Excerpt

Okay, I don’t promise to do this a lot. But today I feel like it.

Many Hands

Not everybody who moves out here has hermitage in mind. Some think in terms of community. And some who maybe hadn’t thought in those terms found that that was the way it went anyway.

It started with a guy we’ll just call T. T was in the original group of friends who invited me to stay here in the first place. He wasn’t in good health, and he wasn’t a particularly gifted builder, but he sure had a lot of energy. And he was plugged into various networks, and he wasn’t afraid to ask for things.

Far away, in a high-dollar suburb of a city about five hours drive away, somebody that none of us knew – somebody rich – bought some property set up for raising fancy horses. On that property was a nearly-new prefab barn, expensive stuff. I don’t know the story or care, but the rich folks decided they didn’t want that barn there. They went looking for a suitable contractor to tear it down and haul it off.

This barn was nearly new. And it was prefab, which meant it could be taken down in pieces and set right back up. It might have been worthless to the rich folks, but it was a prize beyond price to others. People like us, for example.

Word circulated. The man hired to do the demolition needed a bigger crew than he had for the job, and it hurt his thrifty heart to destroy this barn if it could be salvaged. So he called a friend, who called a friend, who knew about this gang of weirdos in the high desert who might be willing to trade a weekend’s work for a five-figure prefab barn. T got that last call, and mobilized his troops.

Oh, yeah. I was there. Oy, what a weekend. We drove down to the city in the height of the summer heat. We worked like crazy people, and by the end of the second day we had removed every vestige of that barn. But rather than tear it down, we dismantled it bolt-by-bolt and neatly (and tightly) packed it into a big rental truck. And yours truly drove that truck back to the high desert.

Now, up to that point we had a gang to work with. The contractor and his crew were there, and so was Ian and Landlady. But once we got back home it was T and me. Neither of us had ever worked as stand-ins for Schwarzenegger, and even though it was just a matter of bolting things together there was no way we were going to build that barn ourselves. We needed a crew. We didn’t have one.

T decided that this situation called for an old-fashioned community barn-raising. I told him he was nuts. Other people told him he was nuts. He went ahead and organized it anyway.

See, T hadn’t been idle before this. He was a social kinda guy, and if you lived in the vicinity you pretty much had to beg him to leave you alone if that was what you wanted. He was always showing up to talk, or to pitch in and lend a hand (whether you’d asked him to or not) or whatever. So by the time the barn arrived, some assembly required, he already knew everybody – and everybody who hadn’t physically driven him off owed him a favor or two.

And let it be said not everybody thought this was such a terrible idea. Everybody around had building projects going on. Why not get just a little organized?

And thus came the first community build. I don’t have pictures of it, but here’s the result:

Not bad, huh?
And then a few months later, T dropped dead in it.

Well, that was a bummer.

See, he was kind of the leader of our merry little band. Everybody knew he was sick. Everybody knew how sick he was. It shouldn’t have come as such a shock, I suppose, because it really wasn’t that much of a surprise. But it dropped us all on our asses.

Landlady most of all, of course. She was married to him.

It only gradually became clear to me, as the sole person now living there full-time, that we weren’t the only people T’s death affected. The neighbors really liked T. More than that, a quorum of them liked the effect he was having on the neighborhood.

They didn’t want it to stop.

And as a sort of symbol of that, they decided that it would be a bad thing if Landlady sold out and left.

So they formed a sort of conspiracy. And one day somebody invited me to join it.

See, building the barn took a lot of resources that had been budgeted for T and Landlady’s house, which remained unbuilt. All there was of it was some engineering drawings and the floor slab. And that was all there was likely to be for a long time, possibly forever. The neighborhood, represented by D&L, wanted to see that house built. So they deputized me to tell her that when she decided the time was right, all she needed do was supply the materials and a sheathed frame would appear there in accordance with the drawings.

I don’t know if that influenced her in any way. She never indicated to me that she planned to give up on building the meadow house. But she took them up on their offer.

And people showed up, and a sheathed frame appeared.

And that wasn’t the only time, by a long shot.

The frame of the Secret Lair was a community project.

The massive concrete slab for Ian’s Cave was a helluva community project.

A couple of times when our neighbors D&L fell behind schedule on their post & beam, strawbale & earthbag extravaganza, they put out a call to the neighborhood to help them catch up. That was fun.

There were others as well. A lot of building got done a lot quicker than it would have otherwise, because we made a neighborhood game of getting the structures up quick. Finishing the insides, of course, was generally an individual thing.

And by the time the flurry of building started to wind down, we had a bunch of people on a first-name basis though some of them lived miles away. And now when the phone rings with somebody needing help, whether it’s for a routine job or an emergency, somebody’s likely to jump in a truck and go help. All because of T, who didn’t live to see it.