This morning Ghost and LB discovered that a big pack rat – that they had previously shared the yard with fairly harmoniously – had built a big nest right in their favorite spot under the Secret Lair. Conflict ensued. I have evidence that the rat survived. In fact I have evidence that it’s the very rat which has lived under a pile of pallets not far from the cabin for quite some time, without ever stirring up any reaction from the dogs at all. But now there’s war against the rat under the pallets. It may take time, but the rat will lose. And it has certainly lost its palatial nest under the cabin. That’s a pile of sticks in the burn barrel now.
Laugh if you will, but the incident got me to thinking about something rather sad and stupid that happened not far from the Lair, several years ago.
There are a lot of stories in the naked desert. Here’s one of them.
I never met the guy who built these, he left shortly before I moved in. But I heard the story. The fellow seems to have had the same idea I did, but with more resources and construction ability. He made some choices I wouldn’t have made, but I see where he was going.
The building on the left is a greenhouse. Given all the raised bed planters he painstakingly built, he was clearly interested in growing plants. There’s nothing but weeds here now.
The other building is a very tiny cabin. In fact it’s mostly porch, oriented so the building blocks the worst of the prevailing wind. The fellow clearly didn’t plan to spend a lot of time indoors. The cabin itself has a sleeping loft and room for a kitchen, and that’s about it. Indoors, I believe it’s less than 100 square feet. I suspect he put a composting toilet in the greenhouse; there’s no running water in the cabin and no outhouse. No electricity, either, though it’s plumbed for propane and the property does have a well.
Say what you will about his peculiar choices, the fellow had style. Built fairly well, too. This has gone maybe eight years with no maintenance at all.
Before he built the greenhouse, with its wide, oddly high porch slab, he dug a big hole and walled in a storage basement. I’d be afraid to go down there now without very good reason.
Yeah, this guy had plans. Dreams. And he worked hard on them. And they all came to nothing in a day. For reasons I don’t know, he didn’t pull any permits for the construction. That hardly makes him unique around here, but he didn’t get away with it. One day, so the story goes, an inspector came by and red-tagged the buildings and that was that. He just sold out and moved away.
I never met him. But I have no trouble identifying the biggest mistake he made, one he really should have seen coming immediately…
Yep, that’s them. Right next to one of the busiest roads in this little corner of the desert. Right on the way, in fact, to a bunch of more-conventional houses under construction, which meant the county inspectors used to pass by here all the frickin’ time. Couldn’t possibly have missed it. Before they started to fade in the sun, those neat little cabins kinda caught the eye.
When Mssr. Pack Rat lived under that pile of pallets, the dogs didn’t care. He wasn’t using anything that interested them; once in a while they’d saunter by and pee on a pallet, but the rat was welcome to stay or go.
I don’t know why it did what it did. Maybe it was getting hot, and the cabin’s deep shadow might have seemed attractive. But the dogs own that. They use it. They really murderously don’t want to share it. And so, very suddenly, a rat they previously hadn’t cared about at all started to look like food.
The moral of the story, of course, is that if you’re going to live your dream without massa’s permission, have the foresight not to rub his nose in it.
sometimes rats have teeth
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Albert_Dryden
Yeah, I truly sympathize, but it does seem one needs to pick their battles a bit more carefully. If you rub their noses in it long enough… they WILL eventually kill you. Owning property doesn’t mean diddly squat without their permission.
Carl Drega (January 19, 1935 – August 19, 1997) was a man from Bow, New Hampshire, who killed two state troopers, a judge and a newspaper editor and wounded three other law enforcement officers before being shot to death in a firefight with police. His story is chronicled in the book The Ballad of Carl Drega by Vin Suprynowicz.
Drega had a long history of conflict with government officials over code enforcement issues, starting in the 1970s over whether he could use tarpaper to side his vacation house in Columbia, New Hampshire. He claimed that in 1981, 80 feet (24 m) of the riverbank along his property collapsed during a rainstorm. Drega decided to dump and pack enough dirt to repair the erosion damage, saying this would restore his lot along the Connecticut River to its original size. State officials, on the other hand, contested that Drega was trying to change the course of the river.
“He just sold out and moved away.”
If he sold out to someone, darn shame you can’t offer to demo the place for them and salvage tons and tons of valuable building materials. You never know when you might like to have a guest cabin or a carport or a goat shed……
I did meet the person who bought the parcel from the guy who built the cabins. Once, briefly. The parcel itself is crap; turns to gloopy, foul-smelling, bug-spawning mud at the drop of any water. Not even junipers grow well there. The current owner took away the trailer he’d parked there, and now the whole thing just bakes in the sun alone. There’s a for-sale sign, but no new fools.
“There’s a for-sale sign, but no new fools.”
Sounds like about $10 might take the parcel.
Obviously not the first cedar rat to abandon the place for one reason or another. Joel, what’s the story on the stone ruin in the first picture? I’d be tempted to rebuild that & live in it – gawd, what beautiful country.
Sooooooo………If the revenuers red flagged the cabins the guy built without the imperial seal of you did it our way and paid us……. how comes they haven’t made anyone demo the cabins? That’s usually how things work. Or did they just condemn them for occupancy?
LJH, you’re looking at an authentic Basque sheepherder’s hut, circa late 19th/early 20th century. Remember those old westerns about sheep vs. cattle? This was one of those places. I know where there’s a couple of those old huts. I know where there’s an Anasazi fixer-upper, too. Used to be practically paved with potshards until S&L’s grandkids picked it clean. There’s a lot of history out here.
Buck, no permit is needed for agricultural buildings, so the most they could do is forbid occupancy. I never understood why the guy didn’t just move an RV in. It couldn’t be less comfortable to sleep in than that cabin would have been.
Awesomeness! Thanks for the reply, Joel.
I’d better add to my earlier comment.
the character who’s wiki entry I linked to, had a particularly eccentric reputation – in the 1970s he was launching home made rockets, which would come down several miles from where he launched them,
he was banned from the machine shop of the steel plant he worked in – after 4″ diameter bullet holes began appearing in road signs around that area.
I knew of the guy, I don’t think I ever met him – or the man he killed.
Years ago, I was friends (platonic!) with one of the dog’s nieces, and had met at least 3 of his brothers, I was also friends with a farmer (who sadly died a good few years back) who used to have some land near to that rat nest.
I’m not sure what alerted the dog
he had a reputation as an officious little b’stard, who once he got his teeth in, kept hold and kept shaking
the house was screened from the road by an earth bund – perhaps inviting the nosey and the officious to have a look over to see what was being hid – especially as the gateway had an ostentatious brick arch built over it.
far better to use plain sight stealth, or as Joel says, sleep in an RV or a trailer.
There was also at least one neighbour in the district, who appeared to take great delight in snitchin to authoriteh – he’d grassed my farmer friend and several other neighbours up for having weeds (prickly ones – not spliff) growing in his fields, and made a nuisance of himself until the bureautwats acted.
Friend said there were several other examples of the gratuitous snitchin.
There was the recipe for a double tragedy:
a dog that wouldn’t let go,
an eccentric rat that was particularly ill equipped to tolerate the harrassment
perhaps also a snitchin neighbour stirring
TV cameras invited allong, in the hope of recording the dog pulling the rat’s nest out – they ended up recording something else. the later coup[ de gras went un filmed, but left an indelible record in the dog’s skull, confirming it as a murder rather than a tragic accident where it could be claimed “it just went off!”
a family lost a father
in Britain, with sufficeint crocodile tears, most murderers are out in about 14 to 16 years
That rat spent about the first 16 years saying that the dog deserved it and he’d do it again tomorrow, so, rat is still caged (about 22 years now), and is probably by now, incapable of life outside. when a state is involved, honesty doesn’t pay.
although never reported on the media, I gather that there were public protests at the time in favour of the rat.
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