I live in the clouds

I live in the clouds. 2500 feet elevation doesn’t seem like much but here in the Gorge it’s where the clouds linger, sometimes for days at a time. The temperature is 10-15 degrees cooler than the nearby town of Hood River. The air is thick and moist, the tall evergreens that line the property appear as silent mystical giants, standing so still as they fade in the distance. I love it. It’s a juxtaposition from our summer which was so hot and dry with no end in sight. Now as I look at a weather app, the chance of rain range from 60%-100%, repeated day after day, for eternity it seems. On days like these, all I want to do is make food, whether it’s cooking or baking, it doesn’t really matter but there’s definitely going to be soup involved. I feel lucky to be with a man that is as much of a soup lover as I am. We’ll make a weekly batch and warm ourselves at mealtime served with a slice of fresh baked sourdough.

One must have a freshly baked loaf on hand when soup is nearby. Simply a must. With the weather being as it is we had a big bake this week, making four different types of loaves using my sourdough starter. A wholewheat raisin loaf, something I always bake because it’s my favorite breakfast. A slice toasted with butter, a sprinkle of sea salt on top and coffee is my go to. The other loaves were a polenta with pepitas and thyme, a country loaf, using part of the batch as pizza dough, and an aged white cheddar cheese loaf which turned out so well I still mourn the loss of one of the loaves, which I dropped on my big toe, breaking the bowl it was resting in. The cheddar loaf was the winner this bake, the rise was perfect, the crust was caramelized and crunchy, the interior was as soft as the clouds we were living in. And the smell!! Cheddar baked into sourdough is heavenly. Maybe I should make tomato soup….

Besides cooking and baking we have been working on the barn this month using the rough cut wood that was used for the stalls to enclose the barn in a board and batten fashion, and installed a sliding barn door to the south. I plan on using the space to host future t.b.d. dinners. The barn is big enough to house our Lil Loafer, a very small and adorable camper trailer from the 1960’s, that serves us perfectly when it’s a little too cold and or rainy to camp in a tent. The trailer is all original and when I say it’s tiny, it’s minuscule but it has everything one needs, a bed, a sink, oven, small icebox. Everything except for a toilet, but I’ve always felt that going out in nature is not only freeing but how it’s meant to be. So that doesn’t bother me at all. The Lil Loafer is so cute, it’s comical hitched to Mitchell’s truck being towed on gravel roads in the back country. But we don’t care, it’s so freaking cute!!! And it is already loved so much. I look forward to many trips this fall and spring in her.

But back to the barn. The plan is to clean it out as best as possible after housing years of chickens, horses and alpaca. When we arrived here there were twenty plus chickens with the ability to roam freely throughout the barn and property. Chickens are gross, that’s what I have learned. They shit everywhere, step in it and track their feces all over, feathers flying about. They churn up the ground looking for things to eat in their coop and wherever else they have access. So we had to be careful where we stepped and extra careful not to step in anything to track the shit throughout the house. Because yes, we live in a barn house that shared a wall with the chicken coop. Half of the barn is the house, the other half a barn that had four stalls and a large chicken coop for the chickens to live and roam. At first I loved the idea of having and taking care of chickens, I’ve never had the pleasure before. But pleasure soon turned to disgust once we found out that we had a serious mouse infestation.

When we first toured the home it wasn’t evident. We were so excited about the possibilities of having so much space and acreage to play around on that we didn’t notice the smell. It was when we were first moving a few things in that he caught the scent coming from the ceiling in the bathroom. I’ll never forget it, the wide range of four letter words that came out of his mouth and the sudden drop of positive energy, gave me that sinking feeling in my stomach. Then I smelled it…the scent of years of urine and feces that soaked through the drywall in the ceiling in the bathroom was overwhelming!! How did we miss that??? It was so bad, we had to get outside immediately and once there we looked at each other in disbelief. We had been looking forward to moving in, discussing our plans on how to set up each room, I was so ready to get my nesting on. But he knew what it would take to get rid of that smell and to make the house sanitary to live in. If it was that bad, that meant that there were mice everywhere! But we had already signed a lease, could we back out? Where would we live, we already put in our month’s notice at the apartment…

Mitchell is a contractor and a home inspector, he asked permission to pull up some floor boards in the loft of the barn where the bathroom was underneath. His suspicions were correct after the first board was removed, piles of mouse droppings lay on top of the drywall and dried urine stains were everywhere, and the smell was nauseating. He scooped out 5 gallons worth of shit that day, called the landlord to give them the news and left the property disgusted and discouraged. Having no where else to go, I still held out hope for this place and together we worked out a plan to get rid of the smell. First, we tried using a spray, Nature’s Miracle Urine Destroyer, after removing the saturated insulation and mouse droppings and doused the drywall with the odor fighting enzyme and waited…Then we sprayed again, and again and waited. The walls were so permeated with piss no matter how much we sprayed and waited, we couldn’t get rid of the smell completely.

As we stood in the hallway, outside of the bathroom, discussing our options, we noticed the smell again, this time right above our heads. We followed the smell through the hallway and into the living room. Mitchell grabbed a screw gun, and took down a part of the ceiling. More droppings rained down on us as we lowered the drywall to the ground. We were in disbelief…mice can get in very easily if there is space for them and it doesn’t take that much for them to squeeze through a hole. We followed their network of walkways and nests finding grain and chicken feed stored for the winter months among their dried piss and shit. The path went along the electrical wires in the ceiling between the floors, from the bathroom out to the barn, making an L shape. Whoever built this barn house did a very shotty job leaving openings for mice to get through with ease and by having a shared walled with the chicken coop meant these mice had easy access to food and warmth throughout the years. At this point we wanted to walk away, feeling so pessimistic and dirty from having mouse turds falling around us for weeks.

It was the view from our back window, the evergreens that lined the property that kept our hopes alive. We loved it here. We were away from the city, we could have a garden in the spring, I could host dinner parties here, the view of the trees and the sunsets were incredible. We wanted to be here and it was worth the literal shitstorm we’ve been through to make it our home. So we persevered, having to replace the ceiling and insulation in the bathroom, hallway and living room, spraying the urine fighting enzyme along the way. The work didn’t stop there, we had to tape, spackle, sand, clean and repeat several times, then finally paint. And along the way we recreated our space into something new that was clean and free of mice, finding and filling the holes that the mice could get through so we could feel confident that this wouldn’t happen again, not while we lived here at least. We even bought two barn cats and got rid of the chickens (they went to another farm) because the mice were attracted to their feed and the grain in the hay that lined the floor of their coop. Don’t share walls with chickens and for god sake, build structures correctly!

I learned so much during this whole process, actually loving the work of building, putting up drywall, using a screw gun, taping and spackling and even painting because in the end we love our home. The greatest thing I learned is that Mitchell and I work so well together, it has brought us even closer and I feel like our relationship is at a new level of trust in each other and finding comfort in the other when things seem impossible. I’m very grateful for this experience and I long for the next project because making something better is so satisfying no matter what the project is.