The Cabin, and Why We Started

It starts with a cabin above the Lampasas River. Our great-grandfather — everybody called him Short — got this ground in the 1940s, after the federal government took his wheat farm in Killeen to build what became Fort Hood. He grew seed wheat here for years, and in the early '60s he and his kids built the cabin down by the river. The family actually lived across the road on separate land, running goats and sheep and cutting hay. The cabin was the other thing — a place to cool off in the river after a day in the fields. They called it "Short's Resort," half joking, and our great-aunts painted the sign by hand.

No running water, no electricity, and four generations later it's still standing. We're the ones keeping it now, and we still camp there most times we come down to work — which is where a lot of this restoration actually gets planned, over a fire with the river going by. The name's a joke that stuck. There's no resort. There's a cabin, a river, and seven sections of ground that need work. But it says something we wanted to keep: this is a place people are welcome, and the work of fixing it up ought to be welcoming too — easy to follow, written down, and free for anyone to copy.

A field journal, not a blog

So that's what this is. A field journal. What we try, what we learn, how we keep track of it, and the problems we run into on the way. The sections are numbered, the species are recorded, the instruments are logged, the plans are open. There's an institution behind it — small, mostly one family — but we run it like one on purpose, because that's what keeps the work going past any single season or any one set of hands.