Jerrymandering 2: Etseri, Svaneti
Blog
Say you’re putting nails in near the top end of a post which is sticking up high out of the ground, otherwise unsupported, and you want to minimize its sway from the hammer blows. How? Have someone hold an axe by the handle with its head on the opposite side of the post from where your blows will fall. The axe head takes most of the transferred force like a billiard ball, bounces with each hit, and keeps the post much steadier. Neat trick! Just one of many things that Jerry has taught me this week.
We’ve finished the gazebo near the main gate to the yard and have also nearly completed a new staircase to the shop entrance; both are in the photos. This too is made of such heavy wood that nothing short of a tornado could budge it and it will be roofed. The beech planks I have, some 3-4 inches thick, are the stairs themselves, and lighter but still very solid wood makes up the posts and rafters.
We actually needed to buy a new circular saw to finish cutting all this material, as hard as it is, and Jerry found a good one as close as Mestia. There is nothing else portable in the village for such a job. A couple of neighbors have big enough table-mounted circular saws, but even getting the amount of wood to them is beyond us. So, new saw it is.
A new hammer too, a heavier one with a grid pattern cut deep into its head so it won’t slip off the nail heads, called a roofing hammer. There’s a great deal of satisfaction to be had from using such good tools, and even acquiring them from this close to home, which is a new thing for me. Mestia even has two hardware shops now!
A major challenge has been two long-lasting power cuts as we started each project. One a couple of nights ago was due to a lightning strike near the house, which managed also to take out our TV and satellite receiver box, which we were using at the time; these may be irreparable, unfortunately. The electricity was off all night and halfway through the next day before the local man could restore it, so we used the small generator, both for the freezers in the house/shop and for the power tools as we needed them.
Now things are all back on, and we remember what it’s like to live without electricity when you do rely on it for quite a lot. We have gas or wood to cook with as necessary, and the big wood stove can give plenty of heat; the laptop I’m writing this on has a couple of hours’ battery and we have a small battery charger for the phones too if we need to charge them during an outage. Candles or solar-powered lamps, check. But the generator is key. I may well get a house-rated one soon in Tbilisi, so we can run everything we need to, heaters and all, when these unpopular but occasional blackouts come. Our local energy system is free, but old, and replacing it would mean we would start having to pay for the power, so we grimace and bear it.
So, in our case, Jerrymandering means taking up our guest’s offer of work for room and board, getting the place more ready for winter and the new tourist season next year, moving ahead but not by unfair or illicit means! Win-win, seems to be. We could do with more such guests, to be honest.
Tony Hanmer has lived in Georgia since 1999, in Svaneti since 2007, and been a weekly writer for GT since early 2011. He runs the “Svaneti Renaissance” Facebook group, now with over 1900 members, at www.facebook.com/groups/SvanetiRenaissance/
He and his wife also run their own guest house in Etseri:
www.facebook.com/hanmer.house.svaneti
By Tony Hanmer