03/07/02 :

Well, I went and did it. It was bound to happen, what with moving all those rocks around and living in close quarters with Eileen. I got hurt.

I guess it was about a week ago. I was taking my noon nap. About 3/4 of the way through, I half awoke, as I usually do, to unhook the tent flap and stumble out into the bright sunlight towards my usual bush. SLAM!! Shit! Damn that hurt. I still wasn't fully awake, as I don't like to be when I'm about to go back into the tent and get my remaining 15 minutes or so. I stood there doing what I usually do but my right big toe wouldn't quit hurting - and it was hurting. When I looked that way, I noticed a dark red pool forming in the sandy soil beneath it. This wasn't good; I wanted to go back to sleep, but it was beginning to appear as though I would not be able to do so. I found this very annoying. When I was done doing what I was doing, I heel walked back to the tent, sat on the bed and wrapped a paper towel around the toe. It was now hurting like hell and the towel was turning red.

I went out to the van where Eileen was resting and got in. It was cold in there. Eileen had all the windows open. I asked her to close them as she began to notice that something wasn't right about my being there in my underclothes. Then she saw the red towel and the expression on my face. She later said that she had never seen me in such absolute pain. She closed the windows while I located the emergency kit and wrapped two Band-Aids around it. I didn't even clean it. The thought of putting anything on it or having to even look at it was out of the question. I then mentioned that what I really needed to do was go back to sleep so she suggested that I do so right there. She went and got my quilt and pillow which I curled up into, which felt really good even though I had my foot sticking out into the cold air. But the pain wouldn't stop. She had also gotten the Advil so I took two of those and tried to fall asleep but didn't really. After awhile the pain was a little less.

I gradually decided that what I really needed to do was get up, get dressed, go have my hot coffee and get back to work - or whatever. Sitting around or lying around feeling pain is no fun; I might as well do something else. I asked her to get my old painting sneakers, a pair of clean socks and the scissors, which she did. The scissors cut the toe off of one sock very nicely but they wouldn't even scratch the rubber toe of that sneaker. My pocket knife went in a little but was almost impossible. (I should start wearing those to bed.) I found a single-edged razor blade in the drawer beneath the passenger's seat. It did the job but with effort. I very gingerly put on the clothes Eileen had brought me, and then the left shoe - and then very carefully very slowly the toeless right sneaker. It worked. I cautiously got out of the van and hobbled slowly back towards the tent to get my coffee, making sure my right foot didn't go anywhere near anything bigger then a small pebble.

That roughly tortoise shaped rock in my patio is now gone. It has been replaced by a truly flat one. I swabbed the toe liberally with peroxide the next day. A few days later, after a shower, I looked at it. The skin had torn in various directions and the nail had snapped laterally. It has been healing very nicely and I have been back in normal shoes for a couple of days now. However, when I come out during my nap, I wake up just enough to choose my path carefully.

The day after toeday was Saturday and at 5:00 we drove down the way around the corner to Eileen's going away party at Bill's. She would be leaving in a week and Ron and Bill wanted to give her a proper party. Bill has a couple of interesting cozy cabins on the property adjacent to his own. He bought this place from his neighbor Fred a few years ago when Fred decided to quit fighting the building inspector and get the hell out. The cabins are in something of a hollow with a bunch of pine, beach and other trees around them. In the center of that setting is a stone fire well two feet high with a grate on top and an old redwood picnic table next to it. Bill had some big logs in there building up a nice comfortable fire. Ron had brought along some long links of sausage, one link chain hot; the other mild, various other condiments and beer. We had brought chips, dips and beer. Bill supplied salad and beans and beer. After awhile Lauren, their older son Erick and her mother Elaine arrived.

It was a fun, relaxed and laid back evening with good food, good beer and casual wayward talk of no consequence, by a hot roaring fire and under a clear brilliant starlit sky. I think Eileen will remember that evening with a warm spot in her heart for years to come.

Eileen and Missy will be flying out of LAX on Saturday, the ninth, the day after tomorrow. Mo and I will follow in the van in May. I hope to have the trailer done by then.

I have begun work in earnest on the trailer. Thus far I have basically glued the pieces of the rounded roof plywood border back together and saturated it with varnish, thinned 50/50 with mineral spirits. The wood had become very dry and fragmented along what was left of the top grain and soft and warped underneath. It soaked up the varnish like a sponge just as it used to drink in the occasional rain. Now it is solid and relatively impervious.

Had I stepped on it prior to the treatment, my foot would certainly have caved through. Now it might hold, but I won't test it. After I fill the holes and slots with wood filler and varnish that, it will be even stronger. After I blow foam up into the roof cavities from below, it will be solid enough to dance on. The exterior sides will get the same treatment. I have also scraped the flat tin roof. There are two holes rusted through and foam will be blown into these, then silver Rustoleum on all the metal including the two roof vents that I will first recondition or replace.

A mini roof will be added to the rear to replace the rotted one that was poorly designed (by me) 34 years ago and didn't make it. The floor immediately below that will be replaced. All windows will be rebuilt or replaced depending on the cost. The door will be rebuilt and a dead-bolt added. Expanding foam will also be gurgitated into the 4 canvas and lath exterior rounded corners. All this will be lightly sanded.

The trailer will then be moved over the new rock driveway to its new site. There it will be painted white to reflect the sun and beige to match the rocks. Then I will go to work on the interior.

That's about it for now. Keep in mind that I occasionally add picture-only stories to the same Joshua Tree Journal web site without telling anybody, so check in there once in awhile and let me know what you think.

March 09, 2002 6:16 PM
Van, we've been following your adventures with much admiration and have enjoyed them a great deal. Rick says to tell you he's thoroughly enjoying them also. Your epics are too long to read on the screen (with my bifocals, my neck has a permanent crook if I try to read it all), so I print it out. Makes wonderful bathroom reading, the only time we really have to enjoy it. Some of it goes hand-in-hand with your writings.

Rick & I spent Christmas/New Years 2000/2001 in Myrtle Beach SC. While there, we visited Charleston and the resurrected Henley, the submarine that sunk the Hoosatonic during the Civil War. Your water tank sure looks a whole lot like the Henley, that held 9 men (barely). Not only was the Henley there, suspended in a large water tank prior to opening, but a mock-up of what the sub looked like inside. I found myself gulping for air as I looked into that tiny interior. As a water tank, it's fine. As a sub that holds 9 men--gulp, gulp!
Be sure and get that book going! Ginny & Rick

March 10, 2002 6:13 AM
Hi Van, I just read your email this morning and was surprised to read Eileen is home now (I assume flights went well and she had no problems).You and Mo must be lonely and I would guess Eileen is as well. Sue

March 10, 2002 9:06 PM
Apparently her flight did not go real well but when I called I caught her coming in the door. She was extremely pleased to be there.

March 10, 2002 9:06 PM
Hannah, I left her at LAX yesterday morning, talked to her this morning as she walked in the door with Missy exhausted but safe and sound and delighted to be home. Van

March 11, 2002 7:24 AM
Glad to hear all is well, even the toe. Good luck with the trailer dad, and Eileen and Missy- I hope you have a nice flight home to civilization :-). Bri

March 13, 2002 6:49 PM
Hi Van, I guess Eileen and Missy are back in civilization. I do not think I could have lasted as long as her, but an interesting excursion. Sorry to here about your toe mishap. Your determined-good luck! Ann

03/17/02, 8:28 pm:

This date is almost never correct. The time is now, or was, but this is actually the 16th. I'm guessing that it may go out by tomorrow night, so that's the date I entered. However, since I have begun holding off, of late, until I have the web version ready with pictures, this may not go out until the 18th or 19th. Come to think of it, you probably didn't want to know all that.

We headed out for LAX at 6:00 a.m. last Saturday to allow plenty of time for her noon departure. I left her there on the terminal sidewalk at 9:00 a.m. The cop was staring at us and tapping her pencil on her ticket pad as we tried to kiss and hug and say goodbye. I later recalled that it was a well worn pad, meaning the cop never uses it for anything except to frighten people away. We had circled the airport a number of times before we finally found the airline. ATA. Ever hear of it? Neither had we, but the price was right: $210 for Eileen and $75 for Missy the old mangy cat. Anyhow, it was a single desk check-in and the woman behind that desk told me Eileen couldn't check in until 9:30. Really? After all the dire warnings about "GET THERE EARLY!"?? We had decided that I would not wait with her due to the cost of parking and because Mo was in the van.

Mo and I arrived back at our camp at 11:30. The driving in and out had been a breeze, about 70 mph (the posted speed limit) almost all the way, though nobody around here believes me when I tell them that. LA has a very poor reputation.

Lightfoot was here to welcome us. Eileen had left a tee-shirt with her scent in a prominent place so the dogs wouldn't miss her. I don't know if they paid any attention to it since her scent is really all over the place anyhow. The tee is still there.

By noon:10, I was sitting up in the rocks with a camera. I could not see any planes in the sky but when I sensed that she and Missy might be overhead, I took a picture. The logic does not stand here; you certainly can't see the planes in the daytime, nor hear them. At night you can see what appear to be moving green or red stars heading towards and away from LAX, so why the picture? I don't know.

As it turned out, her plane did not leave until 12:30. It then arrived an hour late in Chicago due to high turbulence which screwed up her connecting flight. By the time she arrived at Logan, it was too late to catch the bus to the Cape, so she spent the night sitting on a bench along with a few other disgruntled passengers. The bus driver refused to take Missy, but Eileen managed to persuade him otherwise - the poor guy. When he dropped her off at Sagamore 24 sleepless hours after we had said goodbye, her Jeep was indeed sitting there - one good thing that worked out - thank you Dave and Pat. When she walked in the long sought after door of her house, the phone was ringing and it was me saying "How'd it go, hon?". Ouch!

I have been fine. I have been learning how to cook again, wash dishes and shop. There is a heck of a lot more room in the van now - too much. Mo has taken back his domain. The laundry is piling up. The place is really quiet - and alone. Ron and Lauren have walked by a couple of times just to see, as Ron said, if I'm stuck under a rock. Bill also came by taking some friends on the grand tour of which I guess I am a part now. I have shaved once and showered once, but you wonder who you're doing it for. For myself, I probably wouldn't bother so often. I smoke in the van at night now (with the window down). I turn the heater on when I want to and nobody says "It's getting stuffy in here!" while my legs don't even feel any heat yet. (That was after she was in her down cocoon bag.) I miss her.

The trailer is beginning to take back its shape now; I didn't really realize how much it was drooping and sagging. As I do little things to it here and there, the lines get straighter and the body gets firmer. I've done a lot of gluing and clamping, replacing loose nails with glued-toothpick-reinforced screws, replacing the nearly rotted out rear floor with good solid 3/4 inch ply, removing the broken windows to be repaired or replaced later on, installing inside & outside aluminum straps bolted together where an entire corner has sprung outward, reattaching the steel trim that girds the bottom edge, scraping the loose paint chips, etc.. The trailer seems to like what I'm doing. Now I am reconstructing the door that had long ago fallen out into the sand.

I have running water right outside my kitchen door now (tent door). I ran a 75 foot hose underground to a filter I had improvised with an Igloo beverage cooler, some plumbing parts, cotton, charcoal, screening and a colander. The colander holds the charcoal. A bed of cotton lays on top of that. The screening covers that and the incoming water drops down into the center of that. The screen is to catch the bigger stuff like rust chips, moths, etc.. Yes, little moths seem to be finding their way under the lids and into one of the eight 33 gallon Rubbermaid tubs. The water out of the filter no longer tastes like Rubbermaid, but that is because it has a strong taste of new hose. The charcoal should neutralize that. The only thing I can figure is that the water must be flowing across the cotton and down the sides, instead of down through the center, bypassing the whole filtration setup. So, I am going to wrap some screen around the interior outlet tube, get rid of the colander and spill the charcoal in such that it covers the entire bottom including the screened outlet, and mold the cotton into a bowl shape, perhaps using the colander for that. We'll see how that works.

Wait! Cotton?? No, Dummy, you need fiberglass wool; not cotton! Duh!

Other then that, things are pretty quiet around here. You can hear things that you don't normally hear back in civilization, such as the whop whop of the crows as they fly overhead and the fast hum of the hummingbird as he jets by. Little dusty whirlwinds dance and whisk across the countryside and they sound like a passing wind.

By the way, there is a handwritten letter I wrote about 33 years ago available on the main Joshua Tree page, the one with the spherical slide show of the trailer. Click on "the full story" top right to read it.

03/18/02, 9:38 pm really:

Last night at about this time, it began to rain. It was cold and blustery. I turned the headlights on and set the wipers to their slow speed. I put my hat and jacket on, let Mo out so he could enjoy the water and I made the rounds looking for tools and such that shouldn't get wet. There was no screen door on the trailer so I just moved everything inside out of the way. I noticed all the lights in the valley suddenly blink out. Water from my hat flowed into my collar unless I held my head down. I guess that's why the famous Remington paintings show them with their heads down in a storm. The tent roof half's were getting pregnant so I pushed them out and heard gallons of water hit the ground. What a loss.

Back in the van I hung my jacket over the steering wheel. Mo had wanted back in. I'd left the engine on so it was nice and warm. I opened the window and lit up a smoke but that didn't go too well because the wind blew the rain in on my right face and arm. I moved to the downwind window.

The rain stopped about a half hour later. I rechecked the tent and found a couple of puddles on roof of the box trailer, the part inside. The trailer was level so they just sat there. A few things got wet but nothing serious. I returned to the van and went to sleep.

In the morning it was cold and overcast. I got my coffee and checked things out. There was snow on the mountain range surrounding the valley. I took some pictures. The house trailer roof had not leaked. I dropped the box trailer tongue a quarter of an inch so its puddles could drain. All the rocks were clean and the dust was settled. That was good. There was maybe a quarter inch of water in the wheelbarrow. I didn't drink it. It was cold, windy, miserable and wet and the sun was non-existent. I had no interest in working on anything so I got back in the van.

I needed a few things; bread, lettuce, etc. and hadn't felt like going out the evening before so I went now. Checked the mail also - nothing in the box. When I returned it was still the same except for light snow flurries. I got my honey nut flakes in milk and my orange juice and sat in the van and ate them. I went and brushed my teeth. It was too cold to do any work on the trailer - glue requires 60 degrees or better. I sat there awhile, in the van, warm. I remembered that there were some rocks I wanted to move.

The old latrine of '68. It had a waste high rock wall on each side of it. The one towards the street was too low and the one towards the hill was unnecessary, so I piled the right one on top of the left one. I used my Marine rope and winch for one rock. I almost never use that spot anymore because I have better places now, but it also serves to hide the scrap lumber and such which were behind the right wall. Now it looks good and that's done.

The sun was out! Where'd it come from? It was even a little bit warm. It was noon now so I got my beers and sat up in the hill and enjoyed them. For the first time Mo figured a way up there - he was lonely. I took my nap in the van.

I did a little gluing and steel strapping in the afternoon. Need to strengthen that door frame; it never was sturdy enough for that heavy door. So the steel strap anchors it to the floor and the glued-toothpick reinforced decking screws replace the loose nails. Those decking screws get a good grip.

Didn't really feel like I got much done today, but that's okay. Made and ate my dinner and here I sit. Got some cookies. The stars are crisp and the quarter moon is bright - I love it when the moon gets full and the place lights up like subdued daylight. That'll be in a few days - or nights.

Mo just stuck his head under my arm from behind, as he usually does with Eileen, so I put my shoes, hat and coat on and took him out. He didn't do anything, so I guess he just wanted to put his head under my arm.

March 20, 2002 8:03 PM
Thanks for the update on your trip out west, it sure sounds exciting. Take care of that toe and good luck with the rehab work on your trailer! Bob and Cindy Haskell