Twenty Acres or a New Car?

May 31st, 1982, was a day like any other day, except for the fact that Gluten-Free Mama and I pulled up stakes from San Jose, and moved five hours north to a ridge-top in Mendocino County. We loaded up Old Paint, our olive drab, 1962 Double Slug, crammed the rest of our belongings into de Lova Machine, our Chevy Nova, and headed out.

I took two of our cats, Carrie and Manny-Cat, in the bus, and GF Mama took our other feline Sarah in de Lova Machine, and we caravanned on up. Sarah was my favorite, a petite gray and white kitty, who strolled into United Auto Story Road one fine day, and ended up coming home with me.

I had awfully high aspirations for such a short ladder...

Not an adventurous person by nature, our relocation was not only uncharacteristic, it was off-the-charts for me. We were expecting the arrival of a little Sod-Buster in September, and we were moving into a 16-by-20 cabin with no windows, no running water, no power, no heat and no bathroom. We had a Coleman lantern and a flashlight for lighting. And we had candles.

As is frequently the case, June presented us with fog, drizzle and cold. It was a discouraging start to our long-awaited adventure because I had no frame of reference. How DID one go about heating a cabin? I was a grocery man-turned-soldier, not a pioneer.

With the help of a couple of my brothers and a neighbor, the cabin had been erected in three days’ time the previous summer. I was learning carpentry on the fly, having labored with the boys, on a spec house in BrookTrails that same summer. This was my first experience with a cat’s paw, a Skil-Saw, or a miter-box, and all of the rest of the tools of destruction. Sorry, I mean construction. 

Brothers Tom and Matt, summer of 1981

I was used to stocking shelves and working the check-stand, and filing orders for troops about to board a red-tail for home, not problem-solving. We had no electricity, we had no propane and we had no wood stove. A Coleman lantern will warm your hands, but it will not warm a cabin.

What’s missing from the tale is the fact that there was already a support system in place up here on the ridge, several family members having previously made the move. One of the first days we were there, I was taken under wing by Bro Matchu, and led around the ‘hood, first stopping up at the barn to get an ancient cast-iron wood stove, brought from SoCal but currently not in use. 

We then traipsed across The Bell and up to neighbor Rex’s spot, where we scored some gnarly six-inch stove pipe, starting to rust and long-since set aside, but still more than serviceable in a pinch. The boys had fortuitously installed the chimney pipe assembly in the roof and through the loft, so all we had to do was install the pipes, and we were good to go. 

The windows had to wait a year before they got installed.

Though the wood stove was ancient and minuscule, it was more than sufficient to get that little one-room cabin warm and cozy. We were also in the midst of a gold mine, when it came to downed, dry manzanita, a fuel that burns clean and hot, so we were able to easily correct the dismal setting. I also had the windows ready to install in the currently boarded-over openings, so as soon as I got one in place, our cave began to come alive. 

The windows were recycled wood-sash, old and drafty, and a poor choice, but we had gotten them for next-to-nothing at a salvage yard in San Jose, and they were what we had. It would have been smarter to simply get dual-paned, aluminum windows from the building yard, but we did not have that kind of loot. 

Between the two of us, we had about fifteen hundred bones to build the cabin in the first place, so there was not much leeway when it came to basics. Drafty windows in-hand were better than airtight windows down at the building supply place.

I find it helps to keep the context of the times on the front burner: We’re talking about a period when land was available for four hundred dollars an acre. I wrote the words out on that figure, to make sure that no one got confused with a pesky decimal point. My friends at United Auto were buying new cars for the same eight thousand dollars, that I was buying twenty acres of land.

We home-schooled the boys until local politics dismantled our little educational collective, and then we sent them down to the local school district in the ‘Ville. I had taken on a role with the two-room schoolhouse, acting as a liaison between it and the school district, and I had had to acquire a California Teaching Credential to do so. It was a natural step for me to apply for a vacant middle school position in town the following September.

I’d be in the classroom still if it weren’t for standardized testing, bless its pointy little head, but then if I were still teaching, I wouldn’t be planting somewhere in the neighborhood of 120 tomato plants in the next week, so there’s that.

I love being a farmer as much as I loved teaching, maybe more. After all, tomato plants can’t write spelling essays that need to be graded, and they’re not asked to pass any test, except the taste test.

You leave that up to me-that’s one test I am happy to administer. Would you prefer the regular, or the chipotle-flavored tomato catsup that I put up last fall? Or possibly some marinara sauce, chunky salsa, or smooth hot sauce? Got it. Pizza sauce it is. 

Pizza is as good a way as any to celebrate thirty-six years on the mountain.