Original subtitles

I always said I'd go anywhere with Calvin Kastein, but I think he's taken me to the outer reaches here.

We're on the top of the world on the Murtaugh Hill Road. Is that where we are, Rob?

Well, we're 1,200 feet up. We've got ways to go to get to the very top, I suppose.

This is Rob Roy, a guy you may or may not have heard about, and if you haven't, we're going to give you a liberal education today.

If you have, you're going to enhance that education, because here's a guy who believes in nature in ways that a lot of us don't even think about.

Rob, I don't know where to start with your life and career. You've had such an interesting career.

When did you move up to the top of this little mountain?

Well, we moved here in 75, and that's when we came from Scotland, where I'd been living prior to that.

That's where I met Jackie, my wife.

And we built a little Cordwood Masonry cottage about a half mile down the road from here.

And, gee, there wasn't any information on Cordwood Masonry.

You couldn't get a book on it or find anybody to talk to.

But we researched as best we could, and we built that little place.

And there was a demand for a book about it.

And that's how I got started with the alternative building, Cordwood Masonry,

and then later underground housing at the same site.

And finally it developed into the Earthwood Building School here.

You are an amazing guy, and I can't wait to learn more.

Before I came here, I was talking with some co-workers of mine about past life regression,

how we get on these subjects over the coffee pot and the water cooler.

I'll never know.

But did you ever think you might have been a beaver in another life or something?

Well, beaver's a really good analogy because a beaver with a wonderful little chainsaw at one end of his body

and this great little trowel at the other end of his body to slap mud on, he makes what?

He makes a Cordwood house.

They love him down in the Potomac River these days.

Earth-sheltered Cordwood house.

But, you know, sometimes lately I've been involved in moving large stones, which we'll talk about, I'm sure.

And sometimes I wonder if perhaps I haven't regressed myself 5,000 years back into time.

It's the caveman in you that does it.

So you moved up on your mountain.

You've been involved in this kind of thing.

I think a lot of people are in a peripheral way, don't you?

I remember back in the 70s when burning wood was the thing to do, you know,

and I made a few stoves based on designs that we got from Mother Earth magazine.

And then we got a better wood stove and burned wood for years.

And now we've come full circle to my house and we're back to a forced air furnace.

But I was always interested in how people like you lived and why they chose to do this.

Well, what's your real motivation?

Well, I think that freedom really means freedom to do the things that you want to do in life.

And if you're tied to a mortgage, for example, you're working for somebody else.

You know, people say, oh, I own my own house.

What they really mean to say is the bank owns it for me, you see.

And therefore, they have to keep on coming up with a wage each month to pay the mortgage.

Because if they stop paying the mortgage, they're going to find out who really owns the house really, really quick after that.

And so this kind of freedom comes from a certain self-reliance to decrease what Thoreau calls the four necessaries of life,

which is food, fuel, shelter, and clothing.

Well, clothing can be pretty reasonable if you go to the thrift store and the Salvation Army and this sort of thing.

And the main ones are food, fuel, and shelter.

So we try here at Earthwood and the other buildings that we've done to address all of these at the design stage,

not just shelter, but also food production and preservation, energy conservation, energy production even.

I mean, look at this ice storm.

What a horrible thing it was.

It still saddens me to look around and see all these trees broken off.

But you harvest the fallen wood, and that's your fuel source, you see.

So nothing's wasted.

So it's this attitude of being as close to self-reliant as you can be.

Of course, there's still paper costs of living that you can't avoid in this country.

We just, you know, it's April 14th today.

I hope you're ready for that.

Calvin was picking up his extension at the federal building before we came up there.

Yes, we're all aware of what the date is now.

Well, you've got health insurance.

You've got car insurance.

You've got paper costs.

You have to come up with some money, obviously.

But if you can keep that to a minimum, you're in a low tax bracket, which is a good thing.

And if you want to take off and go research stone circles or megaliths in the South Sea Islands,

gee, there's no tie to keep you from doing that sort of thing.

What a way to live.

If you make that choice, what a way to live.

I think Thoreau would like it here.

Oh, well, I have a great affinity with,

You know, based on what I know about Thoreau and his Walden Pond, he'd love it here.

Well, I feel a deep spiritual affinity to old HD.

That's great.

This is a wonderful location.

We've got so many things to talk about.

We just want to pan around.

First of all, you mentioned cordwood homes.

And I imagine many people, who haven't at least had the interest I've had in them,

have any clue as to what they are, why you make them that way.

Well, cordwood masonry is building walls of short logs,

typically in a house for this climate, 16 inches in length,

so your wall is also 16 inches thick.

They're laid transversely in the wall in the way that you might stack a rank of firewood.

And the walls have tremendous thermal characteristics.

They combine both insulation and thermal mass in the one structure.

Plus, you can make use of wood, which is virtually junk wood,

which is unacceptable for bringing to the sawmill.

You can use short bits and pieces.

If it's a curved branch, well, when you cut it into 16-inch pieces,

there isn't much of a curve left, you see.

So you can use virtually any what might be considered a junk wood.

You can't use punky wood or deteriorated wood,

but if it's sound and the bark is off of it, you can make use of that.

This ice storm must have put enough material on the ground for thousands of cordwood homes.

Imagine.

And Poplar actually happens to be quite a good choice for Cordwood Mason.

A lot of Poplar around here, too.

Look at all the broken ones.

On the top of this hill.

Yep.

Now, before we go a second farther, I want to describe for people where we are.

This program is shown in three counties, and we're in Clinton County.

What town are we in?

Well, we're actually in the town of Altona.

Our address is the West Chazee address, but strictly speaking, it's town of Altona.

But the Murtaugh Hill Road is the town line road,

so that we can look into Beekmantown right there at the end of the driveway, you see.

So it's Beekmantown and Altona.

And there's a sign on the military turnpike that says Earthwood Building School,

and you make a left or a right depending on what direction you're coming from,

and just keep going up.

Yeah, we're about 1.8 miles up from the military turnpike.

How did you choose this precise spot?

Well, we actually, when Jackie and I came to this country from Scotland in 1974,

we embarked upon a land search.

It took us four or five months.

We bought an old VW camper van, one of the pop-top camper vans,

and we traveled all over the country.

Within the first few weeks, we'd actually come through this part of the world

and discovered this piece of land by stopping basically and knocking on doors.

And we put a deposit on it, but we continued to look around the country.

And after a few months, we realized that we couldn't find anything better than this.

I mean, it had the nice combination of low cost of land,

the right climate we were looking for.

I was going to say, no great natural disasters.

But basically, I mean, that's pretty true.

As devastating as the ice storm is,

it's nothing compared to in other parts of the country

where they have tornadoes or hurricanes or earthquakes or that sort of thing.

So we're pretty fortunate.

But the combination of things, just right.

Good people.

You can do the kind of things that you want to do here.

You discovered the things that we have known about, Calvin and I have talked about for years,

that I promoted in the radio business for 35 or 36 years

before I started doing this with Calvin and a variety of other ventures.

We have a pretty interesting part of the country here.

And you've mentioned some of the ingredients, but there are many more.

Well, yeah, I'm sure you're,

I've only been half my life here, and no doubt you've been all,

Since 61.

I've been here since 61, but I've lived in the North Country since the late 1940s.

It's like they asked the guy in Maine if he's lived here all his life.

He said, not yet.

Not yet.

I knew there'd be humor in here if we,

It's called country humor, right?

Now, people,

When people look at the roofs of your Cordwood home,

they see something very interesting, and that's for a reason, too.

Yeah, all the roofs on the buildings here are earth roofs,

and that is,

There's a lot of good reasons for earth roofs.

One of them is that it is the longest-lasting roof you can build.

You're protecting the roof substrate from the two things that break down every other roof,

which is freeze-thaw cycling and ultraviolet deterioration.

You take a shingle roof, for example, asphalt shingle roof,

the sun's beating down on that.

There's an ultraviolet deterioration, a breakup of the chemical makeup of that shingle.

Same with the freeze-thaw cycling.

If a little bit of frost gets in there, every time you get a freeze and a thaw,

there's a, you know, microscopic deterioration in that.

So the good shingle roof might last you 25 or 30 years.

With this roof, you've protected it from those two things

for 100 years or forever, whichever comes first.

There's also the insulation characteristic.

Not just the earth, but there's four inches of rigid foam insulation under the earth,

which is important.

The earth by itself, eight inches of earth doesn't make it.

But in combination with the four inches of extruded polystyrene,

you get a well-insulated roof.

You've got an ecologically harmonious roof.

You're returning the footprint of the planet where that,

If you put a,

If you put a,

If you put a,

If you have a black, lifeless moon scape on top of there, you've destroyed, in this case, 1,400 square feet of the planet's surface, I should say.

But we've brought that Earth back on top, so that little critters can live in there again.

So, from an airplane, you can't tell if the house has been built.

There's lots of reasons. I think the aesthetics are important to any building.

And gee, any house that we can design and build is an imposition on nature in one way or another.

And the house with the least imposition of nature is the Earth-sheltered house,

because we're tucking it away back into the Earth from which it sprang.

Well, you're tucking it away in several senses of the word, especially this house, because it's berm on the back.

It's bermed up. 40% of the cylindrical walls of this house are Earth-sheltered.

That's not just the Earth roof, but the actual Earth-berming,

which means that it's like you're building in a climate in South Carolina instead of Plattsburgh, New York,

because at 6 feet of depth, you've got the coldest temperatures at 6 feet of depth is right around the 1st of March.

It's about 40 degrees down there.

Well, that's a whole lot better than 20 below zero.

You're starting 60 degrees better off.

Now, notice we're not even talking about insulation here.

We're talking about climate.

We're talking about ambient temperature.

And we're starting off 60 degrees better in the Earth-sheltered house than we are in the house up on the surface.

It's got to be cheaper to heat and more comfortable and a more steady temperature.

We don't get wild fluctuations in the temperature at the Earth-sheltered house.

That's amazing.

All right, and you've built other kinds of houses, not just this kind.

Well, I've built cordwood houses on the surface, you know, with shingled roofs.

But in the last 25 years, most of the buildings have had either an earth roof or another one that we've been experimenting with is a hay roof.

And we've got some of those here, too.

Oh, yeah.

Really?

There are advantages to that, too.

Well, the earth roof's probably better.

But we're still experimenting.

Well, how can you learn if you don't experiment?

That's right.

You know, we talked, he and I, before the camera began, talked about Mother Earth magazine because, Rob, you worked with them for a while down south.

I remember your bylines.

Yeah, I used to be the, I used to write for them, but I also used to be the seminar leader for their earth-sheltered housing program.

And that's how I got involved in teaching alternative building.

And that's how we ended up with Earthwood Building School.

Now, interestingly, the original people at Mother Earth News a few years ago started a new magazine called Back Home,

which is very much like Mother Earth News used to be back in its heyday when it actually gave you useful information.

Yep.

I love it.

It's become a kind of a coffee table magazine now.

But Back Home has returned to that root since the original people.

And I still do a lot of writing for them.

Do you really?

Yeah.

That's great.

Some of your pictures have been in the magazine down through the years, too, I think.

Oh, yeah.

Mother Earth News back home.

There used to be one called Farmstead, which has gone down the tubes.

Oh, I remember that one, too.

I used to write for them and EarthShelterDigest.

You know, these things run in cycles.

And right now, it's really a strange cycle because for the first time I can remember in 25 years,

the economy is strong and so is the alternative economy.

Isn't that amazing?

Both at the same time.

And the reason is Y2K.

Everybody is buying.

People can't produce enough wind plants and solar cells right now to supply the demand for folk that are worried about Y2K.

And you probably won't stockpile any more for the next millennium than you have for the last 25 years.

Well, no, actually, we won't.

The one thing that we have kind of got lax over the years is the food, laying up the food.

And so we do intend to lay up food better than we have done this coming year because there could be a break in services for a while.

Everybody agrees that something's going to happen.

Nobody knows exactly to what extent it's going to happen.

So best to be, I mean, just the experience of the ice storm should give people the idea that, you know, you've got to lay by for the unexpected.

What, that's a good point.

You've got this windmill here.

What kind of power do you generate with this windmill?

Well, this windmill and the solar cells both generate 12-volt DC current.

And that current is carried through large cables because 12-volt current loses a lot of line loss in that.

Through large copper cables, it takes it to 12 deep-cycle storage batteries.

The only way you can store electricity is in direct current.

You can't store alternating current.

You can store DC.

Then from the batteries, we can either use it at 12 volts DC, which our lighting in the house is done that way,

or we have an inverter to change into more or less ordinary 110-volt AC house current.

You can get inverters now which are totally synchronous with any appliance, you know, what they call a sine wave inverter.

So you can run any appliance without fear.

That's amazing, isn't it?

Yeah.

Now, this great tower, did you put this up soon after you moved here?

Yeah, this tower was put up in, I think it was 82 or 83.

I used to be president of a company called Wood, Wind & Earth years ago.

Oh, wow.

That was you.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Okay.

You still see the couple of windmills out in Cumberland Head that we put up and a number of others.

About 24, 25 systems, I guess, in the Adirondacks in the North Country here.

Not a lot of them still going.

Wind plants tend to break down.

Okay.

They'll blow themselves up or they'll just be mechanical failures and it's hard to get the replacement parts.

I advise people now that want to be off the grid.

And that's a discussion that you have to know why you want to be off the grid.

But if you're going to be off the grid, just go with the solar cell.

Stay away from wind energy.

Because the one certainty with wind is that after a few years, you're going to have mechanical problems like you do with a car.

Your car doesn't last forever.

Your windmill doesn't last forever.

But solar cells so far seem to last forever.

They just keep on.

That's amazing, isn't it?

Yeah.

They are like energizer bunnies.

Yeah.

Just keep going and going and going.

Well, a lot of people have tried the wind.

And first of all, you have to be in an area where there is consistent wind in the first place.

We've certainly had consistent wind over the last few months.

Never can most people I've seen remember this much wind.

We noticed that yours wasn't spinning when we got here.

We got it shut down.

And that's a very good reason.

Sure.

Our batteries are more or less fully charged.

They're not exactly fully charged.

But even on a cloudy day like this, we're making solar energy.

Tonight, if we feel like we need to give it a little jag, we can turn it on for a while.

But why have your windmill spinning for nothing?

You wouldn't leave your car running for nothing in case you might like to take a drive.

You know, you turn it on when you want to use it.

And basically, you'll get longer life out of your wind plant if you,

And the flick of a switch turns it off.

It's electronic, you see.

What did the ice storm do to the tower?

Anything?

Nothing.

Zero damage.

Nothing.

Come on.

No.

Absolutely nothing.

What was the overall impact of the ice storm on you right here?

It took us about three days to get out of the driveway because of the trees over it.

Yeah.

Not that we had to go anywhere.

But really, we were,

I guess the greatest impact for us was the sadness of seeing the trees and hearing them.

Standing out in the deck and being able to do nothing about it.

Never will I ever forget it.

Yeah.

Bang, bang, bang.

Like guns going off.

It was just maple trees breaking off, you know.

And really just a helpless, hopeless feeling.

And even now, I mean, you get used to it.

But you look around, you see all the tops of the hardwood trees broken off.

And it's, I guess, aesthetic, but it didn't impact us as far as our way of life here.

Supplied some firewood, I suppose.

But, in fact, Jack LaDuke came and did a three-minute article during, just after the ice storm on how it impacted us, which was virtually nil.

Yeah.

It's just amazing.

And you can't help but feel nature.

There are people viewing this who are far less close to nature than you are who can't help but feel that.

And it's almost a paradox when you look around here and see all this self-sufficiency and see what's happened to these trees.

There's now a, oh, there's some kind of an effort afoot from people who believe that we shouldn't tap trees to get maple syrup because of the way the trees feel.

But I'll tell you what.

When you mentioned the sound of the trees and the sight of the trees, I felt that.

When I heard them around my house and watched them go down, my wife and I held hands and watched that.

And we're deeply moved by that.

Yeah.

We didn't tap this year because we thought it was best to give it a year's rest and see what it's like next year.

Actually, the ones that we do tap over by the road, they came out of it pretty well.

The only damage we had there was the town cut a tree down that they really didn't need to cut down at all.

It was just, it hadn't even, there was no damage to it.

And those trees up by the road there, there were seven or eight maples that actually, very little damage to them.

But we're still, we're just, you know, a few broken branches.

So we're waiting, waiting a year.

You know, sometimes people move in the country to get away from the, from the everyday battles which the rest of us face just to survive.

But living this way sometimes creates a few battles.

Have you ever had a battle of the grid, the municipalities?

No, never.

And of course, we're off the grid as far as, this electricity we make is stored here.

So we budget it ourselves.

There are no wires in the area so you don't have, they don't have to buy it back from you or?

That's correct.

I'm not even a firm believer of that system.

Until they introduce net metering in New York State, I would advise people to stay away from this utility interface.

That's a very good point.

Explain why.

Well, half the states now in the country have what's called net metering, which is like, as if you're, as if the electricity that you're making and putting back into the grid.

The liquid turns your meter in reverse. Now, that's not actually what happens. There's two separate meters. But they give you full value.

The amount you pay for electricity is the same as the amount they give you for the electricity you make.

In New York, there's not net metering. They're paying you at fuel replacement cost, and they're selling it to you at the full shot.

So, I mean, the power companies,You've got to love New York.

Well, they really don't want to do business with a little guy. They don't make it easy for you.

So, until there's net metering,I mean, this is what gets back to discussion. Why do you want to be electrically independent?

And I'll tell you this. If it's for economic reasons, if you've already got the power company coming by your property, the cheapest thing you can do is to plug into them.

That is actually the cost per kilowatt hour of electricity made at home from solar or wind, with the possible exception of hydropower,

which is,you can do cheaply, but very few people have a decent hydro site. My neighbor has an excellent hydro system.

With the exception of hydro, you can't make electricity anywhere near as cheap as you can buy it from them.

So, if it's for economics, plug into the power company. If you have some religious or spiritual or high philosophical reason for being independent and unplugged from the power company, I say more power to you.

Oh, carefully chosen phrase there.

But you don't do it for economics. The other exception to that would be if you're a long ways from the power line,

and it would be a high line charge to bring the power in. I'm talking about if you're having to pay, let's say, $10,000 to bring the electric in.

Well, gee, you can put in a pretty darn nice solar system with inverter and batteries and everything for $10,000, and now you're free of electric.

So, if you want to spend the $10,000 to bring the electric in, you're going to have electric bills for the rest of your life.

If you want to spend the $10,000 for a good solar system, you're free of electric bills for the rest of your life.

But that's what I reckon is about the break-even point, around $10,000.

There are decisions to make in everything we do in life, and to choose this lifestyle is an important decision, and a pretty heavy one for people, I think.

Yeah, but once you,I don't know, everybody's different. So, you know, somebody else might like to,

Even Thoreau said, I don't think anybody should go and pursue my way of life, because in a couple of years I might decide a new one for myself.

But, to me, it's not only economy, but it's also a quality of life. You get used to a certain quality of life.

The clean air and the fresh food and the good neighbors and the peace and quiet, and so many things that you could list.

It might not be everyone's cup of tea. Someone might like the loud and boisterous life.

But there's a lot of benefits besides,I think there's health benefits, there's social benefits, there's spiritual benefits.

But everybody's different, so I don't want to impose on anyone else.

Yeah. I like that philosophy, and that's mine too. How much land do you have up here?

Well, this site right here, we have six acres, and we have a 20-acre woodlot in the Beekman Town side of the road.

Now, this teaching, how does it work?

Well,

We call it the Earthwood,you call it the Earthwood Building School.

Yeah, we run from one to five-day seminars in earth-sheltered housing and cordwood masonry construction.

Those are the two sustainable building methods that we accent. You can't be an expert on everything.

I got information in the mail today from Cobb Cottage Company.

Cobb Cottage Company in Oregon, they specialize in cob houses. Do you know what cob houses are?

Oh, wow! Is that true?

They're little mud pie houses. You make little mud pies and stack them up.

Well, if you've got clay on site, and you've got straw, and you haven't got trees,

You know, the right answer to housing is the use of indigenous materials.

Yeah, whatever you've got around you, do it.

Yeah.

I always like to point out one of our students came here years ago, and they wanted to build an earthwood house.

He married the daughter of the owner of the Colony Brick and Block Company down in Colony, New York.

And so indigenous materials, for them, were five acres of bricks and blocks that were in the back lot.

You've got to love it.

That's indigenous materials.

That's great. I love it.

But they built the house that looks just like that one, except that instead of cordwood, it's brick face on the outside.

But it has the earth roof and the same design. In fact, they built it from our plans.

So there's no single right answer to housing, Gordy. It's use what you've got. You know, people building houses out of tires and sandbags and anything you can take out of it.

Whatever there is. And you know, there are very few right ways to do anything in this world.

There's a lot of wrong ones.

There are a lot of wrong ways. And that brings me to another point before we move, before our joints freeze in this one location.

You mentioned this before. You have never been afraid to let people learn by your mistakes while you learn by them.

And I think that's another great part of your personal philosophy.

Well, it is. My father used to say, a smart man learns from his mistakes, but a wise man learns from the mistakes of others.

So I want to grease the system a little bit and share my mistakes with you so that you don't have to go and repeat my mistakes.

Gordy, there's plenty of them out there lurking for you. Go and find your own mistakes. Don't repeat mine.

So in my books and in our classes, gee, we feel that's really important to share that stuff.

Why should you go and do the same thing that I've already found has been disastrous?

Well, your textbooks are not necessarily written in stone, huh?

Well, people often comment who read my books that they really appreciate that part of it.

They say to me, you know, I was going to do that. And then they find out maybe that wasn't the right thing to do.

Life is a work in progress, right? It really is. Now, let's take a walk. Can we take a walk?

Sure.

We can talk while we walk. And you can just hop over the court and tell us what we're looking at as we move or anything you want to talk about, Rob.

Well, the last couple of years, what's been tying up most of my energy is megalithic construction.

I love it. I love it. Everybody loves it.

We just came by a couple of stones here. This stone here, for example, that's the stone where you stand on June 21st, which is the summer solstice.

And you watch the sunrise over that great big stone. See that? Great. That's a nine ton stone over there.

And that's where the sun rises on the longest day of the year. So it's exactly diametrically on the other side of our stone circle, which we'll go and see that.

Why am I caught up in standing stones? Well, I'm writing a book about it. It's about modern stone builders, people today who are doing megalithic work.

And I tie it into the ancient stuff. So I've had to do a lot of research and study at places like Stonehenge and Avebury and Kalanish, the great ancient stone circles.

And you'll be amazed at what's being done today, too, and not very far away.

You know, I'm fascinated by all of that. As I said, many people are. They don't take time to study it, but they watch Discovery Channel and National Geographic and so on.

And I'm tremendously interested by some of the sound studies they've been doing at Stonehenge, for example, to see how sound might be connected with all of the other stuff that we've known and studied about for years.

And having been in the radio business, that part of it fascinates me.

Well, one of the archaeologists, I think her name was, she said that anybody will find whatever they want to find at Stonehenge.

Isn't it amazing?

Yeah. It's, you know, I think some of the, actually some of the theories go very borderline nutsy cuckoo.

Almost off the planet. Yeah, I know.

But, certainly, what is indisputable is that these ancient people had a very good knowledge of the skies, much better than what we do today.

I mean, people today, they watch the TV. The ancient people watched those planets and the stars and the moon, and they knew about where they were going to rise and set and things like that.

We've lost that. So they knew that stuff.

Well, they didn't have Tom Messner back in those days to tell him what was going to happen.

Well, they did rely on it. They had to feel nature and see it and hear it.

Yeah. And they also, I think, were tremendous engineers. And I know that because we cannot duplicate what the ancients did today.

We still don't know how they did some of the stuff. And I'm not even talking about the pyramids, which is off the charts.

I mean, some of the stuff that's inside the pyramids is impossible.

Yeah, absolutely.

You take down in Machu Picchu and Cuzco, there's stone blocks that are 100 tons and better, and they're fitting together multi-sided stones that you can't get a knife blade between these stones.

Now, how did they move hexagonal and pentagonal stones and get them one against the other, and you can't get a knife blade between them?

You see, we can't duplicate that today.

A lot of theories, but,

But we're working on it.

Yeah.

This is,

It takes us millennia to figure out how they did it, and sometimes why they did it.

A lot of progress has been made. 20 years ago, one of the archaeologists in France, a fellow called Mohen, he moved a 32-ton capstone.

Dolmen is three stones, generally, with a capstone on top. And he moved a 32-ton stone with 200 men.

Last year, another fellow, Poissonnier, Bertrand Poissonnier, moved the identical stone in front of Mohen.

With Mohen present, he moved the same stone with 20 men. Now, that's a factor. That's one-tenth as many men to do the same job. So we're getting there. And I've learned an awful lot in the last couple of years about standing stones.

You're going to go forward and backwards at the same time. Life is funny.

We're into moving stones by hand here now.

Are you really?

Yeah. Well, a part of the book is, you know, building stone circles. So I deal with building them with equipment, you know, backhoes and that sort of thing, cranes. But I also deal with moving them the old-fashioned way, too. And that's been a great,

Oh, what an experience.

,a fascinating study to talk with people who know about this stuff, to attend camps, to go to camps and move stones. I've been involved in building a stone circle just outside of London over the last year. And that's fantastic. They're building a 19-stone circle with some of the stones up to 10 tons. And they're moving,

They're putting them all in by hand.

But you remember Stonehenge is 25 tons or 40 tons. Actually some of the largest stones at Stonehenge are 40 tons.

And in Apri, they went up to 60 to 90 tons. So the one I like to tell about,

That's way bigger than you and a mule, I'll tell you that.

The one I like to tell about is Jackie and I visited the Grand Menhir Brise in France last year.

This is a 350 ton menhir that fell over, this would be a standing stone, 70 feet long.

And it fell over back, I think around the 17, 1720, something like that, and broke into four pieces when it crashed.

But it's there, still lying in the ground. That thing stood for 4,000 years, and it weighed 350 tons.

And we haven't a clue how they got it up.

Why don't you engineer a way to get it back up?

I'm thinking about that.

Well, let's walk and talk some more. I want to see these other stones. Go ahead.

Well, this is one we put up in November. It's called the Ancestor.

And as you move around the stone, you start to see why we call it the Ancestor.

Oh, isn't that beautiful.

He has,there's different aspects of this character.

Oh, yeah.

And he's certainly ancient because this is the basalt dike infusion here on the Murtaugh Hill.

Well, you know, the underlying strata is anorthosite, which is a type of a granite without quartz.

And sometimes the magma will come up, will force its way through the anorthosite, and make what's called a dike infusion.

In fact, the Plattsburgh State brings their geology class up every spring and studies our dike infusions here on the,

,on Murtaugh Hill.

Well, one of them was about this wide, maybe 10, 12 inches wide.

And that's basalt, which is one of the heaviest rocks you can find.

There's a little sample piece there.

You lift that up and see the weight of that stone.

You'll know right away this isn't an ordinary stone.

It weighs 190 pounds per cubic foot.

So the Ancestor,that's a piece of an orthosite that it's sitting on, as a matter of fact.

And the Ancestor is probably from a dike infusion down the hill.

We got about a mile down the hill.

So we rolled it over. We built a stone boat.

We rolled the stone over right about to where this little pile of gray stone is.

Then we stood up the stone boat up to,

We used it as,we took the stone off the stone boat.

We put the ramp,the stone boat,we turned it upside down, used it as a ramp to the top of the foundation stone.

Now the stone was standing up like a refrigerator.

We tied a 2x6 plank across at,at chest height.

And then walked the stone.

One,you know, one foot forward,one foot forward.

And you'd talk,I was the one doing the shouting. I didn't do the moving.

I said,I said, Peter,up with Peter and down,down with John.

And then up with John and down with Peter.

And they would walk and go forward.

And they'd walk the stone up the ramp.

And that's how the Easter Island,

Some people say the Easter Island stones were built that way.

That they walked,the legend says they walked to the site.

So you could walk them along,

I never thought of that until right now. And why not?

Even a large stone,if you have a well-trained crew,it's a case of coordination.

It's rocking back,

How many times have we,how many times have we done that automatically with heavy weights?

Yeah. Well, a refrigerator is a good example.

So, that stone weighs about a ton.

And we just walked it right up there.

And just put a little cement to fasten it down.

This little guy here is the first of a family of four stones.

He's like a little cowled figure.

And he's looking back at the ancestor.

His sister and his mother and father are larger stones.

And they're going to be in here.

They're walking back to the stone circle after visiting the ancestor.

But this little fellow,he stays back.

And he's looking up in awe at the ancestor or some sort of respect.

And we don't know exactly what's going through his mind.

But there's something there.

There is. If you tell me there is, Rob.

This is the neatest stuff. Really great.

So you've visited many sites.

Oh, yes. Over 1,500 stone circles were built in the British Isles.

There still remains of around 900 of them today.

I haven't been to 900, but I've been to probably a couple of dozen.

I've been to certainly the greatest ones.

But some of the minor stone circles are quite fascinating to visit in Britain.

And this stone circle right here is typical of a small circle that you might find,

Well, up at Calanish, for example, there's a major stone circle at Calanish.

But there's also a couple of minor stone circles.

And this is very much like one of those.

So, uh,

But are they all strategic?

In other words, they're all placed carefully?

Right.

To give you an idea, if I lean against this stone here,

if I center myself with my hands on this stone,

and face the north stone, this is the south stone.

If I face the north stone, right over the center of the north stone,

any clear night of the year, the north star will be right over there.

So you can spot it really easily, because I know just the angle to look at, of course.

So that's just one of the alignments.

We talked about the sunrise alignment on the longest day earlier.

We also have a winter sunset alignment.

If you stand at that rather phallic-looking stone next to the big stone there,

that's the hindsight stone for the winter sunset.

And you sight down through the middle of the circle,

and the winter sun sets right behind Calvin over there at that pointy stone,

the one on the left, Calvin.

Yep.

And we've cleared a little bit through the, you know, through the trees to see that,

so that the sun just sets right as an orb over the point of that stone.

I just want people to know that we're undergoing a certain sacrifice to do this program outside today.

Well, you're trying to feel bad.

No, no, I don't mind at all. I love it. No brain, no pain.

We're talking about April 14th with more than seven snow flurries in the air.

So now what are we doing here?

I don't know if I'm going to be,

Your ancestors' ashes, right?

No, I don't know if I'm going to be successful here, but there is actually,

There's a,

There it is.

There it is right there, but I don't know whether I'm going to be able to get this to stand up.

I have to clean this out.

We'll try.

This is the exact center of the circle there.

Well, it's not going to last long.

There's a white dot that needs to be renewed on there, and this is the exact center.

My surveying friend George Barber in Plattsburgh, he actually laid out the circle for me,

and that white dot is the center. So you can take very accurate alignments off of that dot.

So you get,

This is east-west, for example.

If this,

If the horizon is true, if you have a,

If you're not interrupted by trees and mountains and buildings, if you have a true horizon,

the east-west alignment is also your equinox sunrise and sunset.

See?

But because we don't have a true horizon, we have a different equinox stone, that one right there.

That's so neat.

So how many stones do we have now?

There's twelve standing stones in the circle, twelve sitting stones.

We have our Guy Fawkes Night bonfires right here and other celebrations.

And then there's twelve little fire pit stones.

So there's twelve, twelve, twelve.

And the radiuses, or radii, I don't know if you can use either word actually, is one,

Either one is fine with me.

It's megalithic yards.

There was a professor, Tom, in Scotland, who measured the stone circles.

And he found there was a co,

In the ancient times, there was a commonality of unit of measure, which he calls the megalithic yard.

And it's about two-fourth-eight and five-eighths of an inch.

So we figure if we're building a stone circle, we should use the authentic ancient measure.

So it's one megalithic yard to here, three megalithic yards to the inner surface of the sitting stones,

and five megalithic yards to the inner surface of the standing stones.

Why not?

Why not?

Now, have you actually started putting words to paper for this book?

Oh, it's just about done.

I've been two years,

Oh, it is really?

Well, I've been a year and a half on it.

It'll be almost two years from the time of inception to the time of publication.

But I'm just getting the last bit of it together this week, actually.

I turned 95% of the manuscript last Saturday, and I'm just finishing up some of the back matter right now.

And photographs?

Hundreds. Hundreds of photographs.

Yeah, hundreds of photographs.

Yeah, I had to wade through some 1,200 images, slides and photographs,

most of which, you know, I've taken myself at different sites around the world.

And it's a big book, big book.

You're good. Yeah, are you pretty happy with the progress?

Oh, yeah. I'm,This is my tenth book, but I think it's the one that I've enjoyed the most

because of the people that I've met, and there's just such a fascination with this subject.

It's not just stones, you know. It's people. The people that do this sort of thing are eccentrics from the word go.

Don't you love it, though?

Yeah.

Being normal must be painful. You know, that's the way I look at it.

I resemble that remark.

I love it.

But you have met tremendous people. Of course, you travel to four corners of the world.

I used the word quest in an interview we were doing yesterday with a gentleman who produces movies

and special made for television movies who lives in our area, has chosen to live in a rural part of Clinton County up in Moores, New York.

And we all embark on different quests in our lifetimes. I suppose we're,

You know, there are many quests and then there are big ones. And this one, I guess, for you at this point in your life has been kind of a major one, hasn't it?

Well, I suppose everybody's got to be somewhere.

That's another old joke. Everybody's got to be someplace, right?

You know, I've always had this interest in the stones. This stone circle here was built back in, I think it was 87.

But I first went to Stonehenge 33 years ago. I've been 19 years old.

Really?

Yeah. And I remember when you could just pay a shilling to the guy at the,

There was a kiosk and you pay a shilling, you'd walk in.

Nowadays, you can't even get near the stones unless you get a special access permit.

And it costs you £2.50 and you've got to stand outside a rope to look at the stones.

But we still get in with the special access permit.

Of course you do. Everybody,

Nobody knows who you are by now. Ten books, mostly on construction?

Well, the last one's kind of interesting. The last one was called Mortgage Free, and it's quite a large book.

It's a book of strategies about how you can and should own your own house instead of the bank owning it for you.

And it talks about things like laying up the grub stake. It's not a building book. It's a book of strategies, economic strategies.

The temporary shelter, for example. You know, moving on to the property, living on it, stop paying rent or mortgage.

Whatever it is that you're paying for shelter now, stop right away. For the cost of maybe three, four months of rent,

you can build a little temporary shelter that you can tough it out in on the property while you build your house.

Now, what have you done? You've learned how to build a house with this temporary shelter.

If you can live in a 12 by 16 shed, that makes you equal with all the other building species on the planet.

We mentioned beavers, there's birds and bees and all sorts of indigenous builders on this planet.

So, philosophically, that first night you spend in this little building that you've built yourself,

you suddenly realize that after that, it's only a matter of degree. It's no longer a matter of kind. It's a matter of degree.

If you can build a 12 by 16 shed, you can build a 2,000 square foot house.

Maybe you shouldn't start with a 2,000 square foot house.

But, you see, it's,so that's the types of things that we talk about. It's not a how to build book. It's probably more valuable than that.

Have these, uh, any of your books been collaborations with your wife or with others or you,

No, I've done them all myself. My wife helps out a lot in, you know, some of the work around getting the manuscript together and reading things or, um,

She takes, uh, any time you see me in a photograph, she's bound to be on the other end of the camera.

Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. So,

That makes sense.

And she's supportive and she's interested and,and she teaches at the building school here, too.

So she,she, uh, gives a woman's side to, uh, Cordwood Masonry and, uh, she works with the women, shows them how to,

She's a much better pointer than I'll ever be and, you know, a masonry pointer.

Um, I think women have better patience for that than men do.

That's amazing, isn't it? Special talents.

I love it here. What else are you gonna show us?

Well, let's see. I don't know, uh,

I don't think,a lot of people understand how, uh, how solar panels work.

Uh, so you might explain it as long as we're walking by them.

Yeah, well,I like to joke that there's probably only a half a dozen people in the world who really know how they work,

but basically what happens is sunlight photons come and hit these, uh, silicone panels.

These are photovoltaic panels.

Photovoltaic means that they,they take light energy and they convert it to voltage.

So each one of these produces a microscopic amount of electricity, but I think there's 36 together in series,

and when you add it all up, you get about 50 watts of power.

When the sun is,that is to say, when the sun is hitting at right angles to the plane of the panels,

the maximum this panel can make, one panel, is about 50 watts.

So we've got 10 of them here.

So, uh, that's, uh, a potential of 500 watts at noontime when the sun is perpendicular to the plane of the panels.

So that's 500 watts DC current, which is being brought to the batteries and stored there.

In fact, I can turn this panel now and take advantage of the late afternoon sun.

Now, it will pick up a little extra power that way, because now I really have set it at about right angles to the sun's, uh, direction.

You see? So I've probably, uh, quadrupled the output of these two panels just by changing the angle of them.

Right. And you don't have any way that,they don't track the sun.

No, you can get trackers, but they don't,they don't really pay for themselves in this climate.

Trackers work well down in Colorado or places with long, you know, sunny skies.

But up here, they don't work. What we can do, however, uh, several times a year is to change the angle of these eight panels here.

And this is quite interesting. If you were to only change the angle of the panels four days of the year,

which is a sensible number of times to bother to do this, the four days that you would choose is the ancient Celtic cross-quarter days.

Oh, here we go!

Yes. Why is that?

Isn't that amazing?

These cross-quarter days are the days halfway between the solstice and the equinox.

And they call them, uh, Lugnasad, which is about August 2nd, which is now Lammas in the Christian calendar.

You've got, um, Samhain, which is All Saints or All Hallows' Eve. You know, Halloween is Samhain.

This is about, uh, the first of November. That's halfway between the autumnal equinox and the winter solstice.

Then you've got Groundhog Day, which is the real name of it is Imbolc. It dates back as an ancient Celtic cross-quarter day.

And then May Day, which is really Beltane. You see, all these, we've Christianized all these holidays.

I forget what, uh, I think, uh, Groundhog Day is Candlemas.

What is it?

Candlemas in the Christian calendar.

And, uh, so, but, because they're halfway between the equinox and the solstice, you anticipate the season.

You don't want to wait until the solstice to change them, because now you're six weeks too late.

You anticipate that, the angle of the sun, by six weeks, which puts you back to the Celtic cross-quarter days.

And now you're set for the next three months. And then, in bulk, you change them for the next three months.

You see, and you keep doing, you do that four times a year.

So, it really is something that, right here, you've got an ancient technology, a 5,000-year-old technology,

right next to a modern technology. So, I like to think we get our spiritual energy over here,

and our electrical energy over here, but they both pay attention to the ancient cross-quarter days.

You've got the best of a lot of worlds right here going for you, Rob. I love it.

All right, what's next?

Well, this is a sauna. I don't know, uh, a sauna is, uh, you know, a small building that you bring up to 160, 170 degrees Fahrenheit.

We use this every Sunday. And, uh, it's a wood stove in there.

And, uh, it takes about three hours to season the sauna, to bring the,

Because you actually want to bring the fabric of the building up to temperature.

Of course, yeah.

Because if you just heat the air, uh, you go in there, and if the fire goes out,

you open and close the doors, you lose your air temperature.

But if you heat the fabric of the building, which is the inner mortar joint and the cordwood itself,

now it's like going into a little oven, and you're the one being baked, you see?

And you can, uh, the bricks on top of the, uh, stove in there, uh, get very hot, of course, in three hours' time.

And so you can pour a little water on that, and it instantly explodes into steam.

So you can, uh, alternate between the, uh, the steam and the dry.

People, Americans think that sauna is a dry sauna, but that's not correct.

The Finnish people, who know all about saunas, realize that it's this, uh, constantly moving back between, uh, steam and, uh, dry.

And steam and dry.

They also run naked through the,

They do.

,through the snow and hit each other with branches.

Exactly.

So I'm not so sure that,

Well, here.

Here's a drawing that I did of, uh, two different, uh, points of view of the sauna.

You see, this fellow here is having the time of his life beating himself with the birch, uh, it's called a vishta.

And this, this is probably the first sauna for this guy down here.

He's heading, he's heading for the exits.

That's neat.

So you're a cartoonist besides all that, huh?

That's wonderful.

So did you build this sauna right away quick when you built the rest of the building, or was this, uh, an afterthought?

The Finns, when they moved to the Midwest from Finland back in the, in the 19th century, the first thing they would build is their sauna.

Ah.

And that was, that was the priority for them.

And they'd move into the sauna.

And by, by the time they'd finished their house, they were really dirty, so they had to take a sauna by that time, you see.

Uh, no, this wasn't the first thing we built, it was the second thing that we built.

And we did it during workshops.

This is all, uh, students, cordred masonry students.

Some of the neat stuff we have in here.

We have a little bottle.

You know, I remember the students who did this.

This, this fellow was, uh, Ed Burke from, uh, Thornton, Ontario.

And he put the, this is the Hindi good luck symbol.

It's the reverse of the swastika.

The swastika was based on an ancient, uh, Hindu symbol.

And this little guy here is a diva, uh, the diva.

Uh, he, uh, guards the, uh, the sauna against Bonnock, the evil sauna spirit.

And, uh, I should probably let my dog out.

He'll stop barking that way if I do that.

Either way, okay.

We'll be back in just a moment.

And we've gone inside.

Where are we now, Rob?

Well, we're in my little 20-foot diameter, uh, office building here,

where I do my writing.

And Jackie does all the book orders here.

Behind, behind me is all the, all the books that she sends out all over the world, actually,

right from this, uh, table right here.

And, um, this little building is, I think, a good example of the kind of thing that we were discussing earlier.

The temporary shelter, where somebody could, uh, build this, uh, in maybe six weeks.

They could build it.

You know, husband and wife could build this in six weeks and move in, build it for a couple thousand dollars,

and stop paying shelter costs and tough it out in here for a year or so while you build your, your house.

Uh, and when you finally do move into the house, this becomes a useful out-building.

Maybe it's a master bedroom wing, or maybe it's a guest house or a place of business or whatever.

It's not a temporary structure.

It's simply a temporary shelter while you build your house.

Plus, if you make mistakes, make them here.

Make a $500 mistake here instead of a $5,000 mistake over there.

You see?

People aren't going, everybody who builds one of these is not going to put little pictures in the wall.

They're not going to put the, the dipper over there.

They're not going to put these little faces that I see from time to time.

That's the little dipper right there.

Yeah, the little dipper.

Yeah.

And, uh, well there is a face.

Where is it?

Right there.

I saw a face the minute I walked in.

I focused on that face.

Yeah.

Uh, no.

You can do a lot of things.

You can add your own personality, of course.

Well, cordured masonry allows this creativity.

It's a textural thing.

A lot of people are building straw bale, uh, houses.

And, and , uh, people are building straw bale, uh, houses.

And I'll show you a straw bale house if you're interested.

But with cordwood, you can be a little more creative in terms of texture and design,

and kind of just get into the flow of it.

You know, it's fun.

You've got to have fun, first and foremost.

You only get one life, so have fun.

So you heat this with just a little stove, basically.

Yeah, that's all.

Keep it going once you warm the structure up.

It's going to stay warm for a long time.

You have some of your books here.

Are these the latest four?

Yeah, these are all in print right now.

We have one on cordwood masonry that describes the,

This is actually the house here that Calvin's been filming.

And one on underground houses.

I've built other underground buildings besides this one.

And this is actually a big seller right now,

because a lot of the survivalists are, you know,

they're getting into the Y2K thing, and they're going underground.

So we sell a lot of that one right now.

You know your market, don't you, huh?

Yeah.

This is about the sauna, not only building saunas,

but all the philosophy of the history of sauna,

how to use a sauna, everything to do with sauna.

I've been interested in saunas even longer

than I've been interested in the stones.

I started with saunas when I was about 16.

And this is the latest one, Mortgage Free,

which the subtitle is Radical Strategies for Home Ownership.

And banks don't particularly like this book.

I didn't write it for banks.

You didn't have to borrow money from the bank to get that underway, huh?

No.

And it deals with, for example, the temporary shelter strategy

and the purchase of the land and designing a low-cost home.

You know, just to give you one idea,

people say, why do you build a roundhouse?

Well, that is the most economic house to build.

And you look at any, in nature, beavers and birds and bees,

what do they build?

They build roundhouses.

And they do it because it's, for,

if you compare all the potential shapes of houses,

let's compare a square.

A square, incidentally, is the most efficient use of a rectilinear shape.

As soon as you start to go long and narrow,

twice as long as it is wide, it gets less efficient.

A circle of the same area takes 27% less material than a square.

Now, the beaver and the bird,

he didn't have to take a course in geometry to know this instinctively.

He's got millions of years of experience behind him, you see.

But indigenous people, the people,

if you go back to early shelter, it was round.

They didn't build square back then.

Square came from things like making use of sawn lumber,

sheet goods now,

demarcating a city into city blocks, this sort of thing.

But if you go back to indigenous peoples in the country,

the houses are still round today

because it makes sense for them to be round.

That's just one of the types of design ideas.

I'm not saying everybody has to build a round house, obviously.

But, you know, you go up and down the military turnpike

and you look at the houses that were built in the 19th century,

what shape are they?

They're square.

They're two-story square houses with hip roofs.

Why?

Because it was sensible to do that.

It was an economy of materials.

And then when you come to heat the thing,

there's another kind of economy.

There's the least skin area to enclose given volume

in a cube than there is, for example,

the worst example you could think of would be a mobile home.

The shape of it.

Think of all the skin area in a mobile home

in this long, narrow building,

and you're trying to heat unit volume

with a tremendous amount of skin area.

The cube, or better, the cylinder,

goes right down to the most basic geometry for that.

How many round barns are there around?

Every once in a while, I see one.

Yes, the Amish.

And they did it for lots of practical reasons.

One guy could feed, he could go to the center,

bring his hay right to the center,

and feed all the animals.

All their heads were aiming towards the center.

All right.

Now, we also do some videos.

You've got a couple of videos.

You said you produced them right here.

Well, this one was done at the building school.

This was filmed during courses here.

And it's hard in a book to actually show somebody

how to do something.

But in the video, you can show mixing the mortar.

You can show laying up the logs, the pointing of it.

You know, there's insulation between the inner mortar joint

and the outer mortar joint.

You don't see it.

But in this wall, which is 12 inches thick,

the house is 16,

but in this little building, it's 12 inches thick,

you have four inches of mortar,

and then this insulated space,

four inches of sawdust insulation,

and then four inches of mortar.

And without that insulated space,

the thing doesn't work.

You see, you have to stop the transfer of heat

through the mortar.

So all that kind of stuff,

how you do it is shown in here.

And then one that we're selling an awful lot of

in 1998 and 1999 because of Y2K

is the solar-powered home.

You know, people are going into this

for some of the wrong reasons,

but I don't care.

I'll still sell them a video.

You're in business nonetheless.

All right.

And thousands of photographs.

You've got all kinds of stuff around here.

Look at these fellows here in England standing up.

This is a six-ton stone right here.

We're standing up.

I say we.

Somebody has to take these pictures.

The biggest guy's directing traffic.

Yeah, that's right.

Well, he's a good friend of mine, Ivan Macbeth.

He's the biggest guy.

He goes about 340 pounds.

He's amazing.

He's got the beard on him.

Yeah, he looks like Peter.

Maybe in the sun.

He looks like Peter Ustinov.

But I always say with Ivan,

he doesn't move stones with his brawn.

He moves stones with his brain.

You see?

You can,

Listen, if a stone weighs six ton,

it doesn't matter if you weigh 100 pounds,

200 pounds, or 300 pounds,

you ain't going to lift that stone.

Yeah, right.

So what you really need is the few pounds that are up here.

That's what's going to move the stone.

And when you figure out how to use these levers properly

and rollers and things like that,

we can set up a stone so that my son Darren

can lift the end of an eight-ton stone.

I mean, you may say,

well, that's, you know, that can't be.

But think of jacking up a car.

You know, you're lifting a ton or two

when you jack up a car or a truck or something.

How do you do that?

Because you have mechanical advantage.

You can do that with the simplest of equipment,

fulcrums and levers,

and working in close to the axis of the stone

so that the stone's own weight helps to lift itself.

Yeah, you're making a point here

that I don't think people take time to acknowledge.

There was a lot of science around

thousands and thousands of years ago.

And we tend to think that we're so smart now.

And here we are spending centuries

trying to discover the science

that people had forgotten before we were born.

Yeah, yeah.

It's like a good example.

I don't know if I have anything to illustrate it,

but let's say you had a beam

that you wanted to raise.

We'll use a piece of wood.

And this meant,

I have a beam in the house that weighs 900 pounds.

So how do you get a 900-pound beam up at this level

without having a whole lot of people heaving and hoeing?

Well, you put up,

You have two blocks.

Two blocks.

First, it's down on the ground.

You lift one end of it with a lever, if you like, or whatever,

and you slip one block in close to the center axis.

Then, now, when you lift the other end of the beam,

40% of the weight of the beam is offsetting 40% over here.

So you're not lifting the whole beam anymore.

You're only lifting 20% of it

because the beam is offsetting.

So you lift that side up and you stick a block under,

a larger block.

Then you go back to this side, you lift it up,

and you stick in another block.

And you just work it back and forth like that

until you've got two 8-foot-high stacks of blocks.

And actually, one person can do it.

It's better with two

because it's nice to have somebody slip the blocks in.

But you're never struggling.

You can get that 900-pound beam, 8-foot up,

just with somebody lifting one end easily

and the other person putting a block in.

Absolutely incredible.

And the stones, too.

Absolutely incredible.

So you actually do your writing here.

You do your thinking.

You're composing.

You get onto the computer and put the pages together.

You were actually doing that before we got here, right?

That's right.

And sometimes Jackie, she works as a registered nurse,

so she's actually out working at the pediatric office today.

But this morning she was doing book orders

and workshop registrations right here.

And I was sitting there trying to get Chapter 15 finished up.

Can you tell us who your publisher is?

Have you changed publishers over the years or stuck with one?

I've had two publishers.

One is Sterling, New York.

And for the last two books and the one I'm working on currently,

I'm with Chelsea Green in White River Junction, Vermont.

And I like them because they're smaller.

They pay more attention to the details of the books.

Sterling has been good for me to work with Sterling,

but they publish a lot of books.

They're a huge publishing company,

and they can't afford to spend the time.

Their books are cheaper because they're more mass-produced

and they have bigger print runs and stuff like that.

But the Chelsea Green is, I like working with them.

It's a more personal relationship than it was with Sterling.

And it's nothing against Sterling either.

Do you have a middleman?

Do you have a literary agent?

Or do you do all the peddling yourself?

No, I probably should have gotten an agent years ago,

but never did.

Well, you're fortunate to have been able to make that move

in that direction without that middle person

and to be able to do it.

You obviously have an amazing talent.

How did you sell your first book to the publisher?

Well, I was lucky in that one because, as I said,

there was nothing on Cordwood Masonry.

No.

And so I produced, in fact, unbeknownst to me,

at the same time I was writing this book,

a fellow who has become a good friend of mine up in New Brunswick,

he also was writing a book on Cordwood Masonry,

and our books came out within a month of each other.

But up until then, there hadn't been a book about them.

So it's fairly easy to break into writing

if you've got something to say that nobody else has ever said before.

That's what publishers are looking for.

And once you break in with the first one,

it was the same thing with Underground House.

I was lucky. I came in at the right time with the Underground House book, and then after that I developed a reputation as a writer who, you know, produces the manuscript and gets the work done.

You get your foot in the door, the first one is like a doctoral thesis, and then,

I don't write books on spec anymore. You know, I get a contract to write books now. But the first book was just a spec thing, and they looked at the manuscript and they took it. So I was lucky.

I love it. What else can you show us? Where are we going to go next?

Well, we could look at a straw bale building if you want.

I'd love to. Let's get outside and do it.

There you see it's just cordwood stacked there. You see? It's not,

Okay, we're underway again. We had a stop at the garage on the way by because everything on this property has a story. What's the story in here?

Well, this is a post and beam garage using 8x8 and 4x8 vertical posts. It gives you an 8-inch thick cordwood wall.

Even though the cordwood wall is only 8 inches thick, we still give it that insulation, the mortar insulation mortar.

Because this project is for our students to learn to build cordwood masonry. And we do everything here that we would do in a house.

So I'm in no hurry to get this garage finished. I like to have it as a good covered area so in case it rains, we can still conduct our workshops in here.

Some of the work that you see was done at last year. In fact, all of the work that you see was done at last year's workshops.

You see some of the panels have not been quite completed. The students over here, the panel that Calvin's looking at at the moment, you'll notice a symmetry.

It's symmetrical about the center axis. And notice the bottle ends. These are like two jars or a jar in a bottle.

The bottle, for example, if it's a green or a blue bottle, it plugs into the clear jar and then it's laid up so that you don't have an end.

You know, there's no end to break off. And notice the symmetrical pattern of the bottle ends there.

And even the log ends in that panel are symmetrical. And the shelves sticking out of the wall, you could put a plank across those if you wanted to and have a long shelf there.

So this is workshop projects here.

You'll be working more here in the summertime?

Oh, yes. This is where we're actually doing our workshops.

Our first one is Memorial Day weekend. And then we have the big one in July.

The cordwood work week is, I think, the 15th to the 19th of July, where it's a five-day workshop.

So you just take these canvas panels down?

Easy, yep. And the cordwood's all ready. That happens to be 16-inch cordwood.

But when you make one cut, when you cut it in half, you get two eight-inch pieces and you get two clean cuts.

So your clean cuts are put on the inside and your weathered cut stays on the outside where it's going to weather anyway.

So it just gives you a nice, clean inside finish.

All that and this old recumbent bicycle? What's the story behind that thing?

Oh, that's my son's recumbent bicycle. He's out in Colorado right now. And that's his bike.

What's he doing out there?

Well, he's taking a mountain guiding course.

When he finishes this, he has to apprentice now for a year.

And when he's finished, I guess, all his courses, he might have to do one more. I'm not sure.

And then next year, he'll apprentice with this company. And at the end of all that, he'll be a qualified mountain guide.

You know, big stuff.

Oh, yeah. That's great, though.

Yeah, he loves that kind of thing.

And a lot of people do like that.

He's actually, Rowan has been with me, conducting workshops with me in North Carolina and in Chile in South America.

We went down there together and did a workshop two years ago.

So now he's doing his own thing, huh?

That's marvelous. All right. What's next?

Well, we can go over to that straw bale building. It starts to come into view right here.

Oh, yeah.

I'm not dragging, am I, Calvin?

All right. Pick that sentence up where you started before we started the camera, Rob.

We put this hay bale roof on last fall and then put a couple inches of rotted manure on top of that

and then planted it with seed that a farmer gave me.

And even until middle December, there was the most beautiful Irish green grass growing on top of there.

You can just see a little vestige of it left, but it was a lovely green grassy roof right into December.

Isn't that neat? And that'll come back, I'm sure.

Well, this is the first year for this particular,I think so. I think the grass is still growing there now.

It is. I can see it.

I think it'll come back.

That's amazing.

So you do everything you would do for an earth roof, but instead of putting earth on it, you actually put bales of hay, not straw.

The house is made of straw, but the roof is made of hay.

And eventually it rots down and decomposes and something's going to grow up there.

We don't know what's going to grow, but whatever grows is the right thing to be growing up there, isn't it?

Doesn't that make sense?

Of course it does.

That's truly amazing.

All right, let's walk around and see what we've got here.

Go ahead.

These are,this building is straw bale on three sides and cordwood on the north side, which we'll look at here.

And you can't tell it's straw bale because it's covered with a couple of coats of cement plaster.

But I'll take you inside and prove to you that it's a straw bale house.

I believe you. I believe everything you tell me.

The world is made out of snow.

Oh no.

This is the cordwood side, obviously.

Got a little creature on the shelf outside there.

That's our gargoyle.

That's our gargoyle.

Quite an echo in here without the beds being made.

Yeah, that's neat.

Here's the proof, Gordy.

This is what you call,this is the truth panel.

And we leave that exposed so that you can see the bales of straw right inside of there.

I need to put a little plexiglass cover or something on it, I suppose.

But that's the truth panel.

So now what do we got this tied together with?

Is that this cord or,

This is,

Chicken wire.

One inch hex mesh chicken wire.

And that's over most of the straw bales.

And these,

This is a baling twine.

And the bales are knitted together by using long needles that have holes in them, just like a needle that you do sewing with.

And one person pushes the needle through, pushes the,

The baling twine through.

Then the other person sends it back through with another needle.

And you stitch it like a quilt.

The whole building is stitched together.

Now this mesh here is the half inch heavy mesh, the hardware cloth.

And that's,that gives form to the curved walls around the windows.

Oh, I see.

Okay, yeah, yeah.

There has to be some kind of way of structuring it, doesn't there?

Right.

This is the first one of this kind, Rob, you built?

The first one I built.

And one of our students at this workshop, we had a workshop here.

I actually had a,

I didn't conduct this workshop because I didn't know anything about straw bale construction, but I had an expert come who did know a lot about straw bale construction.

He was very good.

And one of the students lives here on the hill and he's built a beautiful straw bale home, a large straw bale home, which might be an idea for a program program program.

And I'll show you some of them for you someday.

Wow, Calvin, put that in the computer chip.

It's a good time to see it right now because he hasn't actually finished plastering all of the walls.

So you can still see some unplastered walls as well as the parts that he's finished as well.

He's still working on that one.

So this kind of construction, I take it, is pretty tried and true.

Otherwise he wouldn't mention to build a big house with it.

Straw bale's big in this country right now, much bigger than Cordwood or Underground.

Everybody's building straw bale houses.

It's just the kind of the in thing, the fad in alternative building right now is straw bale.

What about the danger of fire?

Well, you're not asking the right person.

It's hard for me to imagine once you've covered it up with the plaster, how you're going to get it.

You're not going to get spontaneous combustion because the straw is very dry and you keep it dry.

I mean, there's ways on the foundation that you keep it up off the ground.

You know, spontaneous combustion is when you get moisture in there and great heat is built up until you reach kindling temperature.

You're not going to get moisture in the hay mow, yeah.

But that doesn't happen.

It's never happened that I know of in a straw bale house.

Straw bale is not new.

This is an old method of building too, certainly 70 years old or something like that, maybe more.

So I don't, it'd be hard to, hard to get this house burning.

I mean, how could you?

What are you going to do with this building when you finish it now?

Well, this building is finished actually.

It's just the beds aren't made.

That's the only thing that's unfinished about it.

This is one of the places where our students stay at the building school.

It's a little guest house where they stay.

And notice the little niches.

Yeah, I like that.

It kind of, it's really nice at nighttime.

This is just, you carve out of the straw with a chainsaw actually.

Oh, come on, with a chainsaw?

Yeah.

Yeah, and then you shape it with that mesh.

And at nighttime, you've got a candle on each side and you've got a little bit of a little bit of a little bit of a little bit.

And with the white walls, it's just really, really charming.

And with the bottles on the other end here, I see.

Well, behind me is our most ambitious bottle end project.

Remember, these walls are not 12 inches thick.

These walls are 19 inches thick because the straw bale is 19 inches thick.

So you'd take a couple of wine bottles or a wine bottle in a jar or a beer bottle in a jar,

any combination that'll get you to 19 inches.

We never cut a bottle.

You just find two that fit together.

And then you put some aluminum printing plate around the bottles so that the insulation doesn't come into the space where the necks are.

That's why you can see all the way through them.

If you didn't put the aluminum cylinder,

The light transfer would just be through the neck.

So this is a pattern of an old tree that has branches growing up through it.

The sun rises in the east, and the moon is over here in the west, and you get fruit growing on this tree.

And the blue sky, the dark blue sky at night, and the lighter sky in the day, and the green grass.

You just have to use your imagination a little bit.

But it's all artwork. It really is art, isn't it? That's beautiful.

I think there's 63 bottle ends. It took quite a while to make the bottle ends to build the panel.

I really thought it did. Okay, what's next?

Well, we have another Cordwood guest house. You can have a quick look at that one.

Okay, let's do it.

One thing,

Just before we leave, we had a couple of dangling participles here.

Calvin was interested in the table.

Well, this is an old piece of elm.

You know, a lot of the elms were killed off a number of years ago.

And this one was up in Morris, actually, on a front lawn.

And people had cut it into discs that were twice as thick as this.

And we asked if we could, you know, would she sell us one of these discs?

No, she says, if you can take them away, you can have them.

When they were twice as thick, they weighed about 300 pounds apiece.

Oh, yeah.

So I made a little table out of that one.

In fact, I ripped this one down the middle, and we made two tables out of it.

And another interesting thing I wanted to mention before we left this building is the floor.

This is what I call instant floor.

You pour your concrete, and while the concrete is still plastic, you press quarter-inch roofing slates, recycled roofing slates,

Is that what that is?

,right into the concrete.

Oh, son of a gun.

Now, the trick is, you put a little acryl-60, which is a bonding agent, you put acryl-60 on the side of the slate, which is going to get put down into the concrete.

And then, with a little rubber mallet, you just tippy-tap them down into the concrete while the concrete is still plastic in nature.

And then finally, you come over with a pointing knife, and you point it just the way you do masonry.

Ha!

Who would ever get it?

This is what I call instant floor.

I love it.

All right, we've moved about ten steps, and what do we have here?

Well, this is another little two-passenger guesthouse.

And this one's all cordwood masonry, eight-by-eight cedar posts and eight-inch cordwood.

And what's kind of interesting is these large log ends, this wood is called Balm of Gilead, and it's like a cottonwood tree.

And to give you an idea of scale, that's, I think, 52 inches on this long diameter and about 46 inches high.

So one piece does the entire, well, does half of the panel, and the other 63 logs and all the mortar in between them makes up the other half of the panel.

So it's kind of what I call megalithic cordwood masonry.

Ha!

Was this your idea, or did somebody think that up?

No, I thought it up.

We got four consecutive slices.

I hired a 48-inch chainsaw from Pete's over there in Dannemore, and look, that's how far it went.

It didn't quite make it through, you see?

You couldn't get through it with a 48-inch steel chainsaw.

Can you imagine that?

But now they've shrunk quite a bit because of the great diameter in them, and I've got some, stuck some paper in there, but this has to be repointed now.

What I would do is drive in some hardwood wedges to hold it in place while you repoint it off the back of your trowel, push the mortar in, chisel away the old mortar, put in the new.

I think it's been a couple of years now, so I don't, I think now if I fill them I'll be all right.

Yeah, sounds good to me. What a great idea.

And, inside, oh wow, this is neat. This is really, really neat. This is great.

Yeah, this is another little guest house where people stay from, you know, two to five days depending on the length of the workshop.

You see some other bottle-end designs in here. This one's all cedar. You can probably smell the cedar in here when you come in.

I love it. Yeah. A white cedar though, not the aromatic red cedar, which would be actually overwhelming.

People who put too much of the red cedar in, it's harsh. I like walking into it. Imagine living in a cedar closet.

Yeah. Well, you've got a little door. What is this over here?

These are vents. So, there's a screen on there, and there's two inches of extruded polystyrene, so that when you have it closed, you can keep some heat in.

This is a thermal pane window.

You don't actually have a heat source in here, right?

No, this is only used in the summertime. Yeah.

Are these new beams or old beams?

No, that's an old one there. That particular beam I happened to pick up for $5.

Yeah. This whole building cost about $900 to build.

Unbelievable.

Yeah.

You're a scrounger too, aren't you?

Well, thank you very much.

Don't you love it?

That's what it's all about, right? Recycle, scrounge, use what you can find.

Or as you said earlier, the indigenous material.

Yep.

This has another of these instant slate floors in it.

Yeah. What a great idea.

Well,

Never would have guessed that that was slate.

Roofing slates.

Yeah. Well, once, you know, once it's bonded to the concrete with the bonding agent, I mean, they never loosen up.

Ultimately, they'll wear out, but it doesn't get that much use. To run through a quarter inch of slate is going to take you quite a long time.

Yeah. It does. And there's slate available around every once in a while. An old house will be torn down.

Exactly. The Air Force Base had a bunch of slate that came off of that.

Oh, sure, sure.

Well, they did. I didn't realize that.

Yeah. Yeah. I've always managed to get slate when I've needed it from three or four different sources.

Yeah. Yeah. That's great. All right. We'll move along.

And now we're inside the Cordwood House that we talked so much about that people,

How many millions of people do you think have looked at this house through photographs?

I don't know how many millions.

Lots of them. All around the world, I know that.

I know we've had over a thousand come through the building school to take courses here.

Have you really?

Yeah.

That's incredible. All right. This building is how old?

This was built in 1982, so I'd make it 17 years old.

So I guess it's going to be here for a while.

Well, if you look overhead and see what's keeping it up, the five by ten timbers, you know,

it doesn't look like it's in any danger of falling down real soon.

And the Cordwood Masonry looks just the same now as it does the day it was laid up.

In 17 years there's been no change, at least on the interior.

The exterior has not deteriorated. It's just weathered. It's gone gray as any wooden wall would do.

As all of us tend to do.

Yeah, that's right.

All right. Let's talk about it a little bit. What do you want to say about it?

Well, this main room here is a large open plan living, kitchen, dining room.

I like that because it gives you the sense of the roundness.

If you compartmentalize the round house too much, you lose this great feeling.

There's a comfort in a round house.

You're drawn, all the radial rafters draw you to the center of the masonry stove here behind me,

which is the main heat plant of the stove.

But you get that curvature. If you're sitting in the couch over there, you see the curvature.

So that's, I like the open plan in that way.

There are bedrooms that are in a bathroom which is compartmentalized,

but for the main room it's open plan.

You get the sense of it and that's very important, I think.

Yeah.

I wanted to show you a couple things in this cordwood panel over here.

All right. Move right along here.

Some of the design features like you can put mushrooms into the wall,

like there's a mushroom here and a mushroom there.

And at this time of day, if only the sun would come out,

the sun would actually be hitting these bottle ends right now on this panel.

And there's an interesting alignment that we've put in about, just about two years ago,

we finally got around to doing this.

It's something I've been meaning to do for 17 years, but finally get around to doing.

We figured out which log to drill a hole through,

and there's some insulation stuffed in there so you can't see right through it.

And you've got a little rubber plug on either end of the thing.

And on the shortest day of the year, December 21st, when the sun sets,

the last rays of the setting sun penetrate through this log end

and hit the standing stone that's built into the masonry stove and light it up,

just like it's lit up right now.

We've got to tell them how we did that.

That's so neat.

My son Darren has turned his laser on.

That's an actual stone crystal, a white quartz crystal, perfectly round, set into that standing stone.

And actually when the sun hits it, it doesn't make it red like that,

but it does really light it up really well.

Because it's about the sun's image is about two inches, the same as the ball.

And it starts to rise up from the lower left-hand side and hits the stone,

and then after that it disappears.

It goes out as the sun sets and that's the event.

Wow.

And that gives you a 12-minute warning to go down to the stone circle,

and you can catch a second event at the stone circle.

You stand at that stone I showed you earlier, and you catch the sunset over the sunset stone.

So you can catch two events.

Just got time to grab a beer and head down there for the second event.

Don't you love it?

It's not the same without the beer though.

No, not quite.

All right, let's talk a little bit about the centerpiece of this house.

The centerpiece is a masonry stove, also sometimes called a Russian fireplace.

This one was built by Steven Englehart of Keyesville,

who's the head of the Adirondack Architectural Heritage now.

But years ago he used to build masonry stoves with Tony Model.

Oh, what a guy Tony was, huh?

Yeah. And so he learned masonry stove construction with him.

I actually designed the stove in order to make sense with the architecture here, but Stephen built it according to my design.

And it has a large firebox downstairs. This is actually the small part of the stove up here, the big bits downstairs.

And you fire up your fire inside the stove, and all the heat that you create is put into the stone mass, which is 23 ton, to give you an idea.

Think about that, folks.

Yeah. Now, these horizontal flues go back and forth, back and forth. There's five horizontal flues that go back and forth.

So you have a long flue and long contact time between the hot flue gases and the masonry mass.

You fire the stove hot and fast. You don't try to smolder the wood.

Eastern Europeans say that Americans don't know how to burn wood. We smolder the wood to death.

We see how long we can keep a fire in. Well, this is crazy.

We want to see what creosote burns like.

Exactly. We're making not only creosote, which as you know is dangerous when it catches fire at 1900 degrees in the chimney,

but what doesn't condense in the chimney goes into the atmosphere in a form of pollution.

These are unburned wood gases. With the masonry stove, you get virtually total combustion.

About once a month, I take a five-gallon metal pail of wood ashes out of that stove.

I do that once a month, five gallons of ash.

Isn't that amazing? Think about it.

Now, compared to this, for example, this old cook stove here, gee, every couple of times you burn it,

you have to take the ash pan out and dump it. But that's because you're not getting total combustion.

With the masonry stove, you're getting 100% fuel value out of the wood,

and all the heat you're making is kept in the house in this 23-ton of mass.

When you're burning the wood hot and fast, you can actually hold your hand over the top of the chimney up on the roof,

because all the heat's been taken out of it by the time it gets up there.

Now, people might say, isn't that an amazing modern technology?

Wrong! It's been around here for a long time.

That's right.

In other parts of the world, they use this technology long before we decided that we'd pick up on it here in this country.

Well, people in the know are doing it. There's a lot of masonry stoves being built.

There's whole companies now. There's Bill Derrick in Peru, sells pre-made masonry stoves.

And you can buy kits for masonry stoves.

And it's this proper use of thermal mass.

You know, for years and years, we were talking about insulation,

because there's a profit to be made in insulation.

You can sell somebody a sheet of styrofoam or some Dow pink, you know, pink, Owens Corning pink fiberglass.

But you can't sell them a pound of stone or a gallon of water.

This is thermal mass.

Thermal mass, which is every bit as valuable as insulation,

but it has to be in the proper juxtaposition with the insulation.

For example, in cordwood masonry, all this inner mortar joint is thermal mass.

But you don't conduct the heat directly to the outside,

because you've got insulation between the thermal mass and the exterior.

So there's this,

You notice that there's a nice equitable temperature in here today.

There's been no fire on here today.

Come on.

No, the last fire,Did Jackie fire it up yesterday?

I'm not even sure if she did.

But usually in the springtime, we fire this masonry stove every second day.

And that's it.

Isn't that amazing?

And you get this nice steady temperature, because the house weighs a couple hundred tons.

We don't have to worry about OPEC.

Right.

Right?

It's a far, far smaller cost than buying fuel oil.

I guarantee you that.

So I can,

More electricity.

If you like, I can show you the guts of the masonry, the firebox.

I can light some paper and you can see it burning,

and show you the batteries and that sort of thing downstairs.

Let's go do it.

All right, we're down in the bowels of the place.

What have we got here?

Well, this is the firebox of the masonry stove right here.

And I'll show you what we do once a day in the winter and once every other day in the spring.

And how long it takes to do.

You just take some newspaper.

That's my last Sunday's column, yeah.

A little free trader here.

Yeah, well that's okay too. Mix it up.

We don't waste anything.

Crumple it up good.

It used to say wrapped a fish in it.

Now we know what we really can do with it, right?

Boy, in Britain, I lived in Britain, you didn't get genuine fish and chips unless it came in the,

It had to come in the paper, of course, in a cone, right?

No, this is,

Okay.

I'm just about to end my kindling here.

But there's just enough,

Just enough to fire it.

And then, look at the size of wood that we use here.

This,

People were amazed by this.

I'll put that on already.

This little tiny stuff.

Now you get this from the sawmill.

You know, it's just scrap pieces.

I used to pay $3 for a whole truckload of that back in the,

That's right.

Back in the old days.

Slab wood.

It's hard wood.

Yep.

A little more.

All right.

I love to watch people work.

Don't you, Derek?

You never have to do that, right?

I know.

Yeah, yeah, you have to do it.

It's stuck there.

And that's all it takes.

Little tiny stuff.

Maybe 16 of them.

Something like that.

People say, well, do you get a good draft?

Because you've got such convoluted pipes.

You've got a fantastic draft in this thing.

Of course you do.

Especially if I close the top floor.

It's like a giant intestine going up through there.

There's quite a bit of area.

Just put it with the door cocked open a little bit like that.

It gives the right amount of air in there.

Now we'll burn that about 45 minutes.

Really put the air to it.

And you saw how small the wood was.

So it doesn't take long for it to reduce into a bed of red-hot coals.

And that,

Then when you shut it down, when you close this door and close the blast gate,

which is like an almost airtight damper upstairs,

now you have trapped this bed of red-hot coals.

And I think of it as a little,

Almost like a little nuclear reactor there that keeps radiating heat into the stove

for, oh, at least 12 hours after that.

And then, of course, it takes a long time for that heat to find its way to the outside of the stove.

You can feel a little warmth.

Feel this stone right here, for example.

That's from yesterday's firing.

Darren tells me Jackie fired this up about 6 o'clock yesterday.

So,

No, I think it was yesterday because I was away at the time.

So this is heat that you're getting from 22 hours ago, you see.

See, that's a concept that most people who burn small wood stoves, you know,

they're just not familiar with.

But you have to understand that you are generating that heat,

absorbing it into this mass, and then disseminating it over a long period of time.

And you don't get a quick heat out of it.

But, mind you, you can go away for a month or so, and the house won't freeze.

It'll drop,

We went away.

Our neighbors kind of looked after the house in February.

It never got below 54 degrees in here.

Come on!

Yeah.

And we came back, and we fired up this stove and the cook stove upstairs,

and we fired up that black stove.

You can get a quick heat off of that black stove if you need a quick heat,

but you don't get a quick heat off of this.

And, gee, within a couple of hours,

we had the air temperature up to 70 or 72.

That doesn't mean to say you've brought the fabric of the house up to that temperature.

It takes a couple of days to bring the fabric of the house up to that temperature.

But, you know, you're comfortable with the air in a couple of hours of the quick stoves,

and this is what gives you the background heat.

That's kind of neat.

And there's these horizontal flues.

Notice that I've got kind of a cinnamon roll

made of some wound-up fiberglass insulation here,

but if I were to take that away, which I can't do now because I've just fired the stove,

you would see a long horizontal flue made of 8 by 12 ceramic flue tile,

and then we just put a stove pipe cap over it to cover it like that.

So what's the total length of that flue? Do you have any idea?

Oh, I'm just going to guess around 46 feet, something like that.

That's why you get a draft.

Oh, yeah, you get a good draft.

Do you have one chimney or two chimneys in here?

Ah, we have. That's a good question, actually.

We have two chimneys. One for the masonry stove and one for these other two stoves

because the other two stoves will produce a little creosote

because you're burning them in a different way.

This flue here for the masonry stove in 17 years has never been cleaned.

It will never have to be cleaned. There's zero, zero creosote.

You could go up onto the roof of the house, look at the two chimneys side by side,

and you would see instantly which one is the masonry stove

and which one is the regular cook stove flue

because the cook stove flue has the shiny black creosote,

and once a year we clean that.

It's not bad, but the masonry stove, all you get is a little what's called fly ash,

and it's non-combustible. You can't burn ash again.

Once you've got ash, it's ash. It doesn't burn again.

Creosote, on the other hand, is that gooey, black, sticky,

uh, substance that has a lot of fuel value still left in it,

and when it burns, it burns, I think, at 19, 17, 1900 degrees Fahrenheit.

And, um, a lot of houses in the North Country burn down because of creosote fires.

Oh, yes, of course. That's why I don't burn wood in my house anymore.

Three creosote fires and one wind.

It was just bad, poor setup in the first place, it was a house that I bought and moved into, and that's the way it developed.

What the heck is this collection over here? What is this? Wow! This is amazing!

Sorry about the pool table being covered up, I'm sorting all my megalithic slides right now.

That is a beer mat collection, over a thousand different beer mats, and painstaking research went into it.

You know it is, you've got to lift the bottle off it before you can see what it is.

Isn't this amazing, with an ancient barber chair?

I don't know how the light works.

Alright, maybe you can, it'll be dark, but that's alright, we've been in dungeons before.

These are the deep cycle batteries that all that electricity which is made from sun and wind power comes into these.

See the little golf cart on them? These are golf cart batteries, and they have deep cells, deep wells underneath the plates,

and you can store electricity in these, and they don't deteriorate.

If you deep cycle them, they don't deteriorate in the way that your car battery,

if you deep cycle your car battery three or four times, you've really damaged that battery.

But these batteries are made for deep cycling.

And then, to save energy on water pumping, which is not much of a concern in an ordinary household,

because it's a small percentage of the use, but when you're making, when you're making and using 10% of the typical American household,

water pumping becomes a significant percentage of that 10% at that point.

So we do it here.

Yeah, my God, this is cool.

This is George Barber, my friend in Plattsburgh designed this, takes an old bike, marries it to a Myers double action piston pump,

and when I go 10 times around with my knee, it makes a little noise.

10 strokes is a gallon of water, which is sucked up from the well, and pushed into this blue holding tank.

And as you pump, notice that the needle goes up, that's your pressure valve, shows you the pressure in the tank.

So I'm up to about 26 pounds, 26 pounds right now.

I'll bring it up to 40 pounds, and that's your ordinary house pressure.

So you have your toilets and your washing machine and showers and everything works at regular house pressure.

We get about 30 to 35 useful gallons of water under pressure in this 80 gallon tank.

So one person can take a shower, the other person wants to take a shower, they get a pump before they take the shower, you see.

What a great idea!

Not only do you save electricity, but if you do this every day until you're 100 years old, you'll live to be 100.

You know that? Think about that statement folks! I love it!

Yogi Berra!

Oh, it ain't over till it's over, right?

That's right.

All right.

Is there,

Green growing things and a little late afternoon sunshine trying to poke through.

There's a God out there somewhere.

Yeah, this is a solar room, obvious to me.

Yeah, we actually can eat out of this bed all winter long.

Now, the plants don't grow very much between about the shortest day and, oh, February, well, in bulk, February 2nd.

Everything is dormant at that time because they're not getting enough sunlight to actually promote growth.

But if you've grown things ahead of time, they'll just stay at that size.

And if you get enough of them, you can,

And then in February, they actually start to grow again.

So you can see all this growth has happened just in the last month.

And practically every night, Jackie gets fresh salad greens out of here.

You can grow spinach, kale, lettuce, things of that nature in here through the winter.

And you can start your plants.

I suppose you could grow some miraculous things through the summer.

Oh, golly. Are you kidding?

We usually use it mostly just for winter garden, winter salad and starting vegetables.

Yeah. There's a little bit of weight in there.

And I see you've got some very sturdy beams to sit it on.

Right. And we also have,this is full of water.

And we usually have another one, but it developed a leak.

These blue apple barrel,full of water.

So that they're thermal mass.

And you've got your 16-inch cordwood walls.

You've got two inches of rigid foam insulation.

You've got thermal paint south-facing glass.

So this doesn't freeze in here.

And you can, if you want, you can cock the door open a little bit to get heat from the house into here.

And conversely, in February, when the sun is low and there's snow down on the ground,

with the door closed, this will get up into the 80s in here.

So you can open the door and help heat the house from the heat that's being produced in here.

Why not? You've got to think of all of it, right?

Yep.

It's a good,with the sun out, you can,we'll go outside and you can see the sun hitting the Ancestor stone right now.

It's really quite,it's a good time of day to see that.

We'll do it. We'll walk outside and wrap up this edition of Our Little Corner in just a moment.

I always wondered where,I wanted to always get back to the source.

And I don't know, I may be fairly close to it right here, huh?

I don't know whose ancestor this is, Gordy. Yours or mine, but he's an old fella anyway.

He's a good strong one too, isn't he?

Feel the weight of this basalt.

Oh, I see what you mean? I see exactly what you mean.

That would be what? About three or four pounds?

I don't know, but a cubic foot of that is 190 pounds a cubic foot.

Oh.

Whereas granite runs 165, so,

Whereas to look at it, it looks extremely light.

So it is deceiving when you pick it up.

Yeah, when you compare it to a piece of sandstone, for example, you can feel the density of that is very much,

That's about 140 pounds per square foot.

That is truly amazing. What a great place to end our program here today.

This is, I've talked, used the word quest before, and this has been a very interesting journey we've taken since we joined you here about two hours ago.

I want to thank you very much for inviting us here.

Before we go, I want to ask you what your next major project is after you finish this great book.

Oh, boy, I need a little rest after this book.

We've got our workshop season coming on, but we're aiming to take a little more time this year.

We've actually, you wouldn't think so to see the things that we do here, but we've been actually working too hard the last couple of years,

and we need to, you only get one life, and we want to do some traveling and just, we've got a little place at Shattagay Lake

that we spent exactly six nights at last year, which is nuts and crazy.

Yeah, that's terrible.

So we're going to rectify all that this year and might do a workshop in British Columbia in June.

Still waiting for word on that.

But the next book will probably be another one on cordwood or roundhouses.

I've got another stone book in mind too for the future about the detective work of tracking down how the ancients did the things that they did.

I think that would make a good book.

It sounds good to me. I've learned a great deal since we came here today.

Again, Rob Roy, thank you so much for what you've done, not only with this program, but for what you've done for the goodness of what's going to come after us.

I think it's very important. You've made a major contribution.

Well, first, you must be happy at your work. That's the thing.

That's it. And you are, obviously.

Oh yeah.

You love every minute of it and you love, you're going to spend at least 14 nights at Shattagay Lake this year.

Gee, I hope so.

Thank you for joining us today. We hope we've entertained you and maybe even taught you a few things as we learned a lot ourselves.

And who knows?