MOVING TO THE MOUNTAINS Part 2

Sally Martin

Rock and Elaine had been huddling in their basement when that same tornado went roaring, tearing, and twisting up Laurel Ridge. Electric wires as well as tall trees went down on Rt. 31. A poor, bedraggled girl came to their door because her car was trapped in front of their house. She was there for a day. They had no electricity. She had just left when we arrived and found that we couldn't even get into our driveway. The tornado had twisted three trees together and thrown them through the roof.

      It took a while to figure this out because of the perhaps two dozen sixty foot trees that were scattered, broken and uprooted, like a giant game of pick-up-sticks gone wild. And we had thought that being flooded out in a condo was a problem! At least we had Henry. Henry knew people with bulldozers and skidders and it took quite a while just to be able to get to the cabin without crawling through the mess of broken trees. We were more experienced with insurance after the condo's insurance mess so there was some financial help. However, insurance doesn't cover trees that are only cluttering up the area, so clearing out just the shattered trees alone did get a bit expensive.

     Then there was the new basement that replaced a crawl space. My fault.  I couldn't imagine being in there without a basement during a tornado. If Rock and Elaine needed a basement to hide in, so do I. Then there was also the entirely new basement room, the new first floor room and the entirely new second floor. We went from two bedrooms to five bedrooms. Most of this was suggested by Henry, who did have such good ideas and didn't mind spending the entire summer with us--- not with two of his kids in college.

     M'luv and I learned how to slab up a stone veneer over the new concrete block basement and the new chimney, using some of the mountainside of native stone that was just lying around. We stained or linseed oiled every board that went into or on the outside of the building. Gee, it was fun. It really was. Henry and gang would rip off a board from the ceiling and seventy years of squirrel doo-doo would shower down. The squirrels had left, of course. However, there were, what seemed to me, anaconda-sized blacksnakes which had lived, for ever so long, in the walls and roof, feasting on squirrel. The snakes were still there, with such an arrogant attitude. Just because they had been born there, as had their parents, and their parents’ parents, etc. was no reason to be so slow moving when prodded out or so quick to slither back when we weren't alert They didn't seem to mind the roof being dry with new wood and new shingles. No matter how much they were encouraged to leave they eventually had to be hacked to pieces, sometimes by Henry's daughter, who was adept with a hoe.