30 Years in a Housetruck

Page Two: The Swap Meet

 

When you own a moving van, you're suddenly everyone's friend. I got plenty of "offers" to help friends and neighbors move, which kind of led into a part-time self-employment. Every time someone would move, they would have things that they wanted to get rid of. I was also called upon to clean out garages and basements of superfluous belongings and appliances, for which I would charge a small fee. Some of this stuff went to the dump, but a lot of it was still useable, and I began making a weekly routine of selling at the Long Beach Swap Meet, held at the Long Beach Drive-In Theatre. Every Saturday and Sunday, I'd arrive at 4:30AM so that I could be one of the first sellers into the lot. Arriving later meant that I would have much more difficulty getting the huge truck into the two parking stalls that served as my "shop" space.

As soon as the rear doors of the truck were opened (it was still a stock moving van at that point), a crowd of buyers would assemble to be the first to buy my wares. Most of these were other sellers who came to recognize that I usually had a truck full of resellable merchandise and that I was most interested in getting rid of it all by the end of the day, no matter how cheaply. Most of them would take their purchases back to their own stalls, mark it up, and sell it later in the day when the public was admitted. If I went to the back of the truck holding a box, a dozen hands would reach up for it and once they got ahold of it, I'd better let go or get pulled off the truck. Buyers would be tossing me money as fast as I could collect it. Clothing for $0.25 a garment, a box of dishes for $1, shelving units for $4, etc. No reasonable offer refused, the idea was to get as much sold before setting up for the day as possible. Anything that I thought would fetch a good price from the paying public was always kept in the front of the truck box, and brought out after the frenzy subsided.

The rest of the day would be spent selling off the remainder of the contents of the truck and cruising the swap meet isles looking for parts and materials for the housetruck conversion. My RV refrigerator ($125), gas cook stove ($25), saddle fuel tanks ($40), propane cylinders ($10 ea), and a variety of other fixtures and fittings were either obtained at the swap meet or procured through my garage cleaning activities.

Here's an old photo, taken with TMAX's camera, and just recently unearthed from it's hiding place after all these years.

We see Crazy Robert, the skinny arms in the black shirt sitting with the back of his head to the camera, and Fat Frank in a blue shirt and in need of a haircut keeping an eye on a lone shopper going through the goods. They were probably both totally stoned on pot, usually were all the time.

The Housetruck is still in moving van mode, and it looks like I had made a lot of progress in sanding and priming the body for paint. The right rear door is open and folded back against the body.

When things got slow, Crazy Robert would go out into the isle and pull people in either verbally or physically and get them to buy something. This actually worked! He would lay guilt trips on them "Hey, even you people on welfare can afford a quarter for clothes." Many times I actually saw people arguing over who saw a moth-eaten sweater first or bidding against each other for who got to purchase a broken record player.

Being the first one in meant being the last one out, as I had to wait until the public had gone home and enough of the other vehicles had moved to allow me room to turn the truck around and head towards an exit. We always drove right past the security guards who were standing at the exit gates to collect the California state sales tax that each buyer was supposed to assess and remit on the day's sales.

The tide of people moving along the isle all day while I sat in the stall watching had a mesermizing effect, not unlike watching a train at a crossing. Hours after leaving, I would still have a sense of motion, even when sitting still in my living room at home.

In all, I was pulling in about $300 a week doing the swap meet, which was fat city compared with $60 a week take-home I was making at the TV shop before I quit. Unemployment kicked in another $45/week (paid in cash!), so I had plenty of time and enough money to follow through on building the truck.

 

30 Years in a Housetruck

Page Three: New Friends

 

When I previously mentioned that I had been evicted from my home due to the landlord's son wanting to move in, things turned out well in the end.

After searching for a small rental house that I could afford (and that the owner would rent to a single young man), I came up empty handed, in spite of looking at at least a hundred properties, leads all supplied by several rental agencies. Since I steadfastly refused to move into an apartment, I realized with sad resignation that I would have to move back in with my mother, who was living in a trailer park after her divorce from my father. At age 55, and after 22 years of marriage, the divorce, and having to sell the family home in the settlement, her attitude was less than inspiring. It was also a blow to my ego to have to return home after three years of being on my own and having never asked for or been given any assistance. (This was some time before I hatched the housetruck plan).

The day that I was to have vacated the property, I was carrying a box of possessions out the front door of my rear house and looked over to the rear house across the fence, next door, to see my neighbor doing the same. A few minutes later, I had arranged with the house's owner to be the new tenant. It became a simple matter to move next door, saving me from a life (or not) in a trailer park. The rent was comparable, and the house a little nicer than the one I moved out of.

The previous landlord's son did move into my old house, but was never friendly to me, in spite of my attempts to show that I didn't regard him as a jerk like his father. He only lived there for three months or so, then moved out. For this I got evicted?

The new tenants in my old house were a young married couple, Ken and Anne, with whom I developed an immediate friendly relationship. They were both students at Cal State Dominguez, and Anne was working part time to support them both. Between classes, Ken and I spent much time together, as we shared common interests and values. On days off, we would frequently ride bicycles to Hermosa Beach and hang around the strand or go surfing (I should say that I *tried* to surf).

Some time shortly after I bought my moving van and was busy making plans for it's conversion to a housetruck, Ken's wife left him. Without a steady means of income, it looked like he was going to lose the house. Before his money ran out, he made the decision to also build a housetruck, purchasing an International step-van from a laundry company in Long Beach. Once he had the van, and minimal facilities were installed, he let the rental house go and moved in with me, sleeping in the van and showering at school. We shared meals, music, and spent many hours planning our trucks together. We attended trailer and motor home exhibitions, toured RV sales lots, and went to yacht and sailboat shows. We learned a lot more from the nautical side of those attendances.

It became obvious that some of the materials that we would need would have to be purchased new. Shopping for RV/trailer supplies revealed that the prices were geared towards people who had a lot more disposable income than us. At some point I came into possession of a Rogers Supply Co. catalog, kind of a Sears catalog for recreational vehicle parts and supplies. Calls to the warehouse confirmed that they were a wholesale-only outfit, and did not make sales to end users. No problem, time to become a manufacturer.

The first step was to create some nice, safe aliases for ourselves. I fell into using the name George Huxley (it's a whole 'nother story in itself), and Ken became Herb Woodley. If that name seems familiar, it's because that's the name of Dagwood Bumstead's next door neighbor in the comic strip Blondie. Hey, he used to live next door...

Next we needed a business checking account. Calls to the bank allowed us to create a "club" account, with no minimum balance, no service charge, and checks imprinted with the "club's" name. So was born Huxwood Associates, an amalgam of our respective aliases. We had letterhead printed up: Huxwood Associates / Mobile Environment Systems (ie, motorhomes). We even had a rubber stamp, I've probably still got it around here somewhere.

Rogers supply was more than happy to sell us anything we wanted from the catalog on a cash-and-carry basis under these terms, and didn't even charge us California sales tax on the purchases because they were supposedly being resold to end users who then would be paying the tax.

My home recording studio had a "phone patch" which allowed recorded audio to by played back down the phone line. I had also rigged up a hold switch on one of my phones. If we knew that Rogers would be calling to confirm an order, I'd be ready with a recording of saws and pounding to play over the conversation. "Just a minute" I'd shout into the phone, "I'm going to put you on hold and go into the office where it's not so noisy". Then I'd put the caller on hold while cutting off the recording, wait a few seconds and pick up the phone again, resuming the conversation in the quiet of the "office". It was a great farce!

When we would go to pick up the order, we would wear blue work shirts from the swap meet with name tags like "Joe" or "Bill" sewn above the pocket. If the will-call counter help started asking any questions, we'd act stupid and tell them that we were just the runner, if they had any questions, to call the "office".

Anyhow, this is how we ended up getting a lot of brand-new gear such as gas/electric water heaters, stainless steel sinks, plumbing parts, RV-sized cook tops, table hardware, roof vents, and a lot more for less than 50% of the retail price.

Of course, we took to calling each other by our aliases, I was "George" and Ken was "Woodley". Mine fell by the wayside rather quickly, but Woodley fit Ken to a 'T', as he was an accomplished woodworker. His name stuck, and to this day, he is known as Reverend Woodley to his friends, family, and parishioners.

"Huxwood" ended up being an all-purpose code word. If uttered out of context, it meant that something was wrong, or that the situation was dangerous, or that one or the other of us should clam up until we both understood what was going on. It probably saved our asses more than a few dollars on RV parts.

 

30 Years in a Housetruck

Page Four: Preparing to Escape

 

Preparing the truck for the move and to be converted into my home involved doing a lot of mechanical work. The original 235 straight-six cylinder engine was worn out at 78,000 miles. As fortune would have it, Woodley's brother-in-law had a GMC 305 cu. in. V6 that he had removed from a Carryall. I purchased it for $25 and disassembled it for rebuilding.

Woodley quickly realized why the laundry company that he bought his step van from wouldn't let him test drive it on the street. Besides having a worn-out engine, the brakes were poor and the front springs broken. Working together, we removed his engine and disassembled it, taking the block and head to the same machine shop that was doing the work on my new V6.

When it was time to pick up the parts, we loaded it all into the back of my beat up old 1962 Rambler American station wagon. I had hauled a lot of stuff in/on that old car, including the rear axle out of Fat Frank's Camaro race car and Ward's Suzuki 350 motorcycle (heaped onto the tailgate), but it was never as much of a low rider as it was with two truck engine blocks, three cylinder heads, two crankshafts and the rest of the parts loaded in. We did get followed by a cop for a while, but didn't get pulled over, which I found kind of amazing.

Here's a old photo of "La Bondo", my old Rambler sitting on the side street behind where we worked on Woodley's truck's engine rebuild install:

The engine assembly took place at "The Shop", which was an industrial warehouse that was rented by several of my associates from the old car club (the "T-Timers", if anyone is interested). The club had since disbanded, but Frank, his brother, and several others had rented the place to have a location to pool their tools and store their race cars. Big James had set up a paint booth, and did body work there, so there was a big three-phase air compressor that could really supply the volume of air needed to run air tools.

I could spend a week going on about some of the antics and exploits that took place at The Shop, but I'll just mention that they included home made explosives, fisticuffs, cheating the phone company, getting ripped off by burglars, turning in some tool thieves, playing detective, and even some actual work on cars. It was the utlimate guy hangout. There was no safe harbor at The Shop, and one day I came in to find that someone had intentionally broken a beer bottle over the top of my partially assembled engine. It was time to leave.

A brake job and a new radiator were added to the project list after the new engine was shoehorned into the engine compartment.

Next on the housetruck came body work. The original box van was badly rusted. Many hours were spent with the pneumatic air tools grinding and removing rust from the exterior of the box, and applying primer and pale yellow paint. The roof leaked pretty badly, so I went up and spackled on some roof goo that didn't really help much.

I had been parking the truck around the corner from my rental house, on a less busy side street. I did my best to keep it out of anyone's way, but being as big as it is, someone was bound to complain. One of the neighbors who lived on the corner of the alley made some noises about calling the police about it being parked there, but I told him that I was kind of interested in what they might be able to do if it was used/moved regularly, and he shut up. In fact, he got rather friendly after a while and started giving me advice on the painting.

Each morning I would pull the truck into the alley behind my rear house and go to work on it. My intent was to have at least a few of the interior amenities installed before I gave up the rental house and put myself on the road.

 

30 Years in a Housetruck

Page Five: Beginning Construction

 

Not all of the materials for the Housetruck came from the swap meet or Rogers Supply. Some were recycled out of existing buildings. The fiberglass insulation was a find from an office next door to "The Shop" that was being remodeled, foil-faced R-11 that was offered by the builders before it went into the dumpster. Somewhere I also managed to acquire several bales of brand new rock-wool insulation, kraft-faced, R-7.

The door and some of the windows in the truck were recycled from the Flamingo Trailer factory before it was torn down. The site was abandoned for years, and was in the last stages of deconstruction when the Huxwood Demolition crew donned their blue work shirts and added hard hats and tool belts. We pulled two doors off of the former guard shack, and salvaged six or so HEHR brand three-tier awning windows. Many of the electrical outlet boxes and some of the wiring came from this factory as well. So complete was our disguise, that a California Highway Patrol officer made a routine traffic stop directly across the street from where we were working an never even glanced at us or what looked to be a tradesman's work truck parked in the lot.

Two days after our visit the remains of the Flamingo Trailer factory was bulldozed into splinters and hauled off to the landfill.

After that, Woodley and I talked a lot about urban camouflage and how to blend into the background while still dwelling in our trucks. We often kidded one another about painting "Goodmill" on the side of his step van, installing a "donations" chute and parking it in supermarket parking lots to see if we could collect any valuables.

The fiberglass insulation was quickly installed in the truck, along with some one-inch styrene (Styrofoam) insulation that we picked up behind some industrial buildings. There was quite a pile of it most of the time, sheets with damaged corners or small stains/cracks. There were also some sheets of ¼" flexible foam that made good under floor insulation and added some extra insulation to the walls against the steel siding.

The floors were built up with ¾" lath, insulated between, and then decked over with ½" plywood, screwed down.

My friend T-Max was around a lot and at one point, he asked me how long I expected that the materials I was using would last. The question kind of took me by surprise, as I hadn't considered that they would need to last much longer than the trip to Oregon. Ten years seemed an eternity then, and I allowed as though they should be good for that long at least.

With the help of George, one of the more responsible members of The Shop crew who had a welder, I modified the framing in the curb side of the truck, and installed one of the Flamingo doors. The rest of the windows and the other door would be packed up to Oregon to be installed as the truck was completed.

When it came time to build my sleeping loft, Woodley's expertise and confidence in woodworking helped a lot. I had taken some wood shop classes in jr. high and high school, but hadn't done all that much construction aside from some rough framing and a nicely finished cabinet for an old tube-type Harmon Kardon stereo preamplifier (lots of 12AX7A vacuum tubes!). I was concerned that my housetruck would end up looking a lot like my first club house, boards all sawn crooked and bent-over nails.

In fact, my first attempt at a loft collapsed when I tested it by placing body weight on its frame. The new frame was made of 2x4's and was much sturdier, built across the front of the van body, about five feet from the floor, with a deck made from my family's former ping-pong table, which was a 5x10' sheet of ¾" plywood.

That was as far as the house construction went before I left for the Beaver State. No appliances, no wiring or plumbing, no cabinets. It was mostly insulated, with an entry door that had a double hung aluminum window, and a platform to hold a foam mattress. All the rest would have to wait until I was away from Los Angeles.

 

30 Years in a Housetruck

Page Six: Going Away Party

 

As the departure date for leaving the hell-hole and human-zoo of LA drew nearer, I began selling off and otherwise unloading my possessions that I would not be taking along. Things like the huge round-tube RCA color TV, a good sized load of hardwood dunage I picked up from empty rail cars down in the industrial districts, and the spare engine for my Rambler. I also sold my electric guitar and let the contract expire on my rented piano.

Someone, probably Fat Frank, decided that I needed a "going-away" party. I think it was Frank, because I seem to remember most of the guests being his friends. I wasn't really looking forward to having a whole house full of people, but since I'd be moving soon, it didn't seem to be too much of a risk. I was concerned about word of my four track recording studio falling on the wrong ears, and getting a nefarious visit by undesirables.

At any rate the party was on April 1, 1975. There were two refrigerators full of alcohol (my regular fridge, and the RV reefer that wasn't installed in the truck yet). About all I can remember of that night was lots of too loud music and some very forward woman who was intent on teaching me how to down tequila shooters.

I had informed my landlord that I would be moving out and that I was applying the security deposit towards the last month's rent. Naturally, he was concerned that the condition of the house was adequate, so I sent some time scrubbing the kitchen floor and making sure that my waterbed hadn't leaked in the bed room. Frank approached the landlord, and worked out a deal that allowed him to move in when I moved out.

Since there wasn't enough room in the truck for all my furniture and appliances, I "loaned" Frank my couch, living room rug, refrigerator, washing machine and kitchen stove. Of course, I was never paid for this, and never saw any of it again.

(I've been doing some research on this topic, mostly reading old letters that I wrote to my mother. When she died, I inherited a box full of letters, apparently every one that I ever wrote to her. It's actually an interesting chronicle of my life told to me by myself.)

Last week while digging through another box of old papers, I found the original floor plan for the Housetruck, and at least some of the construction paper cutouts that I made to allow me to try out various interior layouts:

The large yellow area at the top is my sleeping loft, five feet off the floor, with my desk beneath. I had originally planned a bathroom, with a shower and toilet combined in one enclosure, just to the left of the kitchen. It was never completed, as I found after living in the truck for a while that I wanted/needed more kitchen counter and storage space. Besides, who needs all that steam in the house, anyway?

The narrow red line on the right is the entry door. I had (still have) two old metal and leather office chairs which were going to be used on either side of the table that was also never built. I'm actually sitting in one of the chairs right now.

 

30 Years in a Housetruck

Page Seven: Accompaniment

 

It didn't take too long for Woodley to be included in the plans to move to Oregon. Kim, my old high school buddy, made several visits to LA after his discharge from the service to pick up machine tools, visit, and get his possessions which he had stored before entering the Army and getting married. Everything we did from that point on was preparation to move out of LA and to Oregon to escape the rat race.

The date for our final departure drew near. My rented house had been pretty thoroughly emptied, and the possessions that I was taking along placed into the moving-van-turned-housetruck for the trip, along with several large pieces of welding equipment that I was delivering to Kim.

The night we were to vacate the house and move into our housetrucks for the road journey, Big James invited us over for a small going away party. T-Max was there, along with Fat Frank and Crazy Robert. We cracked open a couple of beers and probably inhaled something illegal. Robert spent most of the evening in the bathroom. Eventually James told us that Robert had been vomiting almost non-stop since he arrived, and that we had to take him somewhere else, as his wife was tired of it. Great, just what I needed. Robert had always been the stone around my neck since high school, always getting me involved in his disputes and generally being a pest. Once he managed to almost get me shot by six nervous cops who were chasing him for brandishing his .44 Magnum. Now I was saddled with his sickness.

Anyway, we took him over to my old house and tried to talk him into seeing a doctor. He would have no part of it, and continued to puke his guts out into the toilet. I tried calling his parents and was told that they "had tried everything over the years and Robert was an adult now" so it was my problem. Eventually, we decided that because it appeared that he was regurgitating blood, we should just call an ambulance, which we did.

The ambulance attendants strapped him to a gurney and wheeled him off to the hospital, in spite of his protests. That was the last time I ever saw him. Last I heard, he had been born again and was living in Florida, so I guess he survived, in more ways than one.

At this point it was after midnight, the house was empty and cold (the gas had been turned off), so it looked like it was time to say goodbye to my old neighborhood. What a great send-off. Woodley and I climbed into our trucks, started the engines and began our journey.

 

 

 

30 Years in a Housetruck

Page Nine: Getting Close

 

The trip to the north continued in a thrust of several days of driving.

For some reason, we didn't cross the Golden Gate Bridge, opting instead to take the San Rafael Bridge across the bay.

Our usual pattern was that I drove in front with Woodley following in his step van. This was probably because the Housetruck was the slower of the two.

During one drive near Capella, California, I lost sight of Woodley in the mirrors. He continued to be not there for a short while, then I came onto a long, straight stretch of road where I could see behind me for at least a mile. Still no Woodley.

I managed to find a turnaround and got headed south again, just in time to see him coming over the horizon. We pulled over to find out what was going on (two-way radios would have been a great thing on this trip).

Woodley was way into stopping to pick up hitch hikers, having all that room in the step van for them to ride, and he had been stopping frequently since we left San Francisco. Too often it seemed, as he had about 15 people in the truck. All the additional weight, along with the cargo he was carrying had made his truck even slower than mine. Of course, stopping to pick up and let off passengers made the bus routine even slower.

As I mentioned, Highway 101 was a lot of two-lane roads then, much of that original pavement is now designated "Scenic Byways", as the main road has been blasted through hill and valley and paved four lanes wide through most of the length of the state.

One night's stay, we simply found a small spur road to the side of the Highway, and pulled out to set up camp. I do remember that we still had one hitch hiker with us who had been riding in the cab with me, as I set up a tarp for him to sleep under. Just before dark, the owner of the property pulled up to find out what was going on. We explained that we were just travelers passing through, and thought that this would be a safe place to spend the night. The owner agreed, and welcomed us to stay on the condition that we light no fires and leave no trash. Things were different back then, I guess. No fences or "No Trespassing" signs, and a property owner who respects the concept of the "Commons" for honest travelers.

The final stopover on this trip is certain in my mind. Our first night in Oregon was spent in a rustic campground a mile or two from Brookings. This was the most remote location we had stayed during the trip, being in a forested location near a creek or small river, and completely away from the city and traffic noise.

In the morning, we were preparing to get back on the road and met up with some other young people who had stayed in the campground. As they were leaving in their pickup truck, we told them that this was our first morning in Oregon, and that we were moving up from L.A. to live in the state. We made some jocular comment about probably not telling them that because Oregonians hate people from out of state, and they turned kind of nasty and said "Why don't you turn around and go back". I don't think they were joking.

In the 1970's, you didn't tell people where you moved into the state from. There was a very strong anti-non-native sentiment. The former governor, Tom McCall had made it pretty clear that tourists were welcome to come visit, spend their money and then go home. "Don't Californicate Oregon" was a popular bumper sticker, and you would frequently see "SNOB" stickers (Society of Native Oregon Born). There was also the small simulated Oregon license plate sticker with the letters "NATIVE" and an open space for stick-on numbers that proclaimed "Since ____", where you could post your birth year, in simulation of the real license plates expiration sticker.

It didn't take long before you found out that keeping quiet about your place of origin was a very good idea. Some people would press you for the information, and on more than one occasion, I would either tell them that I, too was a "native", or else out-snob them by telling them I was from Alaska.

The whole thing was a load of BS in my opinion. I would ask people who claimed to be "natives" what tribe they belonged to. They would get confused, "What'dya mean?". Hey you claim to be a "native", but all that means is that your ancestors came from somewhere else, possibly displacing real native Oregonians in the process, so put up or shut up, are you Nez-Peirce? Siletz tribe? Calapooya band? Alsea family? Clatsop clan?

These days, most of the white "natives" have either died off, moved away, or gotten over it.

Anyhow, back to the trip. We drove north on Highway 101, and after passing through one of the larger coastal cities (not saying which one), I looked in the mirror to see a County Sheriff following. After a short time he turned on his lights and pulled us (me, really) over. I was presented with my "Welcome-to-Oregon" traffic citation for impeding traffic.

As I mentioned, the Housetruck would only do 40 MPH. This meant that I frequently had to pull over and let traffic pass, which I had been doing since leaving LA. In this particular instance, there was nowhere to pull off the road to let traffic pass. The cop told me that it's a violation to have four or more cars following a slow vehicle. I tried to tell him that the first vehicle was Woodley, and that he had been behind me for the last 800 miles. The car behind him was an old granny-lady who refused to pass even on long straight stretches with a dotted center line. The car behind her had only been there for a couple of miles, then his cop car made four, and he had only pulled into line a half-mile back. No dice, I got ticketed anyway. Got to keep the roads safe from all those too-slow hippy trucks. Actually, I don't think he ever registered that the Housetruck was anything more than a moving van, as there were no windows, grilles or appliances visible on the road side to make it look like an RV-type vehicle.

After getting settled, I received a letter at my old LA address from the county directing me to pay the $17 fine for this ticket, or face certain penalty by the justice system. I wrote them a letter back respectfully telling them that they could stuff it. Of course, by that time, I had turned in my California drivers license by sending it back. When I applied for an Oregon license, they asked me if I had my old license, and I told them that I had returned it as a "symbolic protest against air pollution". Whatever, the Oregon DMV didn't care, and issued me a shiny, new license with no citations attached. I still drive straight through that county non-stop just in case there's still a warrant out for me....

The day of the week was Sunday, and we arrived in Eugene at the Franklin Boulevard exit of I-5, having taken Highway 38 from Reedsport to the valley and the Interstate. We stopped at the Shell gas station just across from the Joe Romania Chevrolet dealership and used the pay phone to call Kim and let him know we had arrived. Kim's father, Lyle (known hereon as "Jeep") came to meet us and to lead us through the basically deserted Sunday afternoon streets of Eugene to our new home in the south hills of the city.

 

 

 

30 Years in a Housetruck

Page Ten: Eugene, Oregon

 

Jeep (Kim's dad) lead us through town, past the University of Oregon, down West 11th avenue, and then up Chambers St. to Loraine Highway. Kim was renting a vintage single-wide mobile home on five acres directly across a gravel road from Jeep and Kitty's (Kim's Mom) five acre home. I was told to park my housetruck along side an unfinished shed, in front of an unfinished shop building on the side of the lot. Woodley parked his step van directly across the narrow gravel road at the foot of Kim's driveway.

We toured the properties and were shown a shower and toilet in a nearby office/shop that we would be allowed to use during our stay, and given keys to the building.

The properties were located on a forested hillside, well away from the noise and light of the city, and the gravel road carried only minimal traffic. It was quiet and private there, and about as much as two nearly burned-out city boys could ask for.

The previous owner of Jeep and Kitty's home had been a ferro cement freak of some type, maybe a contractor. Much of the architecture was made from cement of some sort, and there was a big, really big orange ferro cement pumpkin in the front yard. I mean, big enough to be a bus stop shelter, which is what I think it was meant to be. The other interesting feature of the office/shop building where our bathroom was located was that it had an inverted gable roof, that is it was a big "V", with a gutter down the middle. Not the most leak-proof design I've ever seen…

Jeep was the mechanical inspector for the city, and had been making "improvements" to the house, and those will figure more prominently later in the story.

The next day after arriving, Woodley and I were taken into town by Kim's wife, Terri (name changed a bit to protect the innocent, [me], as she has a very distinctive name, and might actually still live in the area), and shown around the downtown area a bit. We saw the pedestrian mall, where the main street and several side streets had all been closed to vehicular traffic and planters and benches installed to entice shoppers to spend time and money with the downtown merchants. Unfortunately, Eugene had gotten caught up in "Urban Renewal" a couple of years before, and almost all of the historic buildings in the downtown area had been bulldozed into rubble and carted off to the landfill. This resulted in many blocks of abandoned, excavated basements and still water pits, as nothing had been built to replace the old buildings.

We saw the Atrium Building, a multi-story modern building with an open, airy covered courtyard in the center, and marveled at the Citizen's Bank building, with it's modern brickwork.

In the very center of downtown was a large, and ultimately ugly concrete fountain in a contemporary design. It had no water flowing, and apparently hadn't for a long time. It was the perfect complement to the stark empty basements of what were once thriving business in the core of the city.

Terri gave each of us a welcome gift, athletic gray T-shirts with the word "OREGON" in green letters on the front. I popped into a coin-op photo booth at Woolworth's to snap some photos of my new shirt, haircut and such to send to my mother, who was now living in Las Vegas (I have the film strip somewhere, but I'm not going to scan and post it, so don't ask).

Of all we did and saw that day, one thing has stayed in my mind clearly. Walking on our way downtown from parking the car on the outskirts of the pedestrian mall, I spotted a small bit of graffiti scrawled on the boarded up windows of a building that no longer stands at 11th and Olive streets, perhaps penned by a bored UO student waiting for a bus. It read:

"I love you, California. I'm coming home, but I'm stuck here for now."

A cosmic message from the beyond, intended for my eyes alone, or simply the ranting of a disgruntled surfer fed up after nine months of rain? Something to ponder until the next installment…

 

 

 

30 Years in a Housetruck

Page Eleven: Settling In

 

After getting the quick tour of the town, the next order of business was to get our trucks unloaded. Both Woodley and I had packed them nearly full of household belongings, building materials for the conversion to housetrucks and a lot of tools and equipment for Kim 's "machine shop", which he was planning on putting together in the incomplete shed building. I hauled a large and heavy arc welder, and Woodley had moved acetylene and oxygen tanks for the gas welder Kim had purchased in L.A. In addition to some of the furniture I brought along, I had a gas stove, RV refrigerator and water heater, windows and doors and other materials. Most of this went into the shop building next to the truck, which needed only a door and some plywood to be enclosed and secure.

Jeep had wired the shop for power, but it didn't work correctly, so I figured out his wiring mistakes and ran an extension cord to my truck to run some lights and the electric blanket on my bed, as I had no other source for heat in the truck yet. Woodley was parked across the gravel road next to the pump shed that served Kim's rental trailer, so he was able to get power there for the same purposes.

We spent a few days exploring the properties, and getting to know the neighborhood. Kim's rental property was quite interesting, the owner had begun building an A-frame house on the lot, but it had burned down during the construction, so the yard was strewn with assorted building materials, car parts, appliances, fasteners, and a lot of miscellaneous junk. Of course, we were "forbidden" by Kim to touch any of it, which made it all that much more attractive. There were several derelict cars and trucks on the property, mostly so overgrown with berry vines that they were unapproachable.

There was a low platform in a tree up the lot from the trailer, a perfect place for us to retreat to for safety breaks when we didn't want anyone to know where we were or what we were doing. There was also a rope swing on the lower part of the property, tied way off the ground on the limb of an ancient tree.

As the days went by, we began clearing a circular area of berry vines and rocks, put up some fencing and began turning the soil to create a large garden area. Old stable stalls on Jeep's property were mucked out for composted straw and manure.

Saturday nights, the three of us would pile into the front of Kim's 1954 Chevy pickup truck and go into town to Max's Tavern on 13th street to drink some beers and listen to live music (frequently folk or bluegrass).

When we weren't being kept busy by Kim or Jeep doing some chores around the properties, Woodley and I would work on our trucks. He was painting the interior of his step van, and I installed an operable vent in the roof above the sleeping loft and began installing some wiring to run proper lighting.

I transfered the open claim for unemployment that I had from California, and the checks started coming in, and we both registered for food stamps, so there was income and groceries. The arrangement for parking our trucks on the properties was barter for our labor, so the rent was covered.

About all that was missing was having my own car, as Kim's truck was fairly unreliable and wasn't always available for us to use when we needed to go somewhere. Mostly, I ended up riding along with whoever was going into town. Woodley would frequently use his step van as basic transportation. Getting my car up to Oregon was going to involve a trip back to LA, one that I wasn't sure how to arrange. At least for a while.

One day in May, Woodley and I returned from a trip to the grocery store and found a familiar Buick with California license plates in Kim's driveway. It was TMAX's parents, Chick and Connie, who were on their way to Reno, and for whatever reason, had made a detour to Eugene. They offered to give me a ride back to LA to pick up my car, but I had to leave with them that afternoon, as soon as possible in fact.

I stuffed some clothes, my car keys and a small bit of money into my Boy Scout backpack, bundled up my sleeping bag, gave Woodley instructions on how to feed my Guinea Pig, and set off for my trip southward.

Our first overnight was in Bend, where the motel owner asked Chick where he had picked up the hitchhiker (me).

Then we were in Reno. I don't gamble, and so I was standing around, being bored and feeling alienated in some casino while Connie fed the slots when some elderly woman I never saw before ran up, grabbed me by the arm, and dragged me over to one of the machines. "Here, Honey" she said- thrusting a handful of nickels at me, "This machine is paying, but I have to leave", which she did.

“WTF?” was my first reaction, but I decided to play out the nickels she had left me and then get back to the important business of being bored that she had interrupted. It didn't take very long to figure out that the machine I had inherited was defective. If you didn't pull the handle very hard, only two of the disks would spin. After getting the sticky disk set on a paying number, it was fairly easy to keep the machine paying out almost every play. Soon I had nickels spilling off the counter and all over the floor. The drinks waitress would walk by every couple of minutes, muttering "Still winning?", and the pit boss (shift floor manager) made a couple of fly-bys, eyeing me suspiciously.

Eventually, I hit a jackpot, but despite the ringing bells and flashing lights, no nickels came out of the chute. I called the waitress over to collect my jackpot. The pit boss came by and told me that the machine was out of money. "Well, fill it up again, I'm on a roll" I told him. Nope, this machine is broken, we're taking it out of service, and they slapped a canvas bag over it, and invited me to play another machine.

I had so many nickels that the waitress had to go to the bar and get me a bunch of paper cups so I could collect them all and take them to be exchanged for paper money. I ended up making $40 (that's 800 nickels, BTW).

I don't remember if we stayed in Reno or moved on, but Connie was not very happy that I had cashed in so well at the casino. I think she might have lost a little while we were there…

Next overnight I recall was Bishop, California. It was a pretty warm night, and I had little interest in the TV in the motel room, so I sat on the hood of the Buick in the motel parking lot, sipping a soda and watching the night life on Main street.

 

 

 

30 Years in a Housetruck

Page Twelve: Back in L.A. ??!

 

Finally, we arrived in LA, and I borrowed my old 1962 Rambler American station wagon from TMAX so I could drive around and run some errands and visit people. I had given him the car when I left for Oregon as payment for a small debit I owed him. I ended up sleeping in the car at least one night while I was down there.

I visited Frank, who had moved into my old rental house to see what he was doing. One thing I did NOT want was to run into Crazy Robert while I was there, so I parked the car up a the Laundromat on the corner, hiding it between a delivery truck and the building, then walked to Frank's. After I left, Robert showed up a few minutes later, so my casino luck was holding.

The major task of this trip was to pick up my car, a 1960 Rambler Classic station wagon that I had left in the parking garage of Woodley's mother's condo in San Pedro. Of course, the battery for this car was in the Housetruck back in Oregon, so I went to Sears and bought a top-of-the-line Die Hard battery. The price? $39.95 (that's 799 nickels).

Someone (don't remember who) gave me a ride to San Pedro and dropped me and the battery off in front of Woodley's mother's condo, then drove away, leaving me to fetch the car myself. Connie (Woodley's mother, also named Connie) was not home, so I decided to see if I could get into the parking garage and get the car without her. As I was rounding the corner of the sidewalk, going to the side street that the garage entrance was on, a San Pedro police car went by, and the cop's head swiveled around like it was mounted on ball bearings. I knew what was coming next, so I set the battery down on the curb and waited for him to do his U-turn. Sure enough, he came around again, stopping right next to where I was standing. When he got out of the patrol car, before he could say anything, I pulled the receipt for the battery out of my shirt pocket, extended it towards him and asked "I suppose you'd like to see this?". Probably a little bit disappointed that he hadn't nabbed a battery thief, the cop didn't stick around to help me get the car, either.

Getting past the motorized gates of the parking garage wasn't too difficult, I simply waited outside until someone drove out, then dived under the gate with the battery before it lowered.

My car was still where I had parked it, covered with a fair amount of dust. Because the front end was parked under an overhead storage cabinet, I needed to roll it back a ways to get the hood open to install the battery. Unfortunately, the day I had driven it into the garage, the maintenance crews had been patching the road outside with hot tar. The tar had gotten on the tires, and although it was a thin film, it was enough to prevent me from rolling the car out to where I could work on it. The tires were effectively glued to the concrete, and working alone, I didn't have enough strength to break it free!

Eventually, I used the bumper jack to raise each corner of the car until the tires were lifted from the sticky patch of concrete, and placed papers and cardboard from the trash dumpster under them to prevent them from re-adhering.

Putting the battery in the car allowed me to start it right up, and once again, I was mobile…

After getting the car running, I dropped in on my friend Mike (known by his nick name, "Frenchy"). When he learned that I had been sleeping in the car, he offered to let me crash that night on his living room couch.

The next morning, I felt like I was getting a cold. By afternoon, it became obvious that it was more than that, and likely was either severe food poisoning or a bad case of the flu. Either way, I couldn't keep food or liquids down, had diarrhea, and a high temperature as well.

I was mortified to be an ill houseguest, but by the time Frenchy got home from work, I was much too sick to be elsewhere. Fortunately, he and his wife were both registered nurses, and weren't put off by my condition. They tended me, fed me broth when I could keep liquids down, and brought me back to health. I was down and out on their couch for three or four days. When I finally had enough strength to get up, I used the shower for the first time in too long, and had to lie down on the bathroom floor afterwards to keep from passing out.

Once I was able to get up and move around without fear of a blackout, I began getting the car ready to drive back to Oregon. One thing that I felt needed doing was to repack the front wheel bearings and adjust the brakes. Working in Frenchy's driveway, I had the car up on jacks and was making some progress when a car pulled up in the street in front of the house and none other than Woodley got out with his backpack! He was about the last person I expected to see, as he was supposed to be 700 miles away in Eugene. For reasons of his own (probably having to do with his estranged wife, Anne), he decided to hitchhike to LA, counting on finding me there for the return trip.

I was actually very glad to see him, because I was still not feeling 100%, and it would be good to have a second driver on the trip back. How, exactly, he managed to find me was kind of a mystery, because Frenchy had moved since we had left town, and I don't know for sure that anyone else even knew where I was while I was sick, or that I hadn't left town altogether. Must have been that TMAX.

Whatever other trouble we managed to get into, I can't remember, but before leaving town, we drove to North Hollywood to a discount RV parts store to purchase materials for our trucks. I bought a cosmetically flawed marine toilet and holding tank. Woodley must have gotten supplies also, because we pretty much filled up the back of the station wagon with RV stuff, and had to strap the holding tank to the roof.

Likely we visited with Woodley's father Wade, and perhaps stayed at Marion's estate for a short while.

I do know that we headed north, and I had to pull the car over in Ventura and remove one of the hubcaps and the dust cover from the wheel bearing because the cotter pin that I had put in after packing the bearings was catching on the dust cap and making an annoying clicking sound.

We probably stayed over with my grandparents in San Jose again. Woodley liked my Grandma Mace quite a lot. His own great-grandmother was a seemingly serious and very proper elderly lady, while my Granny had always been a salt-of-the-earth, give-'em-hell type.

We worked our way northward on Highway 101, heading back to our new home.

 

 

 

30 Years in a Housetruck

Page Thirteen: Back at the Punishment Farm

 

When we returned home, we found that Kim and Terri had been eating the groceries that we bought the day I left. In fact, the groceries were gone. It would be understandable for them to consume perishables like milk or eggs, but they scarfed up the staples too. We asked (quite reasonably, we thought) that they replenish these food items, since we had made the purchase but then not been around to share in their consumption, but we were told in effect, "Tough luck, you move, you lose". Requests for repayment were also rebuffed. After all, $20 worth of groceries (in 1975, $20 was a lot of food) for two people who weren't making a steady income wasn't anything to walk away from. This really disturbed Woodley, who had (and still has) a fine-tuned sense of fair play and justice.

The kitchen and food seemed to be a continuous point of contention. Whenever we were able, we tried to help out with meal preparation, or to take turns doing the cooking. Since Kim and Jeep were so fond of keeping Woodley and I busy doing their projects, we frequently had to fall back on Terri being the cook. In those instances, we would take responsibility for all of the dish washing after the meal.

Woodley and I had been attempting to follow a vegetarian diet for over a year, but unless we did the cooking, we would come in from pouring and finishing cement, or digging the garden all day to be fed Hamburger Helper, meatloaf or pork chops.

As for KP, Kim would have no part of it. He never cooked, would no sooner wash dishes than eat a toad, and would consume a meal, push his chair back from the table, and walk away, leaving his plate and utensils on the table. We tried to talk to him about this, but his response was "I'm a medic. I can handle having to stuff a guy's guts back into his body cavity, but dirty dishes are too gross for me".

Attempts to have "house meetings" to try and work out some of our disagreements didn't go very well. Terri was "very sensitive" and as soon as any complaints or dislikes were expressed, she would break into tears and run out of the room, which of course, put Kim into major defensive mode.

In all, Woodley and I decided that it was time for us to get busy and begin assembling our own kitchen to relieve some of the stress resulting from using the kitchen in the rental trailer. As such, we began building a kitchen counter for my Housetruck. I guess we chose my truck due to it's being bigger. My refrigerator was larger as well, and my cook stove free-standing. Woodley's step van was going to require some careful planning to fit in kitchen appliances and counters without it getting crowded in a hurry.

Woodley had good woodworking skills, but neither of us had built kitchen cabinets before. We just started logically, building a base and toe-kick from 2x4 lumber set on edge. Over that, half a sheet of plywood, cut two feet wide. Some 2x2 and 2x4 framing and another half sheet of plywood for the countertop base. Everything was cut and fitted to the space in the rear corner of the truck box were it would be installed. We decided early on to make the cabinet free standing rather than built in. This was a good choice for several reasons. I needed to pull the cabinet away from the wall several times over the years to change paneling, add plumbing or electrical, or make modifications to the cabinet's back.

Instead of nails to assemble the wood, we used wood glue and ⅜” hardwood dowels. I had never used these as fasteners before, but the construction seemed sturdy, and using the doweling jig to make blind fastenings made it all seem that much more craftsmanlike.

It would be a while before the counter would be ready for use, but in the meantime, we scoured the local building materials supply stores for a double stainless steel sink, a faucet and the bits of plumbing that would be necessary to eventually complete the project.

 

 

 

30 Years in a Housetruck

Page Fourteen: Sarge

 

Time out for a character bio...

Let's get to know Kim a little better, because he's about to get a nickname (or "Prankster" name as we call them up here in Kesey Country).

I'd known Kim for probably seven or eight years. When I actually think about it, I don't know that he ever attended my high school, or had transferred out sometime before graduation. Possibly, he was a friend of TMAX and Stu, who I did attend school with.

At any rate Kim had always been an interesting character. Possessed with a dry sense of humor, appreciative of the cartoons of Ghan Wilson, completely enamored of any music that Frank Zappa made, and fond of being a little wild in his own way. Never one to shirk from a challenge of any sort, he pulled off some nutty pranks.

Like the time one of his friends took his new girlfriend to the Torrance Drive In Theatre. Kim assembled eight or ten friends (including me), and BS'ed our way past the ticket takers to pull a "commando raid" on the movie-going couple. After locating their VW bug in the lot, we converged on it from all different directions at an arranged signal, grabbing the car and tossing it around violently while Kim hopped on the hood, stripped to the waist holding a machete between his teeth.

His favorite pastime when new visitors to his home came calling was to show them his parents "Custom, stock-from-the-factory dog" (a dachshund with one testicle).

One time, he talked me into climbing down a sheer cliff to the Pacific Ocean because someone had stolen a new Ford Mustang and driven it off the cliff. It was laying upside down in about two feet of water, and he wanted to see if it had any salvageable parts. It didn't, but so that the trip wouldn't be wasted, he collected about half a dozen Abalone (still in the shell), and a huge, heavy packing crate that he wanted to use as a cabinet for his stereo. Dragging all that crap back up the cliff wasn't my idea of recreation.

In the early 1970's Kim found that he was about 100% sure to get conscripted into the armed services and sent to Vietnam. Instead, he enlisted in the Army for four years and entered the medic corps. First stationed in El Paso, Texas, I sent him some custom cassette tapes of music, news and skits that those of us with high lottery numbers back at home would perform. I did this for a number of years, sending tapes to friends in the service stationed all over the world. Kim was the only one to ever send tapes back, filled with wit and his own selections of music (mostly Zappa). It was through these tapes that we formed the idea of creating a cooperative living situation in Oregon.

Back in the present (1975), Woodley and I found that Kim had positioned himself as the "alpha male", the boss, the "big cheese" and given that we were dependent upon him and his parents for a place to live, we were pretty much under his thumb.

At some point, I decided that he needed a more appropriate moniker. Since his military background was obvious, and because he liked barking orders at us, we christened him "Sarge", which suited him just fine. Terri didn't care for our choice at all, but Sarge would respond to our calling him by that name, so we continued.

Just so you can see how fitting this name was, here's a photo of "Sarge" at Christmas, 1973:

What Woodley and I were finding that instead of a cooperative living situation, we were more like hired hands, without the benefit of being paid or having days off. Pretty much any time we planned to take a day off, go somewhere, work on our trucks, or just read a book, Sarge or Jeep would find something for us to do, and we'd be forced to cancel our plans. It wasn't even possible for us to retreat to the tree house to practice duets on our recorders, as Sarge would hear the woodwind instruments through the trees and either yell for us, or, if we didn't respond, come up the hill and rout us from our time together.

Sarge was very contemptuous of our desire to maintain a vegetarian diet, equating it with "stump-breaking cows". I didn't then, and never have understood how not eating meat is associated with having sex with farm animals, but that's what he was inferring.

He also took to using his pellet rifle to get our attention. If we slept too late in the morning, he'd stand on the deck outside the trailer and pepper the walls of our trucks with BB's. He even shot Woodley's oversized black Labrador, Zeus in the ass a couple of times, lodging lead pellets in his skin.

No, things weren't turning out to be too terribly cooperative after all.

 

 

 

30 Years in a Housetruck

Page Fifteen: Time Off

 

Just so no one gets the impression that things were all dour and lifeless, we did manage to do a few enjoyable things in between being worked like mules.

There were two young women that worked in the office of Kitty's interior decorating business on Jeep and Kitty's property. One (or both of them) took an interest in Woodley, and had the means to provide some entertainment. Most days, she would drive Daddy's Corvette to work, but it also turned out that her dad had a ski boat. One weekend after the weather turned nice, we all went out on Fern Ridge Reservoir for some water skiing. I hadn't been on skis for at least ten years, but the knack came back fairly quickly. It helped a lot that the boat was of modern hull design, and had a powerful engine. I learned to water ski being hauled around behind a little underpowered runabout on the Colorado River, and the boat would take forever to get to plane, meaning that getting up out of the water on the skis and in good form was a difficult struggle that took way too long.

Another time a neighbor invited us to borrow their horses, and we took an all afternoon ride over the ridge and into a secluded valley. Of course, on the way home the horses got barn fever and wanted to run the last half mile or so home. Sarge kept yelling at us to reign them in, but eventually, Woodley's horse broke into a gallop, inciting the other horses to run also, and we all got a chance to imagine ourselves in the Kentucky Derby. Woodley and I both got yelled at quite a bit afterwards, but I don't know that there was any way we could have kept those lazy barn stall layabouts in a slow walk when they saw home.

There was also that time Sarge took us fishing in a slough out somewhere near Franklin. It was pretty boring, and we didn't catch anything. I was used to fishing off the Redondo Beach pier, catching mackerel and bonita, or fresh water fishing in Clear Lake in Northern California. At least you could count on hooking a few bluegills to throw back.

Come to think of it, Sarge ripped off my fishing pole after that particular expedition.

Oh, I was supposed to be concentrating on having a good time. Well, there's a big celebration with a surprise ending just around the corner….

 

 

 

30 Years in a Housetruck

Page Sixteen: Taking a Dive

 

Well, OK, so this next bit is hard for me to post, partly because it's very personal, but it's also very heavy. I guess I could skip it, but it's part of my early life in Oregon, so here goes:

It's the second week in June, 1975. Sarge and Terri decide that Woodley and I can get out of the work harness for a day and visit the Great Outdoors in observance of my 24th birthday. An outing is planned to Sahalie Falls on the McKenzie River, about 75 miles from Eugene. Lunch is packed, swimsuits and towels stowed in my car, and the four of us are headed upriver for the day.

The McKenzie Highway (Oregon 126) is a very picturesque highway that parallels the McKenzie River, climbing gracefully up the valley through the foothills of the Cascade mountain range. Just before the road gets steep and begins to really climb into the mountains, and very near Clear Lake, the source of the McKenzie, there is a pair of spectacular waterfalls, Sahalie, and Koosah. The area is a National Park, and is developed with hiking trails, campgrounds, and picnicking facilities.

Crosby, Stills and Nash's "4 + 20" from the Déjà Vu album was just ending on the cassette player as we pulled into the parking area. We grabbed our gear, and headed down to the first falls, Sahalie. The view from the stone observation platform was indeed inspiring:

 

 

The spray from the falls made the air alive with negative ions, and the temperature from the constant evaporation of the mist lowered the heat of the day by a good ten degrees. Of course, the thunder of the water echoed off the trees and rocks.

A rustic path lead downriver, winding between the trees, and scrambling over roots and stone. The river itself is moving fast, fairly boiling with air and energy from the falls, and the colors of the water with the sunlight penetrating it was amazing. No painter's palette could ever hope to capture the shades of blue and green contained in that living body of water.

About a half mile down stream is Koosah Falls. Much rockwork has been done to the paths around the falls, creating stairways, observation decks both above and below the falls, and trails to an adjoining campground.

Another half mile of hiking brings one to Carmen Reservoir, where one of the electric utilities diverts a portion of the river's flow into a canal, to be carried to a powerhouse several miles down stream. Here, the water calms a bit, and the widening channel that leads into the reservoir allows the river to slow somewhat, although it's still a huge quantity of water, and moving right along as well.

Over the entrance of the reservoir is a vehicle bridge, a single lane span to allow cars to reach the parking lot on the opposite shore. A few fishermen try their luck on the far end of the bridge. Woodley and Sarge decided that the coolness of the air at the falls has worn off and it's time for some swimming, so they begin taking turns diving off the bridge into the river. I was content to sit on a large stump off to the side and observe. Eventually, Woodley came over and tried to interest me in trying a dive. I wasn't really into it, but he was persistent, and talked me into removing my boots, taking off my glasses and coming over to the bridge to try it.

Without my glasses, not much was in focus, so Woodley guided me over to the place on the bridge where they had been diving, stood me up on top of the guardrail, and said something like "Right here, the water is so cold, it's a rush". I seem to remember that my last words before I went head first into the river were "Aw shit".

Cold? Let me tell you! Some few years ago in July, I went on a rafting trip a few miles down river with one of my radio station clients on their employee appreciation day. The professional white water rafting guides had us all put on life jackets. Then they came by and "helped" each of us make sure that the jackets were secure. This consisted of the guides grabbing the straps that closed the jackets, and pulling them tight until the life preservers fit us like corsets. Then they told us that if any of us got pitched out of the raft, we would likely go into hypothermial shock within a few seconds, and that we'd probably be unable to save ourselves, even if we wanted to. I thought they were just being dramatic, but one member of our crew did get tossed overboard, and spent about two minutes in the water. Once we had hauled her back into the raft, she was unable to do anything, although conscious, and not injured, she was "frozen", and had nearly no muscle control. I thought she was just being a pussy, but when we reached our destination, and we were instructed to go overboard in thigh-deep water to portage the raft up the bank, I realized how really damned cold the water in the river was.

Anyhow, back to my birthday. Apparently, the cold shock of the water distracted me, and I failed to pull out of my dive quickly enough and crashed head first into the rocks on the bottom of the river. I stayed conscious, and swam quickly to the surface, where I shouted to the others that I had hit bottom and needed help. Then I began to pass out.

Terri had the presence of mind to scream "SWIM! SWIM OVER HERE!". This made a certain amount of sense through the pain, and I did swim the short distance to where they were. Woodley and Sarge dragged me out of the water and up the rocky shore. Once there, my respiration arrested, and I remember Sarge grabbing my shoulders forcefully and shaking me, telling me to keep breathing.

The fishermen began to approach to see if they could help, but Sarge waved them off, telling them I just had a bloody nose. I wouldn't discover the extent of my injuries until later, but I had perforated my upper lip in an "X" pattern below my nose, and torn a large flap of my scalp loose. I also had abrasions on my chin and chest. Terri used her white blouse to try and stop some of the bleeding while Woodley ran the mile plus back to where the car was parked. I managed to remind him to grab my glasses and boots from the stump on his way.

Time had little meaning, as seconds seemed like hours, and the pain made them pass slowly. Woodley arrived with my station wagon, I was loaded into the back with Sarge, and we set off for the nearest hospital, that being back in Eugene.

On the road, I went into shock, my eyesight narrowed to a tunnel, and my breathing went hyper. I remember Sarge telling me from very far away to breathe normally. I also remember hearing the engine of my car wound up tight in overdrive, meaning that Woodley was probably going close to 100 MPH . We were pulled over by a State Policeman somewhere near Vida, perhaps. The cop looked in though the back door of the car, and offered Sarge some sterile bandages, and told Woodley to slow it down some.

Once at the hospital, I was made to answer loads of questions, fill out forms, and got to wait around, laying on a gurney in some hallway. I was still wearing only a bathing suit, and the hospital had very effective air conditioning. Eventually, Sarge found me a blanket while we waited to see a doctor. I also needed to use the rest room, which I was allowed to do, and after using the toilet, I tried to look in the mirror to see what damage I had sustained. Sarge sensed the quiet in the room, and barged in, dragging me away from the mirror before I could make much of an assessment. I seem to remember being taken to radiology for some x-rays, waiting some more, and being asked literally a dozen times how the injuries happened. Either they weren't bothering to read my chart, or they had some suspicion that I had gotten hurt during some criminal activity, perhaps a fight.

Without my glasses, I couldn't tell what time it was, were I was or had been or was going, and couldn't recognize people until they had gotten within a few feet of me, not that I was going to know very many of them there anyway. I was eventually conducted to some room where a doctor looked at the various charts, films, and such, and prepared to suture my lacerations.

They started by throwing a sterile cloth with an opening in it over my face so they could work on my upper lip. Now I couldn't see anything at all. Sarge engaged the doctor in some small talk, and the topic turned to one of the popular news items in that day, malpractice lawsuits. I finally had to tell them both to shut up because I didn't think that I was very interested in the subject, considering my current position. It took 13 stitches to close the skin under my nose.

Part of my head was shaved, and another 17 stitches inserted there. The doctor told me that most patients that were admitted with injuries sustained in the manner I received mine spend the rest of their life in a wheelchair. If they're lucky. The nurse gave me a tetanus shot, and I was suddenly back out on the street in the last rays of a setting sun.

Woodley brought the car, and Sarge and I got into the back seat, sitting up this time. We drove about two blocks before Woodley had to pull the car over to the curb and jumped out to empty the contents of his stomach into the gutter. Apparently, I looked pretty bad.

Back at home, I doubt that I ate anything, as that would require using my mouth, which wasn't in much condition for exercise at the moment. One might assume that the indignities of this day were about over, but that's not quite the case yet. I was still wearing my swimming trunks, and they, along with most of the rest of my body were covered with dried blood and mud from the river bank. A bath was called for, but I was in no shape to conduct one. I ended up in the tub, and Sarge carefully washed my head and shoulders, keeping the soap out of the wounds. After the bath, I tried to look in the mirror to see what I looked like, but again, Sarge was lurking outside the door, and burst in to pull me away from the sink before I could get much of a look.

In the living room of the rental trailer, Kitty had come up to see me, bringing with her one or both of the young women from the office. I felt that I was being put on display, and really didn't want to be the focus of the spectacle. They made sympathetic noises, and then went away.

All I wanted to do was sleep in my own bed, but even that was denied. The doctor was concerned that I might have a concussion, so Sarge insisted that I sleep on the living room couch so he could check on me overnight. I didn't care, I was so weary, battered, and in pain that I just crashed there and gave up for the night.

Years later, Woodley confided to me that when he and Sarge had dragged me out of the water, he thought I was dead.

Not yet.

And that is how I spent my 24th birthday.

 

 

 

30 Years in a Housetruck

Page Seventeen: Recovery

 

So... I spent the next week going around looking like Frankenstein's Monster. I was able to pull a hat over the shaved area of my head, but my facial injuries were right out there for all to see. I got asked a number of times if I had a bicycle accident, apparently, the scrape marks on my chin made it appear that I had gone over the handlebars.

In about a week, Sarge removed the sutures, saving me another visit to the doctor's. From that point on, I let my moustache grow, partly to cover the scars, but also because shaving over the proud flesh with a razor was not a pleasant, or bloodless experience. In fact, I think I shaved my upper lip only once since then, which will be explained in a future posting.

The need for Woodley and me to have our own kitchen was still a pressing issue, so when we had the opportunity, we worked on the counter/cabinet, and I began installing one of the operable windows that I had salvaged out of the old Flamingo trailer factory. Some 2x2 framing was secured between the steel framing of the truck box, and a hole the correct size for the window was cut using a reciprocating saw. Some "putty tape" and drillets, and the window was in! Tres Bien! New light into the back of the truck and new energy for getting the rest of the project underway.

Of course, we were still regarded as servants, although unlucky and accident-prone servants by this time.

At some point, Kitty decided that Woodley and I needed jobs to bring in some money, and I got hauled off to the electronics repair department of Montgomery Wards in town to see if my TV repair experience would land me a paying job. In Oregon, it seems, repair of consumer electronics requires a CET (Certified Electronic Technician) license, which I didn't have. I was actually relieved, and when Kitty pressed me to check into getting the license, I told her that if I needed to study for and take a test to obtain a license, that I'd rather do that to get my First Class Radiotelephone license, which would allow me to work in my field of interest, radio broadcasting. (some years later, I did take classes to that end).

All in all, we were coping, but I think we were both aware that we were living out of touch with what we'd really rather be doing. This would soon change, the next event would be something that would affect me, at least, for the next 28 years or so…

 

 

 

30 Years in a Housetruck

Page Eighteen: Country Faire

 

The next couple of weeks went on as before, we worked in the garden and got recruited for chores around Jeep and Kitty's property.

The acrimony over the use of the facilities at the rental trailer continued, so Woodley and I put additional effort into building a kitchen in my Housetruck. Since my RV refrigerator was functional on electric, we put it in the truck and started keeping snacks, juice and yogurt in it to relieve some of the pressure at the trailer.

If the beginning of June was heavy, the end was sublime. Saturday, the 29th, Sarge and Terri loaded us up into the truck to go out to the country for a festival, held each summer. We didn't know much about it, but were told it was like Eugene's Saturday Market, but held in the woods, and it went on for three days.

What the festival turned out to be was the Oregon Country Fair, known that year as the Oregon Country Renaissance Fair. We paid a modest admission fee, and were thrust into a completely different reality once inside. There were all manner of hairy freaks doing whatever they felt best at doing, playing music, making and eating amazing food, selling handmade crafts, performing juggling and slack rope walking, or just hanging out. Many of the fairgoers were dressed in fanciful costumes, political commentary was displayed openly, lots of beer got drank and the air had a particularly pungent aroma most everywhere you went. There was even a circus! I had found my tribe!

We spent most of the morning and early afternoon completely lost in the maze of footpaths winding among the trees, marveled at acoustic music at Shady Grove, got down loud and hard at the solar powered Main Stage, ate wonderful organic meals, and found ourselves a home at last.

Sarge and Terri had their fill by early afternoon, but Woodley and I wanted to stay a while, so they left without us, leaving us to our own devises to find our way home again.

Some time after that, I was walking along on the Left Bank, looking at crafts when I spotted something that interested me in the rear of a jewelry booth. The crafts displayed were earrings, bracelets, brooches and such, but what I inquired about was a small wood stove that had been imaginatively created from a 6 gallon water heater tank. The jeweler was from Coos Bay (whose name was Bill Gates, no kidding, but not THAT Bill Gates…) said that he did blacksmithing in the winter, and that he had brought the stove along to cook on, but that he might sell it to me. We settled on a price of $70, and I gave him a deposit, with the promise to return tomorrow, the last day of the fair, to pick it up.

Woodley and I made plans to return Sunday with my car to get the stove, but we probably would have come back for another day anyway, being at the Fair was like partying with family after months of feeling like we were restricted to a correctional facility of some sort.

We stuck our thumbs out at the exit gate of the parking lot and picked up a ride in short order, hopping into the back of an eastbound pickup truck for the ride home.

Sunday we went back to Veneta with my car to get in another day's festing and pick up my new stove. While at the fair, we watched Moz Wright swallow swords and breathe fire and saw Avner the Eccentric conduct a collected audience of about a thousand people like an orchestra without ever uttering a word. Artis the Spoonman played his body in a frenetic dance that actually made melodies, and Reverend Chumleigh reigned over the circus at Chumleighland. The Flying Karamatzov Brothers juggled for the masses and performed Vaudeville skits while keeping an amazing array of seemingly unrelated objects in the air. Much good food was offered, and I was somewhat astounded to see a milk goat tethered in Kesey Park. When folks came out to the Fair with the family, they brought everyone along!

At some point Woodley and I bought a bunch of Queen Anne cherries, and got into a spontaneous cherry pit fight, eating the fruit as fast as possible, then using the pits as projectiles by squeezing between thumb and forefinger. About halfway through the battle, we realized that a crowd was gathering around to watch us, assuming that we were part of the scheduled entertainment. The cherries left semi-realistic red splotches when they hit, so it was kind of like a primitive paintball game.

Eventually, the day wore on, and we stopped by the jewelers booth to pick up my stove, carting it out the entrance and to the waiting car.

Back to town and the punishment farm, but with a new insight into what was possible in the way of alternate lifestyles here in our adopted home state.

 

 

 

30 Years in a Housetruck

Page Nineteen: Shut Out

 

Time to see if I can get another episode in this play written. The action is about to take a radical shift, bringing this chapter near to a close.

The date is Tuesday, July 1, 1975. The Country Fair is over, and it's time to settle back into "life as normal". This particular normal afternoon, Woodley and I returned home from a trip to the grocery to find that the electrical power to the Housetruck was off. When I asked Sarge about it, he told me that his dad, Jeep, had turned it off while he was working on a circuit in the office building.

My purchase of the wood stove the previous weekend meant that we now had a means to cook food without the use of the rental trailer's kitchen, and we had bought food with which to prepare meals, hoping to further extract ourselves from the discord over menus and diet. We put the food, which included some fish, into the ever-warming RV refrigerator in the Housetruck, and waited for the power to be restored.

Late in the afternoon, I began to be concerned about the food spoiling, and went down to the office to see if Jeep needed help figuring out his wiring problem. He was never very proficient at electrical jobs, and I frequently had to bail him out after his circuits proved defective. I found him noodling around with something not related to electrical wiring. When I asked about the power to the shop and my truck being turned back on, I got some vague excuses that didn't mesh with what Sarge had told me, and which didn't indicate that there was really an electrical problem to begin with. Jeep then launched into a diatribe about several unrelated subjects, the most distressing to him was the fact that I had done laundry that morning and hung it on a clothes line next to the Housetruck to dry. "What will anyone driving by think if they see your clothes hanging there?" he asked. Several replies came immediately to my mind, including "That I have clean clothes?", but what I said was what I thought he was thinking: "That a bunch of hippies had moved in" I didn't hang around waiting for a response from him, but headed up to the trailer to let Sarge know that things were awry.

At the trailer, Sarge asked me what I had said to Jeep to piss him off. I told him and said that I didn't understand why the power was still off, either. Sarge replied that his dad had just called up to the trailer as I was walking up the hill and said that he told me I was evicted, then both Sarge and Terri began to laugh.

Well, that was it then, the old man had cut the power, then let his son do the dirty work. I told Woodley that I was evicted, and his response was that if I was leaving , so was he. Of course, now that the cat was out of the bag, Jeep locked us out of the toilet and shower room. Sarge and Terri came down and made unconvincing sympathetic noises, like "Oh, you can still use our shower, and the kitchen too", but we all knew that it was over and done with.

I think that night, Woodley and I cooked up the fish on the new wood stove, using a fry pan set into the open top of the stove where the eye had been removed. Made sense to salvage the most perishable of the food goods first. I believe that I also tried to wash my hair in a basin, and had a pretty miserable time of it. We were going to have to find another place to live in short order, because neither of our housetrucks were completed enough to sustain us yet.

 

 

 

30 Years in a Housetruck

Page Twenty: Packing Up

 

The next morning, I went into town to buy some ice and stock up on non-perishable foods. Neither Woodley nor I wanted to use any of the facilities at the rental trailer, and we would need to feed ourselves.

I also wanted to check out some of the bulletin boards around town, particularly those at the natural foods stores to try and find a new living situation.

In downtown Eugene, on West 11th street was an alternative mall called "Scarborough Fair" It was an old warehouse building that had been around for a long time. The cavernous interior had been partitioned into a series of small shops catering to counterculture types, and the natural food grocery there was George Brown's "The Kiva". On the bulletin board in the large common area of the building, I found a small note offering a room in a cooperative household located in an old schoolhouse outside of Creswell, about twenty minutes from Eugene. No telephone was given, just the address, which I copied.

No other interesting housing notices were at any of the other bulletin boards, and a bit of searching at "The Switchboard", Eugene's counterculture information exchange turned up nothing as well.

Back at "home", I told Woodley about the single possibility. He agreed that we should go check it out right away, so we loaded into my car and drove south to Creswell, through the tiny town, and west along Camas Swale Road. Three miles out, and before we realized it, we were passing the address and got a glimpse of the building on the left. Once we were past, and as I was turning the car around a bit farther down the road, we discussed what we had seen only briefly. I thought the place looked pretty rough. The old building had siding missing at the gables where a porch roof once must have been, and the skirting below the floors was a patchwork of old plywood and paneling. Woodley wasn't deterred, and wanted to stop and check it out more closely.

We drove up the short, steep gravel driveway and parked the car. A naked four-year-old came out to greet us, and told us his name was Jonah. He took our hands like we were long-lost uncles and showed us the way into the house through a back door and down long hallway into the kitchen.

Inside, we introduced ourselves to Rosalie, Jonah's mother, and explained that we were interested in the room for rent, with revisions. Rosalie made us tea and we explained our situation, that we wanted to find a place to live, but that we had our trucks to sleep in, so what we really needed was access to kitchen and bath facilities. She told us a little bit about the house, and the roommates, who were gone at the time, but wasn't absolutely sure that they wanted to rent to "bus people", and that what they were really hoping for was a single woman to balance out the yin-yang of the house. We observed that since we lived in our trucks, they could still find that person to live in the vacant room, and our rent contributions would make financial arrangements easier for everyone.

Rosalie told us that she'd have to talk to the other residents of the house and see how they felt about that, and that we should check back in a couple of days and see what the consensus was. As there was no phone at the house, we promised to stop in by the end of the week. I wasn't very hopeful that this was going to work out.

Back at Sarge's, we began loading our trucks with our belongings and tools that were stored in the shop and shed, preparing to move out. I turned my truck around and backed it up to the porch on the shop building, which fit it perfectly, acting as a loading dock, allowing me to use my hand truck to shuttle heavy items across a short ramp and through the open back doors of the van body. Woodley backed his step van in next to my truck and carried boxes and tools out, packing them into the back.

Not too long after we started moving things, Sarge appeared on top of the shed building, pretending to inspect and repair the galvanized steel roofing. It was plain that he had positioned himself to watch our every move. We noticed right away that he was wearing his .45 in a holster on his hip. Woodley asked him why he was armed, and he made some cryptic reply about making sure no thievery was going on. Yet again, we confirmed that we were getting out of this place just in time, even though we weren't sure where we were going.

I found out some time later after talking to TMAX that Fat Frank had found one of my old telephone bills after he moved into my rental house in LA, and extracted Jeep and Kitty's and Sarge and Terri's telephone numbers from the long distance portion of the bill. Pretty much from the beginning of our residency in Oregon, Frank had been making frequent calls to them and filling their heads with lies about how Woodley and I were going to steal everything that wasn't nailed down, and how we had to leave LA because the police were looking for us, etc.

Some gratitude, I give the guy a great little rental house, which is very difficult to find, and donate my couch, stove and refrigerator, and he poisons my new situation in Oregon out of jealousy. Tsk, tiny minds have little better to do...

 

 

 

30 Years in a Housetruck

Page Twenty One: Short Circuit

 

July 3, 1975

Morning, we took my car down into town to buy last minute supplies, check the bulletin boards again, and stop by the University to shower at the Men's Gymnasium. No new housing adverts, so our eggs were still in the Creswell basket for the time being.

Back at Sarge's, we gathered up the last of our belongings and made arrangements to return to pick up my car once we had settled somewhere. Not for the first time, I longed for a method of hauling the car along behind the Housetruck.

Since Jeep had turned off the power, and because his electrical acumen was so miserable, I decided to leave him a little going away present. Before we left the shop completely, I reached up and unscrewed one of the exposed 100 watt light bulbs from the ceiling fixture, placed a penny on the tip of the bulb's base, and screwed the combination back into the socket. Now he had an actual electrical short circuit problem to figure out when he turned the power back on, and I wasn't going to be around to help him find it!

By early afternoon, we had completed our packing, and prepared to drive away. As I passed Jeep and Kitty's house, I honked the horn, and they waved. I waved back. The difference in our salutations was that they were waving with all of their fingers raised.

I don't remember how we arrived at the idea of spending a couple of days at the Oregon Coast, but we pointed our trucks more or less west, and drove for a while, intending on taking back roads to the beach. A few miles west of Loraine, Woodley pulled off the road and talked me into camping there for the night. I wanted to see the ocean, but we didn't have a map, it would be dark soon, and we didn't really have a lot of money to be spending on gasoline. We pulled off the road near a bridge over the Siuslaw River, and set up camp for the night, assembling the wood stove and stove pipe on the ground behind the truck to cook dinner. A Forest Service or BLM ranger stopped to see what we were doing, and was only concerned that we wouldn't be starting an open campfire. I had installed a couple of shelves in the back of the truck, and mounted stereo speakers on them, so opening the back doors of the van body gave us audio entertainment.

I didn't know it at the time, but we were only a mile or so from Siuslaw Falls, which offers some pretty nice unofficial camping and is well off the road. It was probably a good thing we didn't try to go all the way to the coast that day. The road does eventually go there, but it's a lot of back road driving, and steep and twisty as well.

 

 

 

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.

 

 

 

30 Years in a Housetruck

Page Thirty Five: The Juice Bar

 

Jay's interest in making raw juices continued, and apparently he had made an impression with Tony, the owner of Sundance Natural Foods where he worked. Tony owned the small strip mall where the grocery was located in southeast Eugene, and the unit immediately next door to the market was coming vacant soon. Jay pitched him on the idea of opening a "juice bar" where market patrons could order organic carrot, wheatgrass, apple or other juice blends and sit at tables to enjoy them while eating sandwiches and other small snacks.

Jay was casting about for a name for the establishment, and decided to bound it off the Schoolhouse crew. I suggested "Fountian of Jouth", which appealed to him and everyone else, as it gave the impression that fresh, raw juices were healthy and promoted youthful vigor. After consulting with Tony, the name got corrected to "Fountain of Juice", which was only partially disappointing to me, but understandable, as the average consumer isn't nearly as cerebral as me, and the name was likely to go over their heads.

Once the location was found, the name decided upon and all that, it was time to find a construction crew to actually build the juice bar. Woodley, Paul, and I jumped in with the understanding that Jay would be paying us something for our labors. Woodley quickly lined up some lumber and hardwoods to build the actual bar itself, and Paul began getting quotes on cedar lumber to build some eating booths. I was to be the head electrician and plumber on the job.

The day that the lease expired on the retail space beside the store, Tony has some of his more energetic employees removed the previous tennants equipment, so when we three builders came to the store, there were pinball machines all along the exterior walls and in the parking lot. Tony had never been very happy with the tenants, they were late with rent, catered to teenage boys from the nearby high school, who were a behavior problem, and the noise of the pinball machines came though the walls and drove everyone who worked in the store nuts. That the tenants hadn't paid their rent in a month or two, and their failure to negotiate a new contract, made eviction on the spot attractive to Tony.

Woodley and Paul and I sized up the space, made drawings with accurate measurements, scouted the walls to determine where the pass-through area to the store would be cut, and prepared for the job. Since we were trying to sp[end as little of Jay's money as possible, we reused as much of the existing facilities as possible. At one time, this had been a barber shop, and the far wall was already plumbed for three sinks. Health regulation required a large restaurant-style stainless steel sink, and a separate hand-washing sink. The existing plumbing meant that we didn't have to apply for a plumbing permit to install the new fixtures.

In order to make the lighting in the storefront more pleasing, new wiring was needed, but we didn't want to apply for a permit for that, either. One weekend, I put up all the new wiring required to put hanging fixtures over the bar and each booth, and before the end of Sunday, got back up on the ladder, and painted all of the conduit and junction boxes to match the ceiling. When asked by the inspector, we told him that we were going to reuse all that "existing" wiring that the previous tenants left behind. It worked.

Since I was spending so much time in the city working on the juice bar, I decided to move my Housetruck into town and stay there until the job was finished. It just made sense to use my portable house to save having to drive back and forth every day. For a while I parked on side streets around the neighborhood, but since my truck was large, it kind of stuck out like a sore thumb. I can remember waking up one morning and opening the living room drapes just as a school bus doing it's morning rounds drove by. The driver looked startled and not at all happy. After breakfast, I drove the truck to the job and parked it in the side of the lot. Woodley come in shortly afterwards and said that there were cops driving around the neighborhood, as they had received a complaint from someone about vagrants on the street. Hmmm.

It was time to arrange for more permanent parking from the truck. I tried to back into the rear yard of the house Jay was renting (by now he was spending a lot of time in town too), but quickly lost traction and sank almost to the axle. Attempting to use a jack to raise the truck resulted in several chunks of 2x4 lumber and a partial sheet of plywood disappearing into the muddy ground. Once I got the truck back on solid ground, I tried pulling into the same area frontward, with the same results, my front bumper was nearly touching the ground. Woodley brought his step van and using a stout chain, we pulled the truck out backwards. Woodley didn't stop once I was back on the dry ground and continued pulling. I ended up scraping the roof eaves of the neighbor's house, putting a big scrape in the sheet metal of the van body on my truck.

After that, I simply left the Housetruck parked in the lot of the health food store. Tony didn't mind, and although it made it a bit tight for customers to pull in and out of the parking spaces in front fo the store, only one old guy in a VW microbus backed into the trcuk, doing no damage.

While nobody around the store cared about the truck being parked there, the city code comliance officer was beside himself with fear. Every day, he would stop by the storefront and read us the riot act about not allowing a vehicle to be used for habitation. Every time he showed up, no matter who he happend to be complaining at, he got the same reply: the Housetruck wasn't a dwelling, it was a job shack, it was where we stored our tools and materials after hours. This went on for a week or more, and finally, he told us to please put cardboard in the "job shack" windows so that the uptight neighbors couldn't see any light from inside and so he wouldn't get any more complaints. We told him "sure thing", but never did anything of the sort. I guess the neighbors must have gotten over it at some point and so did he.

 

 

 

30 Years in a Housetruck

Page Thirty Six: Karma Yoga

 

The Juice Bar project was nearing completion. Woodley had pretty much finished the solid walnut and redwood bar, Paul was putting the finishing touches on the cedar seating booths, and I had shifted over to installing a wainscoting in the bathroom to comply with sanitation requirements.

Jay called us all to a meeting, where he announced that due to the unexpectedly high cost of fixtures, appliances, furnishings and such, he had no money with which to pay us for the labor that we had put in on the project. While this wasn't really what we wanted to hear, we decided that we would complete the building of the business as an act of Karma Yoga, which was to say that in deference to payment with currency, we would trust that our efforts would be repaid in another manner. Besides, we weren't just going to bail out on Jay, and all of us wanted to see the Juice Bar open.

Not more than two or three days later, Paul and I were sitting in the nearly completed space having a lunch break when a hip-looking guy came in. We tried to shoo him out, telling him that we weren't open yet, but he said that he had noticed the Housetruck parked in front, and thought that this would be a good place to find some workers for a project that he needed help with. We told him that we were already busy with this job that didn't pay, and so didn't really have time for anything else. His response was to say that "This job pays $4.00 an hour". Paul and I simultaneously replied "We'll take it, what do we have to do?"

The job, it turned out, was to do finish-up work on a house that his mother had purchased and remodeled in the posh Hendricks Park area of town. The regular carpenters and tradesmen had finished the heavy work and moved along to the next project on their schedules, leaving small projects such as painting trim uncompleted. This fellow's mother wanted a couple of reliable and skilled workers to complete the jobs, help hang artwork on the walls, do minor carpentry, etc.

Paul and I got the directions to the house and met the guy there. We were introduced to JoAnne, his mother, and showed the first bit of work, which was to refinish the redwood framing in the floor of the sun room in the house. We scheduled a day and time to be there, and went back to the Juice Bar to complete our tasks and get it ready to open.

The day we showed up to begin the floor, we were introduced to Grandma Zim, JoAnne's mother, who also lived in the house. Paul and I worked part time for a few days sanding and preparing the floor for a finishing coat of varnish. The sun room adjoined the kitchen, and when we began varnishing, we worked from the far corner, painting the varnish on with brushes until we passed the sliding glass door to the kitchen. We put large masking tape "X"s on the glass of the door, to remind Grandma to not enter the sun room, then painted past the door and out another door that led into the storage room, which had an outside door. Just to be sure, we locked the door between the sun room and the shop behind us.

As we were cleaning up our brushes, we could hear Grandma in the kitchen walk over to the glass door and slide it open. We both held our breath, but we had instructed her to not enter the room due to the wet paint. Just as we began to relax, we heard Shana, the family's Keishound dog running through the kitchen, and Grandma Zim shouting NO! NO! Of course, the dog ran past her, though the open door and onto the freshly painted floor. All we could do was listen though the locked shop door. Shana realized that something was wrong, slammed on the brakes, slid to a fast stop with claws digging in, and ripped back into the kitchen with varnish-covered paws.

Paul and I got paid twice for doing that particular job.

Here's a photo of the sun room after the second application of varnish had dried and the furniture moved back in. The white flooring is painted concrete, with redwood 4x4 inset framing.

Projects on this house were many, and we continued to make ourselves useful several times every week. The Juice Bar was soon finished and opened for business. We had trusted that helping Jay open the Bar would lead us to some manner of reward, and the great Karmic wheel had turned in our favor, and more quickly that either of us had imagined possible.

 

 

 

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.

 

 

 

30 Years in a Housetruck

Page Thirty Eight: Rent Revolt

 

It didn't take much longer to get something done about the driveway. I had spent enough time in Eugene, living on the street so that I could build the Juice Bar, I had rationalized staying there so that I could be close to school and drive the truck to classes, I had even stayed at the end of the road nearby until I could get the truck back up the driveway, but something needed to be done. Mostly, everyone at the house had been parking alongside the neighbor's driveway, and although the old folks were pretty casual about allowing us to do so, we wanted to be able to park in our own yard again.

Here's what it looked like towards the end of our patience. Note the tracks on the right side, where we attempted to skirt the worst of the ruts. Also note that aside from the old 5-window Chevy pickup, which didn't run, there are no other vehicles in front of the house, they're all parked over at the Napper's place...

The very next month, Brian, the landlord came to collect the rent. Since I usually completed the transaction, I told him to forget it, until the driveway was repaired, no rent money from us. Of course, this made him mad, then he tried pleading, switched to threatening, and eventually gave in and promised to get it fixed. After a whole winter of pestering him, we finally would get it repaired!.

In the end, all we ended up getting was a dump truck load of gravel, dumped in a pile at the bottom that we had to spread out ourselves by hand, but it did make the driveway usable again, although the ruts were still awful on the suspension.

During the winter and early spring, Woodley had been telling us about this girl he had met at the University. I think most of us just rolled our eyes and gave him a knowing "uh-huh", as Woodley had proven himself popular with the ladies. He kept insisting that this one was different. They had met in his art painting class, and they had decided to take a ski class together. He referred to Julie as his "Snow Bunny". Uh-huh.

At some point in the spring, he announced that Julie was coming to visit at the schoolhouse, so we probably swept out the living room and maybe collected some of the wine bottles that seemed to always accumulate in the corners of the kitchen. When the Big Day came, they arrived in Julie's Dad's car, a 1976 Mercedes 450SL convertible. I'm sure that they had the top down.

Julie seemed bright and pleasant, if a bit young, and I couldn't help but wonder what all she was thinking about the surroundings and people she was meeting, but since she knew of and apparently approved of Woodley's step van, I guess we passed the test, as she visited often enough afterwards.

Since moving to the Schoolhouse some months before, I hadn't seen much of Sarge. In fact, the one time I went to visit him, he was rather rude and somewhat threatening, so I had stayed away. He did contact me eventually and asked if I was interested in buying the old Forney "buzz-box" welder that I had brought up to Oregon for him. Since I had now become experienced in stick welding, I agreed, and paid him $75 for the old AC welder, which came with heavy cables, a carbon-arc heating electrode setup, and some other small accessories. My intent was to perhaps start taking in some welding projects for pay.

Another electrical device that I purchased was a small, battery-powered Alpha brain wave biofeedback monitor. I had been interested in biofeedback for a number of years, and this device was being offered by a student at the university. It was a very basic monitor, but it did work, and I spent some time training myself to maintain an alpha brain wave pattern during meditation. It was also sensitive to the electrical signals of a beating heart, if the electrodes were placed on your chest, the device would sound out the pattern of heartbeats.

In the early 1970's, biofeedback was touted to be "a step beyond drugs", but I found it mostly useful for grabbing a little bit of inner peace that could be switched on and off without keeping you up all night.