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 Watson-ville 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 Gotterdammerung 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)
Heinlein surveying at Bonny Doon. The Heinleins moved to Santa Cruz in the mid-sixties. 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, ponde-rosa, 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.