Part 5: Turns Out Breaking Ground Was the Easy Part...Now We Gotta Use the Stairs

You thought committing to an idea was hard? Or that not absolutely shitting yourself when they start to carve that idea out of the side of a mountain was going to be your biggest triumph? Close but nope… in all the fuss about butterflies and weak knees, we forgot about the stairs (which is wild considering knees and stairs often go hand-in-hand)…

The string, the level, the square, hell even the

pick axes and el maestro himself we’re easy to get up the stairs (aside from a few labored breaths and choice curse words), what was NOT going to be easy, were the: 100’s of 100 lb bags of cement; the 2000 sum cinder blocks; the quintales of rebar; and the cubic yards of sand/substrate needed to turn that cement into concrete; that would ALL need to find their way up these stairs. EVERY...SINGLE...THING we would need in order to build these cabins at the top of these stairs would require us to first get the entirety of its contents UP...THESE...STAIRS…meaning this was about to be the most intense pre-season conditioning any of us had ever taken on; AND A REMINDER: the first quarter hasn't even started yet...

Grit is Golden but There’s Got to Be a Better Way. ..

Although we did all seem to simply accept the idea that this is what had to be done and so we would, simply, get it done, a half-thought communicated in less than perfect Spanish, because I had yet to need the phrase “pulley system” managed to tumble from my lips accompanied by a series of hand gestures, that would send us down a slightly different path… “what about those things mounted on some sort of cable? and ya go like this (insert absurd hand gestures here) and they go like that (more hand gestures) and it just kinda rolls up here…could we do that?” I didn’t fully think the idea was communicated with enough sound words to make any sense, let alone be taken seriously, but to my surprise the faces looking back at me were in receptive contemplation, there was something in the word jumble that “la gringa” had just spit out that we might be able to work with, and we got to work.

We had a whole handful of cooks in the proverbial kitchen concocting WHAT random assortment of things we might make a pulley system out of; I hadn’t really thought to make the actual pulley, myself, but was not against doing so, after all, I was in the presence of expert inventors, and I would never dream of doubting the abilities of my family to make: exactly what was needed, out of nothing that was expected, utilizing anything that was available. So, having been my 2-cents that catapulted us down this potentially futile side quest, I was happy, at this point, to trust the process and just be along for the ride.

Our first pulley was a beautiful amalgamation of items you would never have believed to be a part of a functioning pulley, and you would be right, she did not pull much of anything. The ideas were good, the concept of counter balance and wheels, and rope were all present but the mechanism was wrong…

It was a fun side mission, we got creative, laughed, took turns being sure we each knew better, laughed more, and then resigned to the fact that although a good attempt this Frankenstein pulley wasn’t gonna cut it. I thought the idea was fully dead when the million dollar answer came from someone who was standing behind me “ I think they sell pulleys over at the hardware store one town over, we can just pick one up” and everyone agreed, made a list of the cable, the fasteners, and the pulley we actually needed, and 15 minutes later we were leaving the hardware store with EVERYTHING we needed… So, WHY did we spend a number of hours “reinventing the wheel”... I don’t really know, but what I do know is that we, now have a functional pulley system and that was something…