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?