Beginnings

The week before we left California, we began to get phone calls from Tim.

“I’m bringing a trampoline cover,” he said. “And a come-along, and some drills and tools. Do you have any tools?”

The calls were ominous. We’d packed dozens of books and other things into boxes, hauled them to the post office, and sent them off to Vermont, but our apartment was still dangerously crowded. The trailer we had on order in Woodland, two hours away, was only 4 feet wide by 8 feet long. He was threatening to bring two suitcases packed full, and I couldn’t imagine how we’d fit it all.

“I’ve got tools here,” I said. “And we can do all the work up at the Dome if we have to.”

The Dome is where I first went when I moved to California in 2000. It’s a place that collects people like an animal shelter collects strays, a geodesic dome on a redwood-studded hilltop in west Sonoma County. My uncle David collected spare parts for VW vans, coils of plastic tubing, tools, nuts, bolts, plumbing fixtures and lumber. It was all still there, even after he’d died, sinking in under layers of grass and fallen leaves. 

The first time we brought Tim there, we had orders to keep him away from Willie, one of the Domers, who wore his beard long and went barefoot everywhere. Liberal Willie and conservative Tim would be a combustible mix, especially around Christmastime, we figured.

But they began talking about school buses – how Tim cut down and welded one of his into a flatbed truck for the tree farm, and how Willie and some of the others slept in one while they built the dome. My grandmother slept there, too, when she came to visit.

“That Willie is a good man. Liberal as hell, but we get along,” said Tim after that first visit.

But now we had to worry about attaching a trailer hitch to the back of the Mercedes, picking up the trailer two hours away, packing everything into the trailer on the streets of San Francisco, and heading east. Tim, certain that there were no tools in San Francisco or vicinity, had taken it upon himself to be prepared.

“My mom had to take the toolbox out,” Colleen told me Sunday night before he arrived. “And some other things. But he’s bringing the trampoline cover.”

“Christ,” I said. “How are we ever going to make it home?”

We got a call Monday as we were trying to pack, and recovering from a weekend wedding, that his plane was early.

“I’m flying into L.A. at 3 p.m.,” he told us. We hoped he meant San Francisco, and went back to packing. We scooped him up at the airport, and nothing from then on when exactly, or even remotely, to plan. The trailer hitch didn’t arrive. We had to be out of the apartment a day earlier than expected. When the trailer hitch arrived, it wasn’t the right one.