Springtime in NWA

Chapter 160: Dogs, Chorizo, and the Mystery of the Missing Progress

One of the best things about vanlife is campground dogs.  Some people wake up to birdsong. Some wake up to ocean waves. I wake up to random dogs appearing at my front door like furry little tax collectors demanding affection.

This is Koda!  4 year old Rottweiler who hates dogs but loves people.

This is Buddy!  Buddy is everyone's friend.

This particular morning, while I was working in the van with the sliding door open, a puppy came to visit. Louie was a long-haired Dachshund in the most unusual pale coloring, and despite being born blind, he somehow managed to locate me with remarkable accuracy.

He wasn't blind to opportunities for pats, that's for sure.  The little guy climbed right up onto our running board and leaned into every scratch and cuddle I offered. It was impossible not to smile.

Louie <3

The rest of the day was pleasantly uneventful. Spring continued its usual identity crisis of warm one day and freezing the next, but this particular afternoon was glorious. I celebrated by making a cold pasta salad that could be eaten straight from the fridge.  It was excellent. Which immediately made me think:  What other cold pasta-based greatness have I been missing out on?

The next day I escalated the experiment by finding proper Spanish chorizo. Not the Mexican kind that's everywhere around here, but the cured Spanish version that tastes like it belongs on a tapas menu and looks a little bit unfortunate.  

Meanwhile, the house build remained stubbornly unchanged.  I drove out to the lot one day, hoping for progress and found absolutely none. Nothing.  The concrete foundation sat there exactly as it had the week before.

However, next door there was sudden activity.  Trees had been cut down.  Brush had been mulched.  A tractor sat nearby looking suspiciously purposeful.  Immediately my imagination went into overdrive.  Were we getting neighbors already?  Would another house suddenly appear beside ours?  Would they be nice?

The following day I returned to investigate.  This time I spotted a pickup truck that radiated strong Contractor Energy.  I waved him down.  He turned out to work for Cox Communications and patiently answered what was probably an exhausting number of questions from an overly curious woman standing in a cul-de-sac.  Apparently Carroll Electric was installing several new power poles, including one specifically for us, and the city had been clearing trees to make room for power and utility infrastructure.

Mystery solved.  No neighbors.  Just electricity.

Before leaving, I waved the poor man down a second time to ask about various spray-painted markings on the road. He remained remarkably polite.  By this point I had officially become one of those people.  The kind who interrogates utility workers because they're curious about infrastructure.

I finally emailed Brody that afternoon.  As optimistic as I am, there is only so much excitement one can extract from staring at concrete foundations week after week.  I needed to see 3D progress!

Chapter 161: Bad News, Good People, and Fish for Breakfast

The next day Brody called me.  Actually called.  Not texted.  Not emailed.  Called.  This immediately triggered panic.

For months, Brody and I had communicated almost exclusively through texts and emails. A phone call felt serious.  I was at the gym when it happened and I nearly fell off the treadmill.

The news wasn't about our house.  It was worse.  Casey, the owner of the building company and one of the main reasons we chose them, had recently been diagnosed with cancer and had started chemotherapy.  I was stunned.  Casey is young with two little kids.  And from every interaction we'd had with him, he seemed like one of those genuinely decent people you want to succeed.

Suddenly the delays made sense.  Dewayne had been trying to cover both his own workload and Casey's.  The company was trying to hire help.  Everyone was stretched thin.  And our project, with its giant sixteen-foot windows and unusual engineering requirements, needed direct supervision that simply wasn't available right now.

The selfish part of me felt relieved.  Not because of Casey's illness, obviously, but because I finally understood what was happening.  The delays weren't caused by dishonesty or neglect.  Life had simply happened, terribly and unfairly.

I realized how much emotional energy I'd been spending wondering whether people were telling me the truth.  Trust is exhausting when you're unsure who deserves it.  And somehow, despite the disappointing news, I felt more confident in our builders than I had in weeks.

That evening we escaped to Roaring River.  The park looked absolutely stunning as the sun disappeared behind the hills.  We ate beef noodle soup and watched the light fade over the water.

The next morning I was still asleep when Nelson left to fish.  At some point he texted me, "Three trout."  I was barely conscious.  The fish were already caught, cleaned, and waiting to become breakfast before I had fully joined the waking world.  We grilled them over charcoal using a mayonnaise trick we'd discovered online that supposedly prevents fish from sticking to the grate.  It worked perfectly.

The problem wasn't the fish.  The problem was that nobody should be eating three trout at what felt like six in the morning.  Nelson was still full from breakfast. I was still emotionally attached to my pillow.  I even made scrambled eggs with the roe, which neither of us touched.  For perhaps the first time in history, we suffered from excessive fishing success.

Lesson learned:  Maybe don't catch dinner before breakfast.

Chapter 162: Tippet Rings, Trout Experiments, and Old Dreams

Sunday began with a crisis.  Well not a real crisis but what I would call a 'Nelson crisis'.  Which, in practical terms, means a fishing-related inconvenience that briefly feels like the collapse of modern civilization.  Somewhere on the river, he managed to lose both a tippet and a tippet ring, for the first time in eight months.

The way he reacted, you'd think he'd misplaced the deed to our future house.  We rushed over to Tim's Fly Shop only to discover they had closed fifteen minutes earlier. This development was met with the appropriate amount of panic.

Fortunately, I reminded him that the park store sold tippet rings too, in packs of ten!  Meaning Nelson now had nine additional opportunities to lose them.  Problem solved.  With disaster narrowly avoided, Nelson returned to the river while I settled into the van and tied flies. After several weeks of battling elk hair, rubber legs, and my own patience, I finally produced a Stimulator that looked reasonably close to what a Stimulator is supposed to look like.

My best one so far!

By the end of the day Nelson had redeemed himself with two respectable trout. After filleting them, I marinated the fish in white miso, mirin, and rice wine, attempting my own version of Nobu's famous miso black cod.  The fish would need three full days in the marinade.... three days of anticipation, three days of wondering whether I was about to create culinary brilliance or expensive disappointment.  The result, when we finally cooked it, was excellent.  Perhaps a touch too salty but really decent.  Another trout recipe added to our ever-growing collection!

The following weekend we decided to do something unusual.  We didn't fish.  Instead, on Mother's Day, we made pancakes from scratch, complete with crispy bacon, blueberries, and maple syrup. We dragged our chairs under the moon shade and enjoyed breakfast outside in the cool morning air.  It felt wonderfully indulgent.

After checking out of the campground, we headed to Devil's Kitchen Trail, which neither of us had hiked it before.  The weather couldn't have been more perfect. Blue skies, a light breeze, and none of the oppressive humidity that the South is famous for.  The trail wound through beautiful forest and along dramatic bluffs. We stopped constantly to look at rock formations, trees, and anything else that caught our attention.  At one point we noticed that our footsteps sounded strangely like broken glass crunching beneath our boots.

After some investigation (i.e. frantically reading the interpretive trail map), we discovered the culprit was chert.  It's a silica-rich rock similar to quartz, and when pieces knock together they make a distinct glass-like sound. Once we knew what it was, we spent the next few minutes kicking rocks around like curious children.

The Devil's Kitchen itself was incredible.  The rock formation genuinely looked like a room.  Massive stone walls surrounded a square-shaped space, with surfaces so straight and smooth that they almost appeared machine-cut.  You could absolutely imagine some early settler stumbling across it and deciding that this was where the Devil came to cook his dinner (the Devil sounds like a domestic god LOL).

The whole place felt ancient and mysterious.  As we continued walking, we kept catching occasional bursts of sweet fragrance in the air.  Neither of us could figure out where it was coming from.  The scent would appear, disappear, and then return again with the breeze.  Eventually, near the trailhead, Nelson spotted a cluster of small white flowers.  We looked them up and found out they are Honeysuckle.  The smell was incredible.  Sweet and summery without being overwhelming.

Within minutes we were already discussing whether we could plant honeysuckle around our future house.

Back in Bella Vista that evening, I made lobster grilled cheese for dinner after being inspired by advertisements for some Maine lobster festival.  The sandwiches were surprisingly good.

As we sat eating them, I reflected on how different this weekend had been.  No fishing schedule.  No fish cleaning.  No trout processing operation.  No emergency tippet-ring procurement missions.  Just hiking, cooking, talking, and enjoying the weather.

It reminded me of something important.  The river had brought us so much happiness over the last year that it was easy to fall into routines, even good ones.  Sometimes it takes stepping away from the thing you love for a day or two to appreciate it all over again.

The next week brought even more excitement at the construction site.  One morning we woke up on our lot and discovered that our power pole had finally been installed.  In my previous life, I would have considered power poles ugly.  Now?  This one was beautiful.  It was our power pole.

The concrete slabs had been poured.  The foundation was complete.  Power lines were connected.  A meter was scheduled.

For months we'd been staring at trenches, rebar, footings, and concrete walls.  Now, for the first time, it genuinely felt like we were moving toward something.  Not just a construction site.  Not just a dream.

A home.