Bear Bottom Gulch (Mental Health Pt 2)
 |
| The tiny house and main house near completion |
Five years ago yesterday was my first night spent here in the town of Philipsburg, Montana, in a tiny camper parked on a neighbor’s empty lot with no electricity or heat; just my sleeping bag, head lamp and my dream of building my own house. Now I am sitting at the kitchen table in a completed house that I built with my own two hands and is owned outright with no mortgage having just turned 32 years old. Six months from now, I will get married on this very property to the lady I met by chance at the local brewery on that very first night in town. Together, Sam and I have achieved a lifetime’s worth of dreams in just a few short years. When I am floundering in my little mental bubble of doubt and misapprehension about what comes next, I try to revisit these life achievements.
The property had been for sale for a dozen years with little interest. Only two blocks off of a historic main street in a town of 900, within sight of the post office and walking distance from the library and brewery, it was a world away from the modern age. It had no road access or electricity or any way to connect to the town water or sewer. An abandoned barn was crumbling at the bottom, surrounded by the remnants of a 1950’s trash dump. The soil was wasted, weeds owned the majority of the hillside. I had spent every penny I had, and a few thousand dollars of borrowed family money to purchase five lots in a steep walled gulley with zero flat space to build on. Numerous townsfolk and neighbors deemed the property worthless, but for $18k, I figured it was my only shot for a place of my own. I had been laughed out of several banks because no one would loan to a self-employed, self-taught carpenter, so I decided to go my own way.
 |
| Cutting a road into the gulley with shovel and rake |
Without money to buy building materials, I traded my time and skills for a few truckloads of gravel and use of an excavator, cutting a road into the gulley through an unbuilt street easement. I sought out abandoned houses slated for demolition. Our old mining town was chock full of turn of the century mining shacks that were being gobbled up for the valuable land beneath. I would spend predawn and sunset hours dismantling these old shacks piece by piece before the dozers showed up. Then I would go to work every day, renovating more old houses for neighbors and salvaging anything they didn’t want or need from light fixtures to tiny blocks of wood. I was a staple at the local dump where I’d raid the dumpsters weekly for anything of use.
Giant piles of reclaimed wood soon filled the gulley. Sam and I would de-nail old boards for hours and call the occasions date-nights. We nicknamed our little camp “Bear Bottom Gulch.” She would spend her evening hours tending to a makeshift garden cobbled together from found materials, while I would dig the foundation holes with a shovel and pickaxe. In the early morning before the summer sun came up, we would four wheel my truck up the mountain roads behind town and haul back dozens of loads of broken stone from the mountain side and tailings piles to build stone walls.
 |
| Tearing down old miner's houses for materials |
By year two, we had built a small workshop and art studio where we could de-nail boards under shelter and store tools out of the weather. I installed a power pole and we got the luxury of electricity to run our tools. Then Covid hit, causing both of us to lose our jobs, so we hauled an old Airstream camper into the bottom of the gulley and set about building a small cabin from our junk piles. As the world raged, we lived in almost complete isolation, tinkering on our land, slowly chipping away at our mountain of dreams. It was exhausting and exhilarating.
We had no plumbing of any kind, so a trip to the toilet involved a quarter mile walk to the public park pit toilet. Showers were either five dollars for six minutes at the laundromat or a pot of water on the porch outside the camper door. In the short summer months, we ran a 400 ft collection of old garden hoses to the neighbor’s house and built a little shower stall. In the July heat, the hose water was boiling hot for three minutes then icy cold. That summer, our frost free season was June 23rd to August 29th and somehow we still managed a decent garden bounty.
 |
| Our Covid projects... Cabin and workshop |
The main house would be our greatest challenge. Out of money, Sam departed for Helena, a hundred miles away for a better paying teaching job. Long distance didn’t change our commitment to each other, but it sure didn’t help when times got hard. I spent my winters living alone in the 12x10 cabin, working construction outside in the cold, saving money for spring when we could pour a foundation. On weekends, I would drive a hundred miles to town for a shower and a trip to the Habitat for Humanity Recycle Store.
When spring finally came, I learned the hard way how to brace concrete forms. I fell off a roof. I electrocuted myself a couple times. I gritted it out, always thinking that success was around the next corner. But with each success, a pile of future problems awaited me to solve or learn. How to tile a shower. How to set walls alone without a crane. How to engineer a roof system. Hours of time on the phone with my dad asking advice. I still had no plumbing, so every day I was walking a half mile just to use a bathroom. I would often stop by the library on my return to pilfer some internet to google things like “how to wire an electrical panel” or “how to lay out a radiant slab.” The only tech I had at home was a flip phone. I learned to build a radiant heat system via text message.
The most insane part of this project was that I was building the house without first having installed water or sewer. We were squatting on our land and only the gully geography and patience of the few neighbors saved us from intervention by the authorities who would not have permitted our strange habitation. I still needed forty thousand dollars to engineer and install a city certified water main and sewer system running over two hundred feet to the closest city line. I gambled that if I made the house and property valuable enough, I could use the property as collateral for the local bank to give me a construction loan to pay for the utilities. When the banker came out to appraise the property, she never thought to look underground at the fact that without utilities, the house was worthless. Eventually, Sam and I were able to combine our meager incomes and fudge the numbers just enough that the bank gave us a small loan. Then we had to hire a competent engineer and excavator to complete the only part of our entire house project I could not legally attempt, a water main down a city street.
In those last few months before water and sewer went in, I was a wreck. I was working full time building other people’s houses, then I would come home and peck away at my own. I had tendinitis in both wrists from overuse and could barely hold my hammer. I was losing sleep worrying that the water line would fall through yet again or that the bank would find out our secret. That is when my mental health declined rapidly. I was angry all the time. I was doubting the entire dream, from the buying of worthless land to the mostly finished but technically worthless house that I stared at every morning. I was tired of hauling drinking water in five gallon buckets and begging for showers from friends. I was tired of seeing my future wife only on the weekends. The burden of my dreams was haunting me with no escape besides completion. Six agonizing months later, after numerous false starts, skyrocketing material prices and missed connections, up against a hard deadline from the bank, we finally were able to turn on a water spigot. We both cried. Then I proposed.
In celebration of our engagement, we installed our first toilet. In one of the proudest moments of both our lives, Sam proceeded to successfully plumb the entire house over the next two weeks without any experience, just a couple old books and her dad’s wisdom. Suddenly projects were being finished around the house and tools were being cleaned up. We went room by room, trimming and drywalling, vacuuming and painting. The appliances I had dug out of the dump were installed and worked beautifully.
And then, one day in late August 2022, it was done. For the sake of time and space, I am skipping over a few details and trials. But the gist is the same. The journey of a thousand steps started and ended with one little step. One piece of trim nailed to the upper gable and we had won. We had a house built almost entirely of reclaimed materials on a piece of reclaimed land. We had taken a worthless piece of hillside property consumed by weeds and turned it into a cute little house surrounded by majestic lawns and gardens. We had overcome a lack of money, gambled and won due to perseverance in all forms of weather. We can turn on a shower whenever we want to. We taught ourselves dozens of new skills and have woven our place in the fabric of the surrounding community. Sam was able to find a job nearby and move home. 32 years old, essentially debt free (student loan debt is a bugger), living on land that we sculpted with our own hands in a house we built alone. Achieving that makes me feel invincible.
Well sorta. I still feel triumphant as I type out this story. That is why I wrote it down, because it is a reminder that when a spiral is dragging me down, I know that I have beaten it back before. I don’t know what the next phase of life holds for me. I thought this dream would take longer than it did. I honestly never thought past building myself a house and finding the one I love to settle down with. Just three days after moving into our house, I suffered a work accident with sheet metal that brought me an 1/8th of an inch away from never building anything with my left hand ever again. A Life Flight helicopter and the three inch scar across my wrist is a sobering return to earth after achieving your wildest dreams.
I am back at it again, building things, tinkering on the property, waiting for spring to try some new ideas for landscaping, preparing for our wedding. But every so often, the panic and worry come back like they did this past weekend. That voice in my head tells me that I am worthless and useless and it is all a waste of time. And so I revisit this story. In one moment, one day, one year, it seems impossible to achieve anything, but five years ago, I never would have thought I could have achieved this. I wonder what the future holds five years from now?
 |
| Under construction before water and sewer |
Song of the Day: Waiting on June, Holly Williams
Comments
Post a Comment