My partner... in 'Super, Stupendous "What Were We Thinking?" Projects'.... after another day of our year long
(began in September 1998) "clearing the land" process........... a man not afraid to get his hands dirty in pursuit of a vision...
....... all because we saw a 50' high red sandstone bluff and a View to die for and thought "How cool would it be to live up there and look out at "that". It faced south.... sunrises over the water... you could see for 30 miles..... and when the moon was full.... it rose straight up, out there over the bay. Many times we caught sight of fishing boats passing through the moon glow cast on the water.... It felt magical..... It would be like working in paradise.
When we found our now "Piece of Heaven" it had been a clear-cut forest ... totally neglected..... it looked like a bomb had gone off... we found out much later, it had been for sale for two years and nobody wanted to touch it..... you really had to have an imagination or be totally insane to think that you could clean this mess up in no time......... At that stage in our lives we had more time than anything else.... so we went for it.
It was an exhausting, back-breaking experience and there were times when we thought we could not go on ..... but the vision of what we wanted to create lured us on..... and all we had to do was get rid of the mess.... Oh I forgot to mention the junked car parts 2 acres of them on the lower entry section of the property... junked sections, pieces, parts of every description, size and shape of vehicle parts.... were everywhere... even after we thought we had this portion of the land cleaned up.... every time it rained, more came to the surface. Unreal!
... the local people (we didn't know a soul there, at the time) must have thought we were crazy..... We kept imagining this seemed like something from Monty Python but we did eventually begin to give it some order, build a road to the top of the bluff, level out the ground, plant a meadow and trees....
These are piles of roots, stumps and the remaining dead trees that had to be root raked into huge piles to dry in the sun before we could get rid of them. They don't look very high here.... but they were at least 10' -12' tall and they went on forever (10 acres)..... My son Max used to crawl inside of them, work his way to the top and use them for look outs and hide outs.
.... Then all we had to do.... was build a house.....
who knew it would take another 8 years to complete that part of our "Bright Idea".......
..........It truly was worth it..... Thank you, John....... my Dear..........
...pictures taken in Fall 1999.
