Even out of high school in 1965, I was already very focused on world environmental problems. This was still at a time when the word “ecology” was pretty much unknown to the general public. Looking back, it is somewhat en heartening to note how rapidly historically (fifty years) that environmental concerns have come to dominate world consciousness. Sometimes, you need to make a mark on the wall of time in order to note any change whatsoever.
Be that as it may, immediately after I graduated from Stanford in 1970, having been tremendously influenced by both the teachings of professor Dr. Paul Ehrlich (“The Population Bomb”), as well as the whole hippie back to the land movement, I moved into a tent in the backwoods of Vashon Island and assessed how to approach my future with the smallest negative impact to nature possible. Though I understood the idea completely, as far as popular phraseology, the term “carbon footprint” was yet to surface. I lived in a little shack made from tar-paper and driftwood, with no water or electricity for a couple of years, figuring out my next strategic move. As it turned out, my next strategic move was to marry Marilyn, and before I knew it, she and our new two year old son, Miles were also living back in the woods with no electricity or water.
Looking back, I can hardly believe that Marilyn went along with the program, living out in the woods, cooking everything over a wood stove, with a two year old baby. I told her to just hang in there, and that every dollar we saved by not paying any rent would go to me building a real house, with my own two hands. And over the next couple of years, that’s what I did. I’d never built a house before, but I learned as I went along. I also got involved in tearing down buildings and salvaging the lumber, and it felt like a real good thing to do, because I wasn’t cutting down any trees, I was keeping good lumber out of the landfill. I was helping the world environmentally, and that’s all I cared about at the time.
At that time, I got real excited about wind power. It seemed like the most elegant idea that anyone could imagine, getting power from the wind. I had hardly any money at the time, we were struggling so just to get by, and I was working every daylight hour building on the house, while Marilyn brought home household money from working as a waitress and substitute teaching, all the time keeping herself respectable without the benefit of running water or electricity. I used to bring in water in two fifty five gallon drums. I built a ramp to hoist them up such that we had gravity feed into the shack.
The idea of free power from the wind was an ultimate allurement. I wound up spending every cent that I could scrape together on a brand new Australian built “Dunelite” 2kw, 120volt DC wind generator and battery bank of 20 six volt storage batteries. It was the first major purchase of anything I’d bought in my life, with the exception of the land we were living on. At a time when my contemporaries were buying new cars and houses and advancing in their new careers, I was living in a shack and spending every last dime I had on a wind generator. It was a big heavy unit weighing about 700lbs. all together. I guyed off a 80ft. Douglas fir, stripped off all the branches and bark, and with the help of a couple of snatch blocks and 150 ft. of steel cable tied to the rear bumper of my truck, I just barely managed to get that machine mounted to the top of the pole, without killing myself. Just barely.
Looking back, it amazes me the total commitment I made to that wind machine, and the high hopes I had for it. As it played out, even though the wind generator was eighty feet up, it was still too low to really get a clean, steady air flow, and it would continually pivot and loose it’s power, as it sought the wind. I tried unsuccessfully to put things right, but it was to no avail, and my adventure was an ultimate failure. Eventually we would bring in power, and I lowered the machine back to the ground and stored it carefully for about the next twenty five years, until I brought it to Kauai around 2000.
I knew that my return on electricity would not pan out in the new Kauai location, but I could not resist bringing the machine back to life, just to see what she could do in her new home. Just to see her spinning in the wind. One of the photographs posted here shows the generator set up, alongside a bank of water heating solar panels, and a second windmill, a water pumping unit, which brought water into a stainless steel tank from a shallow well. I was interested in a water feature where I hoped to experiment with aquaculture. It’s kind of a pretty photograph with everything in play.
But fate then intervened and Marilyn passed on, and I lost heart with staying in Hawaii, and returned to Idaho, where I had friends. I sold the house to some very wrong people who proceeded to trash everything, including my old friend the wind generator, before they quit paying on the purchase contract and defaulted.
Just this last week, I managed to get the hulk of the wind machine back down to the ground, where it’s sitting waiting for me to call my next shot. That’s it in the photograph. It really is a huge monster. I put the Sierra Nevada Torpedo IPA bottle in there for a size reference. That wind machine has been with me now for over forty years. I’ve dragged it through the world, for the love of an idea. Funny how things go sometimes. It’s all good.