Once it was completed, the animal shelter was truly a work of art! It's amazing what you can do with only a few pieces of scrap material. I used the telephone poles as a foundation to nail the windows to, and various size boards to make a roof out of. It was built into an embankment which was the back wall of the shelter. The windows allowed the sun to provide heat and protection at the same time. Unfortunately, I didn't get to stay there long enough to see the animals enjoying it...
The wood cutting deal was another story. The weather was hot, the wood was heavy and when it was over and done, I was completely exhausted. I was in good physical condition for this trip, so I thought. I'd been running at least four miles every other day and had my weight down to where I was feeling strong. The heat in Jerusalem however, was at least one hundred degrees during the time I was helping with the wood, much hotter than what I had been used to in Michigan.
The person I rented from had a van that we used to haul the wood in. We had to transport several very large, heavy blocks of pine from one side of Jerusalem to the other. A couple of trees had fallen on an apartment complex building and the local consumers power guys cut them up into such large pieces that no one could do anything with them. Wood is scarce over there and ordinarily the local people would use it to burn during the winter months in their small wood stoves.
My landlord heard from somewhere that he could have the wood if he wanted it. After telling him that I burned wood back home, he asked me if I would help him with it. What I failed to think about was that this kind of wood wasn't good to burn in a wood stove. It was very green pine with a lot of sap, probably the worst kind of wood you can burn. It was in huge blocks that must have weighed at least sixty pounds apiece. Before it would burn well enough to put into a wood stove, it needed to dry out for at least a couple of years. Even just a small amount of sap produces a lot of very black smoke and makes the wood very difficult to burn. To make things worse, there was nowhere in Jerusalem where you could buy a splitting maul to split these huge blocks of sappy, sticky pieces of wood. There was no way I could split it without a maul. My landlord knew someone who worked in the fire department and was able to get us a fireman's ax which besides looking kind of strange, wasn't designed for splitting wood at all, never the less, I agreed to try. The blocks of wood that we needed to split were so long and wide, in addition to being sappy, that they were impossible to split with the fireman's ax. In another attempt to make things work, he thought it would be a good idea to weld some rather small metal weights onto the back of the ax. This was the situation after we had moved the wood to his house in south Jerusalem. Just getting the wood to his house was a major project in itself...
Cutting fire wood back in Michigan was a cinch compared to this undertaking. First of all, the wood was about forty yards down the side of a hill, on about a fifty degree angle from where we had to carry it uphill to the van. Ordinarily, I never would have attempted to carry such heavy pieces up a hill. On this incline were several large sidewalk steps situated between two apartment buildings. After finding that we couldn't split it with the fireman's ax, we realized that we had to carry it up to the van and worry about splitting it somehow after we got back to the house. After being practically exhausted from trying to split this stuff, it was all I could do to carry it up the steps of this hill that we were parked on. To make it a little more difficult, there were these unnerving sounds coming out of a nearby window of one of the apartment buildings. A young girl, who I'm sure could see that I was struggling with this wood, was painstakingly practicing on her cello. I could see her out of the corner of my eye just inside of a window. You'd think she would've had a little mercy on me, but she didn't. Ironically, she was playing the scales up, up, up and down, d..., d... (with occasional squeaky notes!!) Needless to say, there was no way I could make the wood smaller by using a fireman's ax and it was everything I could do to just get the wood up to the van! I slipped a couple of times, probably because of my uncoordinated feet not being able to find the beat to the music...
0 comments:
Post a Comment