Mud Pies for Adults
Building at the Crossroads Part 2
Building is messy work.
Especially when you are building with literal mud.
With volunteers.
For our first building up at Warrior Heart Ranch / Warrior Goddess wilderness retreat center I wanted to honor the ancient traditions of these lands and reuse as much as we could from the old adobe house we would be tearing down.
I also wanted our first building to be a community project, a way to bring people together and create something very literally from our hands and hearts.
As I write today’s article about learning how to build with adobe, I’m on a train traveling through the Peruvian highland plateau. The landscape outside is a tapestry of corn, bean, and onion fields, scattered cows and lamas, high mountains, and adobe houses and fences that seem to grow straight out of the soil.
Adobe was first discovered in … you guessed it, Peru!
Some adobe history:
The word adobe /əˈdoʊbiː/ has existed for around 4,000 years with relatively little change in either pronunciation or meaning. The word can be traced from the Middle Egyptian (c. 2000 BC) word ḏbt "mud brick" (with vowels unwritten).
Adobe is among the earliest building materials, and is used throughout the world. The first adobe building discovered in Peru dates to before 5,100 B.C.
~ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adobe
The Huaca del Sol is an adobe brick pyramid built by the Moche civilization (100 AD to 800 AD) on the northern coast of what is now Peru. Archeologists have estimated that the Huaca del Sol was composed of over 130 million adobe bricks and was the largest pre-Columbian adobe structure built in the Americas. The number of different makers' marks on the bricks suggests that over a hundred different communities contributed bricks to the construction of the Huacas.
~https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Huaca_del_Sol
The Arg-e Bam (Persian: ارگ بم), located in the city of Bam, Kerman Province of southeastern Iran, is the largest adobe building in the world. Listed by UNESCO as part of the World Heritage Site "Bam and its Cultural Landscape", it can be traced back to at least the Achaemenid Empire (sixth to fourth centuries BC). The citadel rose to importance from the seventh to eleventh centuries, as a crossroads along the Silk Road and other important trade routes, and as a producer of silk and cotton garments.
On 26 December 2003, the citadel was almost completely destroyed by an earthquake, along with much of the rest of Bam and its environs. It has since been rebuilt.
~ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arg-e_Bam
Adobe is a community event, a kind of dirty barn raising.
We have work parties at Warrior Heart Ranch twice a year: late May / early June and late September / early October. I put the call out to friends and students: come camp in the wilderness, do hard, dirty work, and in exchange we’ll feed you.
The first work party in May 2019, the year after we bought the property, was all about clean up. Lots of clean up.
It took about 15 volunteers, 9 truckloads to the dump, and lots of deconstruction to create a blank palette to decide what to do next.
I loved every moment of it. Pushing down old adobe walls and deconstructing the old house.
Sorting through piles of building materials and trash from the early 1980’s. My favorite finds: a cracked bowling ball, a rusted can of Chef Boyardee spagetti and meatballs, a perfectly shiny and sharp serrated knife, a cache of old tools by an ancient freezer, and random toys buried deep in the earth.
We sorted and piled various building materials from the old adobe house: dozens of two-foot rusted nail-spikes. Adobe bricks that were mostly intact. Large wooden beams. Gringo blocks (these are rectangular hollow forms made out of four pieces of 2 x 4 the same size as an adobe brick to fasten windows and doors to.) Unglazed satillo tile in the kitchen area. A couple of us spent three hours cleaning out impressive dried up rat nests and droppings from the nooks and crannies of the ancient rusted cooking wood stove. We also pulled up layer after layer of carpet, carpet pads, and insulation.
Our first week working on the land we learned how amazingly unpredictable the weather can be at the southern tip of the Rockies. At our first work party the temperature dropped to 17 degrees one night. The next day it was in the sunny 70’s. Welcome to the high desert.
One of the first things we built was a fire pit, using old concrete blocks. We pulled up old stumps around it, and started burning the random wood we scrounged from the old building and dump piles.
It was around the fire pit, which we crafted in the center of the now cleared house, that I had the vision of our first building — a community kitchen on the old foundation, using the old adobes and making new ones. It would be recycling at its finest.
My partner Franklin, who was a high-end building contractor in Santa Fe, did his best to dissuade me from this notion.
“You know I could frame out the building for you and have walls up in two weeks?” He said.
“I know. And I want to build with adobe.” I replied.
Making adobe bricks and building with them using unskilled labor would probably take us 20 times longer.
But what I was wanting was not speed or efficiency. My vision was about community. Bonding through hard labor. Creating from the land. Prayer, ceremony, and laughter as we created something, together.
We made the first adobe brick on June 28, 2020.
“Well, that worked!” Franklin said.
“You looked surprised. Haven’t you done this before?” I asked.
“Nope.” he said. “But I’ve seen a lot of adobes made, so figured it couldn’t be that hard.”
Here’s the process of making adobe:
Dig up dirt from around the old adobe house and pile it into a wheelbarrow
Sift out rocks and break down adobe chunks using makeshift screen
Haul five gallons of water from the 250 gallon container where we pump water from the well once a day using a gas-operated generator
Using a hoe and with a friend, start adding water slowly and mixing dirt and water together
Add straw, which has been cut up into small pieces using pruning shears
Don’t add too much straw, or it is too hard to mix and becomes crumbly
Don’t add too much water, or you’ll have to get more dirt for the runny mess
Don’t get too enthusiastic, or you can knock the entire wheelbarrow over
When the mud is more or less the consistency of brownie mix, wheelbarrow it over to the forming area
Using a shovel and hands, scoop mud mixture into the wooden forms, making sure top is flat. Add a word or stone to the wet mix.
Let dry overnight
The next morning gently knock and wiggle the semi-dry bricks out of the forms
Stack on their ends so they dry further
When fully dry, move into larger pile of stacked adobes
Repeat
Over the course of a year many hands created over 400 adobe bricks, many of them with words written on them or stones pressed into the wet mud.
Some were perfect. Most had character. All were much loved and sweated over.
Brick by brick, using mud as the mortar, the kitchen started taking form.
Franklin was our main guide and construction angel through each stage of the process of building. As a life-long contractor who raised four daughters he was uniquely suited to navigate teaching mostly women volunteers how to use power tools, build walls, move heavy wooden beams, mix cement, put in windows and doors, lift and roll vigas (huge logs for the ceiling) into place, pour the cement bond beam that solidifies the building, run electrical, and roof.
We all came in with varying degrees of skill, and learned how to find our rhythm with each other and the work. We also learned: building a home is a massive undertaking, even when it is a simple rectangle with mud walls. The amount of mathematics, precision, and skill that goes into making something safe and stable and beautiful is epic. Blessings to Franklin for his willingness to hold space, use his skills, teach, and step aside to let us figure things out. I know it wasn’t easy being part of something that would have taken his normal team less than two months.
But so much love! So much bonding! At night we would eat dinner and laugh, make music, share about our lives. In the mornings we would stand around in the various versions of the kitchen under construction and drink coffee or tea and marvel at what we had done and how much there was to go. I still tear up when I look at the photos and remember the feeling of coming together in community to create a sacred space.
Thank you, thank you, thank you to all the volunteers over the years and to all who donated their labor, money, prayers, or support. Special gratitude to Marilyn, who has brought her expertise and skills since the beginning; to Sarina for keeping our crew well fed and inspired, and to everyone else who has traveled to help us create, whether you came once or dozens of times. : )
We did it!
We laid the last adobe brick on May 27, 2021.
The house was built in two parts: the north section and the south section. We built the walls, added in window openings, and roofed the north section first. Then the following year we finished the south section, which included a 12-foot sliding glass door and a 5-foot french door.
At a certain point I realized we had a serious choice to make. We had used up almost all the adobe mud from the previous house. If we were going to finish the building we would have to make more adobe, which meant finding and mixing clay and sand soil in the right amounts.
So I let go of my desire to make the house entirely by our efforts, and happily purchased two truckloads of semi-stabilized adobe (adobe mixed with cement to make it stronger) from New Mexico Earth, a small family business in Albuquerque.
The original idea was to plaster the inside adobe walls and insulate and stucco the outside. But as the walls were going up I realized how much I loved seeing our imperfect adobe bricks and the various rocks and bottles we had added as we built. So when the walls were complete we applied diluted Elmer’s glue to the inside, to waterproof the adobe while also allowing them to breathe.
In April, 2022 Franklin finished tacking down the last of the 2-inch rigid insulation around the outside of the building. He sent me a photo of wildfire smoke 30 miles away from us, which I didn’t think much of at the time. I was just so happy that the building was nearly ready to be stuccoed.
In early May the wildfire, driven by 60 mile an hour winds, was at our doorstep.
We managed to evacuate a few things from the land, including our 30-foot teaching yurt which was still in its container, before the wildfire hit. I walked through the community kitchen and said a teary goodbye, not knowing if it would survive the fire that was a few days away.
By a miracle, it did.
The wildfire hit the north end of the community kitchen, melted insulation, cracked windows, destroyed the top plexiglass windows.
And then, it mysteriously left the rest of the building completely and utterly untouched.
As I wrote about in When What you Love Destroys What you Love, we ended up losing about 175 out of 180 acres of our pine, piñon, and Douglas fir forest to the largest wildfire in New Mexico history.
Thanks to the firefighters, and I believe the incredible amount of love put into the community kitchen over the years, while we lost almost everything else the heart of our retreat center was spared.
May 2022 through May 2023 has been about a lot of heartbreak as we’ve navigated the effects of wildfire. And yet, we persevered.
On May 22, 2023, a professional team completed the final coat of stucco.
I hope I was able to give you a little taste of our process in creating over here in New Mexico. It was so difficult to choose photos, there are so, so many.
Below is a link to a three wonderful videos for paid subscribers, enjoy!
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