Summertime
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:
July 27th, 1975
It really looks like moving here was the right thing to do. Woodley and I don't feel guilty when we use the shower or toilet, and most of all, everyone here is like a family to each other and to us.
There's four men including us, and three women and Jonah, who's four years old. Rent runs about $20 a month and we all chip in $5 for household expenses. It's great.
Today I hooked up the washing machine that someone gave us. Yay! No more trips to the laundromat. I spent the rest of the day sanding and painting the cab on my Housetruck. It's now bright white instead of rust and crust.
On July 8th, Woodley and I and four others in the house piled into Woodley's housetruck and went to the Cougar Reservoir Hot Springs. It's about a half mile hike from the parking lot to the springs, but it's worth it. There are six pools on the side of a hill near the bottom of a small ravine. The first pool from the top is about 113 degrees, a real cooker. The second pool down is cooler, and so on down the hill. There's also a fire hose that someone brought in which siphons cold water from a nearby spring. It's really refreshing to hop out of the third pool, squirt yourself down with the cold water and then hop into the next hotter pool.
On the second day we were there, I went down to the lake and joined three other people in paddling a huge raft, made of logs lashed together, out to the water fall. Soon swimmers joined us and Woodley paddled out on his surfboard. More people swam to us and boarded. When we paddled back to shore, there were twelve of us. About fifteen more people were sitting on the bank of the lake, playing music and singing. Needless to say, the trip was quite enjoyable.
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...
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