An Appalachian Man Could Build a Hidden Camp in 72 Hours. Modern Engineers Cannot Copy

🔗 93 things every Appalachian grandfather knew. How many are left in you? https://burlsizemore.com My uncle Dorsey walked up the north fork on a Thursday in November with an axe, a froe, and a sack of cornbread. On Sunday he walked back down off that mountain out of a building that had not been there on Thursday. It had a floor. It had a door that shut. It had a fire in a chimney that drew, and it was dry inside while it rained on us the whole way home. Seventy two hours. Three days and the nights between them, and a roof with not one fastener in it. I have thought about those three days my whole life, and I want to be plain about why. It is not that he worked hard. Men work hard. It is that fifteen separate things happened in that time that a man with an engineering degree cannot do today. Not will not. Cannot. They are gone out of him, and he does not know they are gone. The first one happened before the axe came off his shoulder. He stood on that hillside and read the ground, and he picked the place off the leaf litter and the lean of the timber and where the water was. A man today would need a wet spring and a site visit to know what Dorsey knew standing still, and if you gave that engineer a dry Thursday in November he would have to guess. In the second hour he walked off a good flat bench and went forty feet further up the hill, and it took me thirty years to understand that he was reading where the cold air would settle at night. He found the water before noon and he did not taste it and he did not look at it. He put one hand in it for one minute, and the ache in his hand was the test. He picked his timber by the bark, judging which way the grain ran inside a standing tree while he was still walking past it, and he knew what green oak would do across the grain over two drying seasons the way you know your own name. He felled it so it came down where he wanted it. He set the stones before dark on the first day and he set the sills on them knowing that a floor which is perfect on Sunday is wrong in four years if you do not build the settling in on purpose. The first night we slept in a half faced camp, which is the thing a man throws up in an hour and a half when the sun is going and he has nowhere to be. Three sides and a roof of brush laid bottom to top like shingles, and a fire out front where the open side is. Then the walls. Green oak, notched so the corners hold themselves, and every log lifted by two poles leaned against the wall and a rope. Then the floor, split out of logs with a froe and laid flat side up. Then the chimney out of sticks and clay. Then the roof: eave bearers, butting poles, knees and weight poles, and riven boards held down by nothing but their own weight and the poles across them. There was one window and it was the size of a dinner plate and it was up high near the eave on the downhill wall, and there is a reason for every part of that sentence. And there is one more thing, the thing that made that camp invisible from forty feet, and I have never seen it written down anywhere. There is one nailed board in that whole building and it is the door jamb, and he cut the door hole on the third day and not the second, and there is a reason for that too. Everything else is held by weight, by the notch, and by the piece above it. Nothing bought. Nothing that came up that mountain except what a man could carry on his back. I am Burl Sizemore. I am seventy two years old and I watched him do it when I was fourteen, and I have spent the rest of my life understanding what I was looking at. Go find an old camp and get under the eave and look up at the bottom edge. If there is a pole running along the outside of that first row of boards, holding them from sliding, you are looking at a butting pole, and somebody who has been dead ninety years put it there and it is still doing its job. Then come back and tell me what you found. https://burlsizemore.com