30 Years in a Housetruck

Page Thirty Seven: Back at the Schoolhouse

Meanwhile, back at the Schoolhouse, we had some new roommates, Gerri and Mary, a young couple from the east coast. Rosalie and Jonah had moved in with Chuck, who lived several miles further down the road at a cooperative piece of land owned by Russell. For a long time, I thought Russ' last name was "Overthehill", because every time Rosalie had ever mentioned him, she said Russ over-the-hill, indicating that he lived past the end of the road in the first folds of the Coast Range of mountains.

Since Rosalie had taken Rachel the goat with her, someone suggested that we get some chickens, we already had a coop, and we could use the eggs in the kitchen. Our first two layers were named "Cluck and Rosa-lay" in honor of our former roommate and her beau.

Although I had put up a supply of firewood in the previous fall, there wasn't much of a stash for the house itself. The kitchen stove got stoked from a quickly dwindling assortment of scraps and cut-off ends from various woodshop projects and the odd mill-end that someone brought home. Mostly that winter, we stayed warm during the day by burning great piles of scrap wood in the driveway, most of it splintered and rotted, but stored dry in the shed beside Rosalie's old cabin (now occupied by Mary and Gerri).

One day early in the year, we had been out keeping warm by a big bonfire of this wood when we heard the Creswell Fire Department pumper truck coming down the road from town. The truck was distinctive enough to recognize as it had no muffler, and made a lot of racket, even when it was just poking along. This time, it sounded like it was being really pushed hard, and they were running the siren at full blast too. The truck ripped past our place, and continued down the road until it was out of earshot. We were relieved that they weren't coming to put out our fire, and forgot about it.

At some point in Spring the firewood situation became serious enough that Paul and Jay went into Eugene and bought a firewood permit from the Bureau of Land Management (BLM), and we made plans to go out into the woods and cut some house wood. Paul had a small chain saw, and one sunny day, Paul, Jay and I set out in my old Rambler station wagon to cut us some wood. We followed the directions to the sale area, somewhere west of Cottage Grove, off Loraine Highway, left the pavement, climbed up a gravel logging road to the location. There we filled the back of my car with bolts and rounds of Douglas Fir, packing it full enough that jay had to squeeze in the back with the wood to ride home.

Coming down the logging road was more adventure than I really wanted. We had probably only managed to get a half cord of wood into the car, but that was still probably 750 - 900 pounds of extra weight. It didn't take long for the old manual drum brakes on the car to get hot and fade. I mashed the pedal down as hard as I could, which was enough to prevent us from gaining speed, but not enough to actually stop the car if we had needed to.

Back on the pavement, we hadn't more than gotten up to speed before a cop car pulled in behind us, and then turned on the lights and pulled us over. The first thing the cop wanted to see was our permit for cutting wood on BLM property, which we happily produced. The officer seemed a little disappointed that we were in compliance, and let us go after making me show him that the turn signals and horn on the car were operational.

Back at the Schoolhouse, we had a new problem. The driveway going up off the road had been getting pretty muddy and rutted, and with that large load of wood, my car couldn't get enough traction to get up it. We ended up parking the car alongside the road and carrying the rounds of wood up the bank by hand.

We see Paul standing at the back of the car, while Gerri prepares to grab another handful.
Jay is already trooping back towards the house with a round under each arm.

The state of the driveway would soon cause me to have problems returning my Housetruck to it's place beside the Schoolhouse, and I ended up spending some time living down at the dead-end of Sher Kahn Road until it had dried out enough to allow me to back up to my parking space again.

Later, we learned that the urgent mission of the fire truck was because an A-frame cabin at one of the other communes down the road had caught fire and burned to the ground.