The house in the middle of the forest, among the endless ranges stretching as far as the eye can see in the picture above, is ours.
There are a few neighbours hidden around us in the thick canopy.
We’ve lived here for almost eleven years now, since my husband left his far off home to join me in this remote little country of just over five million people. I was in my late seventies, he in his sixties.
It was a leap of faith for us both, and since we had no money between us after leaving our previous lives, a tough start.
He had left his ranch, and I left my beautiful clifftop cottage in a little fishing village.
He found this place on the internet – a tiny wooden cabin surrounded by trees, gazing across to an amphitheatre of hills and forest.
We joke that we own a quarter of a mountain.
We used to gaze at the ad on the website every night for a year before he arrived on these shores, causing the estate agent to believe that there was massive interest in this remote cabin with no running water, no electricity, and no amenities.
The forest is hidden from the winding dirt road with 298 hairpin bends by huge wrought iron gates, and is a protected area, so that it cannot be spoiled, developed or changed in any way..
The dirt road, we discovered, was notorious for its difficulty, danger and beauty. The river which runs alongside it far below has its source on our forty acres of land.
When my husband- to- be landed in this country, we packed up my beautiful possessions, walls of books, French antiques, china, lamps, pictures and rugs, in two 20foot containers, and arrived here on a sunny day just before Christmas. One loving friend had given us a Christmas wreath to hang on the door, and a tree one foot high equipped with tiny Christmas lights. I brought a stock of beeswax candles to light the cabin at night.
We’d packed the bed last in the crammed container, along with candle sticks, a French mirror, a small table and lace tablecloth, and when I’d scrubbed and cleaned the inside of the cabin, we installed the bed, made it up with beautiful linen sheets and French counterpane, hung the mirror above the bed, arranged the tall candlesticks on the table under the window, and felt we had a home !
Also to hand was a tiny gas camp stove, a frying pan and some plates and cutlery, and I cooked all our meals on a picnic table at the side of the house. It didn’t rain at all for the first few weeks, and we were able to unpack one container into a hastily erected garden pavilion so we could turn the now empty container into a minuscule kitchen and sitting room. We had bought a ranch slider from a demolition yard in a town an hour and a half away, carried home on top of the car, and installed at the end.
Undeterred by our primitive conditions I persuaded my helpful new partner to hang up a big gilt Victorian mirror and several very large pictures in antique gold frames, we unpacked several bookcases and books to line the rest of the walls with books,
furnished it with a sofa and two antique French armchairs, an oriental rug, and screened it from the kitchen with a weathered old grey French shutter.
When our neighbours came to call, they were enchanted – one called it ‘petit Versailles’, another brought her mahjong group for afternoon tea to view it, and another, his daughter and then his sister out from England to view this extraordinary ‘room’ in the
middle of the forest.
Our neighbours were a fascinating group of people drawn here by the environment and the opportunity to help preserve both the trees, as well as some of the rare and endangered species which dwell here.
Among the twenty so, are a well known architect, and a professor of aeronautics, who when he retired, went back to University to obtain a degree in zoology, and is now one of the foremost authorities on lepidoptera ( moths and butterflies ) in the country. He has discovered over three hundred new species of moth on the estate in the last ten years.
Our nearest neighbour is a Dutch cello player, and further away lives one of the country’s most renowned landscape architects and botanist wife, while further up the road, is a Dutch restaurateur and his artist wife. Nearby are a couple, one of whom is Swiss, who run a bungee jumping company in various parts of the world, an engineer, who’d retired from running African gold mines, and his Russian wife, and other fascinating characters.
My husband is one of these fascinating characters, having started life in the US Navy as a highly trained nuclear specialist in a nuclear submarine, and when he left Hawaii to join me, was working at a famous observatory on top of one of the highest mountains in the world. He’s not only creative, designing and building our house, using a skateboard to create a sliding door and other ingenious devices, making concrete spheres and series of waterfalls for the garden and creating a thirty foot tree of lights at Christmas, but he’s also the best informed person I’ve ever met, whether we’re talking about space and the stars, or how the body works, or the waves behave, or the theory of magnetism, gravity or Hadley Cells, or Leonardo da Vinci.
We don’t have a television – instead every night after supper, we read to each other, a ritual we wouldn’t miss.
So we live in a world within a world, making expeditions down the long winding road to the nearest town for supplies, which include all the wood, doors and windows, which have been transported up the mountain to build our house on the sturdy roof rack of our loyal station wagon.
My husband has built the house around us and as the years have gone by we have lived in warmth and comfort and beauty.
I’ve planted a garden, and learned what flowers and plants the roaming bands of quail will spare when foraging for their salad course.
So this is the story of our adventure – the story of the forest and fauna and its rare and precious creatures is yet to be told.
Food for Threadbare Gourmets
Apple tart was a staple of our diet, growing up, nearly always eaten after Sunday lunch of roast beef and Yorkshire pudding.
But these days I can’t be doing with all the faffing of pie-making and instead make a quick, easy French galette.
While the oven is heating to 200 degrees, I grease a flat oven proof dish, and place in it a sheet of frozen sweet shortcrust pastry to melt.
Three or four eating apples, peeled and thinly sliced, are fried in butter. By the time they’re ready, the pastry has sunk into the dish and the apples are then piled in the middle. Then sprinkle with sugar and cinnamon, fold the corners of the pastry over the apple, making a square… sprinkle with more sugar and cook for roughly thirty minutes.
Leaves apple tart for dead !
Food for Thought
We will be held accountable for all the permitted pleasures we failed to enjoy .
Hebrew Haggada
ThesoundofwaterNZ 