Winterizing Season Approacheth

By Donald Holmes Lewis

Published  on July 17 in The Cheboygan Daily Tribune.  \

 

     O.K. Let’s be honest. We’re well past the Fourth of July. During the last couple of days, it dawned on me like a two by four to the forehead. Winterize now. We’ve moved to a summer cottage, we don’t have a lot of dough. We’re the leaky faucet of summer homes in Cheboygan County. Major insulation needs and our place on Mullett Lake is now our year round abode. A voice in my ear, that little guy inside who knows what he’s talking about, is telling me that killer cold weather is only four months downstream and my grasshopper days are numbered. Time for action. But what action?

     First things first. Plumbing. Pipes freeze at twenty below Fahrenheit. I called the plumber guys and they came right out. As they got out of their truck, they looked like Sherlock Holmes and Dr. Watson with denim work shirts. Plumbing detectives on a mysterious case. Following them from room to room, from pump house to the garage, I noticed them shaking their heads, musing about solutions and following leads. Flashlights in their hands, they peered into my crawl space under the cottage, a dark and dangerous Middle Earth. In the bright yellow light of morning, they asked me questions as though I was the only witness to a crime.

     “Any insulation in the walls?” said the tall skinny man, the one obviously in charge.

    “I don’t know. I think so.”

    “Because you don’t have any in the attic or under the house either. You do have an extended family of chipmunks down there though.”

    When they drove off I had a prognosis. Trouble. And I had a list of recommendations: insulate everything, wrap the pipes in heat tape, and forget using the back cabin in winter because all the pipes run through an unheated garage. Cripes, I said to myself. The laundry room is in the back cabin. I got sudden visions of trips to the laundromat in town through howling blizzards. My wife is going to be absolutely thrilled about this.

     After an hour on the World Wide Web, I had a list of things I could tackle on my own. It was one item long. Insulate the attic. An article on Wikipedia pointed me in the right direction. Rent a machine that blows a mixture of recycled newsprint and a bonding material and shoot the stuff into the attic making sure not to get any on the attic ceiling which is the underside of the roof because condensation will soak the stuff and you’ll have a real mess. Don’t cover the vents at all.

     It was clear you had to be a pretty good shot with the nozzle or you could make matters worse. I took the pencil from behind my ear and reluctantly drew a line through my only do-it-yourself scheme. I needed some help. I remembered my mom telling me when I was ten years old ‘there’s nothing wrong with asking for help’ and my mom was always right.    

     I called my handyman Ken who’d said he needed whatever work he could get this summer and told him I had some things for him to do. He showed up just after dinner.     

     As the wind came up from the northeast and threw our words around the yard like confetti, he tried to summarize the situation.

    “What exactly does a consultant do?’ he asked sincerely.

    “You know, consult. Give advice.”

    “But you want me to insulate the crawl spaces and wrap the pipes with heat tape. I do that myself.”

    “Right. I’m just too big to slide around under there.”

    “And I go rent the machine for the attic and do that.”

    “I’ll be your assistant on the attic project.”

    “O.K. I guess I’ve been a consultant all my life.”

    Before Ken left, he did a walkabout through the cottage. He didn’t say a word as he looked around, popping his head up through the trap door to the attic, knocking on the pine walls with his ear pressed to the wood, opening and shutting the front and side doors. He stared at the fireplace for a few minutes and then crouched inside the sooty space with his neck and head cranked around like a great curious bird.

     Back outside again, he slithered on his back with arms tight to his side through the opening to the crawl space. He looked like a man sneaking back into a prison after a night on the town. He seemed to have trouble for a second like he was pinned down by the house as hard and fast as the wicked witch in Munchkin Land. He rolled over, toes in the dirt, and struggled back out.

     On his feet again, he smiled.

    “Piece of cake.”

    “Really?”

    “This will be fun.”

    “Fun?”

    I followed him to his truck where he scribbled some things on a coffee stained legal pad. The writing didn’t come easily for him. His knuckles were stiff and painful looking and I could tell he was fighting to get his spelling right.

    “Besides the attic and under cottage work, here’s what I’d do, Mr. Lewis,” he said, handing me his notes. “I’ll call you tomorrow. And thanks for the job.”

     As his old red pickup disappeared down my gravel road, I put on my reading glasses and studied his scribbles: new doors, new storm doors, fireplace insert, wood burning furnace, insulated vinyl siding. The last one I could barely make out but finally did. Snow Blower. 

Carpenter Ants in the Back Cabin

By Donald Holmes Lewis

Published on July 10, 2009 in The Cheboygan Daily Tribune.

    

     This past Tuesday I made another list. I had a lot of things on it I wanted to do, almost fifteen total, and a couple my wife put on it for me. My stuff started with “Split More Wood” but her two stared at me in a way that blurred everything else: “Ants” and “Mice.”  

     After coffee, she led me across the yard, up the outside stairway, and into to the back cabin bedroom over the garage.  In the smallest bedroom, the one you can hardly fit a single bed into, she pointed to the wall where she’d pulled back a piece of duct tape that someone, me, had placed over a hole in the wall five years ago.

     “Carpenter ants. Look at the saw dust. I can almost hear them chewing on our wood for breakfast.”

     “I’ll call the pest control people.”

     “You are the pest control people.”

     “What about the mice?”

     “They’re not eating the house.”

     At the Do It Center store, a man with a red vest walked me down the aisle where you select weapons for this kind of war. Winking at me from their places on the shelves were the WMD of insect killers. There was one, the Hot Shot Fogger, which drew me to the label.

     “What’s in this stuff?” I asked innocently.

     “Bug killer for the most part.”

     When the man left me alone, I went through an amateur analysis of ingredients on all the different products. I had to use my reading glasses the print was so small.  All I could discern was the simple fact that whatever you get is diluted by close to 99% or more. Strong stuff. But while most of the labels bragged about killing power, when it came to carpenter ants every fogger and sprayer noted the importance of finding the nests. Nests? Nests are for birds.

     Rather than make a purchase, I figured a trip home to research carpenter ants on the internet might be a better idea.

     Google. Carpenter Ants. Google. Carpenter Ant Nests. A 559,000 search history. A lot of people have ant problems.

     The more I read, the less I felt ready to tackle the problem. First, I got the general picture. They don’t eat wood. They nest in wood. That’s where the damage comes from. That wasn’t going to make my wife any happier about living with them. They have a caste system like in India. There’s the Queens. That figures. Winged Males. Of course aren’t we all.  Major Workers. That was easier before the economic crisis. Minor Workers. That’s the category  my wife would most likely pick for me. I wasn’t getting anywhere, especially since the articles all talked about the importance of finding the nests and how difficult that can be.

     So I switched to identification versus other bugs. Maybe we didn’t have carpenter ants at all. Maybe we just had Visitor Ants and they already had their bags packed, ready to vacation in the great outdoor. I learned to spot the difference between regular ant workers and the more ambitious carpenter ant workers. I wondered if they checked in at the union hall before getting work.

    Termites versus carpenter ants. No problem. Not that I didn’t have termites at our cottage. But they were not the enemy of the moment.

     I discovered things about the seasonal habits of carpenter ants. North facing nests stay dormant all winter. South ones have a creepy crawling movement to them year round. I read about how the Queens drop their wings when they’re ready to mate. Sounded familiar. I took pity on the poor guys in the trenches searching for food. They all need moisture. Wet places with room to spread out the furniture. Their outside nests usually start in rotting woodpiles and then they make for the hotel where they prefer sugar snacks to anything else.

     That was it. Rotting, wet, unattended for years kind of wood. I’d been collecting it for over a decade behind the garage right below the new headquarters of the Mullet Lake Carpenter Ant Association, dues optional. My back cabin bedrooms.

     It took me no more than a half hour to get to the hardware store again and get back with my super ant killer spray bottle, the one with a handy attachment for mass application in case my adversaries noticed what I was up to and attacked. I would if someone threatened my fancy new digs.

     An hour later I was finished. Of course, according to the literature it would take a month to know whether I commanded an effective deterrent to their invasion. In fact, one line haunted me. It said “you may never now if carpenter ants have been completely eradicated.” But I crossed “Ants” off my list. Next up: “Mice.” Back to the computer. 

Looking for Five to Nine Horse Outboard Motor

                                                  Looking for Five to Nine Horse Outboard Motor

                                                                By Donald Holmes Lewis

 

Published June 26, 2009 in the Cheboygan Daily Tribune.

 

       I made a new year’s resolution this past January in secret. I didn’t tell my wife because most of my promises about changing my very nature have the life span of a mayfly. I resolved to learn to do things myself—to fix all the broken things around our cottage, to paint and chop and dig and replace and beautify. Unfortunately, I’m no good with mechanical and electrical things. A number two spade maybe, but not much else. The toaster scoffs at me and burns my bread. The door knobs come off in my hand. In fact, my Jeep ran away from home last week.  

       As I was about to pack the last few boxes in my car for our move up here from Ohio, I walked outside for fresh air on a bright sunny day, looked up and down the street with keys jingling in my hand, and couldn’t find my Jeep. Where did I put it? How could I lose something as big and black as a car? I’ve only loved and felt affinity enough to name two cars in my life and Betty, the Jeep, was one of them. Where had she gone? Did she run off for a quick oil change or a much needed pass through the car wash? I called the police. These things take time, they said. No doubt your car will turn up in a few days.

       I took a plane up north after finding a pretty good fare and pondered the loss of stalwart Betty the whole way. I decided the cure for my ills was to buckle down and get started on my New Year’s Resolution. I would make sure everything around our cottage was in proper working condition: electrics, plumbing, power tools, everything.

       Standing in my grimy garage, I faced the real problem. I don’t know much about how anything works.

       Begin with the simple things, I whispered to myself. The wily Weed Whacker? No weeds to whack at the moment. Maybe the manly Circular Saw? No carpentry needed. The Snow Blower? Wrong season. Leaf Blower. No leaves and wrong season again.

       Then I saw it under the boat tarp, the perfect choice for a man without wheels or any other method of propelling himself into an uncertain future. THE OUTBOARD MOTOR—an engine to take me anywhere from Cheboygan to Mullett to Burt and beyond! It was the little five-horse-power beauty I’d grown up with as a kid on the lakes of northern Minnesota. I had hundreds of hours of flight time with this handsome, white topped 1961 Evinrude, a housewarming present from my older brother for our move up north. Our wooden Lyman boat was licensed and already in the water just waiting for its maiden voyage of summer.

        Beside the motor stood a gas tank, its hose anxious to be clipped into place, yearning for partnership—all the planets were aligned!  I was in business and there was plenty of fuel for a good long test ride around the lake. Maybe I’d do a lot of fishing this year and bring home the bacon the old fashioned way. Free at last.

        I changed into my swim trunks and lugged the motor and tank to the dock. The sun came out but the water was still 50 degrees and I felt my legs go numb as I locked the motor in place at the stern. This was a new era. Look how easily things were falling into place. See how logical and satisfying a man, a boat, a motor, and a tank full of gas can be. It was beautiful in its simplicity.

        I got in, put the throttle on start and pulled the cord. It started like a veteran of a million voyages, the low throated murmur of neutral with bubbles rising. I shifted the gear bar and taxied out past the buoys. Cruising along with a five horse isn’t exactly racing speed but exhilarating nonetheless. I was pretty darn proud of myself. I rode in circles in front of the dock, steered a straight line to Dodge Point and back to really warm her up.

         Then I heard a vaguely familiar sneeze and wheeze, that unmistakable sudden bit of huffing and puffing. Then a terminal cough. I imagine it’s the noise you’d hear if the earth stood still, the sudden stopping of time.

        It only took an hour to row home. I borrowed my wife’s car and drove into town with the outboard and the fuel tank. At the marina, Jerry gave me the bad news.

       “This tank doesn’t have any oil in it, man. You burned it up, and they don’t make parts for these anymore.”

       “Oil?”

       “You need about a twenty to one mixture depending on the engine. All these little motors run with oil in the gas.”

      “My brother gave me the motor and the tank. That’s not possible.”

      “Call your brother.”

       I called. Jerry was right. My brother didn’t leave me a tank. He figured I’d remember about the oil when I got my own. I’d attached the little outboard to an old tank left in the garage years before by a summer guest who hadn’t mixed it with any oil at all.

        Despite this setback, I’m still committed to doing things myself and fixing things myself. Two steps forward, one back. That’s the story of life itself.  Nonetheless I’ll take this opportunity to place a free classified with the Daily Tribune: Looking for a Three to Nine Horse Outboard Motor. Call 1-231-268-3688.