The Eden Express_ A Memoir of Insanity - Mark Vonnegut [25]
Beowulf was an unknown quantity Sarah had found in Oregon. He had a ramrod-stiff spine, a darting weasel face with eyes that never seemed to blink, and a wispy, almost-not-there beard. He made his own clothes and wasn’t much of a seamstress. That and his stiff, machinelike way of moving gave him the look of a hastily thrown together puppet.
On our first town trip, we stayed with Joe and Mary and met Luke, whom they had found a few months earlier in the Kootenays, a mountain range about halfway between the Rockies and the coast. He came back up the lake with us and fit in like a charm. Physically and spiritually he was much more like me than any of the others, and I came to feel almost as close to him as to Zeke.
Vincent passed through for two or three weeks every couple of months or so, and other friends and strangers would drop in and stay awhile, but the above plus Simon, Virginia, and me made up the basic cast.
Shelter was the first order of business. There were two standing structures—a roof on eight-foot stilts with half-walls on three sides and open on the fourth that had sheltered a tractor in the old days, and the towering house that McKenzie had said had no value. We set up a kitchen in the smaller structure and set about redoing the house.
McKenzie was right about the house and we would have done much better to tear it down and use the materials to build new ones. It was strangely built; set on a foundation of dug-in logs with hand-split eight-by-eight uprights every two feet, it rose about thirty feet into the air, covered over with hand-split boards of every imaginable dimension, which were covered in turn by hand-split shingles called shakes. It was twenty feet wide and forty long, and consisted of two stories, each divided into two twenty-by-twenty rooms with thirteen-foot ceilings, and an attic topped by a leaky roof. The strangest thing about that building was that there wasn’t a triangular brace anywhere. It swayed slightly in the wind.
What we proceeded to do didn’t help matters much. We tore off the roof and added another story, topped with the most insane roof you could imagine. The first third of the house was covered by a slant roof that started at four feet and rose to twelve, facing east. The next third had the same setup facing west. The back of the house had twin peaked gables facing south. The damned thing looked like a pterodactyl learning to fly. The top floor, partitioned off with blankets into five little bedrooms, was sprinkled with a strange assortment of windows which we always kept an eye out for on the way home from town trips.
We rebuilt the front porch, which had collapsed, and added a new one under the third-story gables. The work went slowly, partly because of our inexperience but more because we had to cut down trees and handsplit any lumber we needed. Three people working all day could split enough boards to cover what six dollars’ worth of plywood would have done tighter and stronger. The wood we split was a bitch to work with. Right angles, straight edges, and so on don’t just happen; each piece had to be whittled and fiddled with incessantly and still never fit quite right. Along with the major construction, there was cleaning windfalls from the trail, cutting and stacking firewood, and several other projects.
An average day: up with the sun; fetch water from the stream; cook breakfast, usually ground whole-grain porridge with honey and dried milk; work five or six hours; lunch, usually peanut butter, dried fruit, and honey; work another six hours; then all run down to the lake, tear our clothes off and splash around awhile; back up to dinner, which was usually brown rice and some vegetable we had brought from town. After dinner we read, wrote letters, made music, or just talked. Kitchen chores