Here to stay on Great Barrier Island! To use an apt metaphor, we took the plunge! With our rental ending as summer begins, and rentals even scarcer now than when we arrived, it was all or nothing, and we chose all! We bought a wee section just a few hundred metres up the road and building has begun on a 49 sq m house. The yellow dot marks where we’ve been since April 2015, and the star marks our new landing spot. Seems GoogleEarth hasn’t flown over the Barrier in a very long time. The section, 809 sq m The site plan Picking up a new thread for a moment to share a bit of our dwelling history. 1976-1985: The French Canadian settlers cabin we reconstructed on 50 acres in the foothills of the Adirondack Mountains just south of the Canadian border. Cost of the land: $9000. Cost of the cabin: $3000. Land taxes (rates): $17. Power: none. Phone: phone box three miles down the road; no cell phones back then. Water: direct from spring to house and garden. Hot water for shower: thermosyphon system from the fireplace. Hot water for kitchen: none, or heated in a kettle. Heat: We cut and stacked wood in the “woods” (North American for bush) through the year and brought it to the woodshed by toboggan. Lights: LPG, kerosene lamp, candles, torch. Food: 1/4 acre garden, grown intensively in the three-month growing season. Bulk crops stored from the end of one growing season to the start of the next: pumpkins on the rafters, onions and garlic braided and hanging from the rafters, root crops and preserved food in a below-ground root cellar accessed by stone steps adjacent to the cabin. 1985-1997: The earth-sheltered passive solar home that Ro designed and built. This 120 sq m house was in the shape of an obtuse triangle, which magically eliminated the north wall, the one facing the notorious “Alberta clipper” arctic winds coming down from Canada. It incorporated all the principles of passive solar building: orientation, double glazing (in colder climates), insolation (the ratio of glazing to surface area for the latitude, to collect the optimal amount of solar energy), thermal mass (rock work, masonry, concrete blocks), insulation, ventilation and reflective surfaces. At 30°F below zero (nearly same ridiculously cold temperature as 30°C below zero), we’d be in shorts sipping lemonade! Ro created a maze of terraced gardens in the earth sheltering at the back and on the roof. Construction in progress on the solar house. This is our musician friend Roy Hurd, still going strong in the Adirondacks: http://royhurd.com. From 1980-85 I was director of the senior centre in Plattsburgh, New York, on Lake Champlain about 30 km from the cabin. Decades later I learned that at that time Tina D of Golden Bay lived in New Hampshire, to the east across the lake and beyond the narrow state of Vermont. More about Tina below! From 1997 to mid-1999 we lived at the Friends Southwest Centre in the desert of southwestern Arizona and then in Tucson. 1999-2015: Golden Bay Back to the here and now! Our last new beginning begins with the heart-of-gold, fun-loving, generous and most very special Charlie and Winnie Blackwell, the octogenarian fourth- and fifth-generation islanders I’ve written about before. We bought the section from these dear people. In one of countless acts of kindness to us, Charlie cleared the building space, several days' work, for the cost of the diesel and some Ginger Nuts. 31 July was the builders’ first day. Scotty, the barefoot lead builder; Roger, the digger operator; and Wendell, in gumboots, Scotty’s right-hand chippy. Roger drills holes for the sentons. It’s a whole new vocabulary – also nogs, purlins, balusters, packers, soffits (be sure to say “sew-feet”), stringers and no doubt more to come! Wendell fills the holes with concrete. The floor is nearly finished. A third builder, Paulie, is brought in to help build the frames. Wendell starts bringing his puppy, Blue, on his motorbike to spend the day on site. On the fifth day after frame building began, in a couple of hours the house popped up like a pink mushroom! We arrived just after the back wall had been stood. Wendell greeted us at the back door saying, “Come in!” Gordon (centre) has been helping too. Ro and Caity at the ranch slider opening at the end of wall-standing day. Behind them are the deck posts – the builders put them to use to make a bench for their radial arm saw. Wendell put up the first rafter near the end of the day on Friday. A heavy shower moved in, he and Scotty packed up, the sky cleared and they drove down Oceanview Road to start their weekend surfing at Kaitoke Beach! Forecast for this week – looking good for building! Good will The most important aspect of the build is the builders! Every time we go to the building site I feel uplifted by the two into-it, good-as-gold guys building our house. Seeing these two lovely people, so friendly and engaged in what they’re doing, having brief happy interactions with them and telling them how great they’re doing and how pleased we are, is one of my favourite things ever. I think it’s noble of Scotty to bring in other builders when he could earn the extra hours himself. He’s doing all he can to get us moved in when we need to. Nothing but good energy is going into that house! Everyone involved in the project knows we have a deadline and they too are cooperating to help us meet it. The architect, Cuan, put aside his mainland projects saying “the hell with everyone else!" in order to get our plans ready in time. The building inspector, Lance, processed our consent application not in the statutory 20 days, but in 11, and the tradies have assured us they’ll be available when we need them. Of course the weather and arrival of materials are out of our control. So far, so good. I have a beautiful feeling about Barrier people. They’re just plain nice! They’re kind, friendly, helpful and make me feel very good. They’re also generous. Recently we were given lemons, fish, avocados, half a giant cupola pumpkin and more. Four different people either brought grapefruits to us or rang inviting us to collect them. At one time we had more than 90! The sincere congratulations we’ve received for starting to build reinforced our decision to stay, though it didn’t need any reinforcing! Sometimes it’s hard to process all the kindness. Our claims to fame here are our yellow car (one of three on the island), our daily swim, we’re building a house, and … I went to Woodstock! Whoa, did that word get around fast, even faster I think than that we’re building a house! Orama Oasis Nick, the plumber for our new house, grew up at Orama, a Christian community in a beautiful setting on Karaka Bay at the end of an unsealed road near Port Fitzroy in North Barrier, founded by his grandparents in the 1960s. The community’s mission is to "care, transform and equip: impacting people’s lives by sharing hospitality, renewing spiritual, emotional and physical well being, and equipping people to impact and lead their communities”. Every year more than 2500 visitors come to Orama for a holiday, a retreat or a training school. Orama community has come a long way from the challenges of its early days on a hilly 800-acre remote bush block. Compare it today at http://orama.org.nz with its history through 2004 at https://www.thebarrier.co.nz/History/OramaHistory.htm. When Nick grew up roads were unsealed and slow, and trips over the saddles to the rest of the island were infrequent, so infrequent that for one seven-year stretch he never left North Barrier! He was one of the Barrier’s lucky “free-range” kids, free to grow through unstructured "outdoor education”, exploring forest and sea, and learning self-reliant living – a deeper way of knowing about the world. He must have had a lot of time to consider the important things in life, like the loving kindness he’s shown to us. When he stopped by one day, in a hurry on his way home, he remembered that two of our cooktop burners had stopped working. He set down his cap and sunglasses and strode over to the stove saying, “I’m happy to fix it for the lady who went to Woodstock.” :-) Anse-à-Vodou: A Summer with my Father in Haiti Meanwhile, my extraordinarily gifted daughter-in-law, Mary, and I finished our three-year collaboration editing her fascinating and inspiring book. Our work was often on hold while she pursued other worthy endeavours, including two journeys to Colombia to cultivate a connection with the indigenous people of the Sierra Nevada. Most recently she's organising a visit to Mount Shasta by three Kogi and Arhuaco elders next month, offering a rare opportunity for people to participate in a restorative event for one of the earth’s main power centres. Small groups of Westerners occasionally visit the Sierra Nevada to forge cooperation with the indigenous people in service to the earth. Mary describes her book as a creative non-fiction memoir that reads like magical realism. Her father was a Haitian Vodouist from a prominent Catholic Haitian family, and an extreme nationalist. He was in exile under François Duvalier's regime when she was born in the United States. When he returned to Haiti post-Duvalier, his dream was to help bring about economic and politcal reform. Haitian people’s lives have been so difficult for so long that many believe they’re literally cursed. He wanted nothing more than to see his beloved country thrive, her people happy. But his longing to help manifest that vision was tragically unfulfilled. He was assassinated less than a year after Mary returned to the States. Mary's narrative weaves together her viewpoint, as a young Western woman, of her father's culture from personal experience at Vodou ceremonies in the summer of 1989, the feeling of homecoming she had with ancestral spirits, pertinent Haitian and American history, the story of her father's family, particularly his own and that of his brother Joe, who was cravenly murdered by the brutal dictator Francois Duvalier in 1964, and her self-healing journey following her father’s death. After her life-changing summer in Haiti, Mary intended to write a book about her experience, but she stopped writing after her father’s death. Over the years she was haunted by the idea of a book about Haiti, Vodou, her father and her decades-long return to wholeness after his assassination. It became a compulsion that she can't explain except to say that the spirit who prophesied her birth made quite an impression when he said to her, “You are compelled to honor the voice of spirits that hold both counsel and war in your blood.... The spirits gave you a connection between blan (non-Haitian) and Haitian so that you would not miss your own gateway. You are a child of people born in slavery and aristocrats born in featherbeds. Trust the path you have been given. The espri will guide you.” Mary is also a fine art photographer and her book includes more than 150 photos offering a rare glimpse into a world that is now almost mythological. We took a break from the fun during Paul and Mary’s visit in February for some serious work on her book. We knew we’d finish eventually, and last week we did! My dear friend and professional book designer, Tina Delceg, who designed several of the books I edited over the years, has now taken over as Director of Aesthetics for Anse-à-Vodou: A Summer with my Father in Haiti. Watch this space for publication details! A vèvè is a pattern drawn in flour corn or coffee on the floor of a Vodou temple that acts as a beacon to call the espri out of their world and into ours. The Barrier Wave Episode 3 The why and how of an island tradition – a bit silly, even boring!, but done with a good heart. NB: At best, ☆ out of 5. The first two episodes are much of a muchness. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r97pMmTn71c&t=8s Lettuce in the lounge The 12-minute deluge One afternoon, looking to the west while swimming at Medlands, we discovered that, all of a sudden, only half the sky was pristine cloudless blue. The other half was the blackest black, and that half was progressing to three-quarters, moving in right over us! Swim complete we headed home as raindrops began to fall, harder and harder still. The rain pelted down but by the time we reached our corner, it was all over, leaving an even more ephemeral trace.
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