RUDIMENTS, pt. 67
Making Cars
When I lived in the country, essentially as
an exile of internal sorts lost in the middle
of nowhere, everything was presented to me
at once. I arrived there alone, it was about
10 below for four or five days, the house -
I found out - had only the most rudimentary
form of conversion heat, a converted coal
burner in the basement into which an oil
line and primary pilot flame had been installed
and, although it functioned, had been given
no form of fan, no set of blowers, to actually
'circulate' or blow the heat up through the
duct-work. So that all one got was what was
called (I learned this one quickly too), 'gravity
feed.' Sounds reasonable and almost scientific,
but what it really meant, especially for a three
level 12 story house, and a huge attic, (fortunately
sealed off nicely by two doors), was that the only
heat you ever got, ever, was what floated up on
its own by the (oh so scientific) means of gravity.
Which can also be transcribed over into 'You're
outta' luck, baby.' Heat rises. Or not. In this case
you could never know any difference.
-
That first Winter that's how we had to live it.
Everything was cold, even the things that were
hot. I went out and purchased a large Franklin
Stove, punched a chimney wall open and installed
duct-work workable enough, and then located a
local school that was heated by pea coal. They
had an outdoor coal-bin, filled with their always
replenished stock of small (pea) coal, and I quickly
learned to help myself. Part of my 'education,' I
called it. It got us over the hump that first long
Winter, and in the Spring and Summer, besides a
kitchen floor (which had huge holes in it and only
vague pieces of old, torn-up and worn linoleum),
I also had a new, regular, functional furnace
installed. Those two items were an enormous
expense, not thought about before. We managed.
And we considered both as necessities. I got a
few 60-day notes from the local bank (Troy
National, which was quite liberal and flexible
about their policies in these matters), in
sequence. As one ran out and was paid back,
another one was opened. Many of the local,
poor folk, country hicks, and farmers operated
that way out there - hand-to-mouth, tiding
oneself and family over as needed. It was the
good side of banking, best I've ever seen
anyway. I don't know what they did when
people failed on payback, but I only very
occasionally saw foreclosures and repo sales.
It all seemed to be done in a tidy and neat
fashion, all these loans and lines of local
credit running back and forth. I paid the
furnace off, eventually, at $38.03 per month,
for about 5 years. The floor, as I recall, cost
about $900, and I got lucky there, as my
wife's parents paid it up for us. They were
aghast at and where-to I'd dragged their
daughter and 6-month old grandchild. To
them it was a combination of imagined Hell
and Yukon. To me it was the Louisiana
Purchase. Go figure the difference.
-
A lot of my stuff was done by barter, trading
services, stealth and theft (like the coal), and
just plain frugality. One lame car sufficed,
and as an occasional other junker was found
a few of us local bummers would haul it in
prop it up and start fixing. Sometimes I kept
something, sometimes we'd split maybe 60
bucks to sell it as fixed, or someone else
would get something. I've traded junk-heap
cars to mountain people up there for guns,
tires and rims, drills and hammers, and even
a generator once. No one cared about anything.
Legality and ownership and titles and all that
was what you made it. There were ten different
ways of getting plates and paper to drive
something. There wasn't ever any policing
around, unless someone got killed or maimed,
and most people in these economic levels knew
where to be and go, and where not to. The town
down the bottom of the hill - Troy, and east
Troy too - was more like a sanctuary town.
That's where the grocery store was, fuel (most
of the farm guys had 100 or 200 gallon gas
tanks on their property, for tractors, gars, and
the rest. The gas was delivered in by tanker
trucks as needed. So there was always fuel
around, somewhere near). Hardware, library,
banks and mortgage offices, and heating oil too.
(I had to pay that on account often enough and,
in person). Back then it was about 30 cents or
so per gallon, and by the time I left there it
had just cracked one dollar, which was
basically killing people's budgets. My first
year there, with that gravity heat thing, I
went through so much heating oil it wasn't
near funny, and mostly got nothing from it.
We had to shut off all extraneous water
feeds except for one sink and the toilet, for
fear of solid freeze and burst pipes. Which
pipes were wrapped in some strange heated
electrical tape too, and kept dripping a bit to
keep flow. Thereby also enriching the local
electric company. Everyone was making
money except me; off me.
-
Country people are sometimes weird too, in
that they hate the country. Have you ever
really looked at a well-kept country property,
people with regular money I mean, not the
poor and the locally indigent. (Do they ever
get indignant, I wondered? An old word-joke
of mine.) - everything is well-kept, maintained
painted, cut, mowed and cleared, and even
the driveways are kept rightly tarred and
smoothed. It's almost paradoxical how
clinical they get over things - everything
is done to counter the fact of it being a nice,
rural location; bugs and flies, spiders and all.
Lights too. Myself, I love the black darkness
of a deep country night. As soon as I got settled
in, I realized that ideal too had been shattered.
The previous owner, like so many bagged-out
country people, was apparently afraid of the
dark. Right smack in the front of the house
he'd had installed a regular telephone pole!
With some sort of arc-light vapor-bulb and
new-fangled high-illumination bullshit that
came on every night at dusk and lit my life
like I was playing center-field for the freaking
New York Yankees! You could read a book
on the front porch, for pity's sake, not that any
of these people would have done that, unless
it was the NRA bulletin or some farm
magazine. On that near perimeter, anywhere,
of house and property the 'lumens' were about
as bright as daylight. I could have maybe shot
the lamp out, but didn't. As soon as the first
electric bill came showing me that this beast
was costing me some 40 bucks a month, alone,
I immediately had it disconnected. The pole
stayed, because it had wires on it, but the
big fixture lamp itself was taken down and
away. Just goes to show how crazy-strange
local customs can get, when you live far-off
and far-away and yet insist that you live
as if it was Main Street itself. It defeats the
entire conceptual purpose of living in the
far-country, in my book anyway; certainly
not theirs.
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