Shielding Oneself
Yesterday, I wandered over to the far north side of the back hillside, a place at have largely ignored for the past two months as I’ve focused all of my attention on the Hobbit House on the south side of the back hillside. I had seen that one of my metal agave sculptures had been upended by the strong winds we had had earlier in the week. I had also seen Joventino spending a good deal of time weeding the rock garden on that side and recalled him mentioning that he wanted to use some of the yellow flowering ice plants that I have been saving for the Hobbit House green roof. That side of the rocky hillside got treated to over 140 plants last summer and an inordinate amount of them were yellow-flowering ice plants, so he wanted to add a few to a couple bare spots. While I was sitting on the teak bench over by the metal Joshua Tree statue, I was surveying the southern side of the hillside, focusing on the Hobbit House area. The perspective was valuable because it showed me something I hadn’t really paid attention to.
When Mary Dragoo owned the property to our south, she rarely used the back parking lot that is just up the hill from where I sited the Hobbit House. The new owners, Robert and Joanna Mooney are car people. To be more accurate, Robert, a Marine Biologist, is a car guy who’s father built performance engines for a living. That apple didn’t fall from the tree and Robert has a regular fleet of vehicles for himself, Joanna and their two kids. He is supplementing his four-car garage with an added two-car garage below in their casita and he has several auto shops in both locations on the property. In the meantime, that parking lot above the Hobbit House seems to always have a truck hovering over it, looking like it is suspended right over the Moonstruck Shire, s we have come to call it.
When I saw the truck from the north side bench, I realized that I should consider doing something to shield the gap in the trees between our property and the Mooney’s. It is through that gap that I usually carry materials down the hillside since the steps next to the house make a lot of twists and turns and is rather tight with the house on one side and a large bed of lavender on the other. But the gap is perhaps fifteen feet wide and positioned such that there are a layer of blue agaves with a terraced wall for the parking area above it by some four feet. As I stared at the space I was reminded of my freshman English seminar at Cornell, fifty years ago. The instructor in that course, the main purpose of which was to force incoming freshmen to learn to write, chose some very unusual visual study subjects to have us write about. The first assignment was for us to analyze the space between the undergraduate and graduate libraries, a path that most Cornell students had to take several times each day to go to the main student union, the campus store, the library or many of the classroom buildings on the Arts Quadrangle.
To do that analysis and write that first college paper in 1971, I had to think about something intangible, a space, as it were. It was not a normal exercise, but it was a useful one. It involved considering the comings and goings through the space, the relationship of the boundaries of the space, the relative elevations of the space at its various depths and the human aspects of what the space meant to people. I knew that learning how to think, analyze and write were the objectives of the assignment. When I received a mark of D on that first paper, I also realized that this right of passage for a freshman writing seminar was like my freshman English class in my first year at Hebron Academy four years prior. The program was designed to knock us all down so that we could be built up over the year. It is a time-honored educational approach which must be seen as valuable as a motivational and disciplinary tool. I think I ended up with a B in the course overall for the semester, not stellar, but also not particularly harmful or demotivating.
I never thought before today that that learning experience from fifty years ago would come in handy in a literal sense rather than just a general educational sense. But here I am, without a project on my plate, staring at a space that needs a solution. The best solution would be an organic one, but a large enough tree would be either very expensive or take a long time to mature to a grand enough scale to serve the shielding purpose. Instead, I have opted to use a purchased metal screen onto which I will adorn it with relevant symbols of our back hillside. There will be a hawk, a sun and moon combination and a dancing Kokopelli symbolizing the whimsy of the hillside. I will add some hanging succulent plants to remind me that we are in a garden. I have looked closely at the space and know exactly how I will position the two screens that measure a total of eight feet in width and more than six feet high. They sit on flat legs that brace from front to back and those have holes that seem right-sized to take a rebar J-stake to secure them to the ground. I will not know until I erect my new shield as to whether it will be sturdy against the wind. I am certain it will provide the visual privacy I seek, but I am equally unsure of its stability.
The only thing worse than a crowded view is one with a shaky element. So, my weekend mission will be to find a way to make those two visual shields rock solid. In fact, I suspect it will require just that…rocks, my best friends on this hillside. Once that problem gets solved, there is the added rocky road of explaining the shield to the Mooneys. I have pondered the various tack I could take and find myself resolved to simply saying that I don’t like the trucks looming over my new playhouse. No harm/no foul. I will explain that I have chosen to make both sides equally attractive so that everyone will be happy with the visuals. I managed to get past the 8’ tall Mexican rooster without any hurt feelings, so let’s see how building a wall, albeit a finite and attractive one, goes down.