We bought another boat.

If you’ve been following this space, you know we already had enough boats to make a raft of armada jokes possible, so you’re probably questioning our boat-buying strategy.

The newest addition to the fleet

Well, it’s like this. We made a mistake. The 14-foot Carolina Skiff we bought last fall just isn’t big enough to do what we need done on the oyster grant, so we bought a replacement – a 17-foot Carolina Skiff.

I use the term “replacement” loosely, since we still have the J14. It is, however, officially for sale, so if you know anyone who needs a wicked fast 14-foot flat-bottom skiff with a 25-horse four-stroke Honda outboard, you know who to call.

The 17-foot version is much larger. It’s not just three feet longer – it’s also much deeper and wider, and it can probably fit something like three times the amount of equipment. Its previous owner — a commercial fisherman – equipped it with a scallop table (a kind of platform that goes from gunwale to gunwale near the stern) and a big pole you can attach a dredge to.

The boat isn’t just bigger, it’s cleaner. We repowered it with a brand-spanking-new 50-horse Evinrude E-Tec, a super-efficient motor with almost zero emissions. And those of you with any boating experience might not credence this, but when you turn the key in the starter, the engine just starts and quietly goes about its business. You don’t have to do the Please Start Dance, you don’t have to sacrifice a goat to Rev, God of Engines. The E-Tec doesn’t cough or sputter, it doesn’t roar and then conk out, it doesn’t give you any lip at all. It starts, and it runs. Hallelujah.

Although we’d had the boat out once or twice since we got the engine, yesterday was its inaugural working trip, schlepping trays out to the flats.

We’d planned to do it the day before. We’d loaded it up with the trays in the driveway, and hooked it to the truck. Then, as we were moving it, we heard a nasty cracking sound, and the left side of the boat dropped a few inches.

It was the leaf spring. It sprung.

Since it was almost two years ago that the same thing happened on the boat trailer under our bigger boat, you probably aren’t aware of the particular antipathy I bear leaf springs.

One of the unfortunate aspects of boat ownership is that, if you’re going to have a boat, you have to have a boat trailer, and if you have a boat trailer you have to have leaf springs. But the shortcomings of boat trailers aren’t limited to their suspension system. Pretty much everything about them sucks. They’re not standard sizes, so it’s hard to get the right parts. And you need parts often, because the constant dips in salt water corrode absolutely everything. Boat trailer parts are heavy, rusty, and sharp, and Kevin’s here to tell you that it’s impossible to do even the most minor repair without bleeding.

What makes fixing a boat trailer most difficult, though, is the presence of the boat on it. Your chances of fixing the trailer without incurring bodily harm is maximized if you can get the boat off of it.

The best way to do this is to put the boat in the water. But the Catch-22 of boat trailer repair is that, just when you need to get your boat off your trailer, you can’t get to the water because your trailer’s broken. That’s when you resort to the old tree trick, where you tie the back of the boat to a tree and slowly pull the trailer out from under it, inserting blocks under the boat as you go.

The first time Kevin tried this trick, it was with the J14, and he tied it to that little strip between our two garage doors. I drove the truck and pulled the trailer out, listening for cracking sound that would preface the collapse of the garage.

That didn’t happen, but this time, with a heavier boat, Kevin wasn’t going to take any chances; he used a tree. The trailer slid out without a hitch, and we were ready to go.

Between the last fixing of a trailer and this fixing of a trailer, Kevin picked up an important piece of advice from Billy, who, with his sister Cindy, runs Anchor Outboard. That’s where we get our boat work done, and we’ve come to rely on Cindy and Billy for guidance, inside information, and parts.

When Kevin went in to buy the leaf springs, Billy said, “I’ve got one tip for you that’ll make working on trailers much, much easier.”

Kevin had done enough work on trailers that he doubted one tip could change everything, but he was all ears.

“Turn the trailer upside down,” Billy told him.

Holy cow. That changes everything. When you turn the trailer upside down, the leaf springs are exposed and accessible, and the world is a better place. It took most of the day, but Kevin got the leaf springs changed, and did a few other trailer-repair jobs while he was at it.

The trailer took the boat to the ramp, put it in, pulled it out, and took it home again without incident, and we’re hoping that the rest of spring passes with no more sprunging. We’ve got work to do.

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I’m generally quick to take full credit for my mistakes, but it’s not because I’m particularly virtuous. It’s just that it makes for a better story. Nobody wants to hear about how other people screwed you, but a story in which you’re the goat, well that’s riveting.

So it is with some trepidation that I take keyboard in hand to share the blame.

In the last three years, since we moved to Cape Cod, I’ve done many jobs I’d never done before. In doing so, I’ve had close encounters with many tools, some of which – like the power washer – I hadn’t even known existed. Many of those tools, particularly the ones powered by fossil fuels, are excellent labor-saving devices. A few of them, though, just plain suck.

Usually, the inadequacy comes in the execution, as with the cheap metal rake with the tines that opened and closed. They opened, they closed, and then they broke. With the gas-powered tools, the failures are more mysterious. The thing works, and then it doesn’t, and you’re damned if you can figure out why.

Sometimes, though, the failure is more fundamental. Despite being the industry standard, the Langstroth beehive seems to me to have some serious design flaws. And don’t get me started on the controls of our boat.

Today, though, I’m taking issue with a simple machine, a gardening staple, a fixture in every suburban garage in the country. I hate wheelbarrows.

The wheelbarrow has been with us for almost two thousand years, having been invented in China some time in the second or third century AD. It is not without serious consideration that I dis an invention of the Chinese, since I’m convinced they’re smarter than the rest of us and are headed for world domination as soon as they all have the Internet. But the wheelbarrow just isn’t up there with gunpowder, the compass, or paper.

The fundamental problem with the wheelbarrow is that it has only one wheel. I mean, really, We all know that, in order for a structure to be stable, it needs three points on the ground. When the wheelbarrow is idle, it has those three points. But as soon as you pick up the handles, it’s only got two: the wheel is one, and you’re the other. Oh, sure, you have two feet, but they’re not far enough apart to provide stability, even if you’re Yosemite Sam. Besides, they’re both on the ground only when you’re standing still, and most work that involves a wheelbarrow requires going from one place to another.

The point of the one-wheel design, I’ve been led to believe, is maneuverability. But we all know that “maneuverable” is a euphemism for “capsizable,” which is what the wheelbarrow is. You pick up the handles, you start rolling the thing up a rocky slope. You find it requires considerable upper-body strength to keep it more-or-less level, and you work hard to fight both gravity and instability. Then you trip on a root, and the whole thing goes over.

It’s not so difficult if you have a light load, but if you have a light load you might as well just carry it. The point of a wheelbarrow is to let you transport things that are heavy.

I wasn’t willing to launch into a full-scale condemnation of the wheelbarrow until I checked in with Kevin. He often understands the rationale of what seem to me to be design flaws.

“So what’s the advantage of the one wheel?” I asked.

He considered. “You can only get one flat tire,” he said. And then added, “at a time.”

Well, there’s a ringing endorsement.

There are wheelbarrows with two wheels. I’ve never used one, but I suspect they’re much more stable, if less “maneuverable.” When I get one, I’m sure my garden will be greener, my property will be cleaner, and all my heavy stuff – stones, wood, dirt – will be in its proper place.

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I’m very excited about my groovy new fishing rod, and I can’t wait for the stripers to arrive so I can try it out. But there is a little voice, deep inside, asking me whether I wouldn’t rather be the kind of fisherman who can catch anything – anything at all – with a willow branch and bakery string.

I am deeply ambivalent about good equipment. On the one hand, I understand the value of clothing, gear, machines, and firearms that are well-designed, of appropriate materials, and built to last. Not only do those kinds of items generally out-perform similar items of inferior quality, they’re often a pleasure to hold, to look at, to use.

On the other hand, I have profound respect for the willow-branch-and-bakery-string guy. One part of the appeal of good equipment is undoubtedly the lure of acquisition, the siren song of stuff.

The clam-digging tines on my Ribb rake

Two years ago, on the first birthday I spent on Cape Cod, Kevin gave me a clam rake. It’s an A1 quality rake from Ribb Rakes, a small company here on Cape Cod. It has long, sharp, curved tines to dig under clams, and it has a stainless steel basket that won’t rust. It is a much more effective rake than the $10. job I got at a yard sale, and it has undoubtedly paid for itself in clams.

I only knew how much better the Ribb rake was because I’d spent many hours on the clam flats learning to clam with crappy equipment. In that particular case, I felt like I’d earned the right to a good rake with time served. I’d proven myself as a clammer.

But it’s relatively easy to prove yourself as a clammer. Not so with other activities.

Back when I was serious about my golf game, I didn’t want any clubs in my bag that were better than I was. When I consistently shot in the low 90s I splurged on a set of Cleveland fairway woods, but it was always in the back of my mind that Lee Trevino could hit a golf ball 120 yards with a Dr. Pepper bottle.

But to hit that 3-wood on the screws, and watch the ball fly up to a green, that was a beautiful thing.

My fishing skills aren’t what they might be. They’re certainly better than they were, but there’s a lot more I could learn with the equipment I have, which is several steps up from the willow branch. Still, I remember struggling to muscle in a ten-pound bluefish last year because my reel was flexing in my hand.

But, really, a fishing rod is just a bendy stick. Sure, the reel is important, but I already have a replacement for the flexing model: a Penn 550ss. (Which, like the clam rake, I picked up at a yard sale for $10. Unlike the clam rake, it was an amazing bargain; it’s a very good reel.) I could put the reel on the rod I have, which certainly qualifies as a bendy stick.

Was I hearing stuff’s siren song? How can a $200. bendy stick be so very different from a $20. bendy stick? Or even a willow branch?

Well, there’s how it bends, where it bends, and how much it bends. There’s how well it transmits the feel of a bite. There’s how far it casts, and how long it lasts. Will the little hoops the line runs through rust? Will the handle be slippery when wet?

The first cast

My Shimano isn’t anywhere near the high end of the fishing-rod spectrum. We spent $110, and we could easily have spent twice that, or even three times. But we also could have spent half that, or even less. And, standing in the store, flicking it back and forth, I couldn’t know how the rod would feel once it had a line and a lure on it, let alone a fish.

When we got it home, Kevin rigged it with the Penn reel, and a line and a lure. I put my waders on and walked out into our pond. I took a cast, and watched the little Deadly Dick lure sail out over the water. I can’t tell you how far – it’s tough to judge distance over water – but I can tell you I couldn’t have done it with the old rig.

As much as I appreciate the idea of catching a fish with a willow branch, what I really want is to catch a fish.

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One of the members had brought a brochure for a workshop entitled “Voluntary Simplicity,” about, presumably, living simply without being coerced. Kevin leafed through it, and stumbled across a cartoon of a guy who was showing another guy the bumper of his car, where he’d just affixed an “I Love the Simple Life” bumpersticker. “I love that bumpersticker so much,” the proud owner was saying, “that I put in on all three of my cars and both my boats.”

Needless to say, I did not think this was funny.

The paraphernalia required to live in a shack and grow your own food never ceases to amaze me. Our garage is an environmentalist’s nightmare, what with the toxic chemicals, heavy-duty plastics, and gasoline engines. And then there’s the three cars and the two boats. And don’t forget the three trailers! We’ll need bumperstickers for those, too.

It’s when something breaks that I really question the need for all this stuff. This week, it was the truck.

Our pickup truck is a 1999 Mazda (a Ford Ranger by another name), and it started acting funny a couple weeks ago. The overdrive light on the dashboard would start blinking after you drove it a couple of miles, and then the shifting (it’s an automatic) would get heavy and rough. We gave it a few days to make sure the problem wouldn’t just go away, but no such luck.

Old Faithful

While we were waiting, though, the dashboard of our 2004 Saab lit up like a Christmas tree. This could be because the car knew it had recently come off warranty, or it could be because Kevin drove it on the beach and got its entire underbelly coated with sea grass. (And a flat tire in the bargain.) Either way, it needed attention.

That makes our 1970 Land Rover our most reliable vehicle.

We took the truck and the car to Gus, our mechanic, and asked him which repair was more urgent. The truck, he said, and recommended a transmission shop he knew and trusted.

Yup. It needed a rebuilt transmission, a job that cost fully half of what the truck is worth.

I will admit to balking. It crossed my mind that we could live in Manhattan without any car at all, let alone a car, a truck, another truck, two boats, and three trailers.

But then it crossed my mind that one of the best days I’ve had in the two years we’ve been doing this was this past August, when Kevin and I took the boat out to Horseshoe Shoal, in Nantucket Sound. It was a beautiful day, and we caught bluefish after bluefish as we circled the shallows. I’d been working extraordinarily hard, and to be out on the water, untethered from the Internet, alone with my husband, was glorious.

A day like that requires a boat. A boat requires a truck. A truck requires a transmission.

I’m not giving up days like that

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We’d been doing a lot of clamming, and we’d lost tines on three rakes – one of our recreational rakes, our bull rake, and our friend Les’s bull rake, which he’d lent to us.

My rake, with all its tines

Time to make a trip to Ribb Rakes, which makes (and repairs) high-quality clam rakes.

I think you can tell a lot about a place by what sorts of businesses don’t have signs. When we lived in New York, it was the kind of after-hours clubs that served absinthe to supermodels. And there was this one restaurant in the Village, which I thought was pretty hip but, judging by the fact that I’ve been there, probably isn’t.

On Cape Cod, though, it’s the clam-rake repair shop that doesn’t have a sign. Only the cognoscenti get to rake with all their tines.

The Ribb Rakes web site has no address. The shop is on a little residential street, and there’s no indication that welding is going on, and clam rakes are being fabricated.

I don’t remember how I found out where it was (you can call, but they don’t always answer the phone). My first visit there was over a year ago, when I wrote an article on clamming for Edible Cape Cod. In it, I sang the praises of the rake Kevin had given me for by birthday – the Ribb “Snappin’ Turtle” model, a long-tined, mean-looking version that, in the article, I said looked like Freddy Krueger’s clam rake.

I hadn’t been there since, but I got us there with only one wrong turn.

We took the rakes out of the back of the truck, and the welder came out of the shop to see what we needed.

If your mental image of a welder is a big old burly guy in one of those Darth Vader helmets, you need to pay a visit to Ribb Rakes (I might even tell you where it is). The welder there is named Greta, and she’s young, and slim, and female. And although I’m no judge of a weld, people who are say she’s very good at what she does.

She does wear the Darth Vader helmet.

It was Greta who came out and said hello when we pulled into the yard. Kevin introduced himself, told her he was a newly minted oyster farmer cleaning clams off his grant, and then introduced me.

“You look familiar,” Greta said.

“I visited a while back because I did a clamming story for Edible Cape Cod,” I said, dubious that she’d remember something so far in the hazy distant past. I figured she saw me at Stop & Shop.

But I was wrong.

“That’s it.” she said. I remember you. You like the Snappin’ Turtle. Freddy Krueger’s clam rake.”

Now, a sure-fire way to make me your friend for life is to remember one of my jokes, especially if it’s over a year old.

“I can’t believe you remember that,” I told her.

“Usually, people take clam rakes much too seriously,” she said. “So I remember that.”

I like Greta. And she repaired all our rakes, overnight.

So, not only do I know where Ribb Rakes is, I have an in with the welder. From there, it’s just a hop, skip, and a jump to absinthe with supermodels.

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The eaves on the house are coated with tree crud. The siding on the shed is turning green. The armada, every boat of it, is slimy on the bottom and grimy on the top. And don’t even get me started on the cars.

And, now, today, at the ripe old age of 47, I have learned why we haven’t been able to keep things clean.

We didn’t have a power washer!

Or, we did, but it didn’t work. Kevin took it to the shop this week, and two days and 87 dollars later, we had a working power washer.

He brought it home today, hooked up the water, fired up the motor, and WHSSSSH! Out came a jet that would do a riot control officer proud.

No more boat ramp embarrassment!

Kevin aimed it at the big boat, and the deck started to look, if not absolutely white, at least something on the right side of gray. The center console had turned positively black, and the water ate through the potent combination of mildew, mold, and seagull shit like it was nothing.

I hereby declare that I will never again be without a power washer. I am done – done! – with all this scrub-a-dub-dub bullshit. Elbow grease may be fine for building character, but when it comes to actually cleaning stuff, a 6.75-horsepower engine is what’s called for.

Do you suppose they make one for indoors?

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He acquired the machine, for free, from a very nice real estate broker in Orleans. He stripped it down to just console and drum, and mounted it on two picnic table benches. He ordered the rubber fingers online, and drilled out holes to attach them to the drum.

The chicken plucker

Forty-eight three-quarter inch holes later, we had our chicken plucker.

Kevin wanted to put a simple on/off switch to replace the console, but we discovered, too late, that the wiring schematic, which we’d need to see which wires would have to be attached to the switch, was on the inside of the washing machine housing, which we’d taken to the dump.

So, to make the thing work, we have to turn the knob to “Spin.”

Kevin hates this. He wants a switch. But I figure that, as long as it makes the thing spin, there’s no problem. And, once he had it all assembled, that’s exactly what it did. You turn the knob to “Spin,” pull it out, and the drum spins. (And, if we get quail, we can put it on “Delicate.”)

To really put it to the test, though, we needed an actual, genuine bird.

Our first scheduled plucking is Drumstick, our alpha male turkey and designated Thanksgiving entrée. But there’s a lot riding on Thanksgiving dinner, and we wanted to be able to test the plucker before then.

Enter Sam.

Sam is the sixteen-year-old son of my high-school friend Ellen, who happens to live in the next town. How we both ended up in the wilds of Cape Cod, a good 250 miles from our high school but a mere five miles from each other, is a mystery. Perhaps Ellen and her husband, John, foresaw the day when we would need their son to bring his chickens over to test our chicken plucker.

This past Saturday, that day came.

Sam, preparing the first bird

Sam had two hens that were reaching the end of their laying life, and he wanted to send them to the great henhouse in the sky to make room for his new flock. When I first wrote about Kevin’s chicken plucker, he volunteered them for a test run. We took him up on it, and decided we’d make a day of it. We’d process the chickens, and then I’d make dinner for all of us – Kevin and me, Ellen and John, and Sam and his two siblings, Zach and Kaitlyn.

I knew the two hens, which were over two years old, would be pretty tough, so I planned to stew them with white beans and carrots. I had everything prepped and ready to go when Sam and John showed up with the chickens – the rest of the family decided that they could miss the spectacle of what Ellen dubbed The Great Chicken Massacre, and show up later, when the deed was done.

Sam brought out the box with his two chickens, Golden Comets who seemed blissfully unaware of the fate awaiting them. Before we dispatched them, though, we went inside to watch a video.

Neither Kevin nor I had ever killed a chicken before, Kevin had thought long and hard about how to do it. The time-tested, old-fashioned way – cutting its head off – seems like the kind of thing that’s hard to get right the first time around, and the prospect of doing it wrong, and having a still-living chicken suffer the consequences, was prohibitive.

After a broad survey of chicken-killing videos, Kevin decided we’d follow the lead of Joel Salatin, of Polyface Farms, who hangs his birds upside down and cuts the blood vessels in their necks. Neither the trachea nor the esophagus is cut, and the bird bleeds out.

Salatin, of course, has a machine with cones to facilitate this, so we looked elsewhere for some less professional instruction. Luckily, Kevin found “Survival Skills with Russ,” a series of YouTube videos in which a supremely competent burly Southerner, Russ, teaches everything from beekeeping to making rope from bear grass. Somewhere in between is butchering a chicken.

Bleeding out

Russ demonstrates very clearly how to hang a chicken by its feet and cut its main artery cleanly. His demonstration bird shows few signs of distress. It bleeds out quietly, and only flaps around a bit when its heart gives out.

Kevin had watched it several times, and showed it to Sam so he’d know what the plan was. Then we went outside to carry it through.

“Do you want to go first, or do you want me to?” Kevin asked Sam.

Sam, whose willingness to try anything is one of the many reasons we like him, said he’d go first. He took one of his Golden Comets out of the box and carried her over to where Kevin had strung a rope from a tree branch. He put her feet through the loop, and she hung there without struggling.

Kevin and Sam located the spot to cut, and Sam pulled the knife across it.

Nothing. Seems that there’s the critical step of getting the feathers out of the way.

Sam was about to try again when we learned an important lesson of chicken butchering: make sure the rope is tied securely to the tree.

Our rope came untied, and the poor bird fell to the ground, flapping. Kevin quickly scooped her up, apologized to her, and reattached the rope, more tightly this time.

The second attempt went better. Sam hit the artery without damaging either trachea or esophagus, and the chicken bled out calmly. In less than thirty seconds, it was dead.

We scalded the bird in 160-degree water to loosen the feathers, and then it was time for Sam to put the plucker to the test. Kevin, who is very familiar with our particular model of GE washing machine because it’s the kind his mother had when he was a kid, turned the knob to “Spin,” and started it up.

We held our collective breath as Sam brought the bird in contact with the spinning fingers.

Miracle of miracles, the feathers flew! The thing works like a charm.

John and Kevin, helping Sam with the last few feathers

Sam rotated the bird, and the legs, and then the breast, and then the back came clean. He was having a little trouble getting into the crooks of the wings, and that’s when we discovered our plucker’s one shortcoming. After working for a while, it just stops.

At first, we thought it was because the spin cycle was over, but it turns out it’s because the thing overheats. We’re not sure why, and we’ll have to figure it out before we start plucking turkeys, but we think it’s a problem we can solve. (My theory: something is rubbing on something else because the machine is horizontal – if we turn it vertical, which is how it was engineered to be, I think it’ll work. Kevin says pshaw to that theory.)

In any case, we finished Sam’s bird by hand, and then Kevin singed off the pinfeathers with a BernzOmatic torch. Sam then gutted it, per Russ’s instructions, and put it in an icewater bath to chill.

Then Kevin tackled the second chicken. He learned a lot from Sam’s experience with the first bird, and Number Two went off without a hitch.

Let’s pause here for a moment and give three cheers for Sam, who not only provided chickens for this experiment, but was willing to be the first to try an unproven process that involved blood, death, and a converted washing machine. If Ellen and John ever get tired of him, he can come starve off the land with us anytime!

While chicken-processing took us a little longer than it takes Russ (who runs through the entire process in an eight-minute video), it wasn’t difficult or complicated. You can see how, with practice, you could get pretty good at it. (The cooking of the chicken didn’t go quite as well as the butchering, and I’ll tell you all about it in another post.)

The biggest surprise for me, though, was that I got through it without flinching or looking away.

Although I’ve been eating animals all my life, this was the first time I’d watched one die for my dinner. It wasn’t as hard as I thought it was going to be.

I’ve always been squeamish about animals. I close my eyes at the movies if I think a dog is going to get kicked, let alone if some poor creature is going to die. But I decided, when I took on this lifestyle, that I was going to have to suck it up and kill things. So far, I’ve only killed fish, but thinking about it, talking about it, and planning for it has gotten me used to the idea of killing other animals.

This time around, I didn’t actually sever the blood vessels in the chickens’ necks, but I saw how it was done and I’m fully prepared to do it.

Squeamishness, I’ve come to believe, is a luxury carnivores are not entitled to.

For me, getting over it has taken time, and determination, and constant exposure. And maybe even a little bit of pluck.

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Our pole saw, and the work it does

So you’ll understand my surprise when, at an estate sale yesterday, Kevin found a saw we didn’t have.

“Honey,” he said, with more excitement than a saw has any right to generate, “I’ve been looking all over for one of these.”

He held out a box containing a rope saw.

A rope saw?

It’s not a saw for cutting rope. It’s a saw for cutting high limbs of trees. It’s basically an eighty-foot rope with a chainsaw blade in the middle and a weight on one end. You throw the weighted end over the limb you want to cut, and position the rope so the blade is on top of the limb. Then you take one end of the rope, and give your wife the other. The two of you pull the chainsaw blade back and forth until the limb comes off.

If ever a tool had Laurel and Hardy written all over it, the rope saw does. For starters, it lacks the gravitas that a serious tool should have. I mean, really. It’s made with string and a beanbag. Besides that, although a rope saw is a great idea in theory, so very many things can go wrong.

Let’s begin with Step One: throwing the bean bag over the tree limb. Keeping in mind that the rope saw is for the tree limbs you can’t reach with your pole saw, think about the job of lobbing the beanbag in just the right spot. The limb is probably thirty feet away, and also probably surrounded by other limbs. To get it over the right limb, without getting tangled in any of the wrong limbs, is daunting.

The rope saw in question

Our particular limb was only about twenty-five feet off the ground, but if I had had to get the beanbag over it, I can guarantee I’d still be other there, thirty-six hours later. Luckily, Kevin did the throwing, and he got it over on the second try.

(A wifely aside: If you’re like me in that what you value about a husband is his intelligence and humor, his honesty and trustworthiness, his fortitude and resourcefulness, and you don’t give a damn about how big and strong and good-looking he is, your instincts will give the lie to your priorities when you watch the man you chose accomplish a physical feat, like throwing a beanbag over a tree limb, with skill and finesse. At that point, he could have dragged me into his cave by my hair, and it would have been okay.)

There was only one problem with Kevin’s dead-on balls accurate throw. The beanbag kept going, and wrapped itself around the limb one more time.

We tried to flick the rope so the loop wrapped around the limb would slacken, but that didn’t work. Then we tried attaching a weight to the other end of the rope saw and throwing that over, thereby undoing the loop from the other end.

Again, Kevin got it over in just a couple of tries. Unfortunately, there was a twig sticking up between the initial loop and the spot where the other end went over. We thought that, if we pulled it hard enough, it might break the twig. But it also might not, in which case we’d be in even worse shape than we already were.

It was time to break out the ladder and the bamboo.

The relevant limb is the leftmost

The ladder got Kevin up about eight feet, and the bamboo, a leftover length from our high-stakes gardening trellis, was about fifteen feet long. He used the end to nudge the beanbag over the limb, and we were in business.

This brings us to the problems of Step Two: positioning the chain over the limb. The main problem is that only one side of the chain is sharp, and there’s some kind of law that guarantees that it’s not the side facing the wood.

We started sawing, and I marveled at how easy it was. The chain absolutely glided over the limb! I don’t know how much time it would have taken me to notice that we weren’t actually sawing anything, but I’m pretty sure it would have been embarrassingly long. Luckily, Kevin pointed out that we weren’t cutting before I had the chance to say anything stupid.

Then came the challenge of getting the chain right-side up. Basically, you just flick it around and hope for the best. It’s not a precision fix. We flicked it around, and it finally came down in the right position. The eagle had landed! We were good to saw.

That’s Step Three: sawing. It’s actually pretty easy. First you pull, then the other guy pulls. You get in a rhythm and the sawdust starts falling. But woe betide you if you pull too far and the chain comes too far to your side, so the rope is in the slot you’ve created. Once you do that – and I assure you that you will do that – you can’t get the chain back in the slot.

Why? It’s physics. The slot is narrow, but the knots that attach the rope to the chain are not. So, if the rope is in the slot and you try and pull it so the chain gets back in the slot, you get jammed on the knot. Every time.

So, you may ask, wouldn’t that same knot have kept the chain where it belonged? How did it get out of the slot in the first place? The answer is that I have no bloody idea. A rope saw only defies the laws of physics when it’s working against you.

We were back to the ladder and the bamboo. Kevin tried to use the end of the bamboo to lift the chain up over the limb so he could drop it in the slot, but the chain kept slipping off. Luckily, bamboo is hollow, so we put a Y-shaped stick in the end and that solved the problem. The chain nestled in the Y of the stick, and Kevin was able to maneuver it.

We were on to Step Four: making sure the limb doesn’t land on anything important. We thought we were in the clear on this one because the limb, which had been casting much too much shade on our garden, was directly over the driveway. All we had to do was move the truck.

Unfortunately, there’s no accounting for falling wood. The limb broke, swung, and landed on the other side of the tree. It was three feet from the newly laid brick hearth of our wood-fired oven, and two feet from my head.

Step Five is the clincher: congratulating yourselves on saving the $150. the guy with the bucket truck would have cost.

The rope saw cost seven bucks. Laurel and Hardy should do so well.

The limb, down

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Why we need a plucker

What did we do before the Internet?

There are as many ways to pluck a chicken as there are to skin a cat, and each and every one of them is on YouTube.

After watching hours of video and reading countless forums, Kevin decided that his course was clear. “Honey,” he said. “I’m going to make us a chicken plucker. All I need is a washing machine and some chicken fingers.”

Washing machine? I assumed that was for the motor. But the chicken fingers? Snacks, was best I could figure.

“No, not those chicken fingers,” he said to me. “These chicken fingers.” He held up his computer and showed me a site where you could buy a package of 70 black rubber finger-looking things for $39.99.

And then he showed me the video.

Although home-made chicken pluckers run the gamut, most are a variation on one theme: a rotating drum with black rubber protrusions. Sometimes, the fingers are on the inside and you put the chicken in the drum. Other times, the fingers are on the outside and you hold the bird up to the fingers.

Kevin opted for the fingers-on-the-outside kind, because it looks like the chicken gets a pretty severe beating when it bounces around in the fingers-on-the-inside kind. (Although that’s the kind used by Joel Salatin of Polyface Farm, the encomium to whom is the centerpiece of Michael Pollan’s The Omnivore’s Dilemma.)

So, all we needed was a washing machine and some chicken fingers.

What did we do before the Internet?

Kevin went straight to Craigslist, where he found washing machines galore. He had only two criteria: it had to work, and it had to be cheap.

He found one that fit both criteria. Steve Flynn, a real estate broker up in Orleans, listed two washers and two dryers, all of which worked, that he would willingly give to anyone who’d come and cart them away. Kevin called and, as luck would have it, he had one washer left. Perfect.

We schlepped up to Orleans to meet Steve, who turned out to be a very nice guy. When we told him what we were doing with the washer, he seemed genuinely pleased. He told us he hated to throw working appliances away, and he was glad that his washer would have a second life plucking chickens. And, oh by the way, he had some 6×6 lumber he also didn’t need … could we find a use for that as well?

We figured we could, and we loaded washer and wood onto the back of the pick-up.

We had one more stop to make before we headed home.

My parents had invited us over for dinner, and we wanted to pick up a couple bottles of a wine we’d had for the first time a couple days ago. (It was a Leese Fitch cabernet, a wine that’s much better than its price tag indicates.) We’d gotten the wine at a little market called Fancy’s, in a little town called Osterville.

Osterville is one town over from us, but a world apart. It’s a town of plaid pants, BMWs, and oceanfront real estate. Many residents are wealthy, even more are blonde, and all are thin. Kevin relished the idea that we’d pull into the Fancy’s parking lot with our pick-up truck loaded with used lumber and a Reagan-era washing machine. “They’ll think the Clampetts are moving in!” he said with enthusiasm.

We got our wine, and I stood on line behind several blonde, thin women buying Saturday night supplies. Nobody took any notice of me, but they all gave Kevin, with his stained overalls and ratty ponytail, a wide berth.

He didn’t mind. “Trophy wives,” he said, dismissing them with a wave of his hand.

“Hey!” I said. “Watch that!” Since I like to think of myself as a trophy wife, I prefer not to see the group disparaged.

We got home just in time to clean up before we went to my parents’ house.

This morning, Kevin tackled the washing machine. First, he plugged it in and was glad to find that it spun the way it was supposed to, even if it needed a little encouragement from a screwdriver to really get going. All he had to do was get the motor and drum out of the white metal box, and he’d be well on his way.

This proved more difficult than he’d anticipated, and he had to take the radical step of tying one side of the housing to the garage and the other side to the Land Rover and throwing it into reverse. “Either the housing will open or the garage will fall down,” he told me as he started backing up.  (Below is yet another in the series of riveting Starving off the Land videos, this one of the housing-opening process.)

Luckily, the housing opened.

As I write, there is, in our driveway, a working motor attached to a spinning drum. To turn it into a bona fide chicken plucker, all we need is a little finish work and some chicken fingers. Ideally, we’ll also find a way to mount it horizontally so the feathers are thrown to the floor, rather than out to the side and all over the property.

If any of you have been doubting our hayseed credentials, I hope this makes up your mind. Making a chicken plucker out of a washing machine is about as Dogpatch as it gets.

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With some engines, it’s a kind of cough. Others, a sputter. Our Land Rover does a sort of whine. The late, lamented George Carlin used to do a bit where he imitated an engine that didn’t want to start: “Leave me alohohohohohohone.”

I used to think that was funny, but now it hits a little close to home.

When we lived in Manhattan, we had only one thing that might not start, and that was the car. Since it was a late-model Saab, the odds of its not starting were fairly slim. Certainly not zero, but not nearly high enough to make me tense up when I turned the key. Here, though, we have plenty of things that might not start, and they don’t start often enough that I’m steeled for the worst every time we take one out.

The boat controller. Goat not included.

Topping the list of possible non-starters is the boat. Although you start the motor by turning the key, it’s not like the car. There’s a whole ritual involved. First, you pump the primer bulb on the fuel line to get some gas in the motor. Then, you lift a lever on the controller (the unit that has the throttle and the ignition, into which you put the key), which is a kind of auxiliary throttle that lets you open it up when you’re in neutral. But you don’t open it all the way, or you’ll flood the engine. Five-sixteenths is about right.

Then, you press the key in three times. Not two, not four. That releases oil to the motor. Last, you sacrifice a goat and offer it up to Vroom, the God of Outboards. There are incantations associated with this, and woe betide you if you get them wrong. Then you turn the key and hope for the best.

At least the boat has a key. We have lots of non-starters that have cords. Chain saw, leaf blower, string trimmer, log splitter, power washer, and rototiller all start with muscle power. Or don’t start, as the case may be. These are the ones that get me. I’ll be in the house, working or cooking or procrastinating, and I’ll hear the unmistakable sound of a starter cord being pulled to no avail. If you’ve ever pulled the starter cord on a decent-size machine, you know that it’s hard. I hear it going in and out of its housing, and I feel Kevin’s pain.

And now we come to my dilemma. When something doesn’t start, I’m no help at all. Kevin will be the first to tell you that his motor skills are limited, but they’re way better than mine, which are nonexistent. So I sit on the sidelines, watching my husband deal with the problem. He opens things and closes them, empties other things and fills them again, toggles switches and jiggles parts, and all I can do is bring the snacks.

I hate being helpless. I’ve told the story here of when, at the ripe old age of eight months, I snatched the clothes out of my mother’s hands when she was trying to dress me and, proclaiming, “Self!” proceeded to put my pants on my head. (Although I talked early, I did everything else late, and my social skills are still behind the curve.)

And so I find myself strongly inclined to learn something about motors. If we’re going to live a life that depends, to a large degree, on power tools, I should understand how they work, how to make them go, and what to do when they don’t.

Shouldn’t we test the glink with the thronkmeter?

But then I have second thoughts. There are so many skills that neither of us has. If I’m going to learn something new, shouldn’t it be one of those? Besides, Kevin has a big head start in the motor skills department, and it’s all too easy to envision a non-starting scenario where I’m leaning over his shoulder saying, “Shouldn’t we test the glink with the thronkmeter?” when he knows full well that the glink has nothing to do with it and the thronkmeter’s broken. That could get annoying, if you’re Kevin.

When you come right down to it, it’s not a question of motor skills at all, it’s a philosophical question about duplication of skills. Do we each develop at least minimal competence at everything we do, or do we each specialize and become primarily responsible for our own areas of expertise?

We tend toward the latter. Not only does it seem more efficient, with more skills developed between us, but it also helps us avoid the too-many-Chiefs situation. Both Kevin and I have Chiefly tendencies, and duplication of skills would leave us desperately short of Indians. Specialization gives us each a chance to be in charge, and our lives seem to go more smoothly when not everything is a collaboration. (This is a version of Stephen Jay Gould’s theory of non-overlapping magisteria, which I invoked a while back in regard to the building of the chicken coop.)

Although much of what we do is collaborative – gardening, beekeeping, chicken raising – we have other areas where one or the other of us is more or less in charge. Kevin is Vice President of Fishing, Hunting, Property Maintenance, and Vehicle Operation. I’m VP for Stonemasonry, Mycology, Home Economics, and Administration.

So, if I’m not going to learn motor skills, what should I learn instead? I’d like to extend my mycological expertise, such as it is, to mushroom cave construction. Or maybe, under the tutelage of our friends the Marcuses, of Cape Cod Beer, I should fine-tune my fermentation skills in anticipation of making mead from our honey.

And someone’s got to bone up on thronkmeter repair.

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