Step Four: Sand, Sand Forever — The Reverse Oregon Trail

Nothing is more boring than sanding. Except maybe writing about it. So I won’t.

(Damn it)

My quasi-neurotic need to chronologize my build-out can’t allow me to skip a step of the process. Sacrilege. Okay, okay, so I am going to write about sanding, but only as the vehicle to sneak in some anecdotes. A dusty Trojan Horse, if you will.

If the length of a post were commensurate to the length of the process I was describing, sanding would undoubtedly be the longest post. By a lot. Instead, it’s the opposite— I used a beefy belt sander to grind away the glue, dirt, and inconsistent edges of the boards until I achieved a smooth uniform surface on all of my arches.

50ish hours. One sentence.

I know, I know, I could easily play this game with each step and distill every process down to an absolute minimum, maybe clocking a paragraph at most. But there really isn’t too much more to say about the actual sanding. It is the “sleep” of woodworking— it lasts for hours, there’s no avoiding it, but everything looks nicely refreshed and feels better afterward.

The resistance you’re picking up on is the result of a long and complicated relationship to sanding. First, back to the land.

I’m sure I’ve made prior reference to QIVC, though I don’t remember to what extent I’ve expounded upon my time there. Forgive me if I’m rehashing. QIVC, aka The Quaker Intentional Village Project of Canaan is the spiritual brainchild of several weighty Friends (that’s Quaker for big shots) in New York Yearly Meeting (NYYM is… bah, just look it up). Basically, some interesting and visionary folks decided to make their own village from scratch. In the woods. With strawbale buildings and goats and gardens. Sign. Me. Up.

I spent several summers there in college (and after) helping to build their common building, and two of the houses in the village. That first summer I had precisely zero experience with building… anything. Which, unfortunately, put me on sanding duty. Eight hours a day, five days a week, for the whole goddamn summer. I would be covered in so much sawdust that it would land on my eyebrows and climb nearly up to my hairline. No photos to prove it, sadly. And yeah, I quickly grew to detest it as a task. The monotony. The droning sound. The awful forehead scaling dust. But, and this is a big but, I loved it there. In part because that area of NY and its Quakers comprise my oldest and happiest sense of home. My parents were once the co-directors of a place called Powell House, a Quaker retreat center just a few miles from QIVC. We lived on-site, in the woods, with plenty of kindhearted and fun people around, large buildings to explore (one of which had a giant pillow pile) and a sizeable pond with a floating dock in the middle. Living and working at QIVC merged a deeply imprinted sense of home with a new adventure. And new characters.

There was Paul, the bedraggled, eccentric, chronic lunchtime napping, Doomsday Prepper, who on our second face-to-face confided in me his belief that 4th-dimensional shape-shifting lizards run the world. There was Jens and Spee, the power couple behind the venture who, while being annoyingly good at absolutely everything, were too charming not to like. Kristin, the dynamic 6’4” Norse academic and her slyly hilarious partner Pat. Natalie, Jens and Spee’s daughter, the quintessential Young Friend (that’s Quaker for teenager) who I dated for several years. And my favorite of all, Emilie, a fairly rotund, quirky and particularly hilarious woman, who was equally capable of deep dives, straight talk, and stand-up-worthy interjections. Emilie could hear you out, lovingly call you on your shit, hold you while you cry and then cajole you into laughing about it. She also helped me to get sober, for which I will be forever grateful.

There are many more characters, too many to name (not true, just lazy), like a gaggle of children, additional partners, parents, at least one set of grandparents, and a very sad goat that I can’t remember if we ate, or just let it escape, but didn’t make it to the end of summer either way.

Ext/int of the house I helped build for Pat & Kristin

My time at QIVC spanned roughly two and a half years. And while the work —thankfully— broadened from sanding to nearly every facet of home building, that first summer was most memorable and magical. Sleeping on a tent platform on the edge of the woods, building a bonfire every night, visiting Powell House, learning to live in community, discovering natural building, occasional gardening, and falling in love.

The next ecovillage adventure, brought to you by Sanding.com, was the year I spent at Aprovecho. If you’ve been following the blog, you’ll remember Apro from my Origin Story. And if you’re an especially proactive Matthew-adventure-follower, then you would have come across my many posts about building HPMs at Aprovecho on the Bike Blender Blog. These posts give a pretty well-rounded picture of the machines I made, and an introduction to one or two characters. But in reviewing them I was surprised at how little I actually said about what I was mainly doing there, the dynamics, the ups and downs, or any takeaways.

It’s not at all surprising that I didn’t say much about my main job because, well, sanding. Womp womp. This most boring and humble of tasks had followed me across the country. But again, herein lies the complication. Endless sanding was what made the rest of the opportunity possible. I really wanted to experiment with and build human-powered machines. Like, really wanted it. So much that I agreed to work 4 days a week sanding, for room and board, so that I could use the other 3 to build HPMs for Aprovecho’s campus. The sanding was, of course, miserable. I remember one low point in particular, having stayed onsite for a week, while everyone else went away for a holiday (Christmas, I think?) and I just fucking sanded alone. And when the guy I was working under came back from his vacation, not only was there zero gratitude for having stuck around to keep things on schedule, his one and only response was to annoyedly criticize me for not having opened the windows (mid-winter) to let the dust out. Of a construction site. Where we’d been sanding for months with the windows closed. I wanted to punch him in the face.

And that folks, is the second reason those older posts were largely absent of mentions of the cast of characters— weird, dumb, frustrating dynamics. If I had to put my finger on it, I’d say that as an organization Aprovecho had an over-inflated sense of self-worth (the land-based, permaculture-course-teaching Apro, not the UN-funded rocket-stove research Apro down the road). After the science-heavy, efficient wood-burning stove people decamped, the original organization lost its clearest value proposition: being world leaders in an impactful, niche, scaleable green technology. And even though the claim to fame was gone, the hubris remained. This played out mostly in how they treated their volunteers. They seemed to assume that an unending stream of free labor would continue to show up and do whatever menial work was available, regardless of how they were treated. They were so distorted in their perspective that one time one of them (same guy from before) actually said to me “you know, other places would be charging you money to do what you’re doing here.” Really? Charging me money to work for them for 65 hours a week? It was another punch-worthy moment. Although he was the only one I ever heard state it that explicitly, it seemed to be the general attitude: you should feel lucky to be a part of what we’re doing, because it’s so radical, so cutting edge. Except it wasn’t. Don’t get me wrong, it was really cool, but it wasn’t singular, or new. Timber framing, permaculture workshops, passive solar, earthen ovens… these are all things that have been around for a while, things you can find elsewhere and in, frankly, more desirable destinations. Like Costa Rica.

Sorry, that’s a lot of negativity. But it’s also accurate. Many former volunteers, apprentices, employees, etc. have voiced similar concerns about their experiences there. One friend joked that we all came away from Apro with some version of Stockholm’s Syndrome or Survivor’s Guilt. Which, as a framing device, was as funny as it was melodramatic. Another common sentiment amongst former staff/volunteers was a real sense of longing for Aprovecho to live up to its potential. The campus was beautiful, the facilities large and accommodating, the very spirit of the place spoke to lofty ideals and a compelling vision of living differently in this world. In some ways, it made good on that promise, in many ways it fell short. Do I have compassion for the folks that were at the helm? Sure do. Running anything is really difficult. Especially something as off-beat as a Sustainability Education Center, where everyone is idealistic, in fact, so idealistic that they have a hard time agreeing on anything. Coordinating human behavior (i.e. leading) is so maddeningly difficult, it’s no wonder we are willing to elevate and revere those who do it well. Was the guy I was working with a more-than-occasional-asshole? Sure was. But he was also in a difficult position, doing the best he could with limited resources.

Now, to the good stuff.

If people were the worst part of Aprovecho, they were also the best part. Some of my most dear friends, people who I care a great deal for and still keep in touch with thirteen years later, I met them there. Kyle and Molly. Brad and Heather. Eleva. All Apro people. All amazing, wonderful and weird. Ironically, there’s so much I could say about all of them, that… I can’t seem to even find the words. Huh. A rare moment of speechlessness.

Okay, now I’m crying.

These friends, they see me. They get me. Maybe more than anyone else. I’d say they’re my chosen family. I miss them so much.

It’s fascinating how a small sampling can have such an outsized impact. All of these friendships were formed within the span of a year, one year out of twelve in Oregon. The very first year at that. And yet, in the remaining eleven years, only a few more people joined that deepest inner circle. If I had to speculate, it’s the freshmen on campus phenomenon. All new, all together, all the time, produces some deep bonds. But it really doesn’t need an explanation or working theory. I just know that these are some of my very favorite humans, and despite my lingering gripes with Aprovecho, I can’t help but feel immense gratitude for the incredible people it connected me to.

Speaking of connections, there were two small-world moments that really got my attention. The first was that Josh Fattal, one of the three American hikers kidnapped by the Iranian regime in 2009, was a former Aprovecho staff member. Not only that, but I learned (from Apro staff) that he was from Elkins Park, PA. We were raised miles apart, went to the same schools, and had friends in common… pretty wild to learn all of this in the middle of the woods, thousands of miles from where we both grew up.

Josh Fattal, Sarah Shourd & Shane Bauer were all eventually released from Iran

Heather and Brad report that he’s moved back to the Cottage Grove area and is doing really well. Apparently, even helping to revitalize Aprovecho, which Heather (very amusedly) says got re-branded as CARL. The acronym stands for… uh, crap, can’t remember. Center for… Right Living? Rural Livelihoods? Something like that. In any event, Josh: godspeed, may you usher in a bright new chapter on the land and help the organization to live up to its fullest potential.

The second instance of mind-bending international interconnection was delivered via Queen Bee. Queen Bee (whose real is Melissa, but no one ever called her that) was the cook during my first couple of months at Aprovecho. Such a character. Boisterous laugh, fantastic cook, wildly inappropriate, born and raised in Missouri. Anyway, she’d just returned from Thailand, where she was helping to plan and build a newly forming permaculture-based eco-village. She’d talked it up a bunch— amazing natural building projects, ripe fruit dripping off of every tree, gigantic snakes like in the movies— so, of course, folks were eagerly petitioning her to do a slideshow. She does her slideshow and it did not disappoint, it was every bit as cool as we were all expecting. However, what I was not expecting was for my childhood next door neighbor, Julia, to pop up in the photos. I think my jaw actually dropped. “What?! How is Julia Jack-Scott in your photos?” I exclaimed. “How do YOU know Julia Jack-Scott?!” Queen Bee exclaimed back at me.

It still blows me away. The specificity. The timing. The sheer unlikelihood of it all.

A trained statistician might argue that given our overlapping niche interests, the limited avenues for pursuing those interests and having the resources and freedom required to pursue them, the odds are actually not that low. Okay, well, fuck your number-crunching rationality, imaginary statistician. No mathematical equation can detract from the edge of impossibilty I experieneced in that moment. I mean, c’mon, in 1984 Julia and I are in diapers in West Mt. Airy, then twenty-odd years later she’s living in a remote jungle outpost in Thailand, where a woman from MO just happens to travel to that exact village in the forest, meets my old neighbor, travels back to the US, decides to go to travel another few thousand miles, I also then just happen to travel a few thousand miles, and on a lark land in the same random middle-of-nowhere spot as this person, who then shows me a photo of herself with my childhood neighbor. In Thailand. Everything that had to line up to produce that moment just seems utterly implausible.

No one ever finds this as baffling as I do. I’ve told this story dozens of times. The most surprising —and funniest— reaction was from my mother. When I told her, I honestly believed she’d be just as fascinated/wowed as I was, instead she stated, in this very matter-of-fact way, “well that’s because you’re part of the same soul group. You know, souls travel in groups, Matthew.”

Now you see where I get my Woo from.

I actually caught up with Julia recently, and her arc of natural building adventures took her to… Missouri. Close by to, you guessed it, Queen Bee/Melissa. Turns out Missouri has some of the most lax building codes in the country, and has become something of a mecca for natural-builder homesteader folks. When I pressed Julia about whether it was de-regulation or just lack of enforcement, she said she wasn’t sure, but that maybe the prevalence of Amish communities had something to do with it. I joked that that must be it, the Amish Lobby. And then I very un-Amishly asked ChatGPT for an answer:

Could be true. Could be bullshit. Could be Big Amish.

Whatever the case may be, the freedom afforded to the citizens of MO in their home construction projects is pretty incredible. Julia, turns out, is a skilled natural builder. That’s what she was doing in Thailand, designing and constructing the natural buildings for that eco-village. She shared her homesteading blog with me and, boy, is it impressive. Going from undeveloped land to massive water features, permaculture food forests, and building her own home from material on site, involving such feats as: cutting down trees by hand and using draft horses to drag them out of the woods. Having undertaken some sizeable projects myself, the big takeaway, what really left me feeling inspired —and downright awed— is the rigorous discipline and unbroken focus of her decade+ pursuit of a beautiful and ambitious vision. You have to go check out her blog, it’s a really well-written, captivating, and often funny testament to perseverance and the power of community.

Random aside, when Julia sent me the link for her site —givingtreehomestead.blogspot.com— somehow, one of us ended up at givingtreehomestead.blogpot.com, which is hilariously NOT Julia’s site, but instead the website equivalent of a street corner preacher standing on a soap box yelling damnation at passersby. The best part is that they seem to acknowledge their “fat finger” blogpot strategy of saving your soul, by poaching traffic from existing URLs:

Not. Definitely not.

It’s funny, an ex of mine liked to make fun of her stepmom’s subtle attempts to push religion, dubbing her CIA for Jesus. Buying up thousands of functionally useless, intentionally misspelled URLs in the hopes that maybe —maybe— someone stumbles across them seems like a CIA for Jesus move. Actually, that’s too flattering, this is closer to Keystone Cops for Jesus. (Though, here I am spreading their Good Word, so maybe it’s a clever-ish strategy after all. Okay, split the difference, State Troopers for Jesus).

Some part of me is fascinated by this bizarre strategy. I have to imagine that this is far from the weirdest, most indirect ploy to lay claim to your hereafter. It probably gets so much more kooky and clandestine and outrageous. I’d actually really love to see a docu-series highlighting the weirdest examples. It would be so good.

Christ, where were we? I’m so many asides deep, I don’t eve… SANDING.

Sanding. We were talking about sanding. And how much I love it. All damn day.

But before I get to the actual story of the sanding of the arches, there’s one last aside to dust off.

The machines.

Omg the machines! This was a bit like heaven for me. It would have been worth suffering through the worst of Aprovecho’s dysfunctional hippie non-profit dynamics for this alone. I was absolutley longing for a chance to design and build some human-powered machines. It was really important to me in terms of my own self-conceptualization as an inventor, something I was only beginning to express. Instead of describing the various machines, may I suggest you watch this oddly VHS-esque video of me from 2010. Seeing them in action is the best representation, and I lucked out in convincing this nice little old lady with a YouTube channel to come film my machines for posterity.

lol, my hat.

The straw chopper was, undoubtedly, my proudest moment from that year. Namely, that I was tasked with building a machine that could shred straw to a specific fineness, operated entirely with human power, made entirely from scrap found on site, and with zero budget— and I pulled it off. It was slow, and ugly (really ugly) and there’s a lot that could be done to improve the design, but it fucking worked. I loved designing and building it, hitting challenges, finding solutions, tweaking things, and then landing it. It was incredibly satisfying. My first real invention. Everything up to that point had been a copy of something that someone else (i.e. Carlos Marroquin) had designed. This was all new, no mimicry involved.

If you want to read the full account of building the straw chopper, here’s a shortcut to the posts:

Alright, that’s the last of the foreseeable anecdotes, now to the business of sanding them there arches.

I took the blocking and tarp off of the truck bed to give myself as unencumbered surface as possible. I laid out my first arch and started sanding with a battery-operated orbital sander. It was sloooow going. Hmm, maybe I should have bought a corded sander (as in, sander with a cord rather than battery).

I think I only got a few hours of sanding in before the weather started to shift. I’d been very lucky up to this point in that I’d had a long streak of beautiful sunny weather to work in. For those of you who are unfamiliar, the pacific northwest is very rainy. In fact, there are really only two seasons, the wet season and the dry season. The wet season typically lasts until the end of June, and then starts back up in late September. I’m not entirely sure when I started construction, I think it was sometime in late February. Not super important, the point is that it should have been raining, but somehow it wasn’t. By this time, I’m fairly certain that I’d been working for at least 4-6 weeks without any real rain. It was inevitable that it would start back up again, and I didn’t have a clear vision of what I would do when it did.

As luck would have it my friend, and former co-worker, Todd was going out of town with his wife Pamela. They had a large, covered, two-car carport and we worked it out that I could bring my stuff there to sand under the cover of the carport, while looking after their house and chickens. Todd even had a burly belt sander I could use. Win-win & win.

When I was bending and gluing, getting the arches soaking wet was an asset. Beyond that, it would be a liability. So I bundled everything up as best I could and headed to Todd and Pamela’s.

Todd walked me through my duties while they were away. I’d actually done this for them before, but there were some updates, like making sure to ventilate the geodesic dome. Because, of course Todd had a geodesic dome. Very Burning Man. Very Todd. (May I remind you that Todd was the one who wanted to name my rig Moon Unit).

Before I started in on the sanding, I made a last-ditch effort to save the first arch. I got it wet, dumped a bunch of glue in it, and clamped the shit out of it. Fingers crossed.

You can see how badly it was splitting from that first failed attempt:

While the glue was drying I turned my attention to preparing for the main event. First I needed to unload everything into the carport. A perfectly sized space, as you can see.

Once everything was in, I began sanding the small arch. I started on the back, it would be less visible and good to practice on. I fired up one of the belt sanders, Todd had several, and was blown away at just how much faster it was than the orbital. I’ll get this done in a day, I thought. Oh, how mistaken I was.

The effect was truly transformative. It’s funny, no matter how many times I have the experience of taking something gnarly and sanding it down to a buttery finish, it still manages to surprise me, even if only in a small way. I loved seeing the newly revived surface. This was going to be good.

As I moved my way through the arches, I was now facing a problem I knew I’d kicked down the road- the layers of laminate weren’t flush, especially from the first arches. In case you’re not understanding what I mean, think of it like this, if you were to cut a cross-section out of one of the arches (a little three-inch block from end to end) and then rotate it and look at the layers running up and down vertically, they would appear jagged, kind of like a bar chart, or musical notes on a sheet of music. Sanding all of the high spots down meant taking a lot off of some spots. I was worried that it could be so much material that it would look bad, making obvious dips in the edge of the arch. I was hopeful that having the arches in their installed locations, visually far apart and with perpendicular lines running against them (the corrugated roofing) would obscure the undulations, effectively tricking your eye into not noticing.

Seeing the arches stacked on top of each other was, of course, when it was most obvious and jarring. Oof, seeing that sure does grate against my desire for precision/perfection, even now, even knowing that it all worked out (I was right, the illusory effect of the corrugation completely hides the imprecision). But what else was I going to do? Rebuild them? Remember: doomsday clock. I was beginning to hear it tick, especially as the sanding dragged on. Sanding them smooth and hoping for the best was my only real option.

While I was sanding, Eleva, one of my aforementioned favorite humans showed up! Almost as if the sanding itself had summoned her. She had, after all, spent many hours sanding alongside me at Aprovecho. In the intervening thirteen years, she’d moved back to Minnesota, married a lovely man, and they were road-tripping in a swanky trailer they just bought. It’s funny, I was (briefly) jealous of the convenience and simplicity of just buying the damn thing instead of building it, but her husband (whose name I’m sorry to say escapes me) seemed a little envious that I was building mine. I guess the grass is always greener. Though, to be honest, the level of ultimate satisfaction that I have with my wagon is far greater than anything I’d get from buying something pre-fabbed. I think I was just exhausted. Which brings me to a funny moment.

Okay, poor phrasing, I don’t think I was exhausted, I know I was exhausted. I was sleeping 4-6 hours a night, working on this project in every waking moment that wasn’t spent at my full-time job. I was starting to have chronic numbness in my hands and arms. And after multiple days of sanding, I had a slow-motion collapse. I’ve never had this happen, that I can remember anyway, except maybe in extreme drunkenness or as an infant. But I was sanding, kneeling on the ground and I just couldn’t keep going. I sort of melted, slowly, face-first onto the ground. I lay there for what felt like forever, but was probably about 15 minutes, awake the whole time, but unable to move. I imagined Todd walking out (they were back now), seeing me, and asking with confusion and slight exasperation “what… are you doing?” To which my response would have been “yoga.”

I found this very funny. But I was too tired to laugh. Instead a low groan came out. Which was also funny, but produced no further non-laugh laughs. If the movie is ever made, the imagined version will definitely be one of the scenes. (Dano, call me, let’s talk).

Sanding stretched wayyyyyy longer than expected or wanted. For all parties involved. Todd and Pamela were polite, but clearly not thrilled that this was still happening upon their return. It was messy, loud, and totally took over their space. I get it. I was also desperate and trying my hardest to get it done. Todd confronted me at one point and said he thought I’d taken on more than I could actually accomplish “I don’t think you realize how big of a task this is. Do you really think you’re going to be able to get this done?” I missed the subtext (this sucks, leave please) and instead took the question at face value and responded that, yes, it was a lot, and, yes, I would get it done. Because I had to.

It’s been so long that I don’t remember exactly how the rest of this shook out. I know that I was there for way too long. That Todd made a couple of sideways comments about the situation that should have clued me into just how frustrated he was with me for overstaying my welcome. Ultimately, he and Pamela were generous enough to let me stay and finish the sanding under the cover of their carport. Todd had mentioned that he really liked a piece of graffiti I’d scored from a contractor who’s remodel got tagged. It was a local favorite that Todd enjoyed seeing on his bike ride to work. I left him the one I snagged as a way to say thanks. I was reluctant to let go of it, but Todd really helped me out, so it felt like a good way to show my appreciation.

The one I had was on a sheet of plywood, which I guess I failed to photograph, but here it is in the wild:

After doing what felt like a not-thorough-enough clean up, though Todd insisted that it was (he really wanted me to go away), I loaded everything back onto the truck and schlepped it all home. The weather had returned to being uncharacteristically sunny, which was perfect.

Now that the arches were prepped, it called for a good old-fashioned barn raising. Time to gather the tribe.

A final thought on sanding.

After all these years, and a few hundred hours of sanding, I’ve largely made my peace with it. I’ve actually come to a place where I can even enjoy it, either as a zen-like meditative exercise, or as an opportunity to listen to podcasts. Having several hours to do a deep dive on geopolitics, linguistics, philosophy, or catch up on current affairs is an eminently wortwhile and highly enjoyable use of my time. Thanks sanding :)