Coarsegold
In most of my adventures, there's no widow comforting herself with a gun.
About a year later, Gary Crawford called up and invited Andrew and me to build a house with him, in Coarsegold, near Yosemite about 175 miles from home.
Gary and I had a couple of weeks work to do before we could use Andrew to fill our framing crew and start the concrete forms. We drove our separate trucks up there and checked into a motel. Gary got on the phone and started rounding up the local subs we would need, the first being a backhoe guy. He had the potential subs come visit us up at the site so we talk turkey and could get a sense of how we would get along with them.
When we started there was only a dirt road through a sparse pine and manzanita forest. There was about a ten-acre lake that the house would face and a dusty dirt road circling its perimeter. There were 8 or 9 lakefront parcels, but none of them had structures on them. There was a fox that would leave a daily deposit of scat on a boulder overlooking our jobsite, and we would often see deer sipping water at the lake before darting off into the forest.
We knew where to find the property corner markers; we had a set of plans, 100-foot tapes, wooden stakes and string. We measured off where the foundation footings would go and marked them with stakes. With a big bag of white flour, we marked off where the trenches would need to be dug. Our backhoe guy arrived when we were nearly done with the marking giving him everything he needed to know to offer his bid. As it turned out, there was a big unforeseen circumstance in this backhoe excavation, and that would cost extra.
The plans called for there being a garage underneath the larger wing of the house, but when the backhoe started to dig out that spot, we found an enormous outcropping of stone, about the size of a VW bus, right in the middle of where the garage was to be. The backhoe guy had to call in his buddy who was the go-to local blasting pro.
My previous experience with dynamite was in the Puna district of Hawaii, where the top soil is very thin on top of a layer cake of lava flows. "Digging" a cesspool was a matter of jackhammers, o'o bars, gloves and sweat. A backhoe was just used to lift the broken rock up out of the hole. There are different densities of lava you would encounter, sort of depending on how many gas bubbles were in it when it came to rest and cooled. The hardest of all was called "blue stone", which had stopped moving when it was extremely hot, all the gas bubbles escaping; cooling to an impenetrable density. Jackhammers were hopeless against this stuff. That's where the dynamite came in.
When cesspool blasting was to be done, and this was a common thing in Puna, a truck with a flatbed trailer would pull up and there would be a big jumbled pile of 20 or 30 old tires all strung through with heavy cables to hold them in a bunch. When the charges were in place and it was time to set them off, a backhoe would pick up this bundle of tires and place it in the hole on top of everything. This was to contain the flying rocks from the explosion. Sometimes the backhoe would rest its bucket on the pile to hold it down. Sometimes when they didn't do that, the blast would throw that whole pile out of the hole and 10 feet in the air.
Back in Coarsegold, 1994, they hadn't got the memo about tangle of old tires trick, and our blaster was just going to have us hide behind the blade of the backhoe, parked 100 feet away. A blaster wants to succeed at getting the job done first try, so to insure that he doesn't use too little explosive material, he will use too much to be on the safe side.
I had been taking photographs of the whole project and thought I could catch a shot of the blast, so I was behind the tractor blade with the others but had my head up so I could see and take my picture then duck down. Kablammo! The forest was sprayed with jagged rock fragments and a big one went whistling by my face, much more quickly than I had thought it would. It was the size of two big apple pies stacked top to top, whirling with its jagged edges like a giant double bladed axe head.
It would have chopped my skull in half had it been two feet lower.
By the time the excavation was done, it was time for Andrew to drive up from Petaluma to join us in forming the foundation. It made more sense for us housed in a vacation house in nearby Bass Lake which had a lot of empty rentals in the off season when the lake was drained.. The house we found was of a peculiar design with three floors and four bedrooms with small decks out each side.
The house had a bunch of wall switches that three construction professionals could never figure out. Our best guesses were that they were miswired 3-way switches or led to lighting fixtures with burnt out bulbs. The first day we got there, exploring the house from top to bottom, we looked in a utility closet under a stairwell on the ground floor, and there was a small coffin standing upright. We didn't open it, but the next day when we came back from the jobsite, we planned to satisfy our curiosity and take a look. When we opened the closet door, it was gone.
The centerpiece of the main living room of this odd house was an odd freestanding gas heater, with a glass window into the firebox. The burner was on the right side and it sent the flames horizontally across to the left behind the glass. Gary, making a joke of everything, called it a "Special Chinese Sideways Fire".
Back at the jobsite, Gary was schooling Andrew and me in the precision he required when building the foundation forms. It was an enlightening experience which has guided my building practices ever since. He had somehow discovered Deming's methods on his own without ever hearing about the man. He insisted on the foundation walls being built precisely plumb, all the way down to their below-grade footings. If you start making compromises at the very get go, by the time your creation is 30 feet in the air, it will be a struggle to make things fit right. All the care you take in those early steps will pay off. It's been proven to me time after time.
There was no power to the site nearly the whole time we were there and we used Gary's portable generator for most of it. There was an odd bunch of ducks that cruised around on the lake. There were 4 or 5 mallards and one big white domestic duck. The mallards followed him around on the lake like he was their leader. When it came to be break time or lunchtime, Gary would shut down the generator, and all would become quiet in the forest and around the lake. At the signal of the quieted generator, the white duck would turn and paddle toward us with the mallards in tow. When they reached the edge of the lake, the white duck would come out and approach us having learned that we were soft touches and we would share lunch with them. The mallards came nervously up behind him for a share of the snacks but never closer. Turned out that when you toss a white piece of bread or a donut, the ducks would run eagerly toward it, but when you threw a piece of a brownie or something dark, they would turn and run away as if it were a rock or some kind of threatening projectile. We called him the Great White Duck, which is how we sometimes referred to Gary.
By the peak of summer in August, our foundations were poured and our basic framing was rising in the forest. One day standing out by our lumber pile while Gary took a cigarette break, we were surprised to see a tarantula out in the wide open, boldly walking down the middle of the dusty road that ran along the lake's edge. It turns out this is seasonal mating behavior and the spider was obviously a male demonstrating his fearlessness. We admired his display, took some pictures of him, and let him continue his studly prowling. He became one of the icons of our Coarsegold experience, along with the fox, the deer, the Great White Duck and his flotilla of mallard followers.
Gary was such a pro, there were no flubs, no accidents and no disasters, just a near miss of that jagged flying rock. My fault.
I wrote a poem to commemorate this adventure, I just haven't found it yet.
Copyright © 2022 John Oliver
All Rights Reserved
mail@unclejohnsweb.com
About a year later, Gary Crawford called up and invited Andrew and me to build a house with him, in Coarsegold, near Yosemite about 175 miles from home.
Gary and I had a couple of weeks work to do before we could use Andrew to fill our framing crew and start the concrete forms. We drove our separate trucks up there and checked into a motel. Gary got on the phone and started rounding up the local subs we would need, the first being a backhoe guy. He had the potential subs come visit us up at the site so we talk turkey and could get a sense of how we would get along with them.
When we started there was only a dirt road through a sparse pine and manzanita forest. There was about a ten-acre lake that the house would face and a dusty dirt road circling its perimeter. There were 8 or 9 lakefront parcels, but none of them had structures on them. There was a fox that would leave a daily deposit of scat on a boulder overlooking our jobsite, and we would often see deer sipping water at the lake before darting off into the forest.
We knew where to find the property corner markers; we had a set of plans, 100-foot tapes, wooden stakes and string. We measured off where the foundation footings would go and marked them with stakes. With a big bag of white flour, we marked off where the trenches would need to be dug. Our backhoe guy arrived when we were nearly done with the marking giving him everything he needed to know to offer his bid. As it turned out, there was a big unforeseen circumstance in this backhoe excavation, and that would cost extra.
The plans called for there being a garage underneath the larger wing of the house, but when the backhoe started to dig out that spot, we found an enormous outcropping of stone, about the size of a VW bus, right in the middle of where the garage was to be. The backhoe guy had to call in his buddy who was the go-to local blasting pro.
My previous experience with dynamite was in the Puna district of Hawaii, where the top soil is very thin on top of a layer cake of lava flows. "Digging" a cesspool was a matter of jackhammers, o'o bars, gloves and sweat. A backhoe was just used to lift the broken rock up out of the hole. There are different densities of lava you would encounter, sort of depending on how many gas bubbles were in it when it came to rest and cooled. The hardest of all was called "blue stone", which had stopped moving when it was extremely hot, all the gas bubbles escaping; cooling to an impenetrable density. Jackhammers were hopeless against this stuff. That's where the dynamite came in.
When cesspool blasting was to be done, and this was a common thing in Puna, a truck with a flatbed trailer would pull up and there would be a big jumbled pile of 20 or 30 old tires all strung through with heavy cables to hold them in a bunch. When the charges were in place and it was time to set them off, a backhoe would pick up this bundle of tires and place it in the hole on top of everything. This was to contain the flying rocks from the explosion. Sometimes the backhoe would rest its bucket on the pile to hold it down. Sometimes when they didn't do that, the blast would throw that whole pile out of the hole and 10 feet in the air.
Back in Coarsegold, 1994, they hadn't got the memo about tangle of old tires trick, and our blaster was just going to have us hide behind the blade of the backhoe, parked 100 feet away. A blaster wants to succeed at getting the job done first try, so to insure that he doesn't use too little explosive material, he will use too much to be on the safe side.
I had been taking photographs of the whole project and thought I could catch a shot of the blast, so I was behind the tractor blade with the others but had my head up so I could see and take my picture then duck down. Kablammo! The forest was sprayed with jagged rock fragments and a big one went whistling by my face, much more quickly than I had thought it would. It was the size of two big apple pies stacked top to top, whirling with its jagged edges like a giant double bladed axe head.
It would have chopped my skull in half had it been two feet lower.
By the time the excavation was done, it was time for Andrew to drive up from Petaluma to join us in forming the foundation. It made more sense for us housed in a vacation house in nearby Bass Lake which had a lot of empty rentals in the off season when the lake was drained.. The house we found was of a peculiar design with three floors and four bedrooms with small decks out each side.
The house had a bunch of wall switches that three construction professionals could never figure out. Our best guesses were that they were miswired 3-way switches or led to lighting fixtures with burnt out bulbs. The first day we got there, exploring the house from top to bottom, we looked in a utility closet under a stairwell on the ground floor, and there was a small coffin standing upright. We didn't open it, but the next day when we came back from the jobsite, we planned to satisfy our curiosity and take a look. When we opened the closet door, it was gone.
The centerpiece of the main living room of this odd house was an odd freestanding gas heater, with a glass window into the firebox. The burner was on the right side and it sent the flames horizontally across to the left behind the glass. Gary, making a joke of everything, called it a "Special Chinese Sideways Fire".
Back at the jobsite, Gary was schooling Andrew and me in the precision he required when building the foundation forms. It was an enlightening experience which has guided my building practices ever since. He had somehow discovered Deming's methods on his own without ever hearing about the man. He insisted on the foundation walls being built precisely plumb, all the way down to their below-grade footings. If you start making compromises at the very get go, by the time your creation is 30 feet in the air, it will be a struggle to make things fit right. All the care you take in those early steps will pay off. It's been proven to me time after time.
There was no power to the site nearly the whole time we were there and we used Gary's portable generator for most of it. There was an odd bunch of ducks that cruised around on the lake. There were 4 or 5 mallards and one big white domestic duck. The mallards followed him around on the lake like he was their leader. When it came to be break time or lunchtime, Gary would shut down the generator, and all would become quiet in the forest and around the lake. At the signal of the quieted generator, the white duck would turn and paddle toward us with the mallards in tow. When they reached the edge of the lake, the white duck would come out and approach us having learned that we were soft touches and we would share lunch with them. The mallards came nervously up behind him for a share of the snacks but never closer. Turned out that when you toss a white piece of bread or a donut, the ducks would run eagerly toward it, but when you threw a piece of a brownie or something dark, they would turn and run away as if it were a rock or some kind of threatening projectile. We called him the Great White Duck, which is how we sometimes referred to Gary.
By the peak of summer in August, our foundations were poured and our basic framing was rising in the forest. One day standing out by our lumber pile while Gary took a cigarette break, we were surprised to see a tarantula out in the wide open, boldly walking down the middle of the dusty road that ran along the lake's edge. It turns out this is seasonal mating behavior and the spider was obviously a male demonstrating his fearlessness. We admired his display, took some pictures of him, and let him continue his studly prowling. He became one of the icons of our Coarsegold experience, along with the fox, the deer, the Great White Duck and his flotilla of mallard followers.
Gary was such a pro, there were no flubs, no accidents and no disasters, just a near miss of that jagged flying rock. My fault. I wrote a poem to commemorate this adventure, I just haven't found it yet.
Copyright © 2022 John Oliver
All Rights Reserved
mail@unclejohnsweb.com
All Rights Reserved
mail@unclejohnsweb.com