Featherman Equipment Co.

PO Box 62
Jamesport, MO 64648 (660) 684-6035 info@featherman.net

David Schafer
Founder

Amanda Riley
Office Manager

Abe Kurtz
Shop Manager

Simply the Greatest Life
"Finding Ourselves in the Country"

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Chapter 7 – Horse Sense

If one advances confidently in the direction of his dreams, and endeavors to live the life which he has imagined, he will meet with a success unexpected in common hours.
- Henry David Thoreau, Walden

Stone walls are heavy.  And they don’t just stick like Velcro to straw bales.  Johnny had never done anything like this before – the Ellis’s was his first stone work - and, as far as we know, no straw bale home besides ours has stone walls.  The marriage of straw and stone required a few major modifications. 

First we had to dig a footing to support the weight of the stone wall.  Well, I managed to get out of that job.  Fortunately, Johnny and his son, David, and the two others on the crew, Raymond Mast and William Ray Detweiler, were willing to dig the three foot deep trench around the two hundred foot circumference of our house.

Alice and I had to add a framework of 2 x 4s all around the house to attach the wall holders to.  Wall holders are corrugated strips of metal used by masons to “tie” the bricks to the wood frame.  They nail one end into the wood frame, and then bend the metal in a right angle so that it sits in plaster in a seam between two bricks.  A wall holder every two or three feet is enough to tie the bricks – or stones – to the house frame.

Since our straw bale house “framework” only existed around the doors and windows, we had to cut slots in the hay and insert 2 x 4s, tying them to the cedar 2 x 6 on the cement and the header at the top.  This is probably where William Ray got his first notion of us making things hard on ourselves.  But we were delighted to do the extra work if the stone walls were going to turn out like we thought they were.

After that, all Alice and I had to do was collect rock.  Pry out rock.  Wash rock.  Unload rock.  And stack rock.  Our good friends Tad and Ann Trombley made the grave mistake of helping us on a rock-collecting day.  After collecting and emptying two pick-up loads I was pleasantly exhausted and ready for shade and a cool drink.

“Shall we get one more load?” Alice asked the group, her voice fresh and chipper.

Before I could groan, Tad – a world class athlete who recently won the national 100-meter competition in his age bracket - said, “Why not?”

I couldn’t very well answer that question the way I wanted to.  Free labor was not to be argued with.  I’m pretty sure Ann and I could have made a case for moderation, but we continued to haul rock like prisoners through the heat of the afternoon.

Johnny and his boys wasted no time trenching.  We poured the cement footing, let it cure and they began laying up the stones during one of the hottest stretches in a July we’ve ever seen.  They emptied their thermoses in the early afternoon and we replenished their water.  But boy could they put up the rock!

And the bigger the stones the better as far as the boys were concerned.  As a team, they hauled several hundred-pounders up in to place, plastered them in and wedged a two-by-four against the ground while they set up.  I looked long and hard at that operation but I couldn’t fault the engineering.  As long as they rested on a solid foundation and didn’t lean out, those giants were going to stick and offered fewer seams to plaster.  Which was the key attraction to the crew.

Two times Johnny said with his trademark smile, “It looks like we’ll be needing some more rock soon.” 

We placed pallets of layered stones all around the house and they’d haul them up on to their scaffolding and choose the right stone for the spot.  They weren’t too interested in using smaller stones, but they also culled for thickness and irregularity.  We wound up with a healthy pile of rejects and had to scramble for more good rock.

Sometimes they’d have to hammer a little off a stone to make it fit right.  Johnny’s crew looked like they’d been working field stone all their lives.  Especially Johnny.  Johnny was the most efficient worker we’d ever seen.  Not a motion was wasted. 

“You ought to see him tape sheet rock,” Mary Kauffman remarked after we told her how fast Johnny could work.

A few months later we got the chance.  We asked Johnny if he’d help us finish mudding and taping the sheet rock.  There were only a few jobs on the house Alice and I didn’t do by ourselves: pour cement, put the stones up, and the solar power installation.  We had done plenty of taping and mudding before and we weren’t especially talented or fast at it, so, remembering that Johnny – who was a whiz at something he’d never done before – was sort of famous for his sheet rock taping, we splurged a little and asked if he’d help.

It wasn’t a splurge at all.  Probably the best money we spent.  Mudding and taping is where you hide the seams of the sheet rock or dry wall before painting.  It needs to be neat.  Invisibility is the goal.

I took note of Johnny’s unusual gear: stilts, ironing board (well, that’s what it looked like), old milk jug and a few trowels.  He mixed up half a milk jug of plaster and set it on his ironing board.  I noticed the jug had a narrow slit in it about half way up.  Then he took a roll of sheetrock tape and put it on a roller - just like a roll of toilet paper – attached to his ironing board.  This was going to be a good show!

He strapped his stilts on, hoisted himself up and threaded the paper roll through the slit in the milk jug.  Slick!  Then he pulled out an arm’s length of tape neatly smeared with plaster.  Then he pulled out another arm’s length and made a loop.  Then he pulled another and another and another until he had enough mudded tape in one long, looped line to span the entire living room ceiling.  With a twist he tore the tape and stilted over to the edge of the wall.

This was the best part.  He stuck the end of the tape at the joint against the wall, took several backwards steps (yep, still on stilts) and, with a flick, stuck the tape on the ceiling directly over the seam!  Two steps back, flick.  Two steps back, flick.  In 15 seconds the tape was all up!  Then he walked forward and smoothed it all in one pass with his trowel.  How he’d learned to do this, I can’t imagine, but I’d bet money on Johnny in a mudding contest with anybody.

Cousin Paul was visiting about that time and we had begun the mudding marathon on the inside of the house.  He asked if he could use the stilts.  We didn’t think Johnny would mind so he put them on and we helped him up.  He seemed pretty stable and was doing fine until Alice asked him a question and he looked over his shoulder to answer.

The movement threw his balance off enough that he began to lean backwards. 

“Oh no,” he understated, committed to a slow crash landing. 

His slow motion fall was probably worse than the landing on his butt.  Lynn rushed to his side but the biggest bruises were on his pride.  He took the stilts off, still chuckling.

Johnny’s legendary talent (we’d been bragging about him, of course) just raised a notch in everyone’s estimation.  He had mastered what it took to do that job in the most efficient way possible.  I imagined Johnny was just as practical in everything he undertook.

Their practicality is one of the many things we admire about our new Amish neighbors.  Their lives are more deeply rooted in the physical world of soil and livestock, garden and horse-and-buggy, and that yields a higher level of common sense - that commodity that “ain’t so common anymore” as Missouri’s own farmer advocate and social commentator, Derry Brownfield, notes in his regular radio program – the Common Sense Coalition.

Common sense is born of solving problems with the mind and hands.  I came from a lineage that used both hand and mind but heavily favored the mind side.  I was clumsy and impatient with tools when I first started using them.  Finding a proper rhythm with physical work was a joy that I discovered much later.

My Dad, Paul Evans Schafer, worked in the cerebral world of calculations and designs and drafting plans for sewage systems, water retaining dams and water purification plants.  His Dad, Paul Abbot Schafer, studied and taught geology and the art and science of extracting minerals from the earth.  And his Dad, Joseph Schafer, was an academician consumed with books and the study of American pioneer history.

Each of them had their connection back to the land.  My Dad spent a lot of time on site studying the land before construction projects and overseeing implementation of plans during construction.  Grandpa walked over thousands of miles of land and observed it like few people have the chance to do.  My great grandfather, Joseph, had such a fascination for history that he rode a bicycle the length of the Oregon Trail.

But for the most part, the careers of civil engineers, geologists and historians are spent at the desk thinking, studying, drafting and writing.  This was the track I was on, too, studying biology at Grinnell College.  I liked to use my mind; that was my paternal history for three generations and I never gave farming as a career a thought until my Dad suggested it as an option.

At first I was offended.  It seemed a giant step backward; a waste of any mental talent I might have.  The trouble is, I have to go back to my great, great grandfather, Joseph’s father, Matthias, to find a farmer in the family. I had no family role models, only stories.

Matthias was actually quite a guy.  As a younger son, he knew he was not in line to run the family vineyards on the north bank of the beautiful Mosel River across from Bernkastel, Germany.  He was a sharp student and went all the way to Trier to school – they called it gymnasium – and had Karl Marx as a classmate.  Whether true or not, family folklore has it that Karl won the award for literature in gymnasium and Matthias won it in math. 

The only other story remaining from that era was that Matthias was in gymnasium when the news of the death of the great German thinker and author, Goethe, interrupted classes.  Marx discussed Goethe’s life work with his teachers while the other boys played games.

Matthias immigrated to Grant County, Wisconsin, raised fourteen children spanning two wives and despised the communist writing of his former classmate, Carl Marx.  Matthias farmed his rich land and served as the town scribe of Muscoda.  He left us a lovely piece of writing called, simply, “Neighbors,” in which he tells of every farmer bordering him, their ethnic background, idiosyncrasies, farming practices and selected anecdotes.

Although Matthias would have been the perfect role model for me – the farmer who also loved literature and writing, I didn’t learn about him until I had already chosen the rural life.  My spirit thrives in the outdoors and working with my hands.  That balancing and grounding influence in my life would be difficult to find in an urban environment.

The Amish are more like Matthias than I am. From a very young age, they help in the gardens, ride horses, milk cows and butcher chickens.  At night, without television or radio, they read, visit, play games, do bookwork and write letters.  Most of the Amish kids I know love to read and do a lot of it.

I had a care-free childhood, growing up in friendly Kansas City and finishing school in Manila, Philippines and San Juan, Puerto Rico.  After four years in a demanding college I was turned loose on the world with the official American stamp of approval – a college diploma.  I didn’t realize until I’d farmed a little while that I was embarrassingly deficient in a commodity that was essential to farming and important in life as well: horse sense.

Horse sense, practicality, common sense, good judgment, call it what you will.  I value it because I came about it the hard way.  I could see that growing up Amish almost guarantees a healthy measure of horse sense.  Then there are a few exceptional people like Johnny Kurtz who take practicality to it’s highest level, like an art form. 

This giant switch in lifestyle – from 540-acre farm to 64-acre farm, from 80 momma cows to zero momma cows, from year-round livestock to three-season livestock, and from inefficient, old farmhouse to new, alternative home – represents our commitment to simplicity and practicality.  Paring down to the essentials in our life is like peeling the layers of onion skin away to find the core of ourselves.

And, yes, the onion skin metaphor is complete with tears.  As we shed the superficial layers we expose more of ourselves and have to deal honestly with who we are.  I am so lucky – though I’ve cursed it a thousand times – to have a mate who will not tolerate the slightest misunderstanding.  With dear Alice, there are no forbidden topics, no grey areas of communication left to fester, no issues set aside because they seem prickly, touchy, or unsolvable. 

With no children to split our attention and Alice’s unwavering dedication to keep us in tune with each other, our relationship became a toboggan ride of self discovery culminating in crafting a living and working environment in which we can thrive.  It is a thrilling adventure and the Amish play a very big part in it, not only as role models of simple, practical living, but as resources, friends and mirrors to help us see ourselves more clearly.

We are not consciously trying to live as simply as the Amish.  We are just trying to live exactly as we want and that means paring down a lot, getting rid of a lot of excessive chores and making life easier.

“Simple down, son,” my Jamesport buddy, Jim Woodward, puts it.  “We’ve got to simple down.”

To many, the simplicity of the Amish seems like suffering and self-denial.  No electricity.  How hard would that be for the rest of us?  Can you imagine life without lights at the flick of a switch?  Alice and I are used to no dish washers or clothes dryers now, but how about pins instead of buttons on Alice’s clothes?  Her fingers would be covered in band-aids!

And speaking of clothes, how about making clothes for all the family?  And – speaking of family – how about no birth control?  Fourteen children like Matthias is a lot but every Amish is related to a family that big or bigger!

When I focus on all the things they do without it seems like such a difficult life they lead.  And that’s what made William Ray’s comment so ironic. 

I never got to know William Ray Detweiler well enough to really break the ice.  We picked him up with the rest of the masonry crew, chatted a little on the drives and they worked hard.  It’s my experience that most of the Amish are a little standoffish with us “English” until you’ve spent enough time together to break the ice. 

Once the ice is broken, they shine from within.  The deceptions and game-playing of modern society are virtually non-existent among the Amish.  That trait that Alice values above all – honesty – is never in doubt.  They feel good about themselves and when they smile and laugh it is without hesitation or reservation.

William Ray stood back at a safe distance watching me weed-wipe the straw bale walls.  Wheat-straw dust billowed out of the room and covered me from head to toe.  I was trimming up the scraggly edges - sort of a wall hair cut - prior to applying the first mud plaster.

Alice and I had dealt with a certain amount of embarrassment over this house.  Sure, the three little pigs joke was a good yuck, but there was also some incredulity involved, too.  For the eight months the straw walls were bare and a parade of visitors saw them, we saw the insanity of the house through their eyes.  It looked like a barn.

“What about mice?” was usually the second question after, “What about fire?”

Fire was easy.  There’s so little air in a tight bale they don’t burn, they just smolder.  It takes four hours to burn through a straw bale wall compared to 15 minutes to burn through a typical frame wall.

The question of mice was trickier.  We shirked it easily saying, “Oh the walls will be covered and they won’t get in.”

We never mentioned that the straw bales were full of wheat and we had ourselves a real mouse vacation resort for quite some time.

The most horrific event – I can tell it now that, thank God, no one ever found out about it – I can blame on Cedar Rose.  She went too far that time.

“Can you get cow manure?” Cedar Rose asked us when we were finally ready to plaster the walls.

Can we get cow manure?  We considered ourselves cow manure experts, authorities, and connoisseurs!  We had made a study of judging the nutritional intake of livestock by assessing their nutritional output, that is, their poop.

If the poop is stacked up high, the diet is too fibrous to gain much, if any, weight.  If the poop is watery, there is too little fiber and the nutrients pass through too quickly to be absorbed.  There was every gradation of poop firmness in between, but the ideal bovine poop (and we made planning decisions based on this, really!) has the firmness of a pumpkin pie.  It’s spread out and an inch or two thick when it drops and holds a peak like whipped cream in the center.  That’s two to three pound-per-day-gain poop.  Good stuff.

“Why do we want manure?”

“Manure has proteins that make the best binding material with mud.”

This wasn’t a witch doctor formula.  Cedar Rose had studied earth home construction in France.  Maybe in some cafe a couple of Frenchmen right this minute are laughing their berets off and spewing their Merlot over the naïve American girl slopping cow crap on houses, I don’t know.

It didn’t take long for us to realize it was a bad joke.  Very bad.

Maybe our high octane, three-pound-a-day poop, had an extra offensive odor that Cedar Rose’s Rocky Mountain cow poop didn’t.  Whatever the case, we knew we’d made a huge mistake as soon as we’d spread it around a few window frames.

“It makes the best first layer,” she said.  “The following mud coat will bind strongly to it.”

Right.  All we knew is that the stench would gag a maggot.  We opened all the windows and doors and put a hex on the driveway to keep visitors away.  Thank God none showed up.  We could imagine how much fun our new neighbors would have with that!

A straw bale house was cute and weird.  But smearing cow dung on the walls?  Foul!  Kinky!  Satanic!  We’d never last in Jamesport if that got out. I finally stopped the weed wiping frenzy, stepped back out of the room to let the dust settle and noticed William Ray studying me from a safe distance.

“What are you doing?” he finally asked as I struggled to pull off my hat, fogged-up safety goggles, and tangled respirator.

“Giving the straw bales a haircut!” I grinned hoping he’d find humor in spite of the ridiculousness.  It didn’t sell.

He thought for a while, and then delivered the knockout punch before turning and walking away. 

“You sure do make things hard on yourself!”

I stood there watching William Ray walk away and nodding my head in agreement. A buggy-driving, electricity-shunning fellow thought I made things hard on myself!?  But I found the common thread between us and it was immediately satisfying.

A life of simplicity doesn’t just happen by doing nothing; that creates chaos.  Crafting a framework for simple living takes discipline, determination and, yes, a very occasional episode of “making things hard on yourself.”

Pre-Order Now!  Pay when it ships! Send name, address and  phone to info@featherman.net