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.