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!

 

 

 

 

Sunday, January 26th
The Chastain Farms
Winterboro, AL 

Today was Sunday – a day we’d decided to take as a personal day, to explore and get in touch with the surrounding area. We picked a lake up on a little mountain, in a state park within a national forest, and mapped a route that avoided major roads, and took us meandering through the back roads, hills, and valleys.

We pulled into a little dead end and found a decommissioned railroad bridge over a creek, and decided to check it out.

Further down the road, an unposted drive to the simplified remains of a structure beckoned to us.

Then we hit the road up into the mountains. Or hills. Whatever, They seem mountainous enough for me, There were kids riding longboards down the hills up at the tops, and 4×4 truck offroaders down in the bottoms (complete with huge Confederate flags waving from their roofs) – but only a handful of each, and they were almost the only humans we encountered all day.

A controlled burn of some sort left a blasted landscape.

An old cemetery in the hills used lichen covered chunks of rocks as grave markers and to pile upon shallow graves.

Then off to the next ruins and discoveries

     

 

Saturday, January 25th
The Chastain Farms
Winterboro, AL

Today  Nathan, Kimm, & SoCal Billy n’ Etti  headed out early in the morning, to take a two-hour drive to Georgia. They were headed to a rental house Nathan owned there, on a mission to get some needed repairs done before a new tenant moved in. Kristin and I stayed back alone with orders to build a chicken brooder, in preparation for the 50 two-day old chicks that would be arriving via USPS on Wednesday.

The type Nathan wanted built was a “hover brooder” – a slightly raised ~4×4′ box with two heat lights in the ceiling, a 4″ gap for chicks to duck under, and a ~6″ high box. The baby chicks would be able to stay warm as though they were being sat upon by their mothers, moving them along in their development toward meaty broiler chickens ready for sale.

So we hauled a wooden pallet back from the Camphouse and broke it down into good side boards, 7.5″ high. We cut 2 4′ sideboards, 2 4’2″ sideboards,  a 4′ x4’2″ roof of chipboard, four and 11.5″ 4×4 posts , and put it together.

Then we scavenged through the various barns and sheds, hunting for light bulb fixtures among the amazing array of materials. We found the electrical boxes quickly, but the porcelain socket plates proved far more elusive. We went through all the structures without finding any – and just when it seemed time to call Nathan and tell him to pick up a couple from the hardware store on the way back to the farm, two appeared inside different Tupperware bins we checked inside the Tool Barn.

We didn’t have the wiring to use, and had to confirm with Nathan our plan to mount them on top, dropped through from above, so we held the project there for the time being, and moved onto the net project: preparing the brooder house.

First we built a divider wall down the middle of the old stone outbuilding that would serve as a brooder house. We found an assembled section of old boards up the Tool Barn loft, chopped off the top couple boards and a bit off one end to make it both easy to step over and fit snugly into the gap from the former fireplace – it fit perfectly, stayed upright on its own, and would be easy to remove as needed.

Then we stapled some plastic leftover from the greenhouse covering over the windows to help minimize draftiness, and rounded off the day by feeding the animals their dinner before the crew returned from Georgia.

Later that night we all went over to Kimms to eat dinner and watch a movie. On the way over I commented that I was going more for the people than the movie – this turned out to be more accurate than I realized, as the pay per view system broke down on us when we tried to watch a horror movie (“The Conjuring”) and instead, a lengthy speaker-phone customer service comedy ensued – and after a couple hours of trying, we gave up and went back to the Milking Barn to sleep.