Summer shepherding in Switzerland

Just imagine that your well-being depended on only a few simple criteria: water to drink, grass to eat all day and a spot to lie down at night, safe from potential packs of wolves. The sheep are in heaven here in the Alps! A fully grown ewe's tail will wag - a sure sign of contentment, much like their lambs when suckling, or like dogs - when they suddenly find themselves in a meadow where there is very good grass. After spending the winter enclosed in a big barn with no contact with the outside world, where freedom of movement is drastically curtailed, fed daily rations of last year's cut and dried grass - to be of a sudden transported to mountain meadows of lush green grass through which to wander and graze at will, or on which to lie down and ruminate while gazing at the surrounding alpine scene must be, for the sheep, akin to arriving in Paradise.

I have looked into the eyes of a sheep and detected very little sheepishness, in the sense 'awareness of having done something wrong.'  The adjective sheepish was first attested around 1200 and then meant simply 'meek, modest, docile, simple' before acquiring the connotation of 'awkward and timorous among strangers' by 1690. Sheep have acquired an awareness that they will get what they want - good grazing - if they comply with what the shepherd wants - to direct their grazing. At times (when dealing with well-behaved, i.e. docile sheep) a strident call from the shepherd will be enough for them to interrupt their grazing, turn around and begin grazing again in the other direction. Most often the presence of the shepherd is necessary, standing for a boundary beyond which they know that they may not go. The occasional sheep will stamp her hoof vehemently, frustrated at the thwarting of her desire to graze in a particular place, before doing as she is told. 

When approached from a certain direction, sheep will inevitably move off in the other direction. This gives rise to the sometimes subtle and strenuous task - when they are advancing along precipitous ledges - of quickly scrambling either above or below them in order to halt their progress in the undesirable direction, without startling them with brusque movements and causing them to fall off. 

The vast majority of sheep have a herd instinct and like grazing together and following each other when in movement. Among the thousand strong flock of sheep which I am shepherding this summer there is one ewe, always followed by her two lambs, who I grew to recognise by her preference to go off on her own. Fortunately, if she has escaped my attention when bringing the flock together in the evening, she will eventually be seen making her own way back to the night pen. However, during the day she displays the opposite of the herd instinct. If there are a group of sheep grazing together she will be sure to strike off on her own at some point. She often finds the most idyllic spots of the lushest grass, or can be found when the weather is inclement grazing cooly in the shelter of cave far away from the herd. She is heedless to any calls I make for to her to turn around. At first she will studiously ignore my rallying cries, then, if she deigns to meet my eyes, it will be with a look of superb indifference, not dissimilar to that of a camel, while continuing to chew nonchalantly on her grass. If I actively incite her to go in one direction, she will do this for a bit, but as soon as my attention is directed elsewhere, she will have turned around and be heading off on her own again, with her two lambs in tow. She often acts alone, but occasionally acts as a herd influencer, inciting other sheep to follow her wayward ways. Her udders are often full of milk. Her lambs are in good health and fattening well. They follow her wherever she goes and seldom bleat, unlike certain other lambs. She is bringing them up to be free thinkers. My heart is close to hers.

However, my task this summer is to shepherd these sheep, which is often like playing the role of a security guard. 

"I am sorry, this area is out of bounds," I will announce to a group of oncoming voracious grazers, "if you would like to move over that way please..."

Or, in the case of insistent overstepping of boundaries, I will adopt a firmer stance, "Right, I've told you lot before, I am not saying it again: you're not going that way. Go on, on your bikes!" 

I am told that it is good to talk to one's sheep. It is good to be on familiar terms with them.

At times it is with reluctance that I play this role. On hot, sun-drenched afternoons I entirely sympathise with their choice to head down into the forbidden woods and there amble through the dappled shadows, munching on the lush grassy undergrowth. But there is an alp to be maintained. 

Last summer I spent a few days with sheep farmer Guillaume in Val d'Illiez cutting down trees that were encroaching onto his alps, piling up the branches and cut up bits of trunk and setting the lot alight. The forest is desperate to reclaim the high meadows that our forefathers deforested centuries ago. I asked Guillaume why - aside from perpetuating the tradition of summer pasturing - was it a priority of the government to maintain well-grazed, unforested alps. Taking cattle and sheep up to graze on the high pastures for the summer would be unprofitable if it were not for the government grants. Great sums of money are dished out to the owners of alps, who must prove that a certain number of beasts have grazed for a certain number of days over a given portion of recognised alpine pasture before getting their grant. Guillaume seemed to have never considered this question before. 

"Well grazed alps encourage a great diversity of flowering alpine plants," came his response. "And they are more beautiful. And that brings tourism to the Alps,"

"But wouldn't the Alps be just as beautiful, or even more so, if they were covered in trees again?" I objected.

"If there were trees everywhere you wouldn't get any views." 

Not able to see the Alps for the trees? I remain unconvinced by this argument. Although the diversity of alpine plants would be reduced if replaced by forestry, from the perspective of reducing greenhouse gases, (re)covering the Alps with trees wound be an excellent way of storing carbon. This is just what the trees want to do.

Previously, before the return of the wolf in Switzerland around fifteen years ago, the sheep were led to the high pastures then left to their own devices, with little, if any, surveillance. With increasing wolf attacks the government made funding available to employ extra shepherds, with the aim of encouraging/ tolerating the return of the wolf while not harming sheep farming. I caught wind of this and scented a potential summer job opportunity for me. The funding has now dried up, but sheep farmers are now aware of the need to protect their sheep, and there are good job prospects for aspiring shepherds.

The obvious drawbacks to this line of work are the long hours and the low pay, but for me it is a golden opportunity to be paid at all for striding around the alps all summer, living simply in a mountain cabin. I have always enjoyed walking in the hills, but the fact that I am now doing it for the sake of the sheep, does away with a certain recreational/aimless aspect of my wandering, and confers upon my striding an additional sense of purpose. The herd must stay together, each lamb must eat plenty good grass each day and fatten, for the butcher's knife is awaiting them in autumn. It is a game we play; and, more importantly, I am getting paid for it.

Aside from giving my attention all day to sheep, another significant aspect of this summer's shepherding apprenticeship is working with and living in close quarters with local shepherd Stefan. He is 68 years old, but still brimming with good health and physical aptitude. Not in the sense of sprinting or leaping around athletically - all his movements are slow and deliberate - but in the sense of solid, dependable endurance. He is a meticulous man, even to a fault. Each person is a mixed bag of character traits and all good traits should be celebrated where they are to be found. I am tempted to say that I prefer living with an over-meticulous man to an overly sloppy one. A felicitous balance between flexibility and firmness is of course the happy medium. Stefan combines his slightly stifling strictness with a formal but well-intentioned friendliness, which overall makes for a tolerable collaboration and cohabitation. 

He says that if there is any possibility that a sheep or a lamb has gone astray, or is endangered in any way, then he will make every effort to bring them back to the flock. He may not be successful, but at least he can go to bed at night knowing he has done all he could.

Most moments Stefan exhibits an attitude of deliberate calm. He showed me this when he showed me how he moves through his flock of sheep while they are grazing: slowly, circling around those who are in his way so as not to disturb their grazing, he intones his mantra-like greeting of peace to his sheep, 

"sooooo guete Schafe, ja jaaaaa,"

in his lulling singsong Swiss German dialect (suuuch good sheep, yes yeeees.)

One evening he was out of sorts for some reason, and unjustly ripped into me for allowing the sheep to cross an imaginary line which was to be their sleeping spot. I protested that, when he had clarified my walkie-talkie question by saying, "yes, you can allow them to keep grazing," that my understanding has been that they were permitted to graze over the line. In short, a simple misunderstanding. At this, Stefan threw his shepherd stick hard on the ground, and uttered colourful imprecations in his Swiss German dialect which in their lyrical vehemence sounded somewhat Italian.

I resumed my guard of the imaginary line. By and by Stefan calmed down, came over to me and apologised for his outburst. Exceptionally, he made physical contact with me by putting his arm around my shoulder in a gesture of reconciliation, saying with a smile, "It is not good to go around with a fist in one's pocket." I agreed smilingly that it would be unpleasant to live with a fist in one's pocket. 

"Is it possible to say 'poor sheep'?" I asked Stefan one evening when we had left the sheep out in the pouring rain and returned to our cosy wood stove heated hut.

"No, one cannot say that," he replied after a pause, "they have a thick coat of wool which repels the water, and keeps them warm. The rain doesn't get to them."

Whether this is so or not - even after an entire night of rain - is hard to tell, due to the phlegmatic countenance with which they regard all that life throws at them. They are verily the embodiment of imperturbability, the masters of stoicism.

I was out one afternoon when a storm began brewing. After days of wall to wall sunshine I felt excited by the drama of the black swirling clouds and the thrilling flashing lightning, followed by the deep booming rumbles of thunder splitting through the sky. When the first drops fell Stefan called me on the walkie talkie and said I should come back to the hut. We hadn't been there for long when a great number of sheep stampeded past the hut, in the direction of the mountain stream. Stefan seemed concerned and began putting on his waterproof gear. 

"Are you worried that they will cross the stream?" I asked. 

"That is not my main concern," he replied in a quiet voice, "I just want to see where they are going"

I put on my rain gear too and went outside with him. There was no sign of the sheep. Thick hailstones were being driven across the hillside as we strode resolutely to the stream. Still no sign of sheep. Stefan told me to follow the stream downhill and see if I could see them. "Here they are" I reported via walkie-talkie. For a hundred metres or so down the hillside, a broad hundred strong band of sheep were standing motionless at a respectable distance from one another, all of them without exception with their hindquarters facing the hill. "Stay with them, if you are warm enough" said Stefan, "and let me know when they move off."

The heavy hail gave way to a gentler rain. I found a spot to sit near the lowest sheep and contemplated them. Their motionlessness was impressive. Normally so full of activity - grazing, bleating, always on the move or looking around - suddenly, after their mad stampede down the hill, they had all adopted these strikingly homogeneous positions and collectively entered a trance-like state. It was as if they were observing some ancient sheep ritual. One could understand that it is sensible to all stay together on a less exposed part of the hill when storms come, but still, their motionlessness was mysterious to me. Some of them from time to time chewed the cud slowly, but most were entirely immobile, eyes fixed blankly in front of them. I was relatively warm with my thick ski jacket and wanted to observe their storm ceremony with them. I closed my eyes and began to replicate their state of complete inner calm, without the slightest thought or of wisp of a desire.

Some time went by.

After a while the rain let up and I heard a few of their bells ringing. One after the other they shook the water off their wool and, very slowly, began looking around and taking an interest in the world around them again. The first few began to wander off. My body temperature had cooled so I got moving too. Their was one sheep, who had been standing closest to me, who remained entirely motionless. I kept looking at her, wondering if I could detect any hint of a thought or a desire in her blank expression. 

Nothing. 

Her wool was otherwise white, but her eyes were encircled by dark markings which suggested that she possessed the mischievous traits of a patch wearing pirate, or a darkly humoured dressed up jester. Then it seemed that I caught a twinkle in her eye, complicit in her understanding that this was just a game, that she was merely carrying out this role as a sheep. In that moment she seemed able to see beyond the vain strivings and sheepish sufferings inherent in living beings and enjoy the simple fact of being a part of this great cosmic comic drama. I beheld her with greater intensity, wondering if I was just seeing things. She was still standing there as motionless as ever, while all around her most of the other sheep has moved away. Of course she was merely a sheep, relatively unaware and whose chief concern in life was to eat grass.

But the more I looked, the more obviously the rascally twinkle in her eye appeared to me. 

I saw just what I wanted to see.

Subida al Teide desde el norte

"subida al Teide desde el norte"

I put the above words into google search, and was a bit baffled to find that nobody seemed to have documented any ascension of the Teide from the north.  Surely someone, I reasoned to myself, over the course of time, someone from one of the settlements spread along the northern flank of the Teide - say, from La Guancha, or San Juan de la Rambla, or Icod de Los Vinos, or Garachico, or El Tanque, or Los Silos, or Buenavista del Norte - surely someone from one of these communities at some point must have risen their eyes to the graceful distant blue peak of El Teide - as I had done - and been filled with the irrepressible urge to climb to the summit.  By all accounts, the shortest and the easiest path to the top of the Teide is from the high altitude road which crosses the southern side of the volcano. But I liked the idea of setting off from Jenny's land above Tierra del Trigo - where I had spent the summer living in her yurt and working in the garden - and walking directly to the top, feeling the distance with every step and seeing the gradual transition from the familiar green 'home' scene to the bare rocky 3715m summit. I saw on the satellite map that from the pinewoods in the north a track climbed to about half way up, and reasoned that, even if the rest of the climb should consist of clambering over boulders, it should offer a satisfying viable ascent, and include a good portion of adventure, precisely because of not following the prescribed paths. The key when striking off into unpathed territory is to strike a handsome balance between venturing into the unknown and staying safe. It is good to have a rough idea of what lies ahead. It is wonderful to rely on one's own resources and resourcefulness while romping around the wilds, while strictly avoiding any kind of recklessness.

It was late in the morning when I set off, due to my obsessive wanting to leave the yurt garden tidy and good-looking, just as I would like to find it again: washing all dishes, wiping all surfaces, as well as watering all seedlings and ensuring that Dulce, the new young goat, had plenty of foliage in her pen to keep her fed till I returned. After 10 minutes I turned back, having finally decided that it would be worth adding two litre cartons of fruit juice to the weight of my rucksack, already laden with abundant food supplies and many litres of water - how wise this decision was! Every drop of those cartons of orange juice and pineapple juice, carried up to the arid desolate heights, would turn into pure liquid gold. Every drop!

In the Sunday-still village of Ruigómez two corpulent children, larking about on a sort of cart, asked me to push them. I don't think they really expected me to take off my rucksack and take up the handle and start pushing them with gusto, "right lads, which direction are we heading, right or left here?"  —  "Stop! enough! leave us here!" they protested. "Bueno" I said, shouldering my rucksack and heading on out the village, leaving their excited chatter fading behind me.

After weeks of voluntary confinement on Jenny's land, encouraging the growth of all sorts of plants and very focussed - quasi obsessed - on the aesthetic layout and conjunction of all garden elements, the squalor and neglected state of many of the parcels of land which I passed struck me. One wants to be comprehending; there are many activities and pursuits which vie for our attention in life; one understands that giving attention to a piece of land which one happens to possess isn't at the top of everyone's 'must do' or 'want to do' list, but this struck me nonetheless. 

After San José de los Llanos the pinewoods begin. Everything is pure & fresh here. In 1909 (the most recent volcanic activity on Tenerife) the magma found a fissure and spluttered up for three days, leaving a massive mound of black little porous nuggets, which are elsewhere gathered and sold in garden centres. At Chinyero they have added an attractive feature to Nature's Garden. This is hallowed ground, protected by law to be as it is, valued for its very untampered nature. What a contrast with much of the rest of the island, bulldozed contemptuously for new commercial centres, new luxury apartments and new roads, or else strewn with unwanted items and the waste of construction. Thank God that these pinewoods can be; thank the authorities that be for awarding them the status of natural reserve. Under the hot afternoon sun I progressed enchanted along forest trails winding between the shadows of silent statuesque pines and the bright sunlight filtered through outlandish groping branches bristling with bushy green needles. The air was heavy with the gorgeous sweet scent of their resin. The forest floor was littered with a thick layer of their dried brown fallen needles, which made a springy mattress on which I took a wee siesta in the shade. I realised that I had forgotten to take my camping mat, and set about stuffing handfuls of the dried pine needles into the bottom of my rucksack, to offer some padding on the rocky top I hoped to have reached by evening. 

Night descended upon me a good way up the slope, and yet still a good way from the top.  I decided that it would be best to leave my tent where it was pitched and set off a few hours before dawn to make a bid for the summit unencumbered by any unnecessary weight. I carried only a couple of litres of water, and a few things to nibble on. Nevertheless the going wasn't easy, picking my way up a steep slope of loose boulders by the faint light of my headlamp, peering into the surrounding darkness, trying to discern what the best way forward was. The thrilling adventure of having ventured off path! I was weary from the previous day's long haul through the woods. I feel that the thinner air as I climbed contributed to my drowsy state of mind, causing me to act more as an automaton than as a real lively centre of awareness. I dimly perceived the first light of dawn silhouetting the peak of El Teide, ever nearer and yet always far away, and trundled slowly on.  I began to give vent to my belaboured breathing, puffing and panting exaggeratedly and then giving audible groans which expressed the intensity of the exertions demanded of me. In my more youthful days I extolled the phrase "where there's a will there's a way", and I still clung to it - I still wanted and believed my will to be strong - all the while observing the inefficacy of my will to surmount the mountain at any speed. I wanted to replace my grunting and groaning with words: 

'O my God' is obviously overused,

'O my Goddess'? 

'O my Goodness'

'O my Word' will do - declining to define the word, but letting the undefined notion speak for itself.  Or just 'O my ...' with the possessed object left unsaid. I quite like the phrase 'O my days' which I heard for the first time from the lips of some youths in the north-east of Scotland; 'days' as a synonym of 'time' symbolosing 'life' standing for 'all that is and all that is and all that is' 

'Mamma mia, O my donna, O my sweet lady of the night, O my life, O my dear sweet precious life, O my world, O my will, O my world as will and representation!'

'O my Mountain!', I had hit upon it. The Mountain as the quintessence of all my aspirations and longings and efforts employed to attain them. Why does anybody want to climb any mountain anyway?  What is the point? Is it pure symbolism: the desire to attain something, cost what it may, the prominent elevations of the earth's surface providing an obvious and convenient vessel for the endeavour?

I began to relativise the significance of the mountain summit. The whole appeal of climbing a mountain is the journey leading up to the top. The bulk and substance of the cake is found in the act of climbing: each and every hard-won step. The standing on the top is the cherry on the cake. (Being high up is already icing). The mountain summit serves as the fundamental focussing and directing of efforts, magnetising the momentum, as it were, but the destination is, paradoxically, always found within the journeying itself. Each and every moment, each and every moment, each and every moment of it. 

Some moments are more toilsome than others. The strong sun of a new day had already risen as I toiled towards El Pico Viejo, where every step that I took up the steep screeslope was followed by sliding back down about half a step. Behind el Pico Viejo - the old crater, now a subsidiary summit a few kilometres from the current highest point, which looks like a bizarre high-altitude gravelly football field surrounded by a jagged ring of desolate jumbled rocks - I came across a path. A decent path, which I could follow with confident trusting steps, without having to stop and scan the terrain ahead, and determine how to navigate the potentially perilous pitfalls.  I made a mental note to follow a path in my future ascents of El Teide, in order to conserve my reserves of energy and enjoy the climbing to the max. A few hundred metres from the summit I turned my phone on and saw it was already 9:10am. After 9 o' clock guards are posted by the final section to the summit to check if one has obtained the necessary authorisation. Authorisation is given free of charge, but one must request it months in advance, such is the demand. The number of people allowed on the summit is limited to 200 per day. The goal is to avoid the erosion of the fragile high-altitude environment. That is why visitors are requested to strictly follow the network of paths on the mountain. That is why nobody makes the ascent from the north. That is why my chosen climbing route contravened the norms required by El Teide national park. I take my hat off to them because they are obviously doing a great job promoting access and enjoyment of this unique volcanic environment while preserving beautifully its unspoiled natural state. Therefore I was happy to carefully pick my way back down to my tent, content that the journey had been the ineluctable journey - every step of it - and, ravelled all together, it had been my only destination.

brothers go camping and climb Ben Alder

Spending the last few years on Tenerife has made me lose my real lived sensory awareness of the enormity of the seasonal pendulum in Northern Europe.

Where would one be here without the summer months? ...struck with some sort of seasonal affective disorder, I'd say.

O how we need these wafts of warm air to chase away the weary dreary winter chill;

we really need to fill our eyes with lush leaves and lingering light all night.

Summer, when sleeping out on a mountain top seems feasible and really appealing,

thanks to the tilt of the planet as she orbits around the sun.

Aye, we can all do with a decent dose of summer therapy.

Thanks, tilt.

Regarding evening meals, we had arranged that we would take turns to cook over the three nights.  The first night camping at Linn of Tummel I arrived first and had baked tatties with cheese and lentils waiting warm on the embers when Kevin and Finlay arrived.  The next two nights, however, without really planning it, unable to really prevent it, we all just found ourselves mucking in - chopping onions, boiling pasta, chucking in chickpeas, creating sauces with great glugs of hoppy tasty homemade beer, thickening them with great dollops of peanut butter and great slabs of solid coconut cream.  We were all reading from the same page in our intuitive cookery book, as it were - all having worked up a similar great appetite after a great day's hiking in the hills.

One the second evening we came to a beautiful bit of sand sticking out into Loch Ericht, strewn with great bits of pine roots which were beautiful and old and gnarly and it seemed somehow profligate for us just to burn them like that on a common camp fire but it also felt special and privileged.

A man and a teenager - probably father and son - walked past with relatively small rucksacks.  We told them that we reckoned we would camp right here; they said that they would camp a bit further on.

"How do they manage to go camping, like us, but carrying so much less?"

"They are obviously not doing the same camping-cooking trip that we are"

"They are probably carrying lightweight ready meals"

 

What was the last night like for you?

I don't know . . . I was tired from the walking but I didn't want to go to sleep.  There was a hushed stillness in the air.  It felt like we didn't need to say anything at all.  There was nothing to say.  I kept eating things.  Our eyes would meet occasionally across the fire and we would just smile with some knowing appreciation, looking around at the stillness and slowness of the coming dawn.  

Kevin and Finlay took a dip in the loch, and came back shivering with vitality.  How was it, Kevin?  "It was cold," he emphasised, with an irrepressible grin.  "Just imagine being cold - that is what it is."  

At that point I was particularly enjoying the warmth of the fire and the thought of plunging into cold water was somewhat off-putting, but after some time I could not resist the appeal either.  However beautifully flickering and warm the flames may seem, these qualities are only enhanced when one has just come from a shocking cold loch.

Almost all these photos come from Kevin's camera.  Thanks, Kevin

snow snap scotland

 

the yurt

The demise of the cave led us to invest more time in the yurt on the land, which was a great place for us to lie low while lockdown was on and best of all was seeing the fulfilment of our vision when Gabriela learned to walk unaided around the yurt.

It took quite a bit of time and effort to get the thing up.  Just getting it delivered to the land was the first obstacle.  Jenny ordered a second-hand traditionally crafted Mongolian yurt from the Catalonian company tipiwakan.  On their website they impressed us with their bold claim that they would deliver "a cualquier punto geografico del globo" - to any geographic point of the globe.  In an email I pointed out to them that we wanted it to be delivered to the top of a very steep narrow road with a very tight bend in it.  They can't have paid much attention to this detail because from Santa Cruz they contracted a big lorry who took one look at the tight bend before driving back to Santa Cruz, where the yurt was stored until we hired a van to take it up ourselves.   We had all the component parts of the yurt but first had to build a strong flat floor raised above the ground.  This we achieved with concrete blocks, which supported a frame of wooden planks, which themselves supported a floor of wooden pallets, upon which were fixed chipboard boards.  The chipboards were purchased but the rest was salvaged from refuse skips of building sites, or found lying around.  Getting all this material up there posed a few obstacles.  Jenny bought a second-hand van with plenty storage in the back, but it just wasn't powerful enough to get up that tight steep curve.   Once I got part way up when the wheels began whirring ineffectually on the spot.  I reversed a little bit and tried to give it another go, then reversed again and ended up going forward and back until the van was sitting precisely across the road at the steepest and sharpest part of the curve.  I had already shattered the back window by bumping into a wall and there was no way of going forward at all.  To me the van was well and truly stuck, and I thought that only a helicopter would be able to liberate the vehicle and free up the road.  I walked down to the garage of the village and asked for help.  Bienvenido (whose name, fittingly, means 'welcome' in spanish) had already come to my rescue by pulling the van out of a muddy rut on the land (when I had previously managed to drive up the hill.)  This time I told him that I considered the prospects of extricating the van to be unpromising.  In his graceful rugged masculine way he approached the problem with the coolness of a hemingway hero.  Another villager - the only one with a 4x4 slim enough to fit through the narrow lane which came out above the van - attached a cord to the front of the van and pulled uphill while Bienvenido, with a rope attached to the back of the van, pulled downhill, making the van simply slide across the road and rotate into the right position.  I was greatly impressed by the mechanical savoir-faire of these village gentlemen, and their unfussy willingness to club together to help out a new arrival in need.  A little crowd had gathered to spectate and comment on the happening.  I must have mentioned my gratitude for the men's helpfulness to a woman standing at her doorstep nearby, for I remember her opening words, "we are a small village here in Tierra del Trigo," followed by her simple, smiling, closing remark: "but we have a big heart."  I offered Bienvenido some money for his very welcome assistance, but he brushed my offer easily aside by saying, "let's have a whisky together sometime," and thereby completed for me his credentials for belonging in a hemingway novel.

The yurt herself was surprisingly easy to set up:  first establish position of door, tie together five flexible lattice walls in the desired circumference (these lattices could be set taller whereby the circumference would be smaller, or they could be set shorter in which case the circumference would be larger), set up the central cupola atop two poles (first tied to the door and lattice wall for stability), then as each of the eighty roof poles got slotted into the holes around the cupola and tied to the top of the lattice wall at the other end, the whole structure became very strong and self-supporting.  It could be assembled or dissembled in a matter of hours.  Not one nail or tool of any sort was needed - just pieces of wood tied together.

Then the clothes came last - first an undergarment of white cotton, then strips of thick isolating felt, attached to the walls with cords from the door all the way round to the door again.  and finally a heavy waterproof canvas, with a hole in the middle to allow the sunlight in or the chimney to stick out.  When it rained we took down the chimney and pulled over a square piece of canvas to close the hole.

Making a solid floor off the ground was the part which required most time and effort and planning.  We decided to make a central circular block of stones, which we finished off with cement, and later a mosaic of cracked tiles, on which the stove sat.  The surrounding structure of cement blocks, wooden planks and pallets were all of varying sizes, and this required very precise micro adjusting, digging a hole for a cement block to sit ever so slightly lower here, adding a little more earth to a hole to raise a cement block by a few millimetres over there, the whole time handy with the spirit level to ensure perfect flatness over the 28 square metre surface.  It was autumn when I was working on this, and often rainy.  Many times when the rain came on I would cover all the wood with plastic sheets and had to wait it out - sometimes for days at a stretch - before it was dry enough to work again.  

This waiting while sheltering and sleeping in a tent, waiting and wanting the yurt up, watching the rain and wanting the sun out and having to accept each drop of rain, watching and waiting and wanting: this led to a great feeling of accomplishment when the yurt was finally up.  The fact is that parts of the yurt had been left on the land for months while we were demotivated by our own story and distracted by Gabriela and whatever was going on in the south.  The wooden lattice walls, still wrapped in their plastic packaging, had meanwhile begun to go mouldy and provided a cosy spot for a colony of ants.  If the yurt wasn't put up when it was, if the wooden parts had had to spend the whole winter in the moist air, it seemed that the whole project would have had to have been scrapped.

past conditional

Even with the yurt finally up, it let little stress points seep in between Jenny and I when during heavy rain the water streamed successfully down the outside canvas, collecting on the fringe of the chipboard floor which stuck out all around the yurt, soon forming puddles which encroached into the yurt, pulling us out of sleep in the middle of the night to move mattresses and cushions and soak up the encroaching water with towels and sheets and regularly wring them out out into the rainy night.  I don't know why I made the floor far wider than the yurt.  If I had thought about it long enough it should have struck me as obvious that the water, being shed off the canvas cover, should be able to fall directly and unobstructed into the ground.  In my thoughtlessness I only thought that it would be far better for the floor to be too big than too small, and that it might be quite attractive to have a shelf around the yurt to sit on, or to put plant pots upon.  The final job was therefore to trim the floor so that it stuck out only a few centimetres from the yurt, which involved sawing laboriously through pieces of pallet and reconfiguring points of support.  This has been only partially achieved; one side of the floor now slopes down noticeably where support has not been provided.  Indeed the whole yurt now stands slightly askew; jenny now speaks of waiting till summer and consecutive days of guaranteed sun before taking the yurt down and doing the floor again properly.

The whole project of constructing a living space - a place to live - intertwined with living beings - a panoply of plants - became the most engrossing, endearing, satisfying, all-consuming project to date.  It was an entire life project, marrying artistic eye for detail with real practical needs.  There was always something to be done, a frothing over of thousands of little projects or big projects in our minds.  Often the flow of a day's activities dictated that an activity which in all earnestness I had begun the day intending to attend to got sidelined by brute reality be it rain or the need to reconsider the storage of food after the rats had been busy of a night or the need to dig a big new hole for the compost toilet, which necessitated first clearing away all the brambles and while I was there I might as well saw off those straight strong branches to make a fence at the front while at the same time opening up the view to the sea . . . or maybe there was suddenly the strong desire to restructure the unstable stone steps leading down to the lower terrace, and while I was searching or digging for big buried stones I would come across the most gorgeous moss-covered rock in the middle of the woods and knew it would go perfectly at the side of the rock garden, and that then became the main heaving focus of attention.  I mean a real fizzing over of energy, when there is a slight pang of regret at the end of each day when the tools have to be put away . . . or sometimes not, sometimes still continuing by climbing up the tree by torchlight and working away engrossed for hours with a machete cutting back the rank incredible growth of the brambles which have thick wooden stems of several centimetres and seem about set to take over the world, so intent are they to climb up and smother the tallest of trees and completely cover abandoned terraces.  Vamos, very successful survivors.  Amidst all these jostling desires and needs - to work and improve the land and lick it into beautiful landscape shapes and cultivate vegetables and remove weeds and water all thirsty plants at the end of dry days and gather dry wood from the dead limbs of trees which have taken over the abandoned terraces on the surrounding hillsides and light a fire and get round to making some food and washing Gabriela's dirty diapers and clothes and hang them around the stove to dry before sitting down to enjoy a good plate of food - I say, amidst all this, there is the preponderant need and desire to be with Gaby.  To simply be with her, to lavish her with the attention she craves, to hold her and comfort her and go for a walk with her in the morning to the well to get good drinking water while mama Jenny gets to lie in, or take her out on her wheelbarrow chariot to the local níspero tree and climb up and collect pocketfuls of creamy yellow fruit which Gabriela, satisfyingly, eagerly devours, or to wonder with her under the night sky and hear her little infant voice of wonder at the brightness of the moon, or on a mid-afternoon, to swing her softly to sleep on the hammock while softly singing songs of love to her,

lots of love,

Gabriela,

how come you get to be so amazing?