Slim Randles'  Home Country

One Man Gets Started on His Dream

[March 08, 2008]  It was the sun that did it. The sun returning, making little things want to be big things, making frozen things want to be liquid things, making sleeping things want to be stretching things. It was the sun.

That's what we figure, anyway.

That's why our resident bunkhouse cowboy, Steve, started buying nails and two-by-fours and going to work behind his pickup parked there on the ranch where he works. It was the sun, warming that part of the backs of our necks that stimulates the "go" process. We went over and helped him saw and nail boards together, and before a week had gone by, he had an interesting looking stack of framed wall sections stacked up there.

We all knew about his obsession, of course. Steve has always dreamed of building a little cabin somewhere. It's not an unusual dream for a man whose way of life generally leads to living on other people's property and taking care of other people's livestock and other people's fences.

"I've been wanting a place," he told us one morning over coffee, "where I can go and nobody can kick me off. Nobody can fire me out of it or divorce me out of it, or anything else. A place that's paid for and I can just go there and stay there and starve if I have to. You know ... a hole-up place."

Oh, we knew. He's not the first guy to dream like that, and he won't be the last.

But nailing boards together on someone else's place didn't seem to fit the plan. We had always pictured Steve hewing away at a forest with an axe and notching up logs. But framing, it seems, is much faster, and, as Steve says, you can insulate the cabin better.

"So when are you going to put the cabin up?" said Doc, looking at the stack of nicely hammered frames.

"As soon as I get a piece of land," Steve says.

Some dreams just won't wait for escrow.

[Text from file received from Slim Randles]

Brought to you by your local tackle shop, if you'll promise to take a kid fishing with you this spring.