Insulation (or the Secret Origin II)

This is another piece that I found on my hard drive. It covers some of the same territory as the last post, but I think I actually like it better. Rather than revise history by replacing the last one with this, I thought I'd post both.

There are a number of things that could be used to sum up my childhood. Each of course would highlight a different part of it. One of these things is insulation. For many years I lived part time with my father, in his unfinished house. By unfinished I mean that the structure was all there, but either money or gumption had run out before the finish work had been completed on interior. So the walls were framed and the insulation was in them, but the drywall that would have completed the inside of the walls in most houses had never been put up, let alone spackled, painted, and trimmed. For many years, in place of wallpaper or the textured walls painted one of the many hues of off-white beloved of interior decorators, when I glanced at a wall or stared at the ceiling I saw the shiny backing of fiberglass insulation decorated with the name of either Johns-Manville or Owens-Corning. It is a testament to the amount of time I spent in this particular occupation (staring at the wall or the ceiling, that is) that I still recall both of those brand names with a familiarity usually reserved for contractors and their employees some twenty-odd years later.

But that is only one way in which insulation can be used to sum up my childhood. As I said, I only enjoyed the warm and silvery embrace of Johns and Owens roughly half of the time. The other half of my life was spent with my mother and stepfather living in a teepee. Now the teepee was the dwelling place of the plains Indians in this country before we white folks killed and enslaved them and turned it into a country. Never mind that the plains Indians, who lived in that great arid middle part of what is now our country (after all, they are mostly dead, how are they going to contest ownership-and when they do, whose courts do the deciding?). My parents decided to pitch their teepees in the temperate rainforest of the Northwest. I don’t think they spent too much time thinking about the wickiups the Pomo built in our part of California, which were more like thatched huts with willow, oak, and reeds. Our teepees were not made of skins as the originals were. Remember these were hippies who tended to frown upon the killing of animals. So our teepees were made of canvas. Which brings me back to the subject of insulation. Canvas, especially wet canvas is one of nature’s crappiest insulators. In fact, there is something called a swamp cooler where one wets a cloth and wraps it around the thing to be cooled. The evaporation of the water makes quite an effective cooler.

We were in the Pacific Northwest, however. I like to include Northern California in the Pacific Northwest which I realize stirs anger in the hearts of Oregon and Washington. You can tell I lived there because I don’t consider San Francisco to be Northern California. It is clearly in the rough center of the state. But most non-Californians and a disturbing number of southern and central Californians seem to believe that San Francisco is a few miles from the Oregon border. As evidence for this I present the stickers plastered all over pickup trucks in Monterey which proudly proclaim “NorCal” in gothic script. I will refrain from further comment on this atrocity and simply refer the owners of those trucks to a state map.

Whatever we call it, northern Mendocino county shares a Mediterranean climate with the Pacific Northwest. This means that the summers are lovely, warm, and clear. The winters , however, are damp and miserable. Luckily, there isn’t much evaporation to cause that evaporative cooling I mentioned. There is a lot of rain however and teepees are not well designed to deal with rain. So we added a second roof of plastic sheeting hung inside the top of the teepee’s cone in the winter, when it rained for 9 months of the year. I remember looking up at the water pooled inside. I am pretty sure that after a while it started to turn green. We also heated our teepees with wood stoves. We did use that lovely invention the chimney, so the smoke was almost all vented out the side of the teepee. The single layer of canvas was far less effective that Messrs. Manville and Corning. So most of the smoke went out the chimney and most of the heat went out through the walls.

We heated bricks on those stoves, wrapped them in towels, and placed them in the bottoms of our sleeping bags before bed. Yes, for that half of my childhood spent in the teepee, I spent every night in a sleeping bag. It seemed perfectly normal at the time. As did the brick-and-board shelves that occupied the edges of the teepee upon which we kept our things. The lovely part about this was that there was a little triangle of extra space between the vertical back of the shelves and the diagonal wall of the teepee. This was a great place for a boy to hide. Unfortunately it was also a perfect place for a cat to leave the entrails of eviscerated rodents. In the summer they kind of dried up and mummified. I can’t actually remember what happened to them in the winter. I think that may be for the best.

So now, years later, I live in a house like everybody else. I have drywall, plaster, and a lovely layer of off-white paint on my walls. Owen and Johns are a thing of memory and the heat from the gas furnace stays neatly inside the house. The toilet is in the bathroom, not 200 yards up the hill in a little shed built over a hole in the ground. I don’t miss the rodent entrails, the long walk through the snow to the toilet in the dark, or the potential for lung cancer represented by the fiberglass insulation. I do miss walking in the forest by starlight. It can be done if you let your eyes adjust and feel carefully with your feet. Where I live now there is too much light pollution to see the milky way, let alone let your eyes truly adjust to the dark. I wonder how much of who I am is the result of little experiences my kids will never have. And I wonder who they will be as a result. And so I raise a nostalgic glass to Johns, Owen, and all the little red ants attracted by the mouse guts behind the shelves. Then I take a hot shower and crawl into a bed between sheets, with no need of a heated brick and realize I don’t miss them that much.

The Secret Origin

I had a very small circle of friends growing up so it wasn't until high school, or maybe college, that I realized that the way my family lived wasn't exactly normal.  For instance, I knew that most Americans don’t live in teepees but I'd never lived any other way so I didn't have anything to compare it to.  Never mind that the teepee was designed by the plains Indians, who lived in that great arid middle part of  what is now our country (after all, they are mostly dead, how are they going to contest ownership-and when they do, whose courts do the deciding?).  My parents (more precisely, my mom and my then-stepdad) decided to pitch their teepees in the temperate rainforest of the Northwest.  I don’t think they spent too much time thinking about the wickiups the Pomo built in our part of California, which were more like thatched huts with willow, oak, and reeds.  And so we had to make a second roof of plastic sheeting hung inside the top of the teepee’s cone in the winter, when it rained for 9 months of the year.  I remember looking up at the water pooled inside.  I am pretty sure that after a while it started to turn green

We didn’t really have a kitchen the way other people understand the term.  We had “Darkest Africa.”  In “Darkest Africa,” there was a table, made from one of those industrial spools telephone crews roll telephone cable off of.  A refrigerator, or more properly, an icebox.  It was an old Frigidaire, not plugged into anything of course, into which we would put big 5 pound blocks of ice in the summer, which kept our food cold.  There was a real gas stove, hooked up to a propane tank.  There were some counters around the outside.  I can’t remember how they were made, but I think the top was bare plywood.  We had plastic tubs into which we poured water to wash dishes.  We had to collect the water from a hose spigot some 50 feet away, and heat it on the stove if we wanted to wash out dishes in hot water.  The floor wasn’t qute dirt, it was a mixture of soil and concrete.  You see my parents (I am just going to use this somewhat imprecise term, unless it is critical to the story) didn't want to leave a mark on the land when they left.  I went back years later to look and they were right.  There is only a flat spot where I used to live.

My memory is a little fuzzy about the exact size of the teepees, blurred by the years and the fact that the things around us get smaller as we get bigger.  I think they were about 20 feet across at the bottom.  My step brother (who we will cal Ari) and I had one.  Our parents had another about 100 feet away through the woods.  I described the kitchen already.  Our living room was a fire pit with a brick grill built next to it for cooking my step-dad's specialty, "Chicken Goo-La-Lee."  In the summer, part of our dinner was usually cooked on this grill, and we would often eat around the fire.  In the winter we sat on the floor and ate on a low table in the teepee I shared with Ari.  During the day we would play outside.  Somehow in my memory it was always summer, so I honestly don't know what we did in the winter.  I remember a lot of Uno.  Maybe we played Uno all day.

There is, of course, another room in most modern homes.  That room we euphemistically call the restroom, W.C., powder room, or bathroom.  That room really has two separate purposes, and in teepee land, we separated those purposes in two different places.  Baths were taken in the bathhouse (think cowboys, not the Bowery or the Castro).  It was one of two permanent buildings on the property that had not only running water, but that pinnacle of modernism, hot running water.  Of course, it didn't have a regular bathtub and certainly nothing like a shower.  I used to take baths in one of those big galvanized metal tubs they use to water horses and cattle.  I remember the fitting they used to plug the hole in the side had a hard, square, plastic piece on it that stuck into the tub.  You had to be careful to watch out for that.  

There was also a toilet in the bathhouse for any citified visitors.  We hardier folk used the outhouse, which was literally a wooden structure over a hole in the ground.  I have developed extensive experience of outhouses in my life, and this was the most primitive.  Not even a seat to sit on, you had to squat over the hole and hope your legs didn't cramp up before you were done. 

Looking back, I wonder what my life would have been like in a regular house, with 4 walls, plumbing, and central heating.  I think about raising my own kids and how different their lives are than mine was.  I like to say that I have experienced the industrial revolution in my life time.  I've gone from kerosene lamps and wood-fired cookstoves to iphones, wireless internet (I refuse to call it wi fi), and blogging.  Sometimes I think I would fit better in an earlier, simpler time.  But that isn't the time I live in.  I live in a world of exponential technological change.  Of fast international travel, instant communication, information saturation, and catastrophic oil spills.  If it ever comes crashing down around our ears, I'm ready to go back to the wood-burning stove.  Until then, I'm off to update my Facebook status.

A blog? Really?

I never thought I would be the sort of person who had a blog.  When I think blog I think either of the semi-professional types who have particular insight (think Daily Kos) or the sort of personal journal that has inane details of someone's personal life (think the worst Twitter stereotype with no character limit).  I recently read a couple of personal blogs that made me change my thinking.  They were structured more like the kind of topical essays I used to love but haven't written since college.  The sort of essays that might be published in Harper's or The New Yorker but without the competition and editorial review.  The sort of essays that get turned into This American Life episodes.  The sort of essays I have been meaning to write, and even have drafts of hiding in a file on my hard drive.  I hope creating this will give me incentive to write more often.  I hope that it will help those family members and friends I just moved away from stay in touch a little better. 

A note about the title:  When I was growing up, my father wrote a column for the local paper, which he called "Down Our Road."  I have gone down a pretty different road, but I would like to think I am continuing that tradition.  Depending on your age and connection to popular culture, you can call it an homage or a shout out to my dad.