During the American War, the Viet Cong spent years in warrens like the Cu Chi caves. These tunnel networks were dug in the rich soil of the Mekong Delta when Agent Orange and other defoliants dropped by the Americans made jungle cover impossible.

Last year I crawled through these tunnels, cradling a broken hand for authenticity. The mud walls pressed tight, and the smell of the stale air and damp, packed earth was heavy. We had the luxury of occasional lightbulbs; the original tenants crawled in blackness.

Long bamboo pipes funnelled smoke from the underground kitchens away to outlets under distant bushes. The underground hospital was stocked with sticks to bite away screams. There was a small factory for turning out hideous booby-traps. Silent villagers sharpened stakes, brushed on poison, made pipe bombs. Their designs were modelled now by large Caucasian dummies, and our stomachs flipped at the sight. There were bouncing betties; forget-me-nots—foot traps you could take home with you; concealed drums that spun above a stake-lined pit; staked boards that would swing down from the trees and impale a soldier at chest level.

Americans threw grenades down the tunnels when they found them, so the Viet Cong developed a system of blind alleys and sharp turns where explosives were marooned. Cave-ins were a constant danger. Sometimes Americans invaded the tunnels, but so many were killed on these missions that they began to refuse to go down. They sent dogs instead. The Vietnamese began to wash with American soap and eat C-rations to confuse the dogs’ senses. Sometimes the tunnels were so extraordinarily well-concealed that they were simply never found. The day I visited, the bigger westerners had trouble wedging their protein-fed bodies through the hidden trapdoors, but the Viet Cong had managed to stay so inconspicuous here that the Americans had once built a camp right on top of a network of caves. They couldn’t figure out why they kept getting shelled.

Mr. Hai, my tunnel guide, was a handsome, charismatic man in his mid-fifties.
   “The question I want you to answer me when we leave,” he announced just before we crawled into the tunnels, “is where did they shit? Think carefully! Where did the people who lived in these tunnels take the shit?”

Mr. Hai had been an officer in the South Vietnamese Army. He worked as a translator for the Americans. Tank Division. Years later he still got a kick out of the memory of those American boys. “Hai,” they would say, “Is hot. Is damn hot!” He laughed, delighted at his command of idiom. The short words sounded good from Mr. Hai.

The boys Mr. Hai fought with went home suddenly in 1975. Mr. Hai was sent to a reeducation camp for three years. His uncle, who was far more senior, was cruelly “reeducated” outside Hanoi for seven years. When he got out, he refused to go back to his job as a surgeon. He would not work for the communists; he would sweep the streets instead. Eventually he got out on a boat and became a heart specialist in Ohio.

Mr. Hai did not hide his own dislike of the communists. “We give them name Viet Cong. They never call themselves Viet Cong. You know why? Because it mean “Dumb Vietnamese”, or “Stupid”. They do not like this. And when they won they took revenge on the South Vietnamese. Especially anyone who had helped the Americans. I did not speak English for twenty-five years. Pretend I never learn English. Only in last five years I can speak English again and work with tourists.”

He had never heard from any of the Americans he served with, though in the last few years he has met a few other servicemen. He could find them on the Internet, I told him. He smiled vaguely.

Tim O’Brien wrote an extraordinary short story about serving in Vietnam. It’s called “The Things They Carried“, the title story in his first collection. In it he lists with great care every item he and his fellow U.S. soldiers carried as they slogged through the jungles outside Saigon.

Pages and pages of stuff, he lists. The personal choices reveal the human beings in O’Brien’s soldiers, and the pounds of standard issue show them as grunts. The people they fought wore black pyjamas and carried a pouch of rice, perhaps a rifle and a few magazines.

We sat in the tiny kitchen, deep underground, and ate boiled taro root dipped in salt.
   “And now,” said Mr. Hai, “you will tell me, where did the Viet Cong living in these tunnels take the shit? Because remember, if the dogs smell, they are dead.”

They buried it in dead-end chambers, we guess. The women who sneaked in rice smuggled it out again in bags. They…burned it in the kitchen fires. They piped it out, like the smoke. Mr. Hai kept shaking his head.

Tim O’Brien had the answer.

They were defeated, these American boys, by the things they carried and by the things they dropped. They were bogged down in the swamps and the jungle on size twelve boots. They dropped C-rations and soap, and all kinds of materials that shored up tunnels. They dropped ammunition and knives that were turned into booby traps against them.

Meanwhile, under night cover, boys in black pyjamas combed the rice fields for metal ammo containers dropped from the choppers. Shockproof. Waterproof. Stinkproof.
   “You don’t know,” says Mr. Hai, laughing again. He waves an ammo case at us. “They take the shit in the ammo box, and carry it out at night. That is how they stay down here for all the years.”

My sister finally convinces me that Colin Farrell is Dubya’s lovechild.

Colin Farrell is a jackeen gouger. Perfect for Britney Spears.

Here at Kedey Island I am temporarily dependent on a car for the first time since I was seventeen. I don’t like to need, and dependendence on a dirty great hunk of metal that I can’t drive makes me particularly uneasy. The car is identified with freedom, but to me it is convenient bondage. The canoe that I use to get to the car, on the other hand, is just fine. Self-propulsion, that’s the key.

After I read this I listed my patterns on two Post-Its. The scale of my life is described by the circles I stir in my porridge.

What are your patterns? Do you live well?

It’s lo-og, lo-og,
It’s big, it’s heavy, it’s wood.
It’s lo-og, lo-og,
It’s better than bad, it’s good.Everyone wants a log,
You’re gonna love it, log
Come on and get your log,
Everyone needs a log.

—Ren and Stimpy

Ranger Rick is a hero of mine, the Soo’s own Renaissance man. Here is how to make a Canadian Renaissance man, in case you’re wondering:

1. Plant him in a home-built cabin eight miles up a dirt road.
2. Give him ten brothers and sisters to knock the corners off him, and a mother and father who teach him not to be scared of anything.
3. Keep him away from school until he is old enough to resist indoctrination. Let him regularly stash his hated city shoes at the gate, “borrow” a boat, and wave to the foxed truant officer standing on the bank.
4. Marry him off to a fine and formidable co-conspirator at the ripe old age of nineteen.
5. Endow him with a quick mind, a boxer’s speed, a seanchaí’† art, an aesthete’s eye, and a woodsman’s soul.

On the phone, Rick coaches me on woodchopping. When he worked at a ski-lodge as a young man, he was given the job of splitting wood one whole day a week. Since he could split enough in eight hours to keep the entire resort going for the week, it was pointless letting anyone else do it. He spent his solitary chopping marathons inventing jokes for his large collection, and new material would be demanded by the other grunts as soon as he finished.
“Now, you’re stacking the logs end in?” he enquires. I have no idea. He explains that if I’m loading logs against the cabin, the fat end goes against the wall (or was it the other way around?). Of course, I tell him, as I realise this is why my drunken woodpiles need to be braced. Wood warms you five times, he says. Chopping the tree, splitting the logs, stacking the pile, carrying it in, and finally burning it.

This summer I was given a gift of an Annie Dillard book, On Writing. I haven’t read her famous Pilgrim at Tinker Creek, but I suspect she is too exquisite for my taste. Prepaid phone cards. This guidebook is a series of metaphors comparing the act of writing to various kinds of hard physical labour. For God’s sake, woman, I wanted to tell her, writing isn’t tin-mining. Tin-mining is tin-mining. Ask the Bolivians which they’d rather do.

But she has a chapter on log-splitting that stuck in my mind. Every morning she had to split her firewood to heat her draughty writer’s cabin on some island on the Pacific Northwest. The epiphany eventually ambles in: aim for the chopping block, not the log.

This is absolutely true. I forget how Annie Dillard ties it to writing, but it applies to Rick’s ski-lodge punchlines, too. Log-splitting is a satisfaction that ranks far above popping bubblewrap and just below squashing mosquitos. These days I live to see two quarters of basswood fall away from the blade like flakes of cod. I’m hampered by poor coordination (will I hit the log?) and a weakling physique (will I be able to swing a maul without braining myself?), but splitting wood requires technique more than strength. My technique so far is focused on not whacking myself in the coccyx when I drop the axe behind me, and on hitting the log with the sharp edge when possible. The really big logs have bested me and my maul, but I have the aching shoulders to prove I’ve tried.

Woodfires are luxuries in Ireland. Our native forests were cut down centuries ago, now replaced by dreary ranks of non-native Christmas trees. We burn turf (peat) or more usually, coal. I love these Canadian trees that turn colour and drop leaves just like storybook trees. I love that this cabin is built of logs still wrapped in silver bark. But lordy, after splintering birch into toothpicks all day long, I can hardly grind the pepper on my dinner.

† Seanchaí is an Irish term for a storyteller or yarnspinner. It was a dedicated role in the community, and taken very seriously.

So here’s the plan for the next few months. I’m like a shark: if I don’t keep moving, Immigration will get me and you’ll stop reading.

• October 25: Trona. Because I have a wedding invitation.

• November 13-25: New York. Because I have to go the dentist for the first time in fifteen months (eww).
• November 26-December 8: London. Because I want to play with Simon, Elly and Edward.
• December 9: Dublin. Because I have three babies to visit.
• December 15: Limerick. Because it’s home.
• March 17: New York. Because BA won’t sell cheap tickets one-way.

The tree guys came today. Tim picked them up from the government dock and brought them to the island to examine the big trees that loomed over the cabin, too ornery for his novice chainsaw skills. They agreed a price and got to work. Paul was a Newfie and Bill was from Nova Scotia, so they sounded just like my Roscommon relatives. They were fine specimens of northern manhood as it is romantically imagined by too-thin girls in Manhattan: flannel shirts, handlebar moustaches, and powerful chainsaws. They gave the old birches a good seeing-to.

I tried to impress them by nonchalently mixing chinking concrete in my old wheelbarrow. Unfortunately, I can’t answer questions and keep count of measures at the same time, so there was a suspicious amount of sand. Then I was distracted enough to tip in a full bucket of water, swamping my too-heavy mix. I arranged my I-meant-to-do-that face and they politely continued oiling their chainsaws and answering Tim’s questions.

They climbed doomed trees and leaned back in the straps glamorously. Their chainsaws—orange Stihls with 20-inch blades—roared. They hacked at giant stumps, shaving them flush to the forest floor. They cut huge boles into firewood lengths, leaving me to cart them to the woodpile. Then they puttered back to the mainland.

The phone is back in my life after an 18-month absence. There is, for a few weeks at least, a private number on which people can reach me, though I guard the secret combination neurotically.

Do other people fear the phone as much as me? Most functioning adults I know seems to answer it crisply without a descent into uh-oh-I’m-busted dread. I like to talk, and I love drop-in guests, but can’t bear the uncertainty of an incoming call. It interrupts as no other communication does, and I feel tethered even on a cordless handset. I resent the way this shrill gizmo takes precedence over physical presence, the way phoneophiles cut you off in mid-sentence to answer the baby on the second ring. Two years ago, when Dublin’s love-affair with the meauboile phone was at its height, my sister and I listened unwillingly as four Southside princesses at the next table yapped the whole way through dinner to guests who weren’t there.

I’m not sure what it is that I fear about the phone. Some giant, disembodied, furious authority figure? An impossible project request that I can’t refuse? Some aggrieved soul I promised to call six months ago? Whatever causes this dread, it is powerful enough for me not to pick up unless I’m expecting a benign call. I may be the only person in North America who is relieved when it’s a telemarketer, on whom I can hang up without guilt.

I spent hours on the phone as a teenager. When I had a job I discharged my phone duty without fuss—it’s easier when you’re paid to—and my industry was civilised enough to rely mostly on email anyhow. I can cope with, and even enjoy, long calls from close friends and my family, particularly if they’ve pandered to my phobia by setting a time in advance. The pleasure I take in these chats may even be heightened by the relief that it is not, in fact, some giant, disembodied authority figure ready to yell at me or give me an impossible task.

But that’s about it. I’ll spend an hour online tracking down information rather than making a two-minute phonecall. I’ll wait days for an email response rather than actually lifting the damn phone. I cheer when I reach voicemail instead of a human. When I’m forced to do business by phone these days, I hear my own creepy, over-polite voice and forget what I wanted to ask.

Avoidant. It’s beginning to make sense that I would end up in a log cabin on a desert island.

There were long dark tubes on the floor I’d just swept. I toed one curiously with my work boot as the nice woman at British Airways processed my credit card. It flinched.
“Worms! Oh Jesus Christ!”
“ I’m sorry?” said the nice woman at British Airways.

Worms on the kitchen floor. Lumbricus terrestris, last seen this closely when I dissected one in Fifth Year biology. I’ve always been fond of earthworms, with their groovy mating habits and fine work ethic. I just didn’t understand why they were now crawling out of the fridge and across the floor. While she tapped away I opened the fridge, so ancient that a springclip holds it shut. A mystery tub had lost its top. Earth and worms spilled out. The worms were jolted out of hibernation and were now making confused bids for freedom: through the vegetables, beneath the fridge, under my boots.

“So that’s D for Delta, F for Freddy…” said Ms. Airways. I kicked open the back door. Tim was oiling his chainsaw on the porch, as usual. I stabbed my finger at the worms, and pantomimed outrage. They seemed to be panicking sluggishly now that I had injured one of their number. uk phone cards
“Oops,” said Tim, “Bait.”
“Can you repeat the confirmation number please?” said Ms. Airways.

This is why I hate the phone.

The spell of beautiful weather in Ottawa has been broken. We got several inches of rain yesterday and were saved some lumberjacking by the wind. The gales put me in the mood for chinking. Chinking is the kind of primitive house project I can really get behind. To chink, you mix concrete according to whatever crackpot formula Google invents, and daub it on the gaps between the logs. In my case, I slop it on, admiring how my lumpy mix matches the silver cedar logs, dropping huge gobs on the leaves until it occurs to me to put down a plywood blob-catcher. The process is satisfyingly close to clay-and-wattle daub, in which we would all still be shivering if progress relied on people like me.

I am reading The Walls Around Us, by David Owen. The subtitle is “The Thinking Person’s Guide to How a House Works.” He’s a New Yorker kind of guy, so it’s heavier on the deeper meaning of gypsum than on practical application. (Did you know that Benjamin Franklin brought gypsum to America from France?) Because he’s tweedy, I trust him more on his descriptions of what his contractors did in his eighteenth-century Connecticut house than on his own excursions into DIY. But if you can tolerate the smirkiness of a former editor of the Harvard Lampoon, it’s interesting. And now I get to parrot nonsense about the history of lime as I make concrete in an old wheelbarrow with a garden trowel.

Six parts sand, four parts lime, one part Portland cement and a bucket of dirty river water. I couldn’t find the hog bristles that the traditional log chinking formulas require, and Tim refused to humour me by shaving into the mix. I’m also hindered by my inability to mix more than Lilliputian amounts of concrete at a time. A sofa-cushion-sized bag of sand weighs more than half my weight. Though I’m a crack baker who doesn’t own an electric mixer, my pastry arm is still too puny to stir more than a few teaspoons of this stuff.

The winter lodge is still at the, uh, drafting stage. My sister has blessed me with a crop of new Canuck in-laws who are kindred spirits. When they left college, Kim and George moved into an old building on forty acres at far side of Ottawa. It’s off the grid, and they didn’t have the money to get the power lines extended. Undaunted, they built an extraordinary modern house around it over several years. Their best stuff is salvaged: the mortuary-refrigerator doors into the garage, the hospital cabinets, the mid-century modern furniture rescued from the roadside. It’s elegant enough to have been in Architectural Digest, and completely solar and wind-powered. My first Canadian Thanksgiving was spent oohing and ahing at this marvel while the kids ran as wild as my ideas.

George was glad to help enthusiastic building newbies. Tim’s cabin has plenty of room for one or two people, but you can’t insulate an old log cabin properly without destroying the essence that makes it cool. “Why don’t you insulate it temporarily?” George said, “Wrap it in Tyvek and stack haybales outside it. That’ll get you through a winter while you plan something really good. And you can practice on a small structure in the meantime.”

So that’s what we’re doing. Chinking. Roof insulation, covered by painter’s drop cloths. Tyvek and straw bales for that Three Little Pigs appeal. That hairdryer-plastic stuff on the windows. Preparing ground. Taking out wobbly and/or inconvenient trees. Figuring out a year-round water supply. Planning a little practice building, just for fun—a Japanese bathhouse (pattern #144) maybe. And after all that I can go to Ireland for the winter, morally secure that Tim will not freeze due to my dereliction.