WATER: PART ONE.

On Memorial Day Weekend, our friends Sarah and David, with their two lovely kids, came to visit the farm and help with the RAM pump. We had purchased the rest of the pipe required to get it going and needed someone with some expertise in plumbing to help me figure out what in the world I was doing––someone like David who actively wanted to spend his vacation working like crazy.David is not only an engineer professionally, and has been building his own beautiful house, but he possesses a really great mind for these types of projects (if you need an engineer for anything, give him a shout!). I cannot tell you how valuable it was to have him every step of the way. I learned a ridiculous amount.Briefly, to explain how the pump works without electricity, I'm going to adapt an analogy our neighbor's use for their RAM: Pretend you have a room full of water balloons. On one end is a door, on the other is a small, water ballon-sized hole. Now imagine you open that door and quickly add another balloon, slamming the door back before everything falls out (think: closet full of clothing). This new balloon puts enough pressure on the other balloons that it forces a balloon out the other side. Do that seventy times or so a minute and you'll have a fair amount of balloons forced out over time. That's essentially what's going on inside the pump. The water traveling down hill is the person hoarding water balloons. An air tight tank with a check valve is the room. And the water balloon-sized hole is the pipe leading uphill. No electricity required. (If you have a better analogy for how the RAM works, please feel free to tell us!)First we had to clean out the spring and build the dam––which was strangely fun. I even got to carve "J + H" into it––you know, like the pros do. Anyway, in the dam we laid a small bit of PVC which collects water. That water then runs into a 35 gallon reservoir tank we situated a few feet away. From that reservoir tank, there are 77 feet of galvanized pipe that lead downhill to the pump.The water travels down that pipe, gathering the momentum needed to make the pipe function. And really, the first half of the day––from seven to noon––was spent just getting all that ready.(I can write a more detailed rundown of how we did everything if you'd like––and you very well may, who knows––but I'll just give you the gist for now.)I had bought some of the wrong fittings so we ventured back to town to swap them out and finish the project. And by the end of the day, we had the pump working––that is to say, we had the pump pumping water through four hundred feet of pipe, uphill over seventy feet of elevation––all powered by water. Unfortunately, that was as far as we could go, because well, we didn't yet have the holding tank.But we bought one this weekend! So next, all we need is the piping to get it down to the house––thus the "Part One" element of the title––and we will officially have water in the cabin. And it only took two years! Uh, two years so far.But big big thank you to David and Sarah. Couldn't have done it without you! Getting Water: to be continued.... hopefully soon.- Jessehttps://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cwGfmrYuXnA

SIMPLE.

It's about seven in the morning, and around thirty-five degrees out. I'm sitting on a small, wet rock at the bottom of the hill scooping water – our drinking water – from a spring into small plastic jugs, and my thumb is slowly going numb. Hannah, I know, is washing dishes in the cabin which involves heating water on the stove and individually scrubbing, rinsing and drying each dish. And for some odd reason, we call this The Simple Life.Though I've always been fond of the term, "Simple Living" is starting to feel like a bit of a misnomer, at least on this small farm. Almost no activity is actually simple, and probably won't be for many generations to come, when the pastures are cleared and up to health; when the cabin is finished, the barns are repaired and the water systems are fleshed out. Even then, it probably won't be simple, though God-willing, it will at least be reasonable.Simple just doesn't feel right. This life is too handmade and demands too much of our attention to be considered simple. Simple was delivery pizza. Simple was living where doors opened for us, escalators did our walking, and our house heated or cooled itself at our whim. Simple was pets in lieu of herds, gas stoves instead of wood. Simple was machines that did our washing. A day off, now that was simple. And we've lived that life, but left it for what we presumed would be a simpler existence.Perhaps right now we are living more thoughtfully than simply. We have no choice. If we forget to visit the spring, we run out of water. In the summer, if we don't get our frozen jug of ice from our neighbor's chest freezer, we have no refrigeration. If we didn't have to start a fire before every meal, or before every dish washing, maybe that would make things simpler. There's just not much that's obviously simple about living this way, and sometimes that lack of simplicity—that we have to think of everything that must be done by the time dark falls—can cause us anxiety and cost us sleep.But it can also be deeply rewarding. Food we grow ourselves, cook ourselves on a wood stove we stoked ourselves, no restaurant can match. The quiet nights spent reading, writing, listening to the radio or conversing by headlamp and firelight make us  wonder what the world ever saw in television in the first place. The cabin, along with all the other odd structures we need to build, teach us how to construct (and sometimes, unfortunately, deconstruct). We're forced to preserve our bounty but enjoy the drying, fermenting and canning as a necessity, for survival. Farming naturally and living this way challenges us in the ways we like to be challenged. This life demands ingenuity and physical fitness, but in turn makes us physically fit, and OK, maybe not ingenious, but definitely doesn't hurt our problem solving skills.Maybe it's so often referred to as simple because the countryside is not thought of as an intellectual place. But we've found few things more sophisticated than the wisdom of old farmers, even if it flows from them slowly and deliberately. Perhaps it's the simple tools we use, the pitch forks and hoes, old scythes dug out of tool bins at peddler malls. Or maybe calling it simple is an ironic, inside joke we're just now getting, because although it's rewarding, it's anything but simple. (I guess I could Google why we call it "The Simple Life", but, not to belabor the point, without the internet or electricity in the cabin, that would be too simple.) Even still, we wouldn't want to live any other way. Thoughtful, rewarding, challenging living—farming with our antique tools and antique ways—that's what we've found so far, and we love it. Who needs simple anyway?- Jesse.