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.