Botkin Creative

How to raise (or lower) a timber frame

Until I went on-site to take a few photos of a Collin Beggs design/build project, I had no idea what a timber frame raising looked like. Apparently, at least in this case, it looks like a roof being lowered onto 12 interlocking joints using a crane and a crew of nine men. Some last-minute chisel touch ups were needed. Afterwards, as tradition dictates, the youngest member of the crew christened the structure with a whetting bough (not to be confused with a wedding bow, which is what I first thought they were saying).

Emotion/logic, sex/purity

I’m not sure if you’ve heard, but girls are emotional. Like so emotional, they’re not supposed to be politicians or CEOs because their hormones might cause them to become irrational and then they’d accidentally kill and/or fire someone.

I actually recited this litany to someone in my early college years, embarrassingly — although it was actually about why females weren’t allowed to be pastors. I recited it in spite of the fact that I was way more even-keeled and responsible than most men I knew. While my male newsroom colleagues were prone to throwing things across the room in frustration over a misplaced modifier or a missed deadline, I stayed in the corner, calmly fixing similar errors, filling the gaps when the cartoonist, photographer or writer didn’t show up. While my male friends spent their money on treats for themselves, I managed mine like an ascetic. While many of my male classmates were out partying and making excuses for their late assignments, I studied and then got a good night’s sleep, beating them at biology, law, statistics, German, Anglo-Saxon, history, pagination, advertising, and, of course, French and ballet. I never pulled an all-nighter; I never broke down crying or froze up over the workload. I never called up my parents asking them for money because I had spent all of mine. Intellectualism, consistency and studiousness were in large part the definition of who I was. That was my personality, and it was also what I had fostered in myself.

Because, as you know, emotional girls might accidentally kill someone. Or they might accidentally date a jerk or something. Just in case, I dated nobody — not really — until Scott. As a teen, I had written in my journal: “I’ve kissed dating goodbye, even though I never made out with it in the first place.” I was committed to the ideals of purity that are often prominent in the homeschooling community, whether or not a family is actively pursuing a specific model of courtship. I was a sanctimonious young woman, determined to remain un-duped by something as shifty as romantic feeling.

In my journals I kept a rather extensive record the time Scott and I dated, and I remember when I was engaged telling two of my male friends, rather smugly: you know, it’s not like I’m under the delusion that he’s perfect. It’s just a matter of what faults you’re willing to live with. I was 26 years old, and the main thing was, nobody else had come along and acted interested. Well, not for awhile — well, not anyone who I found to be any more attractive, and/or who would have been approved by my parents and community. Actually, at 26, I was just beginning to realize that romantically, I could be reasonably popular. But it was a moot point if the person didn’t fit the criteria I’d set out:

Christian, of the correct persuasion
Intelligent enough to win a debate with me
Not too annoying
Wants kids and a good marriage
Responsible
Gets along well with my family and community
Can beat me in a foot race
Has decent genetics

This was more than the bare minimum I’d been assured by my pastor: that any two Christians could get married and make it work as long as they followed the Bible. My ex-husband fit all of my own, added, basic requirements. He was tall, had all his hair, went to the gym and claimed he wanted to go more often, read a ton — none of it stuff I was particularly into, but to each his own — went semi-regularly for pastoral counseling, and he had a law degree. He wanted to marry me and he had all the right answers to just about every question I asked him. His pastoral counseling sessions were directing him towards marriage, and when I told his pastor that I wasn’t sure if Scott was God’s will for me — at the time, I wasn’t convinced — the pastor chucked: “I married a woman like that.” Hmm, I thought, maybe I’m wrong. I assumed, as everyone had insinuated, that if we were to become intimate and come together with the goal of marriage and a family, that I would feel myself swimming in the heady bliss that was missing from my previous interactions with him. Girls fall in love if they have sex. Girls fall in love if they’re safe and provided for. Girls don’t fall in love over physical beauty. And keeping your emotions in check until the time is right, until you’re past the point of commitment, until you’re past the point where you’re going to get your heart broken, that’s all quite commendable. That’s what I had absorbed from 26 years in the homeschooling/purity/courtship community. So why not marry him, if you’re 26 and you want to start a family?

Only, in sort order, I found myself in what felt like a very weird and very uncomfortable roommate situation. Pastoral counseling didn’t help; traveling together to exotic locations didn’t help; time didn’t help. No attitude, attire or attribute I attempted seemed to help either. I hadn’t known him as well as I had thought; no amount of interview-style questions can make up for intuition and emotional intelligence about someone. And without intuition, without chemistry, without the wordless connection of two aligning souls, how well do you really know someone you’re going to spend the rest of your life with?

My point here is not that if you’re not stupid in love with your spouse every day of your marriage that you should get divorced, it’s that if you’re not in love and in tune to begin with, it’s probably a serious warning sign. They say something like 90 percent of communication is non-verbal, or at least non-literal. When we first started dating, I described Scott as having shoulders that swaggered and feet that shuffled, and this duality seemed quite weird to me. There were a lot of things like that. It’s just that after a certain point, I made the choice to ignore virtually all but the 7 to 10 percent of his communication that said “I believe with my mouth all the creeds and the prophecies, and in everything you want.”

Here’s why: I had absorbed the idea that you aren’t supposed to “follow your heart” because you’re supposed to do what God says instead. Your heart, your “intuition,” that’s a deceitful, dubious trap making you second-guess important commandments just because you feel like it. Women are the “weaker vessels” in part because they rely so much on their hearts, on the wayward feelings that fluctuate with their passing fancies and hormonal cycle. I would not be weak, and thus, I would not be emotional. I would be rational. All the time. I would be so literal that eventually I would begin to wonder if I was borderline autistic or something.

At this point, as you may have guessed, I have come to the realization that using your emotion and intuition is an extremely useful tool that can help you profoundly connect with people. I know — shocking. Another shocking realization: this may be where many women’s strengths lie, but it is by no means limited to women. Or, more accurately, it’s only limited to women in cultures where it’s supposed to be limited to women. There are plenty of men who are more emotionally insightful than I am. Not just the ones who sit around playing guitar in their skinny jeans, either. In my experience, the stronger a man is, then the deeper his passions and insight run — and the more capable he is, the more fearless and eloquent he is about those passions and insight. The heroes of folklore wept and howled with the best of them; they pouted over women, sang, laughed, and did a whole lot of talking. The puritans, maybe, not so much. But who would you rather be: Achilles or Roger Chillingworth?

The point of being Roger Chillingworth, or at least to pursue the chilling effects of pure logic in courtship or dating, is to supposedly protect the hearts of women. However, the pain of dating a good man and then breaking up with him, wholesomely and cleanly (or even not wholesomely and cleanly), is far less serious to women than marrying a guy you’re not in love with. You can learn things from both situations, but the first tends to yield more positive lessons.

Another shocking realization: contrary to what I was told growing up about how women and men are innately different, several men have developed deep attachments to me or to a female friend more quickly than we did to them, and this is supposedly the norm across American society. If courtship is all about protecting the overly-quick hearts of your offspring, and insulating the fragile youth from those who naturally desire sex for its own sake, then perhaps it should reverse its policies and start requiring that the girls pass muster before they’re allowed to date to the boys.

Especially if the girls are hopelessly attractive. What possible chance does sheltered 18-year-old Jimmy from Arkansas have against the demure hotness of a Calvinist Sophia Loren? And why should it be Jimmy who is vetted by Sophia’s parents, when Jimmy is more likely to get his heart broken when Sophia sort of decides that he’s sort of ho-hum, after Jimmy has already spent six months of his time and money sweating out his chances with her father in nerve-wracking long-distance phone calls?

Weirdly to me, Christian courtship practice assumes by its very nature that females need more protection than males, that being born with one set of genitalia (regardless of personality or personal strength) versus another puts you in a position to wait and see, shielded from making too many tough decisions on your own recognizance, or to go and conquer, goaded into forcefully pursuing something you’re not all that familiar with even if you’re not totally sure it’s (or she’s) what you want or need. Christian courtship seems to be stuck with a specifically Victorian hangover that girls — all girls — are prone to hysterics and bad judgment when they’re faced by an attractive mustache; that men are both cads and infinitely more wise that the women-folk whose honor they’re battling over. But if you honestly believe that about your daughter and the males in her life, you’ve obviously failed her on many levels.

Now, none of this is to say that family and friends can’t be very handy in giving you perspective about a new prospect. But there’s a big difference between giving your perspective and being willing to accept whatever decision your fully-adult daughter or son comes up with, and expecting that what you say and think will be more important that what they say and think — which is essentially what courtship is. If you don’t believe me, ask yourself the question: what would you do if your daughter told you, “Mom and Dad, I honor you and your opinion, but respectfully, I disagree with your assessment, and I’m going to continue to get to know this man”? If your answer is anything short of: “I would continue to love and support her, and would not seek to punish her, implicitly or explicitly, or diminish my affection for her in any way,” then you just proved my point. You believe your opinion about her life is more important than hers.* You believe your daughter should never fully own her own adulthood.

Here’s one reason why that’s a problem: my family and larger community would have, at any point in my adulthood, had a hard time picking out an outfit that would have physically fit me and that I would also have found to be just my own taste — because, as an adult, I had different taste than most of the people around me. If you don’t know enough to pick out clothes for someone, inanimate objects that have handy measurements and come pre-sewn, you’re hardly going to be able to pick out a spouse who will fit them — I mean, unless you’re expecting that spouses are sort of one-size-fits-all, more generic than an off-the-rack dress from Macy’s.

And we know how well that turns out.

*The typical response to this is: it’s not my opinion I’m worried about, it’s God’s. Ok, but does your take on God’s opinion line up 100% with your own parents’ take on God’s opinion? If not, why do you expect your children’s take on God’s opinion to 100% line up with yours? Because you’ve, finally, miraculously, 100% figured it out? Must be nice…

Hewn into the (non) living rock of Stonehenge

I’ll admit it: the mock documentary This is Spinal Tap made me want to visit Stonehenge. Specifically the line from the song “Stonehenge,” delivered with deadpan idiocy by Christopher Guest, “The Druids! Nobody knows who they were, or… what they were doing.” Who could resist such an enticing summary?

This is actually somewhat accurate about Stonehenge, although supposedly the Druids didn’t really have much to do with it, since the monument pre-dates them. Speculation about what Stonehenge is and what it means abounds, and to be honest I hadn’t heard much about the other henges in the area that some think mean that Stonehenge was a burial ground or religious monument in a larger community. It makes sense, I suppose: it was (and is) aligned with the setting and rising suns of the shortest and longest days of the year, something that in nearby pre-historic burial sites is supposed to be reflective of life after death and the cyclical nature of things. Or something like that.

On a purely structural note, I hadn’t known before visiting Stonehenge that the rock had actually been carved in such a way that the lintel stone would stay fixed to its uprights by means of protrusions and hollows, much like a “mortise and tenon,” according to the audio guide. I would have had no idea what that meant except that I’d been recently looking into timber framing techniques.

Salisbury and the Magna Carta

One of the first essays I ever wrote was, quite pompously, about what “abuses provoked men to demand the Magna Carta.” My research consisted of reading the Encyclopaedia Britannica entry on Magna Carta. I mean, hey, I was 12, and that seemed sufficient. I vaguely remember writing something about unfair taxation, loosely tied into my mind to the Robin Hood myth about King John, obviously the same guy who was forced to sign the Magna Carta, and about the dangers of unmitigated monarchy. I have no idea where the essay went.

So I was quite keen to see the most well-preserved copy of the 1215 Magna Carta original in existence. As it turned out, I couldn’t read it at all, as it is set down on a single sheet of velum in shorthand Latin. I also studied Latin at age 12, but apparently not hard enough.

The Salisbury Cathedral, where the copy is kept, is interesting in its own right, and is used for regular services. The juxtaposition sometimes throws me a little: I stumbled upon the grave of King John (and Richard the Lionhearted)’s bastard brother William Longespée, the third Earl of Salisbury, publicly acknowledged as the son of Henry II. That must have pissed queen Eleanor of Aquitaine right off. Or not, since her husband had already imprisoned her at that point. It’s an interesting bit of history to be reminded of while perusing the hymn book.

The cathedral had installed several modern art pieces within its walls, which seemed more odd than was probably intended. The bell tower had settled unevenly over the centuries, to the point that you can see the stone supports bowing under the weight.

Taking in Bath

If you’ve read Jane Austin, you’re familiar with how trendy it was during the Georgian period for parties of people and particularly sickly women to take the ancient waters at Bath; something that generally turned into a social/tourist outing in which young people would happily subject themselves to a variety of entertainment. Not entirely unlike Bath currently; tourists still flock, and many treat themselves to a spa day or two. Not in the Roman Baths themselves, mind you, although you can have a drink of warm water flavored with minerals from the fountain there.

These Roman baths are supposed to be some of the best-preserved anywhere, which according to the probably inexpert opinion of a local tour guide is due largely to the fact that they were buried under layers of mud for many centuries and thus were kept from marauding Anglo-Saxons, Norman conquerors and peasant farmers looking for stone to quarry. The Romans built on the site sacred to Sulis, a Celtic goddess that they combined syncretistically with Minerva. Before the Romans, the waters at Bath were said to have miraculously cured a Celtic king and his pigs of leprosy.

The modern city of Bath is a world heritage site and as such has to follow strict building codes to enforce the uniform look of the city. Local limestone is used exclusively for the facades of buildings.

Scenes from London

London was predictably gray (or more appropriately, grey) and I had to resort to taking timed self-portraits while balancing the camera haphazardly on a traffic cone.

1984

To be honest, I’d never heard of the Sikh riots, called genocide by many groups because widespread ethnic killings occurred, until I ran into several thousand Khalistan Sikhs marching in downtown London, to the bewilderment of onlookers, for a remembrance and freedom protest.

Intrigued, I walked with them all the way to Parliament Square, which apparently gave them the mistaken idea that I was with the London press and I was taking photos with my rather massive camera lens to publicize their cause.

I was wondering why Sikhs would find it appropriate to march in London, specifically, but given that the British government had such a presence in India for such a long time, and in withdrawing chopped the country into the religious and linguistic divisions that are now India and Pakistan, lumping the Sikhs in with the Hindus, and leaving the borders of their former empire in chaos, I suppose it’s not all that incomprehensible. That and there are quite a few Sikhs who have expatriated to the United Kingdom.

Evensong at Westminster Abbey

Last time I was in London, back in 2001, the one big tourist attraction I paid for was Westminster Abbey. This was on December 31, just after I’d met up with a friend of mine from study abroad: after the semester ended, we agreed to meet up at noon in front of Buckingham Palace on that particular day. This was before I had a cell phone or reliable internet, and so I trusted she would remember for the weeks we didn’t see each other, hoping, as I sat in the drizzle of rain for what seemed like a long time, waiting, that she had not forgotten. She finally showed up, with her British friend, protected by an umbrella. And then we went to Westminster Abbey and walked across the graves of a bunch of well-known dead people.

“When I’m dead, I’m going to get buried here, so that people will say: was she famous or what?” said the British friend.

As we were leaving, I noticed that you could go to an actual service at the Abbey, like normal people do instead of paying to see the inside of a church. That would be better, I thought. Maybe I’ll do that sometime.

So today I did. Evensong is every day, mostly at 5 p.m., but it’s at 3 p.m. on Sundays. You go up to the North Gate, which is guarded by some old guy in crimson to keep the tourists at bay, and he says “can I help you?” and you reply “I’m here for Evensong,” and he lets you in. If you’re half an hour early, and you go in as the bells are ringing, you’ll get a good seat. Not that it will do you much good if you’re in the mood to document it, because you’re not supposed to take photos, and it seems more cheeky than normal to break the rules during a church service. The Westminster Choir is well worth the wait, and the young boys and mostly-young-men sing as they have done for centuries. Only in English, because they’re Anglican. The Abbey claims that it has echoed with music every day for over a thousand years, and as I sat I couldn’t help but think of all the kings and queens that had been coronated there (and then buried there, some of them). You sit, you stand, you sing, you speak; it’s a fairly interactive bit of authentic historical artifact, particularly as far as tourist attractions go.

Sunny side up in Moab, Utah

As it turns out, everyone goes to Moab for recreation, especially on the weekends. Especially on a long weekend. To be honest, after a week and a half of driving, climbing rocks in the Flatirons, staying out late with friends and family, and eating a lot of Whole Foods deli meat and $7 chocolate bars, we had lost track of the passing days and hadn’t even considered this. We had planned on finding a camping ground on the way in, but as we drove towards town, stopping to scope each one out in the dark, we realized that things were looking full. Finally, sometime past 10 p.m., we gave up. We found a pull-out next to the Colorado river, drove as close as we could, and popped open the back of the minivan. I think I found the fact that our sleeping pads and sleeping bags fit perfectly in the back, plus a little extra that stuck out over the cooler, more charming than my boyfriend did. I thought
it was quite wonderful: the moon, a day from being full, lit up the canyon and the outline of the rocks, and we could feel the breeze from the river. There was nobody else to be noisy and obnoxious — aside from the occasional car on the road and the fact that that we could potentially get woken and hassled for not being in a designated camping area. And guess what: it was free.

As it turned out, nobody hassled us, which didn’t stop us from waking up every time a car got close. In the morning, in lieu of a shower, we jumped in the river, headed to town for breakfast, and then went north for the day’s activities.

Up the Arkansas river and down again

We’re at a dog sled camp two miles above sea level, in Leadville, Colorado, the highest city in the United States, not far from the headwaters of the Arkansas river. We passed over the river’s massive width in Little Rock, and stopped to snap a photo of its refurbished Riverfront Park where Collin used to play punk shows in high school by plugging into the unguarded sound system. Now we cross it again where it is little more than a stream.

Ritchie is showing us a sweet little puppy that didn’t quite make the cut genetically speaking, and trying to convince us to adopt it.

“Do you train the dogs to sled?” I ask him.

“If they’re good, if they have the right parents and everything, you don’t need to train them. You hook them up and they just run. You train them to be polite and stuff, you know.”

He’s pointing out his personal team among the plethora of teams he’s taking care of. Wicked, who he’s had for a long time, has done the Iditerod and the Yukon Quest. “The Quest is harder,” says Ritchie.

We go for a little trek to a frozen lake and see some of Leadville. That evening, I start feeling a bit panicky for no real reason. I sleep, and wake up in the middle of the night thinking: it’s probably the elevation. Ritchie has told us that just lying around, your body works as hard as if you’ve been distance running at sea level. He’s lost about 20 pounds just being this high up, he says. It happens to everyone in town: they’re all skinny and weathered.

The next morning, I definitely have elevation sickness or something. I’m not hungry; I’m dizzy and incredibly tired. I drag myself around Leadville behind Collin, who is spry and charged, and snap a few photos of the old buildings in the thin, bright air, colder by far than anyplace we’ve been on the trip yet. I tell Ritchie I don’t feel well. “You need to drink water,” he says “way more than normal. My girlfriend’s sister was up here and got so dehydrated she had to be hospitalized.”

I chug water and we head down a few thousand feet, following the river as it swells again past rafting companies newly open for spring to Cottonwood hot springs in Buena Vista, which turns out to be under construction. We pay the slightly-reduced fee and jump in anyway. We were supposed to go rafting, but it didn’t pan out, and honestly, the way I’m feeling, I’m not that up for it. I kick back in the hot springs and put my limited energy into trying not to get sunburned.

By the time we get west of the Continental divide, I’m feeling better.