It was in that process of getting ready to cut the insulation I discovered a problem. It was a problem severe enough it had to be fixed, but my parts inventory told me I didn’t have what it would take. I couldn’t run the furnace. I checked the clock first, but it was almost ten pm. I didn’t figure Johnny Menard, cheap bastard that he is, kept the stores open even that late. Though it had been warmer the days before, this night was just over freezing. No two ways around it, I was sleeping in the shop for the night.
I finished up my insulation job, including the seam-line between the body frame and the bed. Doing that required me to move my bed to the van floor. Once I got that placed I set up a fan on top of a small box, blowing up and into the van. I figured it would be good to circulate some fresh shop air rather than let the fumes from the expanding foam build up. I suppose it was one thirty a.m. or so by the time I really got bedded down. That is where I slept. Sprawled out on the floor of a cargo van inside a big woodshop.
It’s funny. It was a a restless night of sleep. I wasn’t used to being there. I have been sleeping in the van and I felt sort of uneasy in the big-ness of the room. I woke up several times on my own. The shop is in a multi tenant industrial building. Right next door there is a small wood product manufacturing shop. In fact, the walls don’t even go all the way up to the ceiling, there is about a six foot gap just covered by a layer of plastic. So it was from that shop at 4am I heard the opening and slamming of the door. Lights flipped on and the shop lite up. My shop lite up too. I could hear the man who came in swearing and throwing things around. I don’t what was going wrong over there but he sure wasn’t happy to be there. About six am the rest of the workforce came in. There was a whole bunch more yelling and swearing. I continued to be restless until 7am when my alarm went off. It was a rough night.
I laid there for a moment. Moaned some profanity of my own and drug my ass up. I put the fan away. Since I displaced a bunch of stuff when I moved my bed to the van floor I had to throw all that stuff inside. I unplugged and coiled up my extension cord and got that stashed inside and slammed closed the back doors. It was precisely at that moment the door of the shop opened and a woman stepped inside.
Had it been Satan himself that walked through that door at that moment, I suppose it would have been worse. Right off hand that is the only thing I can think of. In fact in many ways that would have been better. At least I could have have gotten to use the punch line of the funniest (clean) joke I know, “…Aye, I’m not scared of you, I’ve been married to your sister for twenty years now…”
No, instead it was the owner of the shop. She was there early to check on some boxes that had arrived two days before. Now if it would have been fifteen minutes earlier I would have still been asleep. I guess that would have been worse as well. Anyway, there was some explaining to do. I used the story I had previously devised. That I was dropping off some insulation for my friend. But she was relentless of course. I never have done well under the direct questioning of an angry woman. I had to own up as the owner of the tools stashed over in the corner of the shop as well. For that, saying I was storing my stuff there as I helped a dude remodel his kitchen.
It wasn’t a lot of fun. But in all of that of course it was *way* worse for my friend. The guy who had lent me don’t ask/don’t tell access to a shop that wasn’t technically his to lend. It was a week between that morning of the wakeup and his meeting with the boss. He admitted to me later that day I had gotten him into a lot of trouble and of course I feel terrible about that.
I had tried to be pretty small foot print. I didn’t even turn up the heat the nights I was there. —One of the attributes of living here in the Land of Ice and Snow is your body gets to think fifty degrees is a great working temperature. I will admit to the guilty pleasure of arriving one night to find the thermostat accidentally left set at seventy. I couldn’t help that could I? Well, I enjoyed that night with a smile on my face and I turned it down in the morning.
I really shouldn’t have kept anything stashed there. It was foolish of me to think it wouldn’t have been observed. It took so long to load and unload and it was hard to live in the van I was working in. Laziness and naivety on my part.
But here is the rub though. The one crazy element of this whole story… The shop, in its primary purpose, is to build advertising for sustainable and low impact living. I am building a 63 square foot, solar powered, self sustaining living space to be used inside an urban area. I grant you, I wasn’t supposed to be there. But how much closer to their mission statement, and putting my money where their mouth is, could I be?
I know that’s what hooked my friend, back on that first day, when I ran into him in a bar and told him my story. It’s what hooks everyone who thinks about more than themselves. I am doing something environmental people dream about. To varying degrees, whether it even be wishful thinking, they aspire to. Living part of their lives in a small footprint off the grid. This growing technological ability is the cause we all fight for instead of a big paycheck. I feel bad for my friend and for everyone who gets in trouble for something they believe in.
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