Getting your Trinity Audio player ready...

Tales from Exit 22 by Al Batt

 

Things are short of copacetic.

Life has changed for everyone. My day had been filled with John Prine songs. He’s a good friend I’d never met who died from the coronavirus.

We’re going through a rough patch, but we’re not living in sod houses. I’ve visited a sod house. It was cool, but I’ve never wanted to live in one — other than those times soaking in a sleeping bag on a cold, rainy night.

In areas with a scarcity of trees and linoleum, homesteaders relied on prairie sod as building material. Some called it prairie marble. The dense roots of big bluestem, buffalo grass, little bluestem, wire grass, prairie cord grass and Indian grass held sod together.

Once prime sod was located, the next task on the agenda was to cut the sod into bricks. This was done with a spade. A heart, a diamond or a club didn’t work. Pink Floyd sang about it in “Another Brick in the Wall.” In the 1880s, a new kind of plow was invented that eased the process. This breaking or grasshopper plow cut sod into 12-inch wide and 4-inch thick strips. The tough roots made a ripping sound as the plow cut through them. Then the spade, which had filed for unemployment benefits, was used to cut the strips into short lengths. Most homesteaders cut bricks that were 18 inches wide, 24 inches long and weighed around 50 pounds each. Most sod houses were about 16 feet by 20 feet and had only one room that slept 12 uncomfortably. Approximately 3000 bricks were required to build a house that size. It was a jigsaw that gave the house a puzzled look. Sod was often cut from the spot where the house was built. This made for easier movement, protected the house from prairie fires, and lessened the number of insects, snakes, rodents, worms and insurance salesmen refusing to maintain proper social distancing. Sod needed to be used before it dried and crumbled.

Wooden door frames were set in place when wall construction began. In laying the sod bricks, the builder placed them grass side down, making a wall 2 feet thick. Wooden window frames were positioned when the wall reached the proper height. Any gaps left around a frame were filled with rags or grass to protect the windows from breaking as the house settled. The roof was constructed from brush, branches and hay, covered with a layer of sod. There were fewer warning labels in those days.

Building a sod house was a dirty job. So was living in one. It was no Garden of Sweden. Dirt and water fell regularly from the ceiling, making it difficult to finish a bowl of soup.

The thick sod walls made the houses cool in the summer, warm in the winter and nearly fireproof. This made homeowners insurance on a sod house quite reasonable unless you wanted coverage for pocket gopher damage.

There wasn’t much room. Furniture was kept to a minimum. There were no garages and self-storage units were found only in Lock Haven, Pennsylvania; Lockport, New York; and Windsor Locks, Connecticut. I read about a woman who kept her sewing machine outside in good weather and brought it in during bad.

Plastering or wallpapering (sometimes with newspapers) the inside walls brightened the home. Women found floors made from packed dirt a quagmire that was hard to live with. Adding wooden floors was one of the first improvements that homesteaders made to sod houses.

When the house was finished, a framed needlepoint was hung. It read: “Home, dirty home.”

Flowers on the windowsills and caged birds made a house a home. There was no way to listen to the John Prine of the day. Settlers threw flower seeds onto their roofs. Blooming flowers brightened lives. Mark Twain said it was a front yard on top of a house.

That was then, this is now.

I haven’t been getting out of the house (not sod) much other than going on long walks, but I don’t have to eat while holding an umbrella. And I haven’t had that memorable dining experience of a rattlesnake falling on the table while I’m eating my oatmeal. Thanks to technology, I’m fortunate to be within the range of voices important to me. There aren’t enough things we can do or say to make things better. There are too many things that can be done or said to make things worse.

I’m going to throw some proverbial flower seeds on my proverbial roof and call someone I haven’t talked to in years.

Al Batt’s column appears every Wednesday.