Friday, January 31th
The Chastain Farms
Winterboro, AL

We woke up and fed the animals – discovering that in the night, a marauding beast skulked into the chickens and slaughtered one of the golden gang – the recently-free-ranging crew of roosters that we both loved, as they were used to humans and would follow us around at times and get up close.

The head and neck were completely gone, while the body was left behind – a sign that the predator was probably an owl or an underachieving  raccoon, which are both known for this kind of kill.

 

Then Kristin and I worked together to install the first course of toeboards to the high tunnel construction, while Nathan did some computer work for his job and the other WWOOFers built a lean-to type shelter for the pigs.

Since we’d buried the pre-drilled holes down into the concrete, we first had to drill new 5/8″ holes in each of the 26 galvanized posts at the same height. This took quite a bit of force.

 

Kimm came down and helped us work.

When the sun was getting low in the sky and our efforts were completed for the day, we headed out for a walk to check out the creek on the edge of the farm’s woods.

To end the day, we walked across the highway to the Plank Station Lodge, where Joe (of the Coffee Shop Old Men tribe) served as President and groundskeeper. They were having their popular annual Spaghetti Supper fundraiser event, and we were all invited. The people were friendly and talkative, dinner was comfortastic, and the desserts were incredibly delicious, especially the 7-Up Pound Cake, which almost caused a riot when Joe’s grandaughter intercepted a thrown piece Jimmy tried to throw to Nathan.

 

Thursday, January 30th
The Chastain Farms
Winterboro, AL

I woke up at 7:30 and, since the bathroom was still out of order, went out the back door to pee. When I opened the door, I forgot about my bladder and went back inside for my camera – the view of the frosted, shining landscape sparkling and backlit in the dawn sunshine.

It was stunning.

And freezing.

I got Kristin to come out and see it with me – we went out to feed the animals.

Back in Minneapolis, it was 20 degrees at 7:30am – down here in Alpine, Alabama, it was zero degrees.

(On the other hand, Minneapolis was just getting done having 5 inches of snow dumped on them, just before the morning rush hour…)

The Old Men of Chastain Coffee Shop cannot recall it ever being this cold in this area – although one in the group recalls when it went down to 6 degrees, many years ago when he first moved to Winterboro.

The day warmed up incredibly quickly  – and was in the 50s by afternoon.

But in the meantime, I went to work on the bathroom door – Kimm had mentioned an idea to use some old tin sheets to recover the bathroom door, which was currently a patchwork of scrap boards. Without intending to do more than to look and think it over, I brought a couple choice pieces of tin and some more of the weathered cedar floor boards we’d used for the greenhouse roof and the bathroom floor projects.

But instead, the door just got done, everything falling together quickly and effortlessly into a final result I was more than pleased with – first the two sheets of tin fit together perfectly, then there was just enough board to box it in – and finally, the rusty handle and the cool iron decorative piece all came together …

The kids came over – they had school off, again, and it was Cole’s 6th birthday. When the snow was starting to soften and melt, I taught them how to roll snowballs into huge balls and create a snowman.

The snow continued to melt, as warmth came to Alabama again.

Wednesday, January 29th
The Chastain Farms
Winterboro, AL

We woke up to the entire state of Alabama being closed.

None of the Old Men were in the coffee shop.  The commercial coffee pot sat cold and dry. There was literally no traffic on the highway out front. There was no sign of any of the farmers.

It was beautiful and still and white and humanless; a winter wonderland post-apocalypse movie set.

Kristin and I, cold-hardened Northern veterans of all things icy and cold, left the SoCal WWOOFers indoors and ventured out to feed the animals and chop open their ice-plated water supplies.

We threw away the grody broken pile of boombox that had sat on a prominent shelf in the Coffee Shop for years, gathering a thick layer of dirty dust and cobwebs.

It was replaced with some things lying around in the Milk Barn/Kitchen/Bunkhouse/Coffee Shop building: a couple of gorgeous, smooth old aluminum milk pitchers flanking an antique geared machine that no one understood.

Eventually, Nathan & Jimmy arrived in their 4 wheel drive vehicles. Nathan had gone in the ditch once already, but gotten out without too much trouble. Schools were closed again. People were trapped all over the place. The roads were not passable without great caution, luck, and ability to plan a route that avoided icy, impassable uphills.

The 50 day-old chicks were supposed to arrive today – this is what we had built the brooder box for, prepared the building, bought bedding, etc. But the USPS was closed. The company that had shipped them had no idea where they were – the whole shipment was presumed stuck on some icy highway and deceased. We felt bad for the chickens, and disappointed that we would not get to see our work on the brooder in action with piles of baby chickens.

Then we got to work on a little project to stop the loss of most of the woodstove’s heat, through the huge vent fan built into the ceiling. It needed to be removable, so they could take it down in the summer, when the vent was a lifesaver in the combined heat of canning and summertime.   We fashioned a simple wood panel, held in place with wood blocks that were snug but spun easily thanks to some large washers on both sides.

In the afternoon, Nathan & Rachel’s two children came over. They were excited by the unprecedented snowfall, but not sure how to work with it. I taught them how to pack snowballs – how to choose good snow, how to pack with cupped hands.

I also told them to wear gloves to do so. The boy didn’t listen no matter how many times I repeated that part. He cried a bit when his hands started to thaw out and that special tingly-skin pain kicked in … but then went back to packing snowballs without gloves, and running inside to thaw his hands in a big bowl of hot water every few minutes.

When he ambushed his sister, I explained to her the fine art of sneaky snow revenge – how to smuggle some snow behind her unsuspecting victim, and then dump it down the back of his shirt. She tested it out on her brother, and then graduated to snow-prising her Dad.

We cut up some downed trees and limbs for firewood, allowing Nathan to hone his tree-lassoing skills, in our effort to safely pull down a huge dead branch that was menacing the fence of Blossom (the old horse).

Then we hunkered down, burned firewood, hung out, and talked, with our voices slipping into occasional acquired Alabaman drawls, similar to by distinct from the accent we briefly picked up while in Mississippi …

Tuesday, January 28th
The Chastain Farms
Winterboro, AL

Today is our first day without a working bathroom, due to the full septic tank. We take walks over to Jimmy’s house to use the bathroom, and enjoy the opportunity to see his lair.

There was a little snow in the forecast. We all knew it. But we didn’t expect much – I didn’t expect it to stick, even if enough fell to accumulate. So when a dusting began in the mid morning, we quickly took a few photos to document the transient flurry before evidence was gone.

But the snow continued throughout the morning.

And then it intensified.

And in Alabama, the Snow Day began.

By the time school got out, the roads were icy.

There were no salt trucks, and no one really knows how to drive on snow or ice here.

Across the region, highways became parking lots.

Children had to spend the night at school because the buses could not run, and their parents were unable to pick them up – because the roads were not passable, or, in some cases, because the parents were, themselves, trapped – at their workplaces, where many spent the night.

Across the border, Atlanta, Georgia completely shut down in perfect gridlock. The South was frozen solid, making headlines around the world.

It was beautiful.

 

Monday, January 27th
The Chastain Farms
Winterboro, AL

Today we woke up at 7:30 and took a pleasant morning walk out to feed the pigs. I really enjoy the morning walks we’ve taken almost daily at both farms to date, and suspect it will be a habit we take home to live with us.

When we got back, we drilled out holes in the chicken brooder box for the light fixtures to fit through from above, and built simple boxes for them to mount to.

Then we addressed the pots/kitchen space issue. The Chastain Farm does a lot of selling their canned goods, and they had a lot of large aluminum & stainless steel containers and strainers and such as a result. These took up a lot of shelf space – a pot rack would free up a lot of very desirable surface.

 

Up in the Tool Barn’s hay loft, we’d found a pair of aluminum truck bed rails that would make perfect pot holders, with the addition of some kind of s-hooks.

So we brought them into the kitchen and screwed them up deeply into a ceiling joist. That was the easy part – then came the hunt for hanging hooks.

After lunch, we combed through every room of every shed and barn on the land, seeking variations of an s-hook, or things that could be used to connect in other ways. We found a lot of things we hadn’t yet seen, thanks to this search.

While we were looking, I found the pitcher from an old Mr. Coffee maker that would be a perfect and appropriate light shade for the ceiling fan’s bare bulb in the Chastain “Coffee Shop.”*

*the ‘Coffee Shop’ is the room next door to our kitchen / wood heater hang out / living quarters, which served as the Farm’s office & Folgers Dispensary, to WWOOFers and farmers and, most of all, the regular morning crowd: “The Old Men,” who arrived around 6 am to shoot the shit & drink the coffee before getting to work, just as they had every workday for decades.

We eventually returned with a bucket full of bits including the things we wound up using: old aluminum milking hooks, a disused slotted serving spoon, a hay hook, clamps, a threaded dowel bent into a perfect long s-shape, a chain link fence post brace, rotted bungee cord s-hooks, chain, a bracket, and some openable chain link things I don’t recall the name of.

Then the shit hit; I used the bathroom. After completing my business I flushed the toilet, and stood to wash my hands and leave. I heard water splashing, and looked down to see, visible between the slats of the cedar platform we’d built, water welling up from the floor drain, flooding the floor with toilet water. Needless to say, I was glad we’d made the flooring; without it I’d have had some gross feet to clean up.

It turned out that the septic tank was full, and backing up as a result. So while Kristin and Kimm and the SoCal WWOOFers worked with the crew to cement the greenhouse support poles into their final positions, I helped Nathan fetch the pump and do some smelly work, moving the overflow puddle away from the building. I handled the hose and used a board to clear toilet paper off of the intake, which otherwise become clogged immediately. I was glad to have had fun adventures exploring sewer tunnels in my past; the smell actually has positive connotations for me, so it was no trouble to deal with.

We helped the others finish off the cement work, hauled in the tools and extra bags of unused cement, bringing one opened bag to the brooder house, to fill in a hole that had eroded in the the doorway.

It was a good day’s work!