of the repairs to the cabin and she was enthusiastic and said I had done a great job putting things back together! She took me to lunch in town and then gave me $100 cash for hardware and told me she had sent me another check for $200 through the mail for other repair supplies. On the way back I stopped off at a home repair place and got a chimney brush and enough extenders to reach all the way down the stove pipe. So, now I’m a chimney sweep. Move over Dick Van Dyke! Actually, scratch that… I will not be doing any tap dancing on the roof.

And I have a fire going today (it has taken until today to completely warm the house back up to really livable temperatures), so I’ll wait until tomorrow morning to do the sweeping. It is supposed to be sunny on Monday… but who knows! We just had another brief hail storm about an hour ago. The weather is very unpredictable up here!

When I woke up this morning I came downstairs to use the bathroom and surprised what I believe was a cat on my front porch. The front door is a big glass pane in a metal frame and there’s no curtain there (yet) so whatever is outside can see inside easily. All I saw was the back as it ran away and up the hill across the driveway and for a moment I thought maybe it was a raccoon, but it was thinner than that and moved swiftly and gracefully, like a cat. I think what fooled me at first glance was the ringed tail, but it turns out that Bobcats have a similar fur pattern. They also have black stripes down their back. The one I saw was grey with black stripes on the back at least, and you can see that a bit in this picture, although the breast has some browns and tans.

I had seen paw prints in the snow sometime in December or January, some of them ran under the house and away, others I found later running up the driveway. I am not a great tracker though, and couldn’t tell for sure whether they were cat or canine tracks, although I thought they belonged to a medium sized cat or smallish canine (like a coyote). Now I believe my visitor has been hanging around for some time. It seems I am living in her territory. She owns the place and I am only a tenant! Maybe she was here to collect the rent?

If you want to know more about Bobcats, check out the National Geographic Bobcat page. I have set up these links so they will open in a separate page or “tab”, so look at the top of your browser to click back on this page for the other links. You might also be interested in listening to some Bobcat Sounds. Press the blue “forward” button with the “>>” symbol (third from the left) to display the full playlist and hear more tracks.

And, if you want to get the full flavor of what it sounds like up here at night, try listening to these sounds as well: Frog Sounds, Deer Sounds (try track 11), Turkey Sounds (track 5 sounds like my owls), Squirrel Sounds (try tracks 5 and 10), Raven Sounds (track 1 says it all), and Sasquatch Sounds (track 8 is spooky and not that far away! o.O).

In some ways I think life up here was better when I had no electricity. I’m talking about last October when I first came up to visit. It was darn cold and the old wood stove hardly warmed things at all, but it was dark and quiet. I spent a good part of my first night up here out on the deck listening to the wildlife. It was a little bit scary having no electricity and almost no heat, but it was exciting and the woods had a much more mysterious and enchanted feel.

Lately I seem to have fallen into habits similar to my old ones. I watch TV each evening, mostly looking for news about the Democratic presidential race. Then I cook something and play with my computer for a few hours. When it is dry outside, I go out looking for more wood to cut, but little of that is exploring.

To be fair, it has been cold and rainy (if not snowy) for the last few months. Not great hiking weather. A few days ago, however, it was dry and the woods started to wake up with the first hints of Spring. The first thing I noticed was a few squirrels chattering in the trees outside the back deck. I’m not sure what they were arguing over, but they made an amazing range of sounds. It sounded like a quite complex conversation.

That evening I heard an owl hooting and went out to investigate. I walked up the driveway to the West with a flashlight to see if I could find them, but without luck. At first it sounded like there were several owls and they were quite loud but my flashlight may have shut them up. On my way back to the house I heard something that could have been a coyote or a wolf but I’m not sure. Instead of the typical “oooooEEEEE” sound some canines make, this one was more like “OOOOOoooo”, with the louder part at the beginning. It was loud also and sounded quite close. It was probably just a deer or something, but I hurried back to the cabin. hehe

The next day I did go out to explore the woods some more. I followed the ravine up until it reached the road (Dutchy Way) where it curves around to the South. The ravine gets really steep at the top, almost too steep to climb, but I made it. I walked along the road for a ways and then followed an old logging road down into the woods again, finally looping back to approach the cabin from the South.

This picture shows the cabin from across the ravine in back. As usual, a bunch of my pictures didn’t turn out that great. I tried to get a decent picture of a woodpecker, but he flew away and hid. My pictures of the first wildflowers of Spring all came out too blurry, but I did get some semi-decent pictures of some other stuff.

This one shows the fallen Fir trees down in the ravine — the ones I had to toss the logs over to get them up the ravine. You can see how one of the trees is caught up in other trees pretty firmly. I still haven’t decided how to cut that one up. I may have to do the upper part manually with a bow saw, since it wouldn’t be very safe to use a chain saw up there.

At the bottom of that tree are what look like some fungi growing underneath. However, they are very hard and I concluded that it is tree sap that drained out of the dead tree and collected there where the tree probably cracked a bit when it fell.

This one is definitely a fungi. The picture isn’t that clear but I thought it was worth including to show some of the strange fungi that can be found out in the woods. Most of the more conventional mushrooms have disappeared over the Winter, but I am starting to find some here and there as it warms up.

And further down the ravine, almost where it meets the road I found another one of those strange nests of piled branches, twigs, and leaves. Just below it you can see a large beige mushroom, one of the most common shrooms that I see in the woods. I haven’t positively identified it yet, but I’ll let you all know when I do. Of course, the nest builders also remain a mystery. I think I need to bring a picnic lunch and some binoculars some day and just wait until I see who lives there.

Meanwhile I keep looking for work and there isn’t a lot of change from day to day, so not a lot to report. But I will keep posting whenever something newsworthy does crop up!