We've got bales! And bigger problems...

    Yay! We finally found bales! After an exhausting search following every lead we could think of, and one disastrous advertisement in the local paper (not specifying straw and not hay, leading to about twenty calls offering all manner of fescue, alfalfa and the like in bale form... d'oh!), we finally found the barn of straw at the end of the rainbow. Well, really it is our neighbors Don and Dana that found it and called us from their vacation, six time-zones away in Hawaii, to tell us about it! (How is that for above and beyond?) The bales had to be perfect-- tightly packed, full straw, with a moisture percentage reading under 15%, and they were! Thanks to the help of a few of our young strapping neighbors, John and Dan, we took a road trip an hour east and loaded and loaded and loaded our communal truck and trailer, not unlike a game of 3-D tetras, fitting bales into an interlocking matrix for their long ride home! I swear, a day of throwing bales around will wreck you. When I think back to the now three days I have spent staggering around behind a trailer trying to toss a bale up to an impossibly tall stack, my arms limp as spaghetti, hands blistered from the baling twine cutting in... I keep saying "not again" and yet somehow it happens! All I can say is bless our friends for coming along for a long, long day.  

Deranged from the exertion... Dan and Mike loading up bales

Rolling onto Frontier Lane in one piece

Bales in their staging space... our second floor! It was a good test of our newly installed oak floor beams,  showing only a sliver of deflection.

     

      Of course, preparations for this next bale-stacking stage have been seemingly never-ending. All of the detailing that needs to be thought out and installed ahead of bale really has been mind-jamming at points. First there was the "toe-up" you can see being installed by Mike and his cousin (who visited for a few days) around the perimeter of the floor platform. This elevates the bales in case of water pooling or some such disaster. It also help to distribute the load of the bales evenly across the floor joists. After that, there was the process of framing out the rough openings for doors and windows, with much detailing to come as we build out wide sills and seal up the gaps after installation. It took us much consideration of what heights would work for over-counter windows vs. bathroom windows vs. windows with bench seats in front. We have been combing through both used/donated and discount site-rejected windows at warehouses trying to match up U-factors and solar heat gain co-efficients with which direction they will be facing: to the south, we want high heat gain to maximize our passive solar design, and to the north, the opposite. We finally matched them all up and are happy with our selection of mostly wood, double-paned, low-e argon filled windows and doors for a fraction of the price new. All of this penny-pinching is getting a bit exhausting, but we knew this was one area where we could really blow our budget if we weren't careful! 

     After some more consideration of how to keep the bales mostly dry in perpetuity, we decided on a half-wall "rain screen" of vented oak siding, which of course needs support framing embedded in the bale. So again, another day spent measuring and cutting and installing for that. Just when the bales were beginning to seem like a distant reality, we realized one day that we were ready to actually start stacking! And once we started, we realized we were flying along, working at the pace of about one whole-house course per day. Notching the bales to receive the framing is the slowing factor for sure, but getting a good tight fit is worth it. When we reached a point at which we needed a smaller bale to fit, I was able to retie the bale into two half-bales with the help of our neighbor Beth's "bale needle," a long thin piece of metal with a handle and notch cut into it to feed some baling twine through the middle of the bale. The process, all in all, is actually pretty fun and satisfyingly quick, not unlike a giant set of children's building blocks. All of a sudden, our walls are closing in and things are beginning to feel very house like.

Threading the bale needle

Mike notching the bale the quick way, with chainsaw.
Handcutting with a saw, the slow way, is the method I prefer.

     So things are going swimmingly with our construction process, so what is the aforementioned trouble? About a week ago, we received word in our mail box (along with all of our neighbors) that within a half-mile of us a high-voltage power line (435,000V) is slated to be routed through. A midwest power company, Ameren (cue: ominous music and thunder claps), has deemed it necessary to extend their grid and I guess it looks like northeast Missouri makes a cheap and convenient shortcut from Iowa to Illinois. The route map was vaguely zoomed out, and we weren't sure where the two proposed options would fall exactly, but days before the first scheduled community meeting, they released images online. And wouldn't you know it? Our house is 900 feet from one of them! It would cut cleanly through our neighbor's land to the north of us, and perhaps would involve cutting some of our forest. This news, of course, is devastating to us and our neighbors, especially as we learn more about the health risks of living close to electro-magnetic fields and imagine what will happen to our beloved Bear Creek once it is shorn of its vegetation and flanking old-growth trees (somehow the route designers thought it best to run a route directly over a creek bed for several miles, I guess thinking no one would care about that land?). Our priorities now seem totally rearranged and we have been rallying as many neighbors as we can to speak out, but the problem is, the alternative route is no better. It would cut very close to our friend's the Crawford's land as well as Amish friends who live a few miles north. And directly over their Amish schoolhouse. And as I have talked to more people affected, I can see that part of their strategy is to divide communities and families and neighbors over this--for example, one of our neighbors, Lavern, would have one route go over his house or the other route go over his daughter and grandchild's house! Not okay!

      

     I suddenly feel very powerless and ill-equipped to be taking on a power company, and struggling to know the best strategy of resistance. Do we cooperate and politely suggest alternative deviations that would be less impactful? Do we get angry and threaten to fight? We and a group from our community talked with company reps at the meeting, registered ourselves and the particulars of our land--floodplains, oldgrowth, creek, marsh land, our Quaker meeting worship space, the homeschool, the education centers and new Catholic Worker house, plus all the houses of neighbors with small children and concerns about increased risks of childhood leukemia and like. We pointed out that several thousand young university students and environmental activists come every year from all over the country to our neighbor's education center and that we are no strangers to direct, non-violent action and protest (bless our friends for being onboard to resist with us!) I went door to door letting neighbors know and passing our surveys for them to send in to the company. Many of them are just as irate and freaked out as us. Now I am thinking about contacting local representatives and legal aid and seeing if there is any precedent for resisting such infrastructure: maybe they do have eminent domain and we are just plain screwed. Or maybe not? I am even going to look into environmental protections we could apply for ("gee... we have been seeing bald eagles in our neighborhood lately.... maybe there is a nesting pair in our woods?") This is everything I can think of so far, and I have no idea what will work, but I am feeling fired up with my love for the land and all the creatures that exist on it, especially the humans. And no, the irony is not lost on us that even though we are non-electicity users totally "off the grid" so to speak, the grid has found us none the less... 

So if anyone out there reading this has ideas about what would make an effective response in such a case as this, please let us know! The next round of meetings is in October. And we will learn December of their final decision. They have a website: www.ameren.com/MarkTwain/Pages/MarkTwain.aspx