Grumbles From the Grave

by Robert A. Heinlein

  May 15, 1961: Robert A. Heinlein to Lurton Blassingame

  We are now a two-wheelbarrow family. That accounts for the delay.

  Don't brush it off. Are you a two-wheelbarrow family? How many two-wheelbarrow families do you know? I mean to say: two-Cadillac families are common; there are at least twenty in our neighborhood, not counting Texans. But we are the only two-wheelbarrow family I know of.

  It came about like this: I started building Ginny's irrigation dam. Simultaneously Ginny was spreading sheep manure, peat moss, gravel, etc., and it quickly appeared that every time she wanted the wheelbarrow I had it down in the arroyo—and vice versa. A crisis developed, which we resolved by going whole hog and phoning Sears for a second one. Now we are both happily round-shouldered all day long, each with his (her) own wheelbarrow.

  (Live a little! Buy yourself a second one. You don't know what luxury is until you have a wheelbarrow all your own, not constantly being borrowed by your spouse.)

  This dam thing (or damn' thing) I call (with justification) Project Stonehenge; it is the biggest civil engineering feat since the Great Pyramid. The basis of it is boulders, big ones, up to two or three tons each—and I move them into place with block and tackle, crowbar, pick and shovel, sweat, and clean Boy Scout living. Put a manila sling around a big baby, put one tackle to a tree, another to another tree, take up hard and tight with all my weight on each and lock them—then pry at the beast with a ninety-pound crowbar of the sort used to move freight cars by hand, gaining an inch at a time.

  Then, when at last you have it tilted up, balanced, and ready to fall forward, the sling slips and it falls back where it was. This has been very good for my soul.

  (And my waist line—I am carrying no fat at all and am hard all over. Well, moderately hard.)

  Editor's Note: Robert enjoyed doing rock work, and the grounds were greatly improved by three decorative pools and revetments done with rocks.

  SANTA CRUZ COUNTY

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  Heinlein surveying at Bonny Doon. The Heinleins moved to Santa Cruz in the mid-sixties.

  Editor's Note: We loved our home in Colorado Springs—Robert had done so much in the way of rock work outside, and we had lavished our care on it for some years.

  But there were two reasons why we had to leave. One was my health. For some years, it had become increasingly evident that I could not stand the altitude—I had "mountain sickness." The other reason was that the house was too small for our files of papers and books. We left Colorado on the seventeenth anniversary of our marriage, to look on the West Coast for land for building. Three months were spent on this quest before we bought the land in Santa Cruz.

  We remained in that house until 1987, at which time we found that it was too far from medical services, which Robert needed quickly at times. So we looked in Carmel, and found a suitable house, although it had all the drawbacks of the ones we had decided against in Santa Cruz.

  February 1, 1966: Robert A. Heinlein to Lurton Blassingame

  We moved into this house because it is twenty miles closer to the land we finally bought than is the apartment in Watsonville and is the closest rental we could find to our new land—not very close at that: nine miles in a straight line, fourteen by road, twenty-six minutes by car. But the house, besides being nearer, is a vast improvement on the apartment. It is all on one floor, has three bedrooms (which gives me a separate room for my study), two full baths, a dishwasher, a garbage grinder, a double garage, and a gas furnace with forced air instead of electric strip heaters. It is an atrocity in other respects—such as a large view window which has an enchanting view solely of a blank wall ten feet away—but we will be comfortable in it and reasonably efficient until we get our new house built.

  The dismal saga of how we almost-not-quite bought another parcel of land is too complex to tell in detail. Those forty-three acres of redwoods located spang on the San Andreas Fault—Ginny thought I had my heart set on them, I thought she had her heart set on them . . . and in fact both of us were much taken by them. It is an utterly grand piece of land—very mountainous, two rushing, gushing mountain streams with many waterfalls, thousands of redwoods up to two hundred feet tall. But in fact it was better suited to playing Götterdämmerung than it was to building a year-round home. Most of the acreage was so dense as to be of no possible use, and the forest was so dense that the one site for a house would receive sunlight perhaps three hours each day. Mail delivery would be a mile away . . .

  * * *

  I agreed but insisted that we shop first for houses . . . as designing and building a house would cost me, at a minimum, the time to write at least one book as a hidden expense. So we did—but it took me only a couple of days to admit that it was impossible to buy a house ready built which would suit me, much less Ginny. Firetraps built for flash, with other people's uncorrectable mistakes built into them! (Such as a lovely free-form swimming pool so located as to be overlooked by neighbors' windows! Such as Romex wiring, good for only five years, concealed in the wooden walls of a house . . . )

  The new property has none of the hazards of the property we backed away from buying. It is on a well-paved county road and has 220-volt power and telephone right at the property line. It does not have gas (we expect to use butane for cooking, fuel oil for heating), does not have sewer, does not have municipal water. So we'll use a septic tank and a spread field. It has its own spring, which delivers a steady flow at present of 6,000 gallons per day. We had a very heavy rainstorm over this last weekend, so I went up and checked the flow again and was pleased to find that it had not increased at all—i.e., it apparently comes from deep enough that one storm does not affect it. I'll keep on checking it during the coming dry season but we were assured by a neighbor (not the owner) that the spring had not failed in the past seventy-five years. I plan to try to develop it still farther and plan to install not only a swimming pool but two or three ornamental pools and ponds of large capacity against the chance that we might run short of water in the dry season. But I'm not worried about it; it is redwood country and where there are redwoods there is water.

  The land is a gentle, rolling slope, with the maximum pitch being around one in ten and the house site level and about forty feet higher than the road. The parcel is clear but it has on it some eight or nine clumps of redwoods, plus a few big, old live oaks which look like pygmies alongside the sequoias. These are sequoia sempervirens, the coastal redwood, and ours are second growth, about a hundred feet tall, up a yard thick, and around ninety years old. There are also a few other conifers, ponderosa, fir, cypress, etc., but they hardly show up among the redwoods. I have not yet conducted a tree census, but we seem to have something in excess of a hundred of the very big trees, plus younger ones of various sizes. Each redwood clump is associated with the cut stumps of the first growth, six or eight feet thick and eight or ten feet high. Since redwood does not decay, they are still there, great silvery free-form sculptures. Ginny is planning one garden designed around a group of them.

  I am very busy designing the house. I am anxious to start building as soon as possible as I really can't expect to get any writing done, at least until this new house is designed and fully specified. Building becomes a compulsive fever with me; it drives everything else out of my mind.

  April 6, 1966: Robert A. Heinlein to Lurton Blassingame

  . . . I'm still bending over a hot drawing board—I'm very slow, for I am not an architect and have to look up almost every detail. But the end is in sight. As soon as I can get a water system hooked onto our spring and a driveway bulldozed, we will probably buy a thirdhand trailer and move onto the place during building—Ginny is now willing to do this in order to move our cat here. There has been a rabies scare in Colorado Springs; all animals are under a quarantine and we are having to keep him in a kennel with our vet.

  June 22, 1966: Virginia Heinlein to Lurton Blassingame

  [Robert] is still relaxing, since when he spends too much time out of bed, he tire
s very easily . . .

  Every once in a while I hear some sounds which seem to indicate that our cat is trying to despoil a bird's nest nearby . . . He seems to like it here, hasn't started that hike back to Colorado which I predicted.

  July 1, 1966: Robert A. Heinlein to Lurton Blassingame

  I have received, but not yet read, The Psychology of Sleep—but will read it as soon as I can stay awake that long; I want to find out why I am so sleepy. I seem to be practically well now, save that I am sleepy all the time; I'm sleeping twelve and fourteen hours a day. I get up late, have breakfast, and can barely stay awake long enough to go back to bed—get up again, get a couple hours of paperwork done (with great effort), then take a nap. Resolve to get something done after dinner but find myself going to bed again. It is not unpleasant save that I am totally useless and the work piles up. The incision seems to have healed perfectly and my surgeon says that after the 15th of July I can do anything I wish—lift 200 lbs . . . which will be remarkable as I never could in the past. (Oh, off the floor, yes—but not a clean press up into the air.)

  Editor's Note: Robert's health was somewhat fragile. From time to time he would be required to have various major and minor surgery. Although he was able to do extremely heavy work at times, illnesses such as influenza hit him hard, and it might take weeks for him to recover.

  These illnesses fell into major and minor groupings. In his early days he had TB; recovery took about a year. In 1970, he had a perforated diverticulum, undiscovered for seventeen days; it took a long recovery period. Because of the shock to his system, he followed that with herpes Zoster. Because the doctors were afraid to remove his gall bladder at the time they operated for peritonitis, that operation had to be deferred until 1971, when he had recovered from shingles.

  In 1978 in Moorea, he had a TIA [Transient Ischemic Attack, a temporary interference of blood to the brain], which resulted in his undergoing a carotid-bypass operation.

  August 15, 1966: Robert A. Heinlein to Lurton Blassingame

  Ginny is fretted and frustrated because she does not yet have water at the building site—badly needed to stabilize a very dusty excavation and to permit her to start ground cover for great, raw cuts that will wash away if not planted before the heavy rains. Someone warned us when we came here that Santa Cruz was very much a mañana place, with the leisurely attitude affecting even the gringos—and that person was so very right. We were promised a pumping system in two weeks; it has now been more than a month—if we don't have water in a few days, I am going to have to get very nasty with that subcontractor. Which I dread.

  We can't pour concrete for the house until we have [a building] permit, but there are lots of other things to be done. I still hope and expect that we will be closed in by the rains and able to move in, even though the interior will still have to be finished—if Ginny and I both don't wind up in straitjackets before then.

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  Heinlein with Elf of Bonny Doon.

  September 4, 1966: Robert A. Heinlein to Lurton Blassingame

  We have (a) started the house, (b) acquired an unhousebroken kitten, and (c) had a houseguest on our hands for three days when we literally have no room nor facilities for an ill houseguest—so we are running in circles. . .

  The kitten is a fine little girl cat who buzzes all the time . . . and craps right under this typewriter with healthy regularity . . . and gets herself lost under the house . . . and insists on sleeping under Ginny's head . . . and throws our tomcat into a bad state of nerves most of the time. Apparently she isn't old enough to smell like a girl cat to him; she is simply a monster who has invaded his home and who takes up entirely too much of Mama's and Papa's time. But she is another lame duck; Ginny rescued her when she was about to be sent to the pound. Oh, me. Once we get her housebroken and once she comes into heat I think she will turn out to be a most welcome addition to the household—right now she's a burr under the saddle.

  I finally fired our silly architect and took over the job myself . . .

  * * *

  We have water now, on a temporary pump hookup from a temporary tank . . . The site is no longer the horrible dust desert that it was; [Ginny] has it watered down (endless shifting of the single sprinkler the temporary hookup will run) and little green shoots coming up to hold the soil against the coming rains. Between times she keeps coffee and lemonade and candy bars on the job and passes them around (very good for morale), and makes trips down to Santa Cruz as needed for almost anything—and keeps house and cooks and keeps books, and falls into bed dead beat each night. (But the extreme effort is going to get us into our house by the rainy season—we can hardly wait.)

  * * *

  . . . asking me to lecture. The fee is satisfactory and I have in mind an outline for an appropriate lecture. Will you take over from here and accept subject to the following conditions? Mr. Heinlein's terribly busy schedule (i.e., mixing concrete, carrying block, and pushing a shovel, which is none of his business) will not permit him to accept a date to lecture earlier than the first of the year, and also I would expect transportation, to wit, round trip by air from San Francisco to Chicago.

  . . . I guess that is about all, and I've still got to do some electrical work tonight—calculate the maximum working loads for the whole house and try to see if I can use a four-wire, three-phase cable underground . . . This is just one of the hairy little jobs the architect left undone.

  The new cat is out again and again under the house—no way to get under, but she manages. Ginny has just gone out in the dark with a dish of cat food and a flashlight, to try to lure her out. Never a dull moment around here—

  November 21, 1966: Robert A. Heinlein to Lurton Blassingame

  I enclose a picture taken last week of the state of the job. As you can see, the masonry walls are almost complete. Four courses of "bond beam" now go around the top of what you see (looks like all the other courses but has buried in it four half-inch steel bars, poured in place—this building is for all practical purposes a steel-reinforced monolith; there are hundreds and hundreds of pounds of steel concealed in it).

  But we are having trouble: (a) the winter rains have started; (b) our mason is being childishly temperamental. The contractor is quite disgusted with him, and I have refrained from telling him off simply because I did not wish to joggle the contractor's elbow—he being a number one conscientious and mature person.

  December 4, 1966: Robert A. Heinlein to Lurton Blassingame

  We are now building between raindrops, but thank God the masonry on the house is at last all finished. We still have two little masonry outbuildings to put up, a pump house and an electrical service housing, but these won't take long and are neither urgent nor difficult—even I could lay them up. We need about two weeks of dry weather to frame the roof and put on the roofing—but the winter rains have set in unusually early and unusually hard and it could very well be some time in January before we get the roof on. The contractor has decided that the job will work every dry day from now on, including Saturdays and Sundays. But dry days are scarce. There have been only two fairly dry days this week, it is storming right now and is supposed to rain even harder tomorrow. But I am not dismayed, as carpentry is not nearly as affected by weather as is masonry. Our worst problem is to get a long enough dry spell to permit us to put in the septic tank and to dig a 200-foot ditch for the services, water, electricity, telephone, and low-voltage messenger lines. This soil is getting very soggy for backhoe operations.

  February 3, 1967: Robert A. Heinlein to Lurton Blassingame

  At the moment, [Ginny] is over at the house site swinging a paint brush . . . The job is still moving but very slowly; it looks from the outside much as it did in the last picture I sent you, but quite a lot has been accomplished inside. We are stalled by the glazing—still no firm date as to when our double-glazing units will arrive. It is not only a strain on us—Ginny in particular, since she has to put up with the primitive housekeeping and cooking facilities of this sum
mer cabin—but also it has had a very bad effect on our general contractor; he's become moody and tempery, and unable to supervise other mechanics without chewing them out—which in my opinion is not the way to get the most out of a man.

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  Robert and Virginia tree planting at Bonny Doon.

  February 17, 1967: Robert A. Heinlein to Lurton Blassingame

  Building—we seem to be frozen in a nightmare. The glazing units still have not arrived—the manager won't even promise a firm date. The water closets and hand basins which were supposed to be in stock in San Jose (it now appears) do not even exist and we must wait until the factory again makes a run of that color. One of the soi-disant "mechanics" who loused up our water system is now suing us for "wages"—trial on the 24th. We have developed a great big bog of quicksand in our driveway, so it must now be rebuilt at God knows what expense. In the meantime, the wiring progresses at painful slowness . . .

  But our house in Colorado is sold at last and at not too great a loss—not much immediate cash out of the deal after closing costs and commission, but nevertheless I am much relieved. Ginny continues to swing a paint brush daily while I am slowly getting back to the drawing board to finish the detailing of the cabinet work. We are in good health, we don't owe any bills we can't pay, and Ginny says we can stay out of the red despite all these problems. The weather is beautiful, the rainy season is almost over, and things don't look too bad.

  June 27, 1967: Robert A. Heinlein to Lurton Blassingame

  Nothing else of any real importance today. Ginny is working herself silly everyday on the woodwork finishing—bleaching and sanding and varnishing the mahogany; I'm still sweating over a hot drawing board on the last of the finish details; today I'm designing Ginny's office. The cabinetwork and paneling is about 80% finished now; then we have the floors, ceilings, fireplaces, permanent lighting fixtures, front steps, driveway, and some exterior painting to do—still lots but the end is a faint gleam in the distance.