Land Escaping III

          Although I had a workbench capable of all manner of extravagant tooling (and a router which was yet to be unpacked), I decided to simplify everything down to the basics. This also fit well with my preferred joinery style, which could best be described as “structural obviism” - which abandons traditional joinery techniques in favour of simply hammering or screwing things together. Who needs dovetails, dowels and precision cutting when a couple of nails is just as effective?

Yet, even adopting a primitive, pre-carpentric style didn’t mean making the door/window frames was entirely easy. There was still notches to be cut and grooves to be etched into the dry timber. Actually, I did eventually try to use my router for the groove, but all the heads from my ‘all-purpose multi-head router bits’ set I’d received free with the router seemed to have both a timber allergy and a violent anti- people streak. So I decided to use my trusty powersaw instead.

           Of course, once I’d completed the door frames, they didn’t just slide gently into place. Because although the door frames were reasonably square, the space they were meant to occupy wasn’t. So each frame had to be bullied and pushed and cajoled into place, then screwed into the surrounding framing.

I’ll never understand why screws are made more durable than screwdrivers, especially those of the Phillips head variety. I don’t know how many Phillips headless screwdrivers I now have cluttering my workshop. Either it’s a capitalist toolmakers conspiracy, or I’m making my holes one size too small.

          Once the frames were in, the doors themselves could be hung. Hanging doors is not so much an artform as a matter of trial and error. It might take a few attempts before it opens and closes smoothly, but it will happen ... eventually. Unfortunately, I didn’t consider closing mechanisms before I’d started, so there was some difficulty in finding latches which suited. Because both my doors opened inwards to the left, while all the available latches were designed for doors opening outwards to the right.

In the end, I had to turn the latches upside-down. Which has little impact on the door itself, but the key is now above the handle, and locking/unlocking operates in reverse. A small inconvenience for the joy of having doors opening the way you want them to open!

          In the meantime I was beginning to believe I'd never get my roof finished. I needed two fine days to dry out the pplywood, and two more days to glue the butynol. Five fine days all up. Surely we’d soon be in for a dry spell ...

          Twice in the next few weeks there was almost a false start. As soon as there were two dry days in a row, I’d prepare everything for an early morning start. But both times I woke to the familiar window of grey, so rolled over and went back to sleep. There’d be another time ...

          A week later there was a good, dry day. Then another.

          That afternoon I finished work early in order to get everything prepared, just in case. Two more days ...

          Later that afternoon my neighbour came across to pass on an urgent message from the hardware store. Don’t butynol roof, phone asap. I immediately cycled to the shop and called. The salesman was relieved to hear I hadn’t yet glued the butynol, because during a chat with the manufacturer he’d casually mentioned I was planning a grass roof. The stunned manufacturer had informed him that butynol wasn’t supposed to be used under grass rooves unless the seams were first vulcanised. If they weren’t, the root system would penetrate the glue and simply push the seams apart, causing a serious leaking problem.

The salesman would pick up the butynol rolls the next day, return them to the manufacturer, and they would vulcanise the seams, thereby creating a single, seamless sheet, free of charge.

          All the salesman’s information was second-hand, so I decided to talk to the manufacturer directly. The manufacturers had had experience with grass rooves. They were shocked that the hardware store had supplied their product without checking their specifications. We discussed various examples they’d dealt with (mostly near Nelson). It’s always a pleasant change to deal with someone who is not only experienced, but interested, so our conversation had the effect of dispelling some of my initial frustrations at being again delayed.

          As promised, the butynol sheet arrived a week later - all 60 kilograms of it. It was a huge, unwieldy lump, so I had to wait until John and Allan were available to help me get it onto the roof. The roof was, by now, damp again, but once we’d figured out which direction the sheet sat, and carefully unfolded it, it created a huge tarpaulin covering the entire roof. Of course. If I could just keep it in place for a few days, my entire roof would dry out regardless of how bad the weather remained.

          Which was a good theory. But if building paper became a spinnaker in the wind, a 100 square metre sheet of waterproof, windproof butynol was a mainsail. Naturally, a few calm days were outside the realm of possibilities. Even windy days seemed like too much to hope for under the circumstances. But surely the suddenly violent southerlies which swooped down to kidnap my butynol were uncalled for? There was little I could do but grit my teeth and endure the flapping, flopping struggle unfolding (and folding) on the roof. A few times I tried to intervene, dragging up hefty beams and untold metres of timber to anchor my butynol balloon, but the wind unleashed its fury anew and tossed my feeble efforts aside.

          As soon as the wind stopped, the rain would start. It was a conspiracy! The wind flipping back the butynol during the night to allow the rain to soak the plywood again.

Once this occurred while I was awake, so I was able to climb onto the roof and rearrange the crumpled butynol in time to prevent further wetness. But normally the transfer of power occurred in the night’s most secret moments. I berated the weather and God and Penelope (as long as weather presenters pretend to understand the weather, they’ve got to take some of the flack!) for their lack of compassion. Conveniently ignoring the fact that the weather had been my saviour a few weeks earlier, maintaining a protective veil of mist over my house until the hardware cavalry had finally ridden into town, saving me thousands of dollars and a lifetime of leaks and lifted seams. But who could be thankful at a time like this?

          The front was soon glued. Having a single sheet meant I only had to glue the edges rather than the entire area. With my rubber tarpaulin sheltering my roof helped dry out the rest. Apart from the back edge, which remained stubbornly damp.

With three sides securely glued, I thought it was a good opportunity to go to Dunedin for a few days and visit friends. But the next day a call from a local farmer informed me my roof had been “shredded” and was hanging limply over the side of the house. Panic-stricken and expecting the worst, I returned to find the butynol hadn’t been shredded, but the wind had peeled one edge away so that the entire back was blown over the side. The farmer had seen the ragged end draped over the edge from the road, and had assumed it had been torn. I breathed a sigh of relief, but became even more determined to finish the gluing as soon as possible.

          There were another few winds. Even with the edges glued, the wind wasn’t deterred, sucking the sheet high into the air, stretching and expanding it until it looked like a dirigible trying to lift off. No amount of timber would anchor it, but I continued this futile process simply out of fear that without some discouragement, the roof would peel off and sail into the creek. It never happened, but many nights I lay awake listening to loud music with the wind pounding time against the ceiling. Twice I rode the magic flying rubber carpet in the darkness as I struggled to increase the roof’s burden of timber. There were another few wettings, too. But the day finally arrived when I could glue the remaining edge, and confidently state I now had a waterproof house.

          David returned from his expedition overwhelmed by the audacity of the undertaking he was proposing. Establishing an Environment Centre in Dunedin was, he believed, a worthy and worthwhile project. But now that he’d investigated further, it also seemed such a monumentous task, fraught with obstacles, that he was no longer as confident of his ability to succeed by himself as he had been when it was still just an idea.

We discussed his proposal in detail, considering its benefits and its burdens for himself, for Dunedin, and for the green cause. Our strategies for overcoming obstacles and local inertia were diametrically opposed. David believed in intricately plotting every move beforehand to anticipate difficulties, while I believed in simply pushing ahead one step at a time ... as usual, David wanted to play chess, while I preferred checkers. But our thoughts about the Centre’s broader goals and philosophy converged at nearly every point. Suddenly it seemed he was embarking upon a Holy Quest to rid the world of ignorance. The Environment Centre would be the rallying point for the forces of goodness, the staging post from which the final assault on the world’s problems would be launched.

          At that moment, as we basked in the warmth of our momentarily shared semi-religious fervour, David asked whether I’d be interested in joining him on his great Crusade. I accepted.

          We should have known better ...

          Why did I accept? Establishing an Environment Centre had never been anything I’d imagined doing. I’d never even heard of such a thing until David came along. The thought of working in any public place full-time has never appealed. But the thought of doing something positive, of playing a small role in changing the world, even if the world was limited to Dunedin, of becoming an active member of a community after so many years of isolation, was an offer too tempting to refuse. Besides, my level of frustration with the world had reached saturation point - I either had to do something to change it, or stop complaining about it.

          That’s the community-minded, positive, charitable version, and I’d like to believe such sentiments were my prime motivation for making the decision to go to Dunedin and devote my immediate future to such a noble cause. But the waters of truth are always murky. So I can’t claim such purity of purpose.

Later, after the project had baulked at the starting gates, after it had stumbled and fallen at every hurdle, after David had torn up his betting slips and left the track, after it appeared permanently hobbled, destined only for the glue factory, only then was I truly gripped by an evangelical zeal. Only then, as I sat alone astride the lame creature, did I become determined to nurse it back to health. Only then, did I truly believe the project had to gallop again, that it had to win, not just for me, but for everybody ...

          But, at the time, I wasn’t so much going to Dunedin, as leaving Millers Flat. Leaving my house. The truth is I didn’t really care what the reason was, as long as it was reasonable. As long as I could persuade myself that it was worth leaving for, that I wasn’t just abandoning my life or fleeing from myself. I couldn’t have asked for a better reason to leave than to start an Environment Centre, because it seemed like such a positive thing to do. Such a positive excuse.

          So, despite my reservations about leaving the house in an unlockable state (with only a thin sheet of plastic between the world and all my worldly goods), I packed a bag of essentials and moved to Dunedin.