30 Years in a Housetruck

Page Twenty Three: Rural Retreat

 

A description of our new home:

"The Schoolhouse" was just exactly that, a one-room schoolhouse built in 1908 to serve the community of Creswell, Oregon and its surrounding area. It was a typical stud-frame wooden building with shiplap siding on the exterior and interior. At some point in the not-recent past, the interior of the building had been partitioned off into three separate bed rooms, with a common living room/kitchen/dining area. The original twelve foot high ceilings had been lowered by the addition of framing and lath and plaster, and the old ceiling-high sash windows had been cut down to accommodate the new ceiling height.

The living room was basic, with an old, overstuffed mohair couch, a not-exactly matching arm chair, a set of bookshelves, and a leaky old wood heater that would fill the room with acrid smoke every time it was used. The floors were badly worn softwood flooring, and most of the time they looked more like the ground outside, being covered with dirt, and being horribly chewed up and weathered by sixty seven years of hard use.

There was a big set of hand built shelves separating the kitchen from the living room, stocked with all manner of bulk foods. A pair of rough hewn benches straddled a pole-and-plywood kitchen table. The table top was a 4' x 8' sheet of ¾" plywood with the corners rounded off to form an oval. It was huge, and gave lots of room for kneading bread, chopping vegetables, or grinding grain. It also allowed large number of hungry hippies to load up on vittles without crowding things.

Kitchen appliances were few, an old enameled steel cabinet with built-in single basin sink, a 1950's-era refrigerator, and an antique, classic wood burning range. No sissy electric or gas cooking around here, if you wanted hot grub, you had to put the time into chopping kindling and feeding the fire. This actually worked out to our advantage mostly, because the women of the household didn't really care too much for having to tend the fire while cooking or baking, so it was usually up to the men-folk to keep the fire stoked. We also got duty cranking the handle on the grain mill a lot. Impolite as it may sound, the division of labor by gender was in full force. This is not to say that the women always cooked and the men just ate, any time there was a group meal being prepared, everyone got into the act in one way or the other. Many fine meals prepared by both sexes came out of that kitchen, with no Cuisinart in sight. Some of my fondest memories in that kitchen are of making giant batches of home made granola, baking it in the oven, and of hot fresh loaves of bread, both of which required a roaring fire to maintain the temperature required.

When it was built, the building had a wide covered entry stairs on the east side, which had been removed. The original entry doorway was roughly closed off by a wall, but the area where the gabled roof overhang had been gaped open to the exterior. The bathroom was in the front of the building to the side of where the entry stairs had been, accessed off of the long entry hall, and contained a old clawfoot tub, as well as the traditional porcelain conveniences. Also in the hall were the washing machine, a wood box for firewood, and after we moved in, Woodley's table saw.

The property was three acres, located three miles west of town, set on a bank above the road. There were mature fruit trees, two garden areas, upper and lower, a pump shed and a couple of sleeping cabins, one of which used to be the old stable when educational classes reigned. A disused chicken coop and run, and a small pen to hold Rosalie's goat, Rachel, were uphill from the front porch. There was a nice big Marijuana bush in the upper garden.

We are now entering the time zone of which I have the beginnings of a photographic history. My camera was a cheap snapshot rig, without proper view finder, zoom lens f-stop or exposure settings. I think it was a gift from my mother, who realized that the only way to get me to send photos was to supply me herself with the tools to do so. Since she worked in a drug store, she got an employee discount on film and developing, so I would send her the exposed film for processing.

Anyhow, here's a grainy, badly lit and poorly framed, barely focused image of the Schoolhouse looking from the upper garden south of the house:

 

 

The original, covered entrance was attached to the right side of the building in this view. The side of the house facing the camera had a large wooden deck built on the ground (it was mostly rotten) and the main entry of the building was the door on the right side of that wall. Rachel the Goat's shelter is in the center foreground of the photo and the pump shed can be seen on the right.. The rear quarter of my Housetruck is barely visible behind the house on the left hand side (it's kind of yellow). There's a blue school bus parked behind it, which belonged to Phil, one of the later roommates. The two tracks leading off into the background in the right side of the photo are the neighbor's driveway on the other side of the road. More about them and their property later.

 

 

 

30 Years in a Housetruck

Page Twenty Four: Summertime

 

I managed to back my truck up the driveway past the house on the downhill side, and parked it more or less permanently off the northwest corner of the house. This meant that it was not looming outside of any of the house's windows, but was still easily accessible from the deck. The electrical circuit breaker panel had some spare slots, so I wired in a dedicated breaker for my truck so there would be no interruptions in power and no brownouts due to sharing inadequate wiring.

Woodley parked his step van alongside the house, but since it was less tall than my truck, and because of the height of the foundation on that side of the house, all of the windows looked over the top of his van. Since he didn't have any windows in the truck yet, his view wasn't impeded by the location.

One of the rooms inside the house was a narrow passageway that might have been intended to be a sleeping area when the walls were installed. It had an exterior door and served as more of a second entry than a discrete room. The door was always difficult to open or close, so it got next to no use. The interesting thing about this room was that the wall separating it from the adjoining bedroom had never been nailed into the floor or ceiling. This meant that by wholloping it with a sledge, you could actually move the wall's position in the room, making the room wider or narrower!. At any rate, since this room was not in use, I loaded a lot of the tools, possessions and materials from the Housetruck into it for storage.

Since I also had a spare set of homemade loudspeakers and a spare cassette player and amplifier, I set these up on the bookshelves in the living room. This gave a nice boost to the ambience of the house, as there had been no stereo there for some time after one or other of the roommates had moved out and taken theirs, leaving an old turntable and a pretty good collection of scratchy rock-n-roll records behind. There were several selections by John Fahey, Grateful Dead "From the Mars Hotel", and one that has stuck with me for all this time, Leo Kottke's "Six and Twelve String Guitar". Whenever I want to get that old Schoolhouse feeling, I put on my CD of this album, and I'm transported back to the living room there.

In all, things fell pretty much into a comfortable place, and we relaxed into our new surroundings. We'd finally managed to find a place where we felt like we belonged. I even wrote about it in letters to family. In fact, I'm just going to quote verbatim from a letter 33 years old, written to my Mother:

What the letter to Mom doesn't mention about the hot springs trip is that no one was bothering to wear any swimwear at the time!

Woodley's truck became the de facto transportation mode for hot springs trips, especially after he constructed kitchen facilities. I can remember several trips to Cougar with the truck packed with bodies. At night we'd be all crashed out under the truck to escape the morning dew, or else we'd camp at the springs so we could soak all night. This could be adventurous, because there were very few level places to throw down your sleeping bag, and you were always at risk of being stepped on by people without flashlights arriving for a soak during the wee hours. On at least one trip, I had to straddle my feet inside the sleeping bag around a tree to keep from rolling down the hill. It wasn't very comfortable, but better than having hikers trip over you.

More from this letter, and others in future installments...

 

 

 

30 Years in a Housetruck

Page Twenty Five: Roomies

 

In a previous page, I mention that there were others living in the house, so maybe some introductions are in order.

I've already mentioned Rosalie and Jonah. They lived in the cabin up the hill, a rustic collection of scrap wood and windows set on the side of the hill by the upper garden. The cabin had a thin electric wire so it had lights, but there was no running water, and no creature comforts like insulation or interior siding.

Rosalie was a transplant from Rochester, New York, who had been raised in an upper middle class family and had received some higher education. She had lived at the Schoolhouse for a couple of years, being in her "middle twenties" and as such, was the default "House Mother". I took to affectionately calling her "Ma". I don't know who Jonah's father was, but I assume that she does.

One of the other two women in the household was Seretta, a US citizen born of South American parents. She was just 20 or 21 years of age, and generally had a sunny, if clueless disposition. Her room in the house was next to the hallway, off the kitchen, and was the least appealing space available (other than the narrow storage room), being dark and with only a small window.

Finally, we had Laura. Laura's room was on the northwest side of the house, off the living room. It had a large window on the west wall and a full-lite patio door on the north. The room was painted a cheery yellow color, and Laura had decorated the windows with faux stained-glass paints, in a pattern of vines and flowers.

 

While doing some research on the internet, I came up with an old photo of The Schoolhouse from 1911 showing the interior:

This image shows the corner of the building that became Laura's bedroom. The covered window behind the teacher was that which was painted with vines, and the window to the right had been replaced with the glass door. Everyone looks so severe! Cheer up folks! In another 64 years, your grandkids will be having a huge party right where you are sitting!

 

Laura, it turned out, was a 16 year-old runaway who had been living at the house for a couple of months with the knowledge of her mother. These days, kids of this sort are known as "throwaways", I suppose. Laura was very dedicated to the study of Krishna, and practiced non-violence in all things. This led to some difficult times when we put up flypaper in the kitchen, and she would have a mini-freakout if you asked her to get into a car that had seats upholstered in what might be leather. I assured her at the seats in my Rambler were made of genuine Naugahide, and that the Naugas had been humanely killed before being stripped of their skins. I stuck Laura with the nickname of "Karma Kid". We didn't get along all that well, but it was a benign truce between us

More than once, we had to drive into town to the Skipworth Juvenile Detention Facility to spring her after she got picked up in town for underage curfew infraction or some such. The officers on duty had a very hard time accepting that a carload of hairy hippies were actually her "guardians", and we would always have to wait until they would call her mother to confirm this before releasing her to us. Of course, the first thing we would do after picking her up is light up some joints on the way to the grocery to by the evening's supply of wine and beer.

Of the two other men in the house, one was Jay, who resided in the cabin that used to be the stable when the Schoolhouse was an actual learning facility. This cabin was also pretty rustic, with a sleeping loft built into the former hayloft over the barn bays. There were electric lights and a small, smoky, airtight wood stove.

Jay was also a transplant from the East Coast, and had traveled extensively, including Central and South America, and Hawaii. He was perhaps the oldest of us, being just over thirty. He was also the most musical, and frequently would sit in the open doors of his barn/cabin picking out tunes on his banjo on warm summer nights. He was fairly intellectual, and seemed to have a good education.

Finally (but not least), there was Paul, yet another New Yorker recently moved to Oregon. I think the Schoolhouse was his first place to stay after moving into the state. Paul was 29, sported a huge bushy beard, and was quickly balding. He had been an office worker in NY, working for a large insurance firm, and destined to slave away in a cubicle somewhere until he got the bug to travel. His room was the largest in the house, on the southeast corner, and it had it's own wood stove.

Paul and I became very fast friends, and over the years both traveled and worked together, as will be revealed in future episodes. After eventually moving out of the Schoolhouse, he bought a converted bus, a 1946 Dodge, which I put a lot of work into over the next few years, which again, is a subject for later. Over the last 33 years, Paul and I have remained friends. We don't cross paths all that often anymore, and the last time I saw him was just before I moved (2006). I'm sure we'll be seeing each other in the near future. Oh, and he is crazy about turtles.

 

 

 

30 Years in a Housetruck

Page Twenty Six: Kitchen Patrol

 

One of the more important communal activities at The Schoolhouse revolved around food. Meals were nearly all shared, with most house mates kicking in on the preparation of same. This was a big change from our living situation at The Punishment Farm.

For the first 22 years or so of my life, I was, to put it politely, a "picky eater". I would only eat a few things, and only if they were prepared to my liking. Hamburgers, steak, pork chops, and spaghetti were about it for dinner items, and I can never remember eating a vegetable other than potatoes and corn when I was growing up. Breakfast was always cold cereal, and lunch was never much more than a bread-and-jelly (grape) sandwich. This must have caused my family a lot of problems. My mother often told me that she pitied any woman who ever married me.

Even after moving out on my own, I lived on burgers and Chips Ahoy cookies. For the first year or so, I didn't even own a stove, and never cooked. The refrigerator held only milk, (which I consumed in gallons) and Boone's Farm Strawberry Hill wine.

At some point, my aunt Jean gave me a 1950's full-sized gas stove, which I hauled home from San Diego, stuffed in the trunk of Crazy Robert's wife's Dodge Dart. After that, I made burgers at home.

I can't remember when I started branching out in the food groups, but I discovered that I could enjoy a whole world of other foods. Chinese, Mexican, Italian, seafood, pizza, rice, beans, the Full Monte. This was a revelation in my life, an opening up to something that I had resisted as a child, and never explored as an adolescent.

Some time in 1973 or 74, the price of beef went sky high, and as a protest against the prices, I toyed with vegetarianism. After the meat prices went back down, I never went back.

Life at The Schoolhouse was another such revelation. After moving to Oregon, Woodley and I were exposed to shopping for food at funky natural foods stores, places like The Kiva, Pat Leonard's Community Store, and Grower's Market Co-op. We also had our pick of many natural foods restaurants. What really made a difference was living among folks who had experience with natural foods cooking. Rosalie was a stupendous natural foods cook, and others, particularly Jay were into organic foods, raw juices and macrobiotic diets. We learned a ton about an alternative foods diet in a very short period of time.

Everyone at the house was collecting food stamps, and we kept a big gallon jar on the kitchen table to hold them. When each of our food stamp coupon books would arrive in the mail, we'd rip out the notes and stuff them into the jar. If anyone was going to town to buy food, they'd dip into the jar, take what they thought they needed, and return the change (in the form of lower denomination coupons) to the jar after the shopping trip. The shelves and refrigerator were always brimming with great natural foods.

This arrangement ~could~ cause problems, though. Officially, each of us was supposed to segregate our victuals, and keep them separate from the food of other people in the house. Several times, I opened the fridge to find little notes taped to all the food inside with various housemate's names on them, and pretend nag notes: "Who ate some of my cheese? Keep your hands off." What this turned out to be was the prelude to a visit by the Food Stamp Inspector, who would inspect the food storage and preparation areas of randomly selected household to check for proper observance of "the rules". Failing to properly separate your foods could lead to your being dumped from the food stamp program.

Once, either Woodley or I was "randomly" chosen for one of these inspections. The inspector was to be our regular caseworker, who notified us in writing of the time of his visit.

Sure enough, late in the day on the date of the inspection, a fleet-issue State of Oregon vehicle ground up the steep driveway, complete with the <E> "exempt" license plates. Our case worker got out, greeted us, looked at his watch, said "Oh, 5 P.M., quitting time". He then pulled a joint out of his pocket, asked if we had any beer, and joined us for dinner! No one in the house ever again got scheduled for an inspection after that!

 

The official motto of The Schoolhouse kitchen:
"It's not how often you fast that matters, it's how fast you can eat it."

 

 

 

30 Years in a Housetruck

Page Twenty Seven: New Name

 

Apparently, the rest of July and the month of August were busy and productive times for me. My letters indicate that in addition to trips to the hot springs, I worked on the Housetruck kitchen cabinet and took on a job rebuilding the engine in Jay's 1960 Chevy pickup for pay. Jay's pickup was a housetruck of sorts, it had a rustic cabin with an airtight wood stove on the bed, kind of a hippie camper.

Another significant project was that I was approached by the owner of the Community Natural Foods store in Eugene to do some electrical work on the premises, installing a 40 ampere branch circuit for a walk-in refrigerator. Since I was in need of some spending cash and wanted to make sure I got the job, I wrote my middle name down as "Sparks" on the paper with my contact information. This got picked up by the roommates at the Schoolhouse, and I was bestowed a new nickname. This was fine with me, as "George Huxley" was getting a bit old by that time. Interestingly, the name has stuck until now, at least as many people know me by that name as Sharkey.

Woodley had a few changes as well, his estranged wife, Anne moved to Oregon, and they began a process of reconciliation. Anne moved in and became a member of the household, living in Woodley's step van. With the van needing to support two and a dog, Woodley put a lot of effort into finishing the interior.

The other notable occasion was that my guinea pig gave birth to four babies. I took the cover off her cage one morning and there were three times as many little eyes staring out at me as the night before. Guinea pigs give birth to fully furred, wide-eyed young, who take only a few minutes or so to shake off the experience and then begin scrambling around exploring their new world. They are drop-dead cute, and completely tame from the first breath. Best of all, the pet shop paid me $4 each for them as soon as they were 6 weeks old! Try that with kittens.

 

 

 

30 Years in a Housetruck

Page Twenty Nine: Road Trip

 

At some point in September, Paul's mother sent word that she would be making a trip from New York, where she lived, to Las Vegas, and convinced Paul to come visit, since she would be "so close". My own mother had lived in Las Vegas for some time, and I owed her a visit as well, so Paul and I formulated a road trip to meet our familial obligations.

We set out from the Schoolhouse in Paul's 1972 Toyota Celica GT with some food, bedding and my expired gasoline credit card, headed for the capital of sin.

The first day, we got almost as far as Reno before we pulled into a rest stop outside of Sparks, Nevada for a break. It was apparent that neither of us was any longer awake enough to do any more driving, so Paul ratcheted back the driver's seat into a reclining position and fell quickly to sleep.

I did the same and laid there for a while staring at the dark headliner (it was sometime well after midnight), without getting comfortable enough to doze off. After a while, I gave up and got my pad and sleeping bag from the back seat, intending to find a place to toss out somewhere outside. There wasn't really very much around aside from the restrooms and some low shrubbery near the offramp of the highway, so I unrolled by bag under the bushes and conked out for the duration, hoping that Paul didn't wake up and decide to drive off without me.

The L.V. visit was awful, not so much because of our mothers, but because L.V. is an awful place. I stayed with my mom in her studio apartment, and Paul lodged with his ma at her hotel. We got together for some meals, and our mothers spent some time hitting casinos together, and took in at least one show at The Showboat. That's about all I care to remember of L.V., other than I did find a nice plaid flannel shirt at a thrift store, which kind of blew my mother's mind, because she thought that it was rather frumpy and looked like it belonged on some old guy.

Our trip back to Oregon was more memorable, partly because I wrote some of it up in a letter to Mom afterwards. Heading north out of L.V., we took Route 95, which runs through Beatty and up to Tonopah. Wanting some scenic travels, we cut off at Route 3, a narrow, twisty road that winds through a deserted valley to a town named Oasis. There we picked up Route 168, which took us over the White Mountains, depositing us on Highway 395 at Big Pine, south of Bishop, California.

Once again, it was time to find a place to bed down, and we wanted to be a little more organized about it, so we followed some signs, ending up at Horton Creek campground at around 10 PM. The campground is located a little north of Bishop, and is directly east of Yosemite National Park, at an elevation of 4,700+ feet. The moon was full, and the early Fall night warm enough to not require even a light jacket. After heating some food on a camp stove and setting up the tent, we spent a couple of hours just sitting in the high desert, taking in a wide panorama of sky and mountains, all illuminated by lunar glow. Nearby Horton Creek provided bubbling water sound effects and frog and cricket music.

Here's a piccy of the view from the campground, courtesy of the Bureau of Land Management:

 

 

The next morning, we headed north, passing Mono Lake, and picking up Route 89 to skirt Lake Tahoe on the west side. Up and up, through the Northern California forests, staying on Rt 89 and it's equivalents until we came to Lassen Volcanic Park, a place where the rents and tears of the formation of the crust of the planet haven't yet healed over. We spent some time exploring the park visitor center, and looked at some of the presented displays of geysers, fumaroles, steaming mud pots and the like.

Back on the road, it was a reasonably short trip to join Interstate 5, south of Weed, CA, then a boring drive up the lower half of Oregon, eventually arriving home at the Schoolhouse after dark. Rosalie was just arrived home from travels of her own, and Woodley and Anne were there. Life returned to "normal", whatever that is defined to be, and I returned to preparing wood for the winter and working on the Housetruck.

 

 

 

30 Years in a Housetruck

Page Twenty Eight: Wood Heat

 

Late summer and early fall were insanely busy times for me. Getting ready for my first "real" winter in Oregon meant that I needed to get the wood burning stove installed in the Housetruck and prepare a supply of firewood to keep it stoked.

Installing the stove wasn't particularly difficult. I purchased a six inch roof jack and blue steel stove pipe at Quackenbush's, a venerable hardware store located in the downtown of Eugene. The sales clerk who helped me wasn't too sure about installing a chimney on a flat metal roof, but I was fairly certain that the jack that I purchased could be secured to the roof using sheet metal screws and putty. The clerk made the comment that he could tell people who heated with wood as soon as they walked into the store by the sooty aroma on their clothes.

The jack did install easily on the truck roof, and the pipe fitted together with two 90 degree elbows to provide an offset to avoid a steel beam in the roof. This gave the pipe the classic "bent pipe" look that nearly all truck installations seem to have. It also made installation of the pipe easier with the stove in place because the two elbows could be connected at the horizontal joint between them after putting the top and bottom sections in their respective places.

The first fire I lit was a fairly small one, but the heat from the stove made the kraft-faced insulation behind the stove immediately turn black, as if it was about to burst into flame! After damping the fire down, I realized that the black was caused by the tarry treatment on the interior of the facing bleeding through to the face. The lesson was learned, however, and I found a square section of 1/8" asbestos hardboard to put behind the stove to protect the bare insulation from becoming too warm.

Firewood was a different matter. I was very dedicated to cutting all of my wood without the use of petroleum products (i.e. chainsaw), so I purchased a small bow saw to do the job and built a sawbuck to support the wood while I worked. It didn't take to long to figure out why power tools were invented. Hand sawing soft wood like fir or cedar was a workout, and I switched the saw from hand to hand to build up muscles in both arms equally. Sawing through hardwoods like oak was a completely different matter altogether. Some larger pieces of wood required a rest break in the middle of the cut to gather some reserves to continue.

Somehow, I managed to buck up a fair supply of wood, split it (while sharpening my skill with the axe and maul), and get it stacked under the truck for the approaching cold weather. My only surprise turned out to be that it was not necessary to split the hardwood into as small as pieces as I thought, so I ended up with no larger logs to bank up overnight fires with.

Now that I had the ability to heat the truck interior, I removed the (!) unvented (!) gas heater that I had been fueling from a propane tank, and began to enjoy the coziness of wood heat.

 

 

 

30 Years in a Housetruck

Page Thirty: Adult Ed

 

Work on the Housetruck continued, with Woodley and I exchanging skills and helping each other to get farther along in the process. My kitchen cabinet got a finished counter top and a backboard, and Woodley's step van was fitted with a fresh water tank and a system of valves that allowed the pump to be configured for several modes. I began building a floor-to-ceiling cabinet to house my refrigerator, and took the first steps to make my apartment-sized gas cook stove operational, hooking a regulator to the tank and using rubber hose to supply the stove with gas so that it could be used, even though the LPG tank was inside the truck (not good...).

I wanted the propane cylinder out of my living space, so it was time to build a rack for it and the three other tanks I had purchased in L.A. before leaving. There was a lot of scrap iron around the Schoolhouse, including many old bed frames, made of very sturdy angle iron. Several of these were cut into measured sections and formed up as a rack that would mount under the truck's van body on the left side. All that remained to be done was to have them welded together. One of the auto repair shops in Creswell had a "Welding" sign outside, so I approached the owner and described my project. He said he would do the welding for $20, but only if I assembled the pieces as he worked, and helped him by holding them in position. I agreed, and after arriving at an appointed day and time, we began. I was given a spare welding hood so that I could watch the process while I held the parts in place. All told, it took about an hour to weld the rack into shape, during which time I received many nice electrical shocks from the rudimentary "buzz box" welder that he was using. Nevertheless, the job was done, and done to my satisfaction. Afterwards, I decided that it didn't look all that difficult, and since I had much more welding to do on the truck, I determined that I would have to learn to do it myself.

Enrollment for Fall classes at the local community college (Lane Community College, or LCC) were just opening, and looking at the schedule, I found that Basic Welding was offered as an adult education class evening and weekends. The tuition was next to nothing, $9 if I recall, with a materials fee of $11 or something ridiculous like that. I signed up at once, and also registered for a class in First Class Radiotelephone Licensing, with the expectation that this might make it possible for me to apply for a job at one of the local radio stations.

At the first welding class, along with about a dozen other students, I was given the "safety rap", an orientation of the welding tech shop, was issued a small handful of 6011 welding rod, and after picking some small pieces of steel out of the scrap bin was shown into a welding booth in the far end of the shop. No classroom instruction, no book reading, no real direction, just "Here's the materials, now go weld".

By this time, I had purchased my own welding hood and a pair of gloves, so I started burning rod on the scraps of steel, getting familiar with the routine of putting the hood up and down, becoming comfortable with the smell of hot flux, and trying to not flinch with every small spark that worked it's way into my clothing.

After about an hour, an instructor popped his head into the booth to see how I was doing. Not all that well, considering the goal of producing good, clean, strong welds it turns out. A few minutes of having him weld while I watched, some explanation of what to watch for, and having him guide my gloved hand while I welded, showing correct technique produced a lot of understanding, and gave me the direction I needed to start practicing for real.

By the end of the first class, I could lay a bead well enough to join two pieces of metal. On the way out after class, I stopped into the tool crib and asked if it was possible to bring in projects to work on. I was told that this was fine, but they had to be small enough to carry into the shop and get into a booth. Vehicles were NOT allowed inside the welding tech building, due to the hazardous combination of liquid motor fuels and welding sparks.

Every class after that, I had some kind of project to work on, either something brought in from home, or a fabrication job made from odds and ends found in the scrap bins. I took my wood stove in to weld feet to the legs so that it could be bolted to the floor of the truck. A few scavenged car parts from the old Citroën in the Schoolhouse yard were welded to my stove to make a forced-air plenum that gathered cold drafts from the floor and exhausted them as a super-heated column of air. I made a poker for the stove, and a custom grate to burn on. I modified the stove top to be more air tight, and cradle a cooking pan better. An old hot water heater tank I found under the Schoolhouse was recruited to be my fresh water tank, and a mount was welded up to hold it under the truck. Woodley designed some custom latches for an opening skylight that he was building for his truck, which I fabricated using other tools in the welding shop before doing the actual welding on them. I learned to braze and discovered the joy of wire feed welding (MIG process). The gas welding area of the shop had long benches lined with fire brick, where oxy-acetylene welding was accomplished. A motorized line cutter with adjustable flame cutting heads could cut long, straight lines in metal. The whole shop was filled with all of these amazing, expensive tools, and they were all mine for four hours every Saturday.

I quickly became the two instructor's favorite student. Each week they would ask what I had brought them to work on. The rest of the students were all practicing to be certified welders. This was back when the Alaska Pipeline was being built, and welders were needed to work on it. There would be 20 guys in booths, welding together 6" sections of 6" steel pipe, then cutting the pipe assemblies lengthwise into "coupons", and trying to break the coupons in the hydraulic press to test their welds. For the most part, the instructors were bored stiff with the rest of the class, most of whom didn't need any attention from them anyway.

I took the adult ed version of "Basic Welding" over and over, just to have access to the shop, the tools and the instructors, who would help me design and build projects, making suggestions and offering ideas and introducing me to new techniques of fabrication.

In all, the whole experience was summed up by some graffiti that someone had burned into one of the portable welding screens in the shop:

"LOVE TO WELD"

it said.

 

 

 

30 Years in a Housetruck

Page Thirty-One: View to the Seasons

 

Fall of 1975 progressed, as the seasons are wont to do. Great chevrons of Canada geese tread their way south across the sky seeking warmer climes for the coming winter. The days grew shorter and the light weaker, and the nighttime temperatures colder. All of this was somewhat of a new experience for me. In Los Angeles, the changing of the seasons is not all that obvious, this would be my first true taste of winter.

The roommates at the Schoolhouse organized a Halloween costume party, and the intent was to invite a bunch of people, some of whom we might even have known, and get together for a large meal, ingest some intoxicants and laugh our masked asses off. I had plans to dress up as Dracula, all the better to nibble on young ladies necks.

The reality was that Halloween night came, but no guests or costumes were to be seen. The roommates kind of languished around the house in the evening, and by dark it was apparent that no festivities were forthcoming. I retired to the Housetruck, lit a fire and did some quiet reading before going to bed. Not long after falling asleep, the truck started rocking violently as several of the other occupants of the household stood outside and shoved back and forth on the walls of the truck in unison.

Just having gotten to sleep, and being groggy from being awakened, my first concern was that the truck was rocking enough to cause my kerosene lamp to slide back and forth on the shelf it was sitting on, getting very close to the edge at each oscillation. I called out to stop the rocking, telling them that "I had kerosene" (I was groggy, remember). Apparently the revelers outside thought that I was attempting to threaten them with retribution, so they went back into the house calling me a "bad sport". I went back to bed and back to sleep and that was the end of the big Halloween party of 1975. I didn't get to make contact with any female necks.

When the instructors at the welding class said "no vehicles in the shop", I guess I didn't listen too well, because somehow I managed to talk them into allowing me to bring the Housetruck to school in order to allow me to weld in support steel for the windows in the loft and living room.

In order to prepare for this project, I needed to move out of the truck temporarily. Fortunately, Jay was out traveling in Panama, so I moved into his cabin, taking my bedding, books, storage gear and all out of the truck. Jay's cabin was once the stable back in the days when the Schoolhouse was actually used for tutoring students. Back in those days, motor cars weren't invented yet, and some students rode in on livestock instead of schoolbuses. There was a large sleeping loft, and a small "airtight" wood stove. For the most part, it was drafty and cold as well as cluttered, but it was just for a while, so I persevered.

The truck was much too big to get into the shop, so I parked it outside the big roll up door and moved the wire feed welder over to the opening. A single night's session and I had the metal framing installed. Back at home I cut the sheet steel wall sheathing away to produce an opening and installed the two windows. The weather was not very cooperative, I got rained on six different times while putting in the living room window. The final precipitation was a nice pelting of hail, which I didn't mind so much.

The new windows made an amazing difference in the interior of the truck, I now had light and a view. The window in the sleeping loft was a new window that I had purchased from a local second hand market, and Woodley had purchased one also to use as his kitchen window. These windows had the latest in safety features, which was that they were designed to allow egress in an emergency by lifting two handles. This caused the glass, screen and frame to swing out on hinges. Seemed like a nice addition to my loft in case of fire. The loft window was directly above the cab of the truck, so it was quite easy to step out the window and onto the roof of the cab, no ladder was needed to get up or down.

With the window project complete, and Jay due back from his travels, it was time to move my junk back into the truck. Towards the end of the day, I was carrying a milk crate packed full of books back to the truck when I stepped on a short length of wet dimensional lumber laying in the sloped driveway. Wet wood can be as slick as ice, and when my boot lost traction, I fell backwards fast, launching the crate of books into the air. It came down hard on my left leg and to this day, I don't know why my leg didn't break.

With no further disasters, I settled back into the truck to enjoy my new views.

 

 

 

30 Years in a Housetruck

Page Thirty-Two: Fantasia - Winter Wonderland

 

Winter approached, and it began to get genuinely cold. The formerly "cold" overnight temperatures of 45° gave way to the thirties, and then the twenties. My senses were treated to new levels of stimulation, not just from the temperature, but as a result of the nightly frost. Growing up in Southern California, it was unusual to have temperatures anything near freezing. Here, every night brought a coating of glistening frost and hard ice covering puddles. I can remember feeling like I was in a Disney movie, maybe Fantasia. As my flashlight beam played off the frozen surfaces and reflected back to me like myriad twinkling stars covering everything, I could imagine the fairies ice skating across the water, leaving crystal patterns of frost and freezing in their wake.

My education in wood heat was fast and important, as the Housetruck still had not been completely insulated and sealed from all air leaks. I built a false wall at the rear of the truck to separate the van body doors from my living space and insulated it and the doors to keep the heat from escaping. Getting the remainder of the walls and ceiling insulated, and finishing the areas around the new windows became a priority.

The sleeping loft had a stout dowel rod from which hung a heavy blanket, closing it off from the rest of the truck interior. Most nights, the fire would go out, and I would depend on the electric blanket to make sleeping comfortable. In the morning, opening the loft curtain revealed a noticeable temperature difference between the loft and the rest of the truck. My mother helpfully sent me some long underwear and some ski gloves, all of which I put to immediate use.

Some time in early December, the event for which I had awaited all my life occurred. It snowed.

As a youth, I had seen snow only a couple of times, and only briefly. I have some home movies of me running around during a work party at my grandparent's desert cabin while snow flurries fall around everyone. Some time when I was about 13 or 14, my parents made a day trip to Palm Springs, where we rode a tram to a ski resort, and I was able to play around in some half-melted snow banks, getting very cold in the process.

It was actually snowing, big fluffy flakes, covering the frosty ground and beginning to accumulate. Now life really felt like a Disney movie. By the next morning, there was three inches or so, not a lot, but it felt like a wonderland. I tried using an old VW bug engine cover as a sled, but it didn't move so well over the snow.

Woodley suggested that we go for a hike in the snow to the top of the ridge. I didn't have any other waterproof boots, so I put on my old, heavy steel-toed work boots, the ones I had spray painted to improve the appearance, and put on a couple of pairs of socks for insulation.

The hike was fun, up the hillside, cutting through neighbor's properties and ending up at the back of Vern's junk yard before gaining the top of the ridge, where the view of the surrounding snow covered pastures was postcard pretty. The fir trees were majestic in their white flocking.

Back at the Schoolhouse, my feet had stayed dry in the boots, but felt kind of numb with the cold. A day later I was making an appointment with a foot doctor because both of my little toes were swollen up and purple and hurt like hell. His diagnosis was that the extra socks had cut off the circulation to my toes. Combined with the cold steel toes in the boots, this had given me a case of "chilblains", a mild form of frostbite. Minor, I say, but the doctor wanted to take some photos of my feet for a dissertation he was giving, explaining that mine was the worst case he had ever seen. Thanks.

I was put on a diet of niacin supplements to increase the circulation, and told to soak my feet regularly in warm water, and wait for nature to do the healing, which took several years to complete. To this day, my small toes are rather purple colored...

 

 

 

30 Years in a Housetruck

Page Thirty-Three: Winter Driving Tips

 

The new winter conditions made for fast lessons in driving. Not only were the roads frequently wet from rain, but often icy, if not packed with at least a thin layer of snow. This made for some interesting road conditions for all of us.

One Friday night after one of the early snowfalls, Jay came home from being in the city and announced that "the roads were murder". Then next morning, after another dusting of flurries, I cancelled my plans to drive into the city for my welding class.

Woodley's wife, Anne had purchased a used car to commute to work and school, a blue 1964 Rambler sedan named "Frank". One cold morning Woodley and I were going to meet Anne at her friend Barbara's home out on Seavey Way. Barbara was renting an old homestead cabin out in Goshen near the river that was now owned by a gravel quarry. When we came to the end of the pavement, Anne's car was sitting wedged sideways between the guard rails of a narrow bridge over the Coast Fork of the Willamette. It had been a frosty morning, and while the ice had melted off the roads, the bridge was still covered in what we here call "black ice", which is difficult to see and more difficult on which to control a car.

There was no damage to Anne's car, the front and rear bumpers were just contacting the guard rails on each side of the bridge. The pavement was still icy, and after hot-wiring her car and starting the engine, we found that it was stuck well enough that the rear tires would only spin on the ice. This gave me an idea, so I pulled out a tow strap from the back of my car and hooked it to Frank's rear bumper, connecting the other end to the front bumper of my car. Woodley got in Frank's front seat, and while he spun the rear wheels on the ice, I gave a pull backwards with my car, which was still on the pavement off of the bridge, so there was no ice under my tires. Frank was quickly pulled sideways back to proper alignment with the lane, and Woodley and I continued our drive to Barbara's house, about a half-mile away. Anne was just starting her walk back to the bridge and car after finding Barbara not at home. She was rather amazed that we were able to extricate Frank from the bridge, but hey, that's what guys ~do~.

Paul had a more serious encounter with the road that winter. He was driving along Interstate 5 just outside of Eugene one dark night when he rounded a curve and saw a dead deer laying in his lane. There was no way to change lanes to avoid it, and no time to stop, so he swerved the best he could and missed it. Unfortunately, the car didn't recover from the maneuver, went up an embankment, came down, flipped upside down and came to a rest on the highway. No injuries, but the car was pretty beat up. After righting the car and checking the fluids, Paul drove it home to the Schoolhouse, relating the incident to us with the words "I guess it wasn't my time to go".

The damage to his car was $1,800, which was a fortune back then, today that will almost fix a dented fender. The roof was caved in over the back seat, and the mirrors sheared off. All of the fenders were scraped from sliding on the pavement and the muffler had been ejected in the rollover. He continued to drive it during the worst of weather until the insurance claim had been processed. I tried to convince Paul to take the insurance money and let the Schoolhouse Auto Repair crew do something creative with the car, like build a geodesic dome on the back and turn it into a mobile herb garden. He wasn't impressed. Paul's insurance company ended up paying for the repair, and Paul kept that Celica for a lot more years.

I do remember having to scrape a lot of ice off my windshield before going anywhere in the mornings. One day I was in a hurry, and the ice wasn't coming off very well. The engine hadn't warmed up enough to make the defrosters work, so I took off driving anyway, and after rolling down the window, stuck my head out the window to see where I was going. This worked pretty well until my glasses fogged up and iced over.

One unnecessary winter trip I remember was Christmas Eve, 1975. Somebody, maybe Jay decided that we should drive into the city and get some ice cream. I thought it was nuts to drive all that way for a sugary treat, but Woodley decided it was a great idea, and Jay was going to drive, so I went along for the ride.

The streets weren't really a problem, it had been sprinkling rain, so everything was clean and wet. We arrived at the Nice Cream parlor (alternative shop run by hippies), and each had some iced confection. I remember being impressed by how quiet it seemed that night, the hustle and bustle of the holiday season had settled down, and calmness replaced the nervous hum of the city. Along Blair Street, there was a vintage house, neat and tidy with some simple yard decorations added, and the windows looked to have a display of the occupants collectable Christmas china arranged to be seen from the sidewalk. Somehow, all the glitz and glitter of the commercialized season seemed far away when I saw this heartfelt home and simple decoration.