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Army Corps of Engineers hosts public workshop to discuss potential dam removal Maryville Daily TimesCBS News Live
MIAMI - City of Oakland Park commissioners want to help keep home prices within the reach of people in their community. While they see no urgent need for affordable housing, the commission held an open workshop to hear ideas that could help develop a strategy.
"We certainly want to see that Oakland Park is an affordable city for not only our citizens but also for those who are interested in living in our city," Mayor Aisha Gordon told CBS News Miami.
The build-up around the city is no secret. Along north Dixie Highway, there's a renovated park and billboard boasting blueprints for a multi-million dollar development. One sign of the times, though, feels unwritten to homeowner Mark Harris.
"I'm glad I'm locked in (with a mortgage) but I feel for people trying to get into our community," he said. "It's tough."
Harris bought his house for $350,000 in 2017. His neighbor recently sold for nearly twice that, he said.
In Broward County, the median home price jumped 7.9% in February compared the previous year, according to the Miami Association of Realtors. That increase is greater than what the association recorded in Miami-Dade or Palm Beach County.
While Mayor Gordon feels there is no dire current need for more easily attainable housing, the commission wonders about the future and wants to do as much as possible to keep it that way.
"It matters because it offers an opportunity for individuals to want to come and live in our city and work and play in our city," Gordon said.
Two weeks after seeing the city's first million-dollar home sale of the year, city leaders hosted their workshop for ideas Wednesday evening at 6 pm inside city hall.
Harris was glad to see it happen but wonders if the city can do much to slow the rising tide of home prices.
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Every week in a conference room at Lincoln Medical Center in the Bronx, Kraig Lewis teaches about a dozen teenagers the six Rs for interacting with police: Don’t run, don’t resist, right to an attorney, refuse all searches, refuse food, and the right to remain silent.
“We’re here to enlighten them and teach them the right way to move in New York City,” said Lewis, an organizer with the Legal Aid Society who is running the sessions over the course of eight weeks. “Because one false move, they’ll end up in jail, or even worse.”
NYPD data crunched by the New York Civil Liberties Union shows that youths aged 15 to 17 were stopped by the NYPD at a higher rate than any other age group between 2003 and 2021. Once they were stopped, they were then frisked, arrested and assaulted by officers at the same rates as adults.
Such negative interactions prompted Legal Aid to team up with antiviolence organizations across the city to host Know Your Rights workshops to teach young people how to more safely deal with police officers. While Legal Aid has been running Know Your Rights workshops for nine years, the new program is intended to create “youth ambassadors” who can take the information they learn and share it with their peers.
Kraig Lewis’ pad with notes on what he teaches the teens at the Know Your Rights workshop.
Matt Katz / Gothamist
The workshops cover the NYPD’s gang database, and how it can ensnare innocent young people of color in the criminal justice system and subject them to surveillance. It addresses how and when to film police, and what to do when stopped and searched. And on the afternoon that Gothamist attended, kids at risk of incarceration who are part of the antiviolence group Guns Down, Life Up watched as Lewis pulled up videos on YouTube. He showed the teenagers a video of a police interaction in Iowa, in which a white officer stops and eventually arrests a Black man based on reports of a suspicious person. The man was handing out fliers for a political candidate.
The students found the situation familiar, and were shocked that police operate that way in Iowa. But the workshop organizers reminded them that aggressive policing can happen anywhere.
That prompted the kids, one after the next, to begin describing their own experiences with officers not turning on their body-worn cameras, or stopping them for no reason, or roughing them up.
One teenager, Daniel Calderon, described how he and his friends were once swarmed by NYPD officers after being falsely accused of stealing a moped. “They put us in handcuffs, they didn’t read us no rights, no [body-worn] cameras was on,” he said. Another time, officers rolled through an apartment building where he was hanging out in the staircase. “One or two just slapped my cousin — like, boom! Stop moving!” he said.
Young New Yorkers in neighborhoods with higher levels of street crime, like Mott Haven, are in regular contact with police officers. And a surge of NYPD officers in the subway system has led to a spike in arrests and summons for fare evasions, and could lead to more police interactions with young people underground. Just last week, a sobbing 12-year-old girl told the City Council that an officer at a Brooklyn subway station was so accusatory after she asked for help with her broken Metrocard that she feared for her life.
Legal Aid’s Kraig Lewis and Al Saint-Jean listen as Kanye Farrison Stone raps his own lyrics to get practice talking in front of other people.
Matt Katz / Gothamist
The NYPD didn’t respond to multiple requests for comment about the workshops and youth-police relations. But Alfred Titus, a retired NYPD homicide detective with a doctorate in criminal justice, said he thinks the NYPD should be doing its own version of Know Your Rights sessions.
“In these minority communities, the police are one of the biggest concerns for young people — even young people not involved in any criminal activity, just regular African American, Hispanic males and females, and their parents,” Titus said.
He agrees with the work Legal Aid is doing, so the public is better able to deal with officers who become too aggressive.
“There are officers that do not know how to take a step back and just calm down a situation,” he said. “They don’t use the de-escalation training that they are given. And instead they either add fuel to the fire or just don’t handle it correctly.”
And while that’s long been the reality of police-youth interactions in the city, he said, the difference now is because of cellphone videos, we see it more. Those videos go viral, and get on the news. Young people digest that as reality, even if the most violent incidents aren’t everyday occurrences.
Titus actually runs his own workshops through his consulting firm on how to have positive interactions with police. He said he tries to impart the perspectives of police officers, who often have their own fears when dealing with the public: “When an officer is walking up to a dark-tinted vehicle, and it’s night, and he can’t see who’s in the backseat, and your music is blasting, maybe there’s smoke ...This officer is now thinking, ‘OK, this might be my last hurrah right here. There may be someone who’s going to take me out.’”
At the session in Mott Haven, Lewis told teenagers that the responsibility for de-escalating police interactions is on them. Don’t argue, and don’t yell. And if you manage to keep it cool, you can preserve the right to sue the police if officers engage in misconduct, he said.
“That is the way to get back at these people because we cannot physically harm them,” Lewis said. “We tried to defund them. It didn’t work.”
Legal Aid’s Kraig Lewis calls on a student at the Know Your Rights class.
Matt Katz / Gothamist
Takeasha Newton, another organizer with Legal Aid, reminded the teenagers that police officers have the authority to kill people in some circumstances. So never run from the cops, she said. And “you should be giving this information to your family members and your community, because we want to save your life at the end of the day.”
At the end of class, the teenagers were asked to go to the front of the room and share a talent that they might have. The point was to get the kids to practice being in front of a crowd, so they’re best able to talk to groups of their peers about the rights they have and the risks they face when dealing with cops.
Lewis knows about cop interactions gone wrong. He was locked up after an infamous 2016 gang takedown in the Bronx that netted 120 arrests for supposed gang activity, but yielded very few convictions for actual violent crime. Lewis — a father who had no criminal record and was on the verge of graduating college in Connecticut — ended up spending almost two years in jail before copping to a marijuana charge to get released, even though he says he was innocent.
“Now I have to use what happened to me to try to help other people,” he said. “That’s my calling.”
Shanghai-based Far Workshop has transformed an historic lot of land in China’s countryside and its underground and overground into a wine cellar. Prior to the renovation, the site’s underground concrete vault was originally used for grain storage, meanwhile the traditional lodge was left abandoned for years.
Now, the vault sits as a wine cellar including a space for tasting, and the lodge serves as welcoming entrance to receive guests. Both spaces are united by an atmosphere that fuses a modern ambience with the site’s quality of a ‘relic’ to be preserved. Further, the design team has re-landscaped the site to restore its natural qualities, extending the structure with a canopy and rows of textured black concrete columns that create dynamic viewpoints and echo the woodlands beyond.
a revival and extension of an abandoned lodge | all images © Far Workshop
The Chinese wine cellar blends into its engulfing countryside environment with the integration of rustic columns that form the dominant visual language of the project. Defining both the entrance to the wine cellar and the boundary of the land, the concrete elements lend a sculptural presence, while standing in dialogue with the natural landscape and the adjacent structure’s plastered facade.
Interdisciplinary design firm Far Workshop has diverged from the standard industrialized concrete column expressions which are often reminiscent of stones. Instead, the team uses a black and rough, abstracted finish in a unique expression that tones down such representation and balances over the figurative image. Embracing craftsmanship of casted forms, the columns express their raw materiality, and cracks, holes, and uneven surfaces are left untreated to adorn the surfaces. In doing so, each of the casted columns maintain individuality from one another despite expressing the same formwork.
the canopy extends out from the original building, echoing its form
Far Workshop transforms abandoned land and its structural remnants into a wine cellar
A controversial seminar about white privilege that had been planned by the city teachers’ union for Monday was abruptly canceled — because its host was inundated with “hate messages and disparaging comments.”
The United Federation of Teachers — which represents more than 190,000 teachers, paraprofessional educators and child care workers in the five boroughs — had planned the virtual “Holding the Weight of Whiteness” seminar for 4 to 6 p.m. before it was postponed over blowback from politicians and online commenters.
Scheduled presenter Erica Sandoval, a Queens licensed clinical social worker, said in a statement that the event addressing the “harmful effects of whiteness in our lives” was canceled when she received “hate messages and disparaging comments being left in my email inbox and on my social media platforms.
“Because of this, UFT expressed concern and we collectively decided to postpone the discussion,” Sandoval said.
The union sent out an email to members Sunday night informing them that the $25 virtual workshop would not go on as scheduled, a source told The Post.
The optional course for licensed mental health professionals was focused on “cultural humility and inclusion” and sought to teach educators “how whiteness relates to privilege and identity, and how both become normalized and invisible,” according to literature promoting the event.
“Participants will leave the workshop with a better understanding of how to center ourselves as a form of resistance against the harmful effects of whiteness in our lives, the organizations we work for or direct, and the communities in which we serve,” according to a promo on Instagram.
Attendees would have earned two hours of credit for their continuing-education resume, which eventually results in higher pay.
Calls and emails to union officials about the nature of the cancellation were not immediately returned.
More than half of the teachers in the nation’s largest school system are white — and tasked with educating a mostly minority student body in which 72% of the students are economically disadvantaged, according to the city DOE.
Sandoval, an Ecuadorian native, told The Post that the event was “misinterpreted by certain members of the UFT and the public at large.”
The “lifelong advocate of diversity, equity, and inclusion” added that she was “open to discussing this further in a public forum sponsored by The Post.
“I would like to clarify that my job was presenting the CE, and had no intention of offending and causing any discomfort to the audience,” Sandoval wrote. “I am a strong advocate for inclusion and love of all human beings and the focus is to unite, restore peace, and heal.”
Local Republican lawmakers such as City Council Minority Leader Joe Borelli and Councilwoman Joann Ariola of Queens had slammed the class with Ariola, blasting the “appalling” decision to “label one racial group as inherently harmful.”
An Instagram post on the UFT’s Member Assistance Program page was taken down after The Post drew attention to the controversy.
A huge fire engulfed a car workshop in West Sussex on Friday evening.
West Sussex Fire and Rescue was called to the scene on Albourne Road, Hurstpierpoint, at about 20:20 GMT.
At the height of the blaze there were eight fire engines tackling the flames, while local people were asked to avoid the area and keep windows shut.
Horses in an adjoining building were led to safety and residents in a nearby house were also evacuated, but there were no reports of any injuries.
The fire service said crews remained at the scene until 09:30 on Saturday, damping down hotspots to ensure the fire was fully extinguished.
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Forging steel at the Pennsylvania Guild of Craftsmen's blacksmith workshop [photos] LNP | LancasterOnlineIf you’re a caregiver, creative expression might help you cope. The Senior Center of West Seattle has several spots still open in a free workshop next week. We just got the announcement:
Creative Workshops for Caregivers
Wednesday, March 29, 1–2 pm
Senior Center of West Seattle (4217 SW Oregon St.)Creative Aging at the Frye Art Museum is excited to launch the first in a series of creative workshops for caregivers. Presented in partnership with Sound Generations and led by teaching artist Carmen Ficarra, the workshops are designed to give caregivers an opportunity to create in a fun and relaxing manner. While the session will focus on how caregivers can turn to art in their own leisure time, participants will also explore the possibilities of these projects being done with those in their care. No prior experience as an artist is necessary. The workshop is free and art materials are provided. For more information, or to register by Monday, March 27, email brittanybl@soundgenerations.org or call 206-727-6261.
The Israel Defense Forces says it is delaying a two-day workshop session for members of the General Staff, to allow for the senior officers to discuss the judicial overhaul with their respective units.
“In the coming days, all IDF commanders will hold talks with their subordinates, standing and reserve, following the protests in Israeli society, with the aim of strengthening the cohesion of the IDF and maintaining its competence,” the military says.
The now-delayed two-day session was meant to discuss the IDF’s multi-year plan, the military says.
It’s a typically chilly spring morning in the broad high-desert region of southern Oregon nicknamed “Oregon’s Outback.” A gravel road winds past hayfields and around small buttes. A heavy-duty pickup hauls a large trailer, rattling over cattle guards and kicking up a wake of dust.
Trucks hauling trailers of hay or livestock are not an uncommon sight in this vast sagebrush rangeland. But this trailer is like no other in the region; it is hand-made of plywood, rusted machine parts, sun-bleached wood reclaimed from the desert playa and an assortment of salvage windows.
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The large trailer looks like a nomadic tiny house on wheels. In fact, it has been used for that purpose. And it is also a classroom. And a manufacturing shop.
The truck pulls up to an unmarked spot on a desolate stretch of public land managed by the Bureau of Land Management. There is a gnarled tree for shade and a view of an alkali lake. A good view for the day’s work.
Michael Lish climbs out of the cab. He wears heavy work boots, Carhartt pants stained with grease, a faded chambray work shirt and leather work gloves. His black hair is starting to show some gray of middle age, though it is cut in a style Lish has sported since he was a teenager — his signature mohawk.
He walks to the back of the trailer and unlatches the shutter doors. He pulls out power tools and an electric generator to run them.
It’s time to make some custom skis, and school is now in session.
On this particular spring weekend, Lish and Kristin Broumas are offering one of their two-day build-your-own-ski workshops. It’s just one facet of Lish and Broumas’ ever-evolving business endeavors — collectively called Community Skis — that allow them to share their love of making skis and creating community.
“When people find out about us, they want to come to where we are because they’re coming to natural places that are incredibly beautiful and create an amazing backdrop for building their ski,” Lish said.
Participants in the workshops have ranged in age from 7 to 80, said Broumas and come from all over the world. The students for one of their workshops last March were Attila Jurecska, Hungarian born, but now living in Beaverton and his daughter, Francesca Jurecska, 19, who was visiting him from Italy. Attila skis a little, but Francesca has never skied before.
“It can be intimidating for some to think, ‘I don’t know anything about ski design. I don’t even really know much about how I ski in a sense. So, how am I gonna design a set of skis?’” Broumas said. “But it’s not like that. It’s having a conversation with somebody who knows what you say and how to take that and turn it into a perfect, basically custom-fit ski for you.”
Think of the term “custom-designed skis,” you might imagine movie stars and super models in fur-trimmed ski parkas getting out of Porsches to hit the slopes … that image is a far cry from this basin of sagebrush, dotted with cattle, crisscrossed by barbwire.
Located about 40 miles north of Oregon’s border with California, this ski-making enterprise is a long way from the ski resorts on Mount Bachelor and Mount Hood. It’s even farther from the legendary high-end destinations like Colorado’s Vail and Aspen, Sun Valley, Idaho, or Park City, Utah.
“I wouldn’t say it’s a spectacle, but it certainly creates curiosity,” Lish said. “People drive by like, ‘What are you guys doing?’”
Michael Lish, co-founder of Community Skis, helps Attila Jurecska and his daughter Francesca build a set of custom skis in Southern Oregon during a two-day workshop in March 2022.
Ian McCluskey / OPB
The task begins with locking lengths of Baltic birch plywood onto a workbench, then cutting them into the exact contoured shape of skis with a router.
Francesca takes the router in her hand and flips the switch. The tool comes to life with a high-pitched whir. As soon as it begins to move along the edge of the plywood, it shoots a spray of wood shavings.
“A router is a pretty gnarly tool in the sense of what it does,” Broumas said. “It has a kind of high-pitch noise, and it’s heavy and it’s kind of awkward. It’s not an intuitive tool. And most people, unless you’re a cabinet maker, really haven’t ever used a router or really even been around a router. So it’s cool to see someone, especially a young lady, just pick up that router and just go for it!”
As Francesca moves the router around the second board, carving it into the contours of a ski, she gets more relaxed and assured.
“Nice,” Lish said, looking over Francesca’s shoulder.
“We’re using power tools that you get at Home Depot, but these custom jigs are pretty ingenious how they were set up and designed so that anyone that has never used a power tool before can come in and build their own ski and feel confident and feel safe,” Broumas said.
This tiny ski-making factory is engineered to be as efficient with space as a sailboat — every tool has its place. The workbench can be different things at different steps. Below it is a heater chamber, to cure the skis once they are coated in epoxy resin.
Every step of this process has been designed by Lish and Broumas. And they want to share this process. They’ve created a program where they go to schools to work with middle and high school students. Every year they bring their ski-making trailer to Colorado and conduct workshops with high school students at schools in Carbondale and Denver. This year, they are doing a ski-making program with a non-profit Art center in Denver in conjunction with the Colorado School of Mines.
In their traveling ski-making program, they can work with 16 students to produce 16 sets of skis. They’ve broken the process down into stations for each step.
“So we aren’t teaching every student how to build their skis,” Broumas said. “We’re teaching a few students how to run each station and then they’re teaching each other.”
By the end, the students have their own custom skis; but in the process, they have learned hands-on skills, communication and cooperation, while having a lot of applied-learning fun.
Some schools want to host their own ski-making programs and have a ski-making trailer of their own, like in the town of Wenatchee, Washington.
Lish and Broumas created a branch of their business they called Community Fabrication, to build these compact classroom workshops.
“And so we’ll build, say, a 40-foot trailer, which is a neat solution for a school district that has maybe two high schools and a few middle schools, and they want all the schools to be able to make use of this mobile classroom,” Broumas said.
The handmade trailers built by Michael Lish and Kristin Broumas are part living quarters, part classroom, and part ski-making factory. Parked in the vast public lands of "Oregon's outback" near Lakeview, they offer a spectacular view for the unique two-day ski-making workshops.
Ian McCluskey / OPB
After a morning of shaping the skis and laying on the smooth P-Tex base and metal edges, it is time to bind everything together with a layer of fiberglass.
Broumas mixes a small batch of 2-part epoxy in a plastic tub. Attila and Francesca suit up with smocks and rubber gloves. Scooping up globs of the gooey resin, they spread it over the tops of their skis with their fingers and smooth it over the strips of fiberglass sheets. This is a quiet moment, no whirring and buzzing power tools. It looks more like Montessori arts-and-crafts hour than custom ski-making.
“This is nice,” Attila said.
The graphics, which have been printed on a thin, translucent rice paper, are unfolded and laid over the wooden ski base, revealing the design.
“These are amazing,” Francesca said.
“Oh wow!” Attila seconds.
Attila loves astronomy, and his custom ski design has mountains and a starry night sky. Francesca’s is a complimentary style, with an image of a rugged mountain range, like the Italian Alps. The color and texture look like an antique lithograph from a 19th-century book.
Broumas is the talent behind the graphics. In the trailer, she’ll sit at the tiny countertop with her laptop. Sometimes customers will send her a handful of images of their favorite things — photos or family or pets, or their favorite places, cartoons, or drawings … or they might offer just general concepts of what they love or their personality.
Someone could, for example, ask for a Hawaiian surf theme with a Salvador Dali twist, incorporating their favorite food jelly beans and an image of their Burmese mountain dog Herbert, and yes, Broumas can not only put that together but meld these disparate elements into a unified design that plays out across the two skis.
Broumas promises that she will never reuse a design. “So it’s truly theirs. Nobody else will ever have a ski that looks like that,” she said.
Kristin Broumas applies graphics to a new set of handmade skis, as workshop participants Attila Jurecska and his daughter Francesca watch their new skis become truly custom in a trailer parked in Southern Oregon in March 2022.
Ian McCluskey, Ian McCluskey / OPB
In the middle of the vast sagebrush range, where rural routes 395 and 31 split, is a spot on the map called Valley Falls.
There’s an abandoned gas station on one side. Another side has a large metal pole barn and a row of John Deere farm equipment. And on the third side of this junction is a patch of gravel where the highway crews used to park their heavy equipment.
You could give the locals a million guesses as to what would happen to this patch of gravel when the 1-acre of land at the fork of the road sold in 2020, but no one would have guessed it would become Oregon’s destination for do-it-yourself custom skis.
Lish recalls the locals gave him leery looks when he first moved his trailer onto the gravel spot in the spring of 2020. His oil-stained Carhartt’s fit in, but they did a double-take of his mohawk.
Originally from L.A., Lish has sported his signature mohawk since he was a young man. He told Broumas that he’d keep it until he felt comfortable with it in all social situations.
“Apparently he hasn’t gotten comfortable with it yet,” Broumas said with a chuckle. “But that’s who he is. He likes to push himself outside of his comfort zone.”
Lish recalls his first encounter with a neighbor. Lish was outside, fabricating a new a gate for his new property with an electric MIG welder.
The neighbor, Ken Weekley, jumped into his pickup, sped across the highway and pulled up into the parking area so hard that he sent gravel flying. He berated Lish for being careless about the fire hazard of his welder catching the dry grass on such a windy day.
A few weeks later, Weekley returned, apologized for the aggressive tone and introduced himself.
“As it turns out, we’re incredibly close friends now,” Lish said.
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Over the months, the locals watched this patch of gravel become a nexus of trailers. In the summer of that year, two shipping containers arrived and were stacked on top of each other and converted to a workshop. An unusual and somewhat eccentric compound was being created.
But the locals could see their like-minded spirit of pioneering, self-reliance and hard manual labor, Lish said.
“We only have maybe 10 households within a 40-mile radius, but within those 10 households we’ve gotten to become very close,” Lish said. “And what I mean by close is you watch each other’s back, and unless you’ve experienced it, it sounds kind of cute, cozy, whatever, maybe a distant past, but it’s real out here. It’s absolutely real.”
Lish and Bromaus, the new arrivals, were starting to fit into the local community just fine.
Their long, winding journey started in the parking lot of California’s Mammoth Mountain Ski Area.
Lish had a small trailer, portable generator and an inexpensive hand-grinder that he was using to tune the metal edges of skis. Then he began to try to make his own skis.
He’d make a pair, test them on a run. They’d break, and he would go back to the drawing board, analyze the damage and make another pair.
As people stopped by to see what the skier with the mohawk was making in his trailer, Lish invited them to help or even make a set of skis for themselves.
This evolved into the first business that he dubbed 333. He’d ask the client three questions about what they wanted, take three hours to make them a set of skis and charge them $333.
Lish moved his fledgling enterprise to various stretches of BLM land.
“It’s nuts,” Lish said, “it became this really popular thing in Mammoth.”
As his cottage business grew, Lish needed help managing the orders and administration.
In 2009, he posted an ad for a business manager. In his iconoclastic way, he created an application that was intentionally designed to take several hours to fill out and asked seemingly non-related questions, like what books the applicant was currently reading.
“I got people that were seasoned business managers, people that were in the ski industry, recently-graduated MBAs. I mean, it was impressive,” he said. “And I got this one application and she had no managerial experience. Her background was interior design.”
On one of Lish’s questions, the applicant replied simply that she thought she knew what Lish was asking, but had no way of forming an answer. This intrigued him.
He followed up with a phone interview, which resulted in Lish getting into an argument with the applicant. He decided then that this was the applicant he needed — someone who could stand up to him and speak her mind.
“I’m like, ‘that’s perfect,’” he said. “Because this is not gonna be a typical company and its objectives aren’t even typical.”
Broumas was living in Golden, Colorado, at the time. Although she could do the job remotely, she agreed to drive out to California to meet Lish in person and spend a few weeks getting to know the ski-making process.
Broumas met Lish on the side of the road in Death Valley, and he gave her an iPod loaded with songs he thought she’d enjoy. “And that’s how Michael is, he’s very thoughtful like that. He’s thinking about ‘how she’s gonna feel when she gets here,’” she said. “‘How can I make her kind of just get connected and dialed in as quickly as possible?’”
Broumas listened to the playlist as she drove through Death Valley and into California’s Eastern Sierra. She immediately felt comfortable with him.
“It just felt right, like, ‘okay, this is where I need to be right now,’” she said.
Broumas stayed with Lish for a month, learning about the process of making skis in the off-grid trailer on BLM rangeland.
In the desert, days could be searing hot and frigid at night. Living in a tiny trailer was tight quarters and offered few creature comforts.
“Growing up in Maine helped,” Broumas said.
Her family cut firewood for the long Maine winters and grew their own food in the summer. She was used to hard work and outdoor chores.
“So the idea of building skis off-grid in a trailer I thought was really interesting,” she said. “And I knew I could live that lifestyle at least for a little while.”
The first month rolled into the next. And then the next. Broumas realized she was going to stay.
Michael Lish and Kristin Broumas live and work in the handmade trailers they build. It's tight quarters, but as Broumas said, they've "just made it work."
Ian McCluskey / OPB
They built up the business and eventually had a ski-making workspace and community gallery in Mammoth Lakes, California, where they hosted public events. They named this new version of the business Community Skis.
They recall this time with nostalgia and some bittersweet feelings. Lish describes that time in his life as being younger, more temperamental, perhaps too proud, and alludes to burning bridges in the community, prompting them to pull up stakes and set off across the West.
As they roamed in their mobile factory, they worked and lived in the tiny trailer they built. Sometimes literally elbow to elbow, they were in proximity that would be challenging for any couple. But they weren’t a couple; they were strictly business partners.
“We just had separate sleeping spaces, and we kind of had our own routines, and we just figured it out,” Broumas said.
“The truth is, our focus was truly on developing these businesses,” Lish said.
They roamed across the West and landed in Wyoming for a while, where they built skis for customers. Then, they circled to the Northwest and settled in Bend and built a custom ski factory for a local high school.
Other schools wanted factories of their own, so they built more. Then, they found a 1-acre property in Valley Falls and shifted their operations to Southern Oregon.
“When we finally kind of got this property, about that time, things started to make settle-down sense,” Lish said. “At that point we looked at each other and like, we’re not totally sick of each other. In fact, we’re not sick of each other at all!”
Lish and Bromaus had found the reason to halt their searching and settled into a new chapter of making a home base together as a couple in Valley Falls.
After travelling and working across the West, Michael Lish and Kristin Broumas picked Valley Falls, a small town in Southern Oregon, as the place to settle down and create a headquarters for their efforts to build custom skis and create community out of their homemade trailers.
Ian McCluskey / OPB
The skis are completed and Francesca is excited to ski for the first time in her life.
Lish and Francesca head to the only ski hill in the area, the one-lift Warner Canyon. Run by volunteers, it’s only open on weekends, so Lish and Francesca have the bottom of the ski hill to themselves.
Lish guides Francesca as they step into the skis. He holds her coat gently as they begin to move, gravity tugging them downhill.
“Now, turn,” he said. “Good!”
They make a series of slow s-shaped turns. As the ground eventually levels out by the lodge, they glide to a stop. They high-five.
“Let’s do it again!” Francesca said with glee.
For the final evening of the workshop, Lish and Broumas haul one of their large trailers a few miles from their headquarters, down a gravel farm road and park it in the middle of a hay field. This trailer is dubbed, “House in the fields,” and is another custom aspect of the custom ski-making experience — a one-of-a-kind one-table restaurant.
Broumas moves easily in the small kitchen of the trailer. On a massive stove, several pots simmer. Her chef knife slides effortlessly through vegetables. Skills she learned working in commercial kitchens translated easily to this part of the business.
This trailer with the commercial kitchen has a surprise: as Bromaus preps the evening meal, Lish flips a few latches and presses a start button to a small winch. One of the walls of the dining room slowly begins to drop. Once completely down, the wall creates a deck to step out onto, offering a panoramic view of the surrounding fields and hillsides.
Attila and Francesca sit to be treated to the delicacy of Broumas’ cooking. They toast as the setting sun turns the surrounding hay fields golden.
Two neighbors stop by, having finished up a long day of spring cattle branding. Lish and Bromaus invite them to stay for dinner.
The meal comes out in courses. The wine flows freely, like the conversation. Broumas looks around and appreciates the moment.
“It’s the atmosphere that was created that makes them feel so comfortable and safe and happy,” she said.
One of the neighbors offers to take Francesca horse riding, which would be another first for her. This is what Lish and Broumas had envisioned — strangers brought together at the table, united by hard work and craft and inviting an openness to new experiences.
“It’s kind of exponential,” Broumas said. “The further along we get, the more we kind of feel like we get back from it.”
Michael Lish and Kristin Broumas have created a one-table restaurant they call "house in the fields." It can be hauled to scenic locations, and with a drop-down wall that becomes a deck, this homemade trailer truly offers a movable feast.
Ian McCluskey / OPB
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A huge fire engulfed a car workshop in West Sussex on Friday evening.
West Sussex Fire and Rescue was called to the scene on Albourne Road, Hurstpierpoint, at about 20:20 GMT.
At the height of the blaze there were eight fire engines tackling the flames, while local people were asked to avoid the area and keep windows shut.
The fire service said one fire engine remained in the area on Saturday morning "damping down" and there were no reports of any injuries.
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