Timothy Birdnow

Just a quick personal note. Thursday I went to the Ozark Hilton, that fabled place immortalized in legend and song. The temperature was in the mid 70's, making it an ideal day to visit. I had work to do (I always have work to do there) and arrived in mid-afternoon to get to it. I wanted to nail up some boards I found to act as siding (the OH has been nothing but a tarpaper shack for years now) and the work was humming along nicely, so I let time get away from me.

For new readers, the Ozark Hilton is a tarpaper shack I constructed out of materials scrounged from the alleys and dumpsters of St. Louis. Deep in the Ozark mountains, the OH is, uh, a bit rustic, with no electricity, no gas, no running water, no toilet. I light with kerosene, heat with a barrel stove (actually just a barrel with a stove pipe sticking out and a Weber kettle barbeque lid to keep the smoke in), use a couple of cinder blocks for a toilet. In summer I run a battery-operated fan on really hot days. he OH is a two room cabin with a giant picture window made from an old glass door. The structure was built with old boards and constructed in a less than workmanlike manner; I just slapped it together as best I could. A tin roof rounds out the place. I didn't even really cut any boards, just fit pieces together like a mixture of many jigsaw puzzles. It really is a sort of Frankenstein's monster in splintery wood.

At any rate, I was busy and let time get away. It wouldn't have been that much of an issue except that a storm started blowing in and I had to work fast to light my fire (it was going to cool off considerably) and get my 12 lamps lit (it takes that many to have reasonable light). By the time I finished there was a torrential downpour falling from the sky. I was able to finish filling my lamps inside, however, so all was well.

Well, maybe not well. I tried to watch a movie (the five hour epic Gettysburg) but couldn't hear it without putting an ear phone in. I use a battery operated DVD player (I used to read but my eyesight has gotten too poor for that in the low light) and I plug it into a batter, one of those kind used to jump cars. The end result is I can watch movies all night if I wish. But I found it increasingly difficult to hear the movie; rain was coming out of the sky like Noah's flood.

Amazingly (and I am always amazed by it) the cabin remained as dry and snug as always. If rain had started coming out of the ground I wouldn't have noticed except it would have seeped through the floor, probably. But despite the endless pounding of rain on sheet metal the cabin did fine.

But then my first emergency alert came through. Flash flood warning. I didn't sweat it; the Ozark Hilton sits at the top of a ridge, not far from the state highway. The valley below might wash out, but my property drains extremely well - so well that the worst flooding disappears in minutes. It's part of the water table for Big Springs, the mammoth spring that feeds the Current River.

But I DID worry the other FOUR times the emergency alert went off on my phone; tornado warnings for my area! Take immediate shelter, the warning said. Fat chance of that! The best I could do was stay in the cabin and hope the rickety structure held together. My wife asked me later what my emergency plan entailed and I informed her:

"kiss my lily white posterior goodbye". That about sums it up; there is no storm cellar or even a good indentation to hide in. If a tornadoes passed the cabin I would become a resident of Oz.

Maybe I should rename it the Oz-ark Hilton!

It was more than a little scary, let me tell you. But then, sitting on a ridge above a valley in the heavy woodland, the OH is in a fairly unlikely tornado alley. Tornadoes like flat country, and I once heard it said that Indians always claimed they didn't like rivers. I'm not on a river, but at least I am not too far from one.

Despite the worst Mother Nature could throw, I made it through fine. In fact, it felt rather cozy, snuggled into my little cabin with a warm fire while a terrible storm raged just outside of paper thin walls. I am always amazed at how sturdy that ratty old place can be.

I didn't even have any falling debris. A week ago a similar storm rolled through and knocked over a couple of tress, which I had to move out of my drive. One was too big to move, and was hanging over the road. I simply drove under it. I will have to deal with it eventually; get my chainsaw serviced and chop it up. But nothing dropped this time. I am always a bit worried; some trees that weren't much at the time I started building are now hanging over the cabin and I fear they may eventually fall on it. I am going to have to do something about them at some point. But they aren't an issue yet.

And so I survived a series of tornadoes in my little rat's nest (and it is, too; the little love children invade my cabin when I am not there, chewing up everything and generally making themselves nuisances. I've poisoned them, but more keep coming. Wish I had a better way to chase them off, but there isn't any that I can see. I tried dumping used cat litter, and that seemed to work to a degree, but my cats have all died, so it's no longer an option.)

A final thought; there is a need in a man for danger, and the wild certainly beckons. I go to my property to get away from it all, and I can enjoy a sense of danger and feel the great savage. It's all a farce, because I am not in the wilderness - I have a highway a couple of hundred yards from my cabin, for crying out loud! But I can pretend to be a pioneer and enjoy it. The reality is, if I were to be forced to actually live that way my existence would be miserable beyond measure. Civilization can be a great annoyance, but in the end it is superior by far to true wilderness living. There is a reason civilization was created in the first place; the simple life isn't so simple, and it is far from entertaining as a way of life.

Posted by: Timothy Birdnow at 12:42 PM | No Comments | Add Comment
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