Free The Eden Express by Mark Vonnegut Page A

thirty feet into the air, covered over with hand-split boards of every imaginable dimension, which were covered in turn by hand-split shingles called shakes. It was twenty feet wide and forty long, and consisted of two stories, each divided into two twenty-by-twenty rooms with thirteen-foot
ceilings, and an attic topped by a leaky roof. The strangest thing about that building was that there wasn’t a triangular brace anywhere. It swayed slightly in the wind.
    What we proceeded to do didn’t help matters much. We tore off the roof and added another story, topped with the most insane roof you could imagine. The first third of the house was covered by a slant roof that started at four feet and rose to twelve, facing east. The next third had the same setup facing west. The back of the house had twin peaked gables facing south. The damned thing looked like a pterodactyl learning to fly. The top floor, partitioned off with blankets into five little bedrooms, was sprinkled with a strange assortment of windows which we always kept an eye out for on the way home from town trips.
    We rebuilt the front porch, which had collapsed, and added a new one under the third-story gables. The work went slowly, partly because of our inexperience but more because we had to cut down trees and handsplit any lumber we needed. Three people working all day could split enough boards to cover what six dollars’ worth of plywood would have done tighter and stronger. The wood we split was a bitch to work with. Right angles, straight edges, and so on don’t just happen; each piece had to be whittled and fiddled with incessantly and still never fit quite right. Along with the major construction, there was cleaning windfalls from the trail, cutting and stacking firewood, and several other projects.
    An average day: up with the sun; fetch water from the stream; cook breakfast, usually ground whole-grain porridge with honey and dried milk; work five or six hours; lunch, usually peanut butter, dried fruit, and honey; work another six hours; then all run down to the lake, tear our clothes off and splash around awhile; back up to dinner, which was usually brown rice and some vegetable we had brought from town. After dinner we read, wrote letters, made music, or just talked. Kitchen chores were shared by all, though I remember telling Virge, after a snotty comment
about the quality of my cleanup job, that I’d get better as soon as she showed a little interest in the chain saw. The traditional male-female division of labor would have made a lot of sense out there, but we stuck as closely as possible to these newfangled urban notions of equality.
    The cooking got a bit fancier when we brought in a big old wood stove (a full day’s operation) and set up an inside kitchen. Then, if someone was willing to grind flour for an hour or so, we could bake bread and make pies with the apples and blackberries we had coming out of our ears. Occasionally someone would catch a trout or two or shoot a grouse with a gun John Eastman gave us, but mostly it was very simple vegetarian fare.
    Nootka and Tanga, sisters from a Border collie-Samoyed cross, joined us in early September. Nootka was theoretically Virginia’s dog and Tanga Vincent’s, but both turned out to be generalized commune dogs. Samoyeds and Border collies don’t cross very well. Nootka turned out a lot better than Tanga and had a certain impish charm, but neither was much use around the farm and both were always underfoot, tearing things up and general-nuisancing. Tanga was an outright foul and obnoxious creature who should have been shot. Zeke’s nobility shone forth brighter than ever next to these canine misfits.
    It was a great life. I didn’t mind the physical discomforts—smoke in the eyes around the cooking fire, rain, cold, lots of hard work, the outhouse, general dirtiness, being so far from civilization, the mosquitoes, the impossibility of keeping anything clean or dry. I loved it all. The only