The (Fairly Complete) History of the
Piute Canyon Partnership
(In the Foothills of the Southern Sierras)
1. "The Upside Risk"
Each of our partners would certainly tell a different story of how they and we came to own the piece of land in the southeastern foothills of the Sierras that we all have come to call "Piute." This is my version: the version that gives part of the credit to Casper Weinburger and Larry Niven.
My name is Paul Golding. In 1981 I was a screenwriter in Hollywood and I heard something that scared the daylights out of me. Ronald Reagan had just been elected President and his Secretary of Defense had just declared that he thought that a nuclear war was not just survivable but also "winnable."
I was living in Santa Monica, California, and I started thinking about fallout shelters. I read a few books published back in the 50's and 60's that included diagrams of American cities overlaid with circles with such delightful labels as "total annihilation," "firestorm," and "severe blast damage" -- maybe you remember those days. We had "duck and cover" drills in my grade school. There were lots of books written back then that had intricately detailed plans for fallout shelters. So I looked at our back yard, pondered the words of Secretary Weinburger and shivered just a little. Because it wouldn't matter how deep a hole I dug or which circle of destruction our house ended up in. This was L.A.! The city that had become famous for not even being able to dissipate its automobiles' exhausts. The very birthplace of the word "smog." A fallout shelter in the L.A. basin? I don't think so.
Neither did a bunch of other people in 1981. They looked at wind patterns, considered probable targets, stocked up on guns and supplies, and started a land boom in southwestern Oregon. They were called "Survivalists." The owner of my local gas station was one of them. He bragged to me one day about the place he'd bought in Medford, Oregon. Of course he didn't get up there too often, but owning it made him feel safer. I understood his feelings perfectly. I wasn't into guns, but I had started raising chickens in our back yard that spring -- just so I'd know how to do it.
So I thought about Medford. But not seriously enough to ever drive up there and look for a place. It was just too far. I may be paranoid. Hell, I am paranoid. I even defined paranoia in a movie I wrote and directed called "Pulse." "Heightened awareness" is what I called it. But I wasn't quite paranoid enough to spend a large part of the little money we had in those days on a place that we'd only get a lot of use out of if my worst nightmares came true. What if there wasn't a nuclear war? I called this the "upside risk" -- and decided to look for our hidey-hole a little closer to home -- someplace my family could use and enjoy if the world didn't blow itself up.
And then along came Larry Niven. He and Jerry Pournelle wrote a book called "Lucifer's Hammer" about a comet striking the earth. A different Armageddon. And its small band of survivors made it through partly because of the location of their refuge: the foothills of the southern Sierra Nevada's. I won't bore you with the details of why Niven thought this place was so inherently survivable. (But I will recommend the book, which was much better than later knock-offs and big budget movies on the same subject.) I'd been backpacking further north in the Sierras and loved the look and feel of the land. The foothills may not be as spectacular, but they're pretty enough, and green -- because they have that most precious of all Southern California commodities: water.
I talked to a couple of friends at a party and found sympathetic ears. It wasn't just the "survivalists" who wanted some piece of land they could call their own. And if a few of us got together maybe we could find something big enough that we could share. I started to look...
2. A Two-Liner in the L.A. Times
"640 acres. Trees. Stream. $160,000" (and a Realtor's name and number in Mojave, California)
I was scanning the section of the L.A.Times classifieds labeled "Property -- Other Locations" It was something I did whenever my paranoia rose a notch. And that day Casper had made another inspiring statement. I later found out from the realtor that she had only placed this two line ad for that one day. Another realtor (the brother of the land's owner) had the listing for a whole year and hadn't gotten much action. This may have had something to do with the fact that the former realtor was located in San Diego and had never actually made the drive up to show the land to anyone. So the current realtor had allocated a pretty skimpy budget to publicizing her new listing. Two lines, one day -- and if Casper hadn't been taunting the Russians that morning, I'd never have seen it.
I called the number, and made arrangements to see the land. My ex-wife and I decided to go to Lake Isabella that weekend to look at another (much smaller) piece of property that I'd seen while fly-fishing with an old Dutchman who'd looked forward for decades to plying his art on the "fabulous Kern River." We decided to go by way of Mojave, pick up a map, then go to Isabella via the "back way" -- up 395 to Jawbone Canyon Road. (See Maps)
We found Jawbone easily enough, drove through the official "Off-Road Recreational Area" which was buzzing with neon clad road warriors aboard dusty 2, 3, and 4-wheelers, frowned as the pavement turned from asphalt to dirt, and then plunged onward toward the fabled "640 acres. Trees. Stream."
Jawbone Canyon Road traverses a spectacularly desolate section of the Mojave desert:
After ten or fifteen miles of this we were quoting the ad to each other: "Trees -- yeah, Joshua trees! Stream -- uh huh, flash flood channel!" Then we crested the third ridge line that Jawbone snakes its way across and saw an amazing thing: the southern tip of the Sierra Nevada's, called the "Piute Range," formed the far side of a broad valley. The valley was barren where we were, on its eastern side, but across the way were green meadows and, yes, "Trees." Hey, maybe there would be a stream...
There was:
It was a warm Spring day and we took off our shoes and cooled our feet in Cottonwood Creek for the first time. When we took them out they sparkled with gold flecks. Come to think of it the realtor had said something about an abandoned gold mine on the property. No, it couldn't be... And of course it wasn't. The flecks were pyrite, "fool's gold." We couldn't spend much time on the land that day. We still had a long and uncertain passage up Kelso Creek Rd. to Isabella and we'd gotten a late start. We hiked around for a little bit, saw more than our fill of trees -- pine and oak, mostly. (There are Sequoia on the property, too, but we wouldn't see the first of them till we did some serious exploring, months later.)
On our way back down the road, I thought about the image of the gold flecks on our wet feet. And I realized that there was real gold on the land. It had covered our feet in the warm June air. Not the mineral. The water.
3. "I'm Just Going to Say One Word to You..."
We got to our motel in Isabella easily enough. Kelso Creek Rd. is paved from a couple of miles north of its intersection with Jawbone all the way to Highway 178. I'd intended to show my ex-wife another piece of property that I'd seen on my fishing trip, but I knew there was no competition with what we'd just seen. The land on Cottonwood Creek looked like heaven to us, but even at $250 / acre, it was more than we could afford by ourselves. So I took out my phone book, sat down at the little desk in our motel room and started making calls. I began each conversation the same way: "I'm just going to say one word to you... Land!"
In an hour I had five friends intrigued enough to take a look. During the next month I became intimately familiar with the twists and turns of Jawbone Canyon. (Nowadays we just call it "the road" -- as in "What's the road like?" Range of answers: "After that last storm, there's a huge gully just before the cattle guard. You'll make it, but don't take your Buick" to "They just bladed it out last week. It's like a runway!")
During our various explorations that June and July, we discovered a few features that were sufficiently striking that they would later become regular destinations whenever we showed new friends our little corner of paradise. Hiking up Cottonwood Creek we came to a series of pools, each fed by a differently formed waterfall. Someone called it the "Seven Pools of Haleakela." But really there were only three and the description was a mite over the top and (fortunately) never stuck.
Then there was "The Meadow." We didn't find it until our fourth or fifth trip. We followed a trail broken and kept open by our neighbor's cattle. Cattle being unfortunately shorter than most people this involved a fair amount of ducking and crawling. Later, after we'd seen where it led, we took clippers and shears and made the trail into a pleasant hike for full-sized (and even elderly) adults. Where it led was to a gently sloping meadow about the size of a football field. We joked about actually playing football there some day -- knowing that, given the slope, you'd have to change ends fairly often. The meadow was bordered by a small stream that managed to keep the entire field well watered. It had green grass late into the Summer, well after other nearby spots were yellow or brown. That, of course, was why the cattle had come here so often. They kept the grass so consistently clipped that the meadow looked tended instead of wild. We called the cows our "Toro Lawnmower Squad."
4. What We Learned From Peter Fonda and Dennis Hopper
We spent the whole Summer of 1981 putting together the partnership. We decided on eight partners because the realtor told us that there was some likelihood that the area would be down-zoned that year to a minimum of 80 acre parcels. My thinking was that if worse came to worst we could always divide the land. She turned out to have been misinformed, however, and the then-current zoning of 20 acre minimums has continued to this day. (So we could have lined up 32 partners for our 640 acres -- but I'm very glad we didn't!) Eight partners meant a total purchase of about $20,000 apiece, which was an easier sell to my friends. We agreed on a ten year nine percent mortgage from the seller. Including the mortgage payment, an allowance for taxes, and contributions to a "maintenance fund" meant our monthly payment would be $316.00 each after putting in a down payment of $3,000 apiece.
The original partners were all friends of mine -- and like myself they were mostly movie people -- except for three, Steve Acronico (our next-door neighbor in Santa Monica, gourmet chef, master gardener, and lawyer for the IRS), Mike Emery (a college journalism professor), and Jim Sharp (gemologist). Mike and Jim were the two friends I had talked to at that party before I started looking for land. Mike made great contributions to our discussions that led to the partnership agreement we hired a lawyer to draft, but financial problems caused him to withdraw just before we signed the agreement. He was replaced by Sidey Copilow (a lawyer with a major love of the outdoors). The "movie people" were Zalman King (and his wife Patricia Knop), Haskell Wexler, Carol Littleton (and her husband, John Bailey), and Christopher Holmes. These are all people whose names you've seen if you read the credits of films beyond just the stars and (maybe) director. You can look them up in online movie databases, and you'll see a couple of Academy Awards and a lot of films seen and loved by a lot of people. But I'm not trying to sell you on movie glitz. This is about one word (remember?) -- land. What's most important about my partners isn't their credits or awards. They are good people. I've always been happy to share this land with them.
During the course of our meetings that Summer we worked out the details of our "Partnership Agreement." The final document was drafted by a lawyer we all hired, and reflects the group's "liberal" (maybe "green" is a better word today) leanings. You can't use "insecticides, herbicides or other poisons," nor can you hunt or kill wild life, or even shoot guns for target practice on the land. (But fishing is okay -- something I insisted on, but a rather moot point since there aren't any fish in Cottonwood Creek except for a few Koi that my wife, Carlene, transported from our current home in Las Vegas.) You also can't ride your off-road vehicle or snowmobile anywhere except on the existing roads. (But there's a huge State Recreational Area for that very purpose just down the hill.)
We also agreed (though we never bothered to put it in writing) that we would keep the land pristine, always taking back down the hill whatever we had brought up it -- be it cans, food wrappers, or even cigarette filters.
Probably the most important rule we agreed on is the one that says "No guests shall be allowed upon the property unless accompanied by a partner, a partner's spouse, a partner's parent, or a partner's child." Haskell had had a bad experience with a previous partnership in which he and Peter Fonda and Dennis Hopper had gone in together on a place in Mexico. Haskell would frequently arrive to find the place buzzing with people he'd never seen before, all of whom would proudly proclaim that Peter or Dennis had told them how to get there. In 22 years we've all brought our share of "guests" -- Carol once held the wrap party at Piute for a film she edited -- but the bottom line is that whenever any of us go to the land, we know we'll at least know somebody who's there.
We also agreed that any of the partners can build a house of their own on the property -- as long as its location and exterior appearance is acceptable to the majority of the other partners. In practical terms what this has come to mean is "don't let it be visible from the main cabin -- or from any of the pools on the upper part of the stream." Given the size and gently rolling contours of the land, that's not as much of a restriction as it might sound.
The person building the house has to pay for it themselves, but the partnership will pay for a road to the new house (up to 1/8 mile long) from money in the maintenance fund. So far only one of the partners, Carol (and John), has built a place of their own, a neat one bedroom cabin with a steeply pitched roof and a great covered porch with a view down the valley. Carlene and I talked very seriously about building our own "retirement" house on the land. We had a beautiful and secluded spot all picked out with a great view of the stream. We even paid our caretaker to clear some brush so we could pitch a tent there prior to building. Then we bought an old farm house in upstate New York. Go figure.
Well, maybe one of our kids (or grandkids) will build there some day.
5. "Due Diligence" (Why the Old Miner Quit His Claim)
During that same Summer of 1981 we did a fair amount of "due diligence" to find out why the price of the land was so low. (Well, we city boys and girls thought it was low.) We learned the history of ownership from the Kern County records office. It was originally deeded to the State of California -- as were all Section 16's and Section 36's -- as the state's cut for doing the original survey back in the nineteenth century. The surveyors put in oak stakes with brass medallions at the corners. We found one of them later, a neat piece of history. California sold the land in 1947 along with a huge amount of other land in the nearby mountains and foothills to a land corporation for the princely sum of $10.00 an acre. The corporation held the land for exactly one year and a day (capital gains tax buffs will know why), then sold our section 36 to the San Diego dentist who was now offering it for sale to us. He paid $100.00 an acre. Not a bad little deal for that corporation! So after 33 years his asking price was less than inflation during the same period.
The parcel of land as a whole is not fenced. There was fencing along both sides of Jawbone Canyon Rd. and a 10 acre rectangle enclosing an area south of the road on both banks of the stream. This was where the former owner camped and planned some day to build his house. On the rest of the land we saw plenty of cattle. Our neighbor on three sides is the Kelso Valley Ranch and the cattle belonged to them. Worried about possible "proscriptive easements" earned by the cud-chewers we consulted an attorney in Bakersfield. He explained there was no easement issue and that California's free range laws allowed the cattle to go wherever they weren't fenced out of. Since they had provided us with some handy trails -- and free lawn mowing in the meadow -- we never talked seriously about the hefty task of fencing in our entire section.
We also hired a hydrologist to check into our water prospects. In July, the stream no longer crossed the road, but was still burbling along and keeping the upstream pools filled, albeit with their falls greatly reduced in volume. The leathery old hydrologist assured us that water would be no problem: we were in the seventh year of a drought cycle and the fact that water was still flowing up by the pools, where the bedrock was up on the surface, was an excellent sign. He also found two springs which have turned out to be year round water sources. But what really got his interest was the remains of the abandoned gold mine.
When the realtor first mentioned the old mine, my mental image (from countless movies) was a tunnel shored up by creaking beams, maybe a set of tracks for a little hopper car filled with tailings, and definitely a few puffs of dirt and pebbles falling ominously on your back as the old oak beams creaked overhead. Ours was more like a burrow dug by a huge and very paranoid gopher. It slopes down at a steep angle and is barely wide or high enough for a normal person to wriggle down on his stomach. (Although, arguably, any person who crawls down deep, dark holes in the ground is not normal.) What got our hydrologist excited was the fact that there was water at the bottom of our mine shaft. There were only two reasons to abandon a gold mine, he explained, the most common being that the vein of gold that you've been following has finally played out. So most abandoned gold mines deserve to be abandoned. But the other reason is that the miner has hit the water table and, with the hydraulic pumps available at the time, couldn't get any deeper.
In the last 22 years none of our partners has evinced any interest in crawling down our shaft with a high-powered pump to investigate. And I am sure that none of us would allow any kind of land-disturbing mining in the future.
6. A Thousand Daffodil Bulbs
Near the end of September the eight partners signed the agreement and the newly minted "Piute Canyon Partnership" bought the land. One day that winter Steve Acronico leaned over our fence in Santa Monica and confided that he'd just found a great deal on two thousand mixed daffodil bulbs from an upscale mail-order nursery. If I'd help him plant them, he'd donate half of them to the partnership. He thought the spot where the trail widened just below the meadow would be perfect. I agreed -- and was soon to learn how heavy a thousand daffodil bulbs actually are.
We drove up to the land on what turned out to be the perfect planting day. The first snowfall had just started to melt, softening the ground and at the same time showing us a melted map of the sun's path.
The actual planting was easy. I'd just plunge the shovel into the soft hillside and lean downhill, opening a slit into which Steve could poke a few bulbs. But carrying the bulbs up the cattle path gave us great incentive to clip, prune and generally improve our trail.
The next spring (and every spring since) showed what a good idea Steve had:
The next spring also showed us what a tiny contribution Steve and I had made to the floral arrangements nature itself had long ago made on our land. Indeed, although I've long been an avid gardener, tackling 640 acres is something I'd leave to the next generation of Frederick Law Olmsted's and Capability Brown's.
7. Barns Unlimited and the Prince of Isabella
That spring also led our partnership to arrive at one of the best decisions we've ever made -- to build ourselves a cabin. I had spoken that winter to an in-law who had a cautionary tale to tell. She and a half-dozen friends had gotten together several years ago and bought a beautiful piece of land in the mountains. They were all into camping, so they never built anything more elaborate than a solidly constructed outhouse. As the years had passed, however, her partners had begun to wonder why they were shelling out every year for taxes and mortgage payments on what was really just a campground. After all, they could stay in hundreds of western campgrounds with the same level of comfort -- and for virtually no money at all. So that winter her partnership decided to sell its land.
I worried that the same thing might happen to us. So I pushed hard for us all to kick in a little extra money and build something more elaborate and useful than an outhouse. Of course how little the extra money turned out to be was going to determine whether we'd do it or not.
A magazine ad led us to a "Barns Unlimited" franchise in Bakersfield. The contractor showed us a full-sized model sitting out on his smoggy parking lot:
The contractor quoted us a total price of $5,995.00 for the structure, stick-built (as opposed to pre-fab) on our land. This was for the "Basic Model" and didn't include site preparation costs, of course. For the six grand we'd get two windows, a regular and a sliding barn door, 2 x 4 wall construction, two stories with a staircase, and slab on grade foundation. Then we could add "options." We chose 2 x 6 walls, a raised main floor with crawlspace, twelve windows and a dormer. We should have added plywood sheathing under the standing seam steel roof -- as we learned when the first rains came. (We rectified our error a couple of years later and have since then been able to use our pails and cooking pots for their intended purposes.)
We saved a bundle of money by locating a dozen steel sash casement windows in a junk yard. We sanded away the rust, then primed and painted them on our driveway one afternoon.
That would take care of the house. Now, where exactly to put it? I had long been a fan of architect Christopher Alexander's amazing book "A Pattern Language." His chapter on "Site Repair" says, in essence, "Buildings must always be built on those parts of the land which are in the worst condition, not the best... When we build on the best parts of the land, those beauties which are there already -- it is always these things which get lost in the shuffle. When the construction starts on the parts of the land which are already healthy, innumerable beauties are wiped out with every act of building... Therefore: Leave those areas that are the most precious, beautiful, comfortable, and healthy as they are, and build new structures in those parts of the site which are the least pleasant now." It's a breathtakingly simple idea -- and one we used in finding our building site. So, not in the meadow certainly, and not near the falls and pools. After all, buildings are called "improvements," and we could scarcely improve those places.
When Zal and Pat first saw the land, we hiked up the stream to a spot about halfway between the road and the falls. There was a little bend in the stream, some tiny Beatrix Potter meadows nearby, lush with spring grass, the sounds of water splashing over smooth rocks mixed with the chirping of birds. Pat fell back luxuriantly on the soft grass, smiled beatifically at Zalman and me, and proclaimed, "I could stay here forever!" That spot immediately became (in my mind, anyway) "Pat's Point." So a year later, when a half dozen of us set out to find a place for Barns Unlimited to do their thing, we started at "Pat's Point." Of course, we wouldn't build there. It was already perfect. We headed uphill. At the top of the rise we found an open, gently rounded knoll with a few large oaks and a grand view down the valley. Another wonderful place not to build. But below the knoll (and above "Pat's Point"), on a bramble-covered hillside where we could still hear the splashing of the stream... Yes!
Call in the bulldozer.
A few inquiries at the closest town put us in touch with the son-in-law of Bill Joughin. Bill had been a struggling cattle rancher (all cattle ranchers are struggling -- it's a hard way to make a buck nowadays) whose spread was partly submerged when the waters rose behind Lake Isabella's new dam. He was no doubt properly compensated for his drowned acreage, but his real fortune would come from what was left. He now owned a huge amount of lakefront property. The hell with the cattle business -- Bill went into real estate! I think of him as the "Prince of Isabella." His number one bulldozer man, Mike, cut our road and leveled our pad -- and did a great job of it. Bill himself came by one afternoon to see the project and symbolically hefted Mike's chainsaw to trim a single overhanging branch. I felt we had gained the Prince's blessing and that only good things were in store.
I was wrong.
8. Dream Builders
The foundation went in quickly and the lumber arrived a week later, followed by the framing crew from Bakersfield. They'd been told the place was "near Mojave," and had packed and dressed for a few weeks in the hot California desert. But the elevation of our cabin's site was 5,000 feet. That night it snowed.
The next day they packed up their trailer and headed back to Bakersfield, leaving us with thousands of dollars worth of lumber sitting out there in the middle of nowhere.
I spent the next three weeks living in the tiny camper shell on the back of my Chevy Silverado, making daily drives in to Lake Isabella to call the contractor and find out when -- or if -- the next crew would come so I could go back to my life and stop being guard dog for a pile of building materials.
I had more than a few adventures during those weeks, but no moment so sweet as first hearing the sound of the new framing crew's truck rumbling up the road.
The new framing crew had met the old one at the Bakersfield unemployment office and what had scared away the first boys sounded like a paid vacation to the second. Work went quickly at first and partners would make the drive up occasionally on weekends to lend a hand.
I don't mean to disparage our own contributions. Several of us spent one very rainy weekend digging the post holes and installing the hefty gate that Mike, our multi-talented bulldozer man, had welded together for the entrance to our brand new road.
It took the three man framing crew six weeks to finish the cabin, but they confided to me afterwards that they could have done it easily in three. They just enjoyed camping on our property so much they didn't want to go home.
Their love of the project showed itself in dozens of ways. They were willing to take down an already erected outside wall so they could move a window opening two feet to the left for me because it would better frame a particular view. The structure was classified as a "barn," but they knew we were going to live in it, so they put in the additional fire-stop blocking that the building code requires for dwellings. And the twelfth window opening would house a gift from Zalman and Pat to the partnership -- a big, half-moon stained glass window, whose curved sash would be "a might tricky"...
And then it was done. And the crew reluctantly packed up their camping gear and went back to their wives and lives.
We had spent less than $16,000.00 including the road, pad, window glazing which we'd install ourselves that next weekend, paint we'd apply, and even Mike's silver gate:
That summer we insulated the cabin -- with Sidney sweating in the crawlspace to do the floor, fiberglass prickling his bare chest, while Jim and I climbed ladders in the second floor to do the double-pitched barn roof.
Furniture appeared sporadically all that summer and fall -- helping to empty all the partners' garages and attics. We put in a kitchen sink that drained down a hillside pipe. We still had to haul water from the closest spring, but at least we had a drain for it. We told friends we didn't have running water yet -- we had "walking water."
We got a propane-powered refrigerator and replaced the wood-burning range Pat had given us with a fancy 1950's gas model. A Franklin stove was a great bargain from a sweet young couple who sold rabbits down the road toward Isabella, though the code-approved chimney cost us three times as much.
We put in a water system, with a 6,000 gallon tank, gravity fed by our nearby spring, a gas powered pump, and a long pipe up to another, equal sized holding tank well above the cabin. Hey, you could turn a faucet now and "walking water" was just a memory.
For the first few years, every time we made it up to the cabin there seemed to be some new surprise brought by someone else who'd been there in the meanwhile -- a folk art painting, an antique barbeque, more chairs. It was one of the nicest aspects of our partnership to me.
And one of the nicest surprises came after Carol and John remodeled a bathroom "down the hill" and brought up a huge cast-iron bathtub. We installed it on the outside of the cabin -- on the North side, invisible from the entrance -- and hooked up some plumbing to our nifty new water system. Bathing outside on a moonlit night is probably the thing I most look forward to on the long, dusty Summer drive up Jawbone.
Having my first can of beer while sitting at our dining room table and looking out the windows that our crew relocated without a word of complaint ranks as number two.
We panelled the downstairs with wood, trimmed the windows and doors, divided the upstairs into four bedrooms, put up drywall, fixed the leaky roof, and called it home.
9. The Dark Side
The foregoing makes everything seem like sweetness and light, and I didn't sit down to "pitch" this place like a realtor or some other salesman. We're looking for two new partners. We're looking for people who, like the remaining partners, can love this place for what it is and for what they can help make it into -- people who are in this for the long haul. It would waste your time and ours if I didn't give you as full and accurate picture as I can. "Warts and all," as they say.
We built the cabin knowing that it would be vacant most of the time. We created clever plywood shutters to solidly cover all the windows. And the first winter someone broke in anyway. They took some canned goods, spent a few nights burning logs in our Franklin stove and at least when they left they closed the door whose lock they'd broken. We shrugged it off.
The next spring Jim and I wired the house (to code, I promise!) and arranged things so anybody could wheel my Honda generator part way down the road (so we couldn't hear it) and then "plug in" the whole house at the breaker box. That fall somebody broke through the door a second time and wheeled my generator all the way down the road, under our locked silver gate, and right into their pickup. They stole some of my tools, too, but it turned out that the homeowner's insurance on our house in Santa Monica covered the theft. Oh, well... We replaced the front door with a metal-clad version.
That winter my writing partner and I arrived one cold evening to find that someone had put a chain on our silver gate, pulled it open, driven up to our cabin, and stolen our Franklin stove.
So, time for a new strategy. We had provided in our partnership agreement for hiring a caretaker. Time to do it. The person we found, Richard Sawyer, turned out to be -- there's no other word for it -- a treasure!
We bought him the tiniest trailer anyone has ever seen. He augmented it with a big army tent and a 55-gallon stove. He froze his butt during his second winter. But he didn't leave. So we all kicked in another $1,250 each and built him a neat one bedroom house up the hill (and hidden) from our main cabin. He's still there. And our cabin hasn't been broken into since.
Then there's the "bathroom question." We don't have one. We have a kitchen sink, an outdoor bathtub and shower, and an outhouse:
This isn't because we have some aversion to modern conveniences. After the first two years we started losing some of our original partners. Chris Holmes left first, victim of an "unpleasant" divorce that sent him scrambling for every penny he could find. Sidney had a friend to replace him, John William. John signed on sight unseen. He kept it that way by becoming the only partner to never visit the property during the few years he made his payments. Next Steve Acronico moved up the coast and decided that the driving time -- over five hours -- was too much. Gib and Jane Jaffee, more movie people, took his place. Then Jim and Chris Sharp moved back to Atlanta -- definitely too far to commute. Ellen Segal took their place -- leaving Sidney as the only non-movie member. Others came. Others went.
Today, Haskell, Zalman & Pat, Carol & John, Ellen, Sidney, and Carlene & I hold the remaining six paid-up partnership shares. Carol & John have their own cabin, so they don't use the main cabin any more. Carlene & I have a farm in New York and haven't been to Piute in over two years now. Zalman & Pat and Haskell talk about visiting but are always just a little too busy. Ellen goes occasionally. Sidney lives in Oregon and would like to find someone to whom he could sell his share. Our "maintenance fund" is zero. The deck we planned on the west side of the cabin never got built. Ditto the septic system. And that's why we're still using that lovely old outhouse.
That's also why we're looking for two new partners. We'd like our land -- and our partnership -- to continue to flourish. It's a very special place. And we'd like to build that deck some day -- and a bathroom.
Some of our children are already going up "the road" on their own now, showing their friends "the pools" and "the meadow" and the remains of the old miner's shack -- and bringing their own kids. I had a glimmer of the thought that that very thing might someday happen when I was driving back down the hill, 23 years ago, on the day I first saw the place. It was -- and is -- a hope for some kind of continuity that will finally make us all "survivalists" in a much finer and gentler sense of that word.
It's that hope that I once called the "upside risk."
So, if you're still interested:
