Читать книгу Off On Our Own - Ted Carns - Страница 8

“. . . it was the hardest of possible conditions in which to carve out a true self-sufficient and self-sustaining lifestyle.”

To be here is to be inside an 85-year-old living organism, rather than just a warm, cozy, inanimate house. Maybe conscious entity would be a better description. You’ll see what I mean. But first, some history.

Way back in the family memory is a story of a grant of land being given in return for services to the old Forbes Trail around the time of the French and Indian War. The Forbes Trail was the vital link between British forts from Philadelphia to Pittsburgh. In our area it connected Ft. Bedford and Ft. Ligonier. Through the generations, the land was divided and divided again. In 1926 a 5-acre parcel was sold to some people from the city who wanted to have a hunting camp. They hired my great uncles to build it.

Great Uncle John, a master carpenter and woodwright, headed up the project. They hauled materials up by mule train. To give a sense of how difficult that must have been, in the early ’70s the Forest Service (now DCNR) told me The Stone Camp was the most isolated dwelling in Pennsylvania’s southwest division.

The cabin was entirely framed in post-blighted wormy chestnut, most likely sawn on my Great Uncle Charley’s steam-powered mill. I used to sit glued listening to the stories he told of the old days. He said he ordered the first chainsaw ever made, from Montgomery Ward’s. I especially remember him telling me about the switch from crosscut saws and how fast that chainsaw cut the first big cherry tree he sunk it into.

This place came to be called The Stone Camp because it’s entirely encased in mountain sandstone. You can tell it was probably done by the local family of stonemasons by the pattern they laid. It’s a big family and these guys are still the best stonemasons around – and they’re the nicest guys you’d ever meet. They were also good hunters, fishermen and trappers. They all had/have cool nicknames, like Fat, Spike, Heimy, Peg, Grummy Cork, Cocky, Lemon (his surname) and Ed, who never got nicknamed. I grew up with Bird and Big Liz (short for The Big Lizard). As far as I know, they could all do magic with mountain stone, but old Spike was one of the best.

By the time I came along years later and tried to dig a deep cistern, I found to my surprise that The Stone Camp doesn’t sit on a concrete foundation. There’s solid rock shelf about four feet down. The mortared stone encasement walls of the camp were set on a great, thick three-foot-wide, four-foot-high solid wall of stone and mortar. That huge foundation wall sits on a bed of sandstone crushed fine by hand with sledgehammers, that in turn sits on solid rock. I think the idea of the pulverized sandstone was to French-drain the entire foundation down the mountain so the freeze thaw wouldn’t heave the walls.

It’s an unusual way of building a stone house but it’s lasted this long. I think of the parable of the wise man and the fool. It’s said that the wise man builds his house on solid rock and the foolish man builds his on sand. Being that this house is built on both I guess I can claim the right to be both wise and foolish.

I once asked Great Uncle Charley where they got the water for the camp. He said there’s a spring right over the hill that they all used. I couldn’t find it for at least the first 25 years up here, the reason being that “right over the hill” to a guy who walked several miles to school is different to a guy who walked 75 yards to catch the bus. Turns out I was looking way too close. Finally I found it and sure enough, there was an old cut glass tumbler sticking out of the mud. The glass my ancestors used to drink from.

I remember coming up here as a child. The road seemed to wind uphill forever. Dad let us ride in the bed of the old teal-colored Chevy pickup. The wheels disappeared in the tall mountain grass and it gave us the distinct feeling the truck was floating like a boat through deep water. At the camp, Dad would talk to the hunters about which bucks were moving where and at what time of the day. There was a big black snake that was almost always sunning itself above the door that faced south. His descendants are still around and they often drop in for a visit.

Over time, people stopped coming to The Stone Camp and things began to deteriorate. The rain barrels rusted down to half their height. The place seemed abandoned, unwanted, the last place on earth anybody would ever want to live. There were no utilities, no water, no power; no soil, only rock and clay. There was no way to heat the main cabin but with a big, inefficient fireplace that constantly smoked. Lone Cabin Jr., now our main guesthouse, is where the hunters used to sleep. It had an old, ornate potbelly stove that some bastard has since stolen from us. The Stone Camp was truly the least among dwellings; it had nowhere to go but up.

Years passed, and it was pretty much forgotten – until one day a 19-year-old kid crawled through a broken window on two hits of purple microdot LSD. Somewhere in his (my) young mind was stored an image from an old movie: the warm, inviting cabin of Heidi’s grandfather. I looked around and there I was, in Grandfather’s cabin in the Alps, with the LSD making sure that warm feeling stuck. I fell completely in love with the place and arranged to move in, rent: 5 a month. The nice widow from the city who owned it said I could improve it any way I wanted, so every three months I would send her an update on my projects, along with a rent check.

In those days I wasn’t bound by any builder’s code (and to this day no insurance regulation). Being that I hated anything that had to do with conformity, I took my first step on a journey away from conventional living, and drugs as well, and into years of intense spiritual practices. I tried as best I could to imitate the lives of the hermits and sages.

When I look back I’m a bit embarrassed at myself. I was like a kid in a sandbox of spiritual traditions, but more of an immature, irresponsible, spiritual flunky than the sage I dreamed of becoming. I feel like I never perfected a single practice, but as the real masters say, the actual practices are worthless, but you gotta do the practices in order to see they’re worthless. Once you finally realize there’s nothing you can do, only then are you qualified to give up totally and surrender.

However, being so irresponsible does have its advantages. I was free to flip convention the bird and resurrect my childhood imagination into a lifestyle. I think that’s what makes children’s faces light up when they come here. There’s so much Peter Pan stuff for them to do and look at. I once heard a youngster say, “This is way better than Disney World.”

As far as wants, dreams and desires go, I probably have as many as anyone else. I just let go and watch my mind toy with its wishes, as a mother would let her child play with his new toy fire truck.

The good mother knows her child is in for a life of ups and downs, joys and sorrows. She sees the value of both, doesn’t interfere, and just lets the kid entertain himself. She knows he’ll either grow out of his pretend world or stay in it and become a real fireman.

A while back, I consented to a short interview on Finland’s public television with two well-known Finnish environmentalists who came to see what The Stone Camp was all about. The first thing they said on camera was, “This place is like a fairyland but it’s real.” Another time an art teacher from New York said it’s an example of “living art.”

How did it happen? How did it go from the lowest of dwellings to “living art”? How did it become the conscious entity that I know it to be? It didn’t happen all at once or from some pre-set plan. But it did have a lot to do with having Kathy in my life.