A brief history of Gooble Dell
   
   
   
   
   
   This article is online at http://www.efn.org/~wolfe/history.htm, about
the house at 2060 west 13th.
   Gooble Dell began in 1990 as a fairly flat vacant lot that I bought from
the City of Eugene for $8522. My intent was to arrange a way to live with
other people, virtually all of whom require a building. I had saved $12,500
over the previous year and a half, working temp service jobs, doing two
paper routes and living in my car in Skinner Butte Park. I sold a portion of
the back of the lot to the neighbor for $1600 and hired a fellow to move a
house in, but the fellow died of a stroke that month and a new property
owner confiscated the condemned house that I had fixed up to move. I tried
again with Chris Shoap and the present house for more money, $5500. With
another 6 months of temp service work, and two years of low key learning by
doing, I completed the house in the spring of 1992.
   After several more months of living other places and struggling to
coalesce an intentional community vision, I collected roommates through a
simple ad requesting $40 a month. Nearly all the respondents have been
seriously bad self-managers down on their luck, only willing to share a one
bedroom house with several others out of lack of alternatives. My hope was
that the forced emotional maturation of the shared small space would evolve
into a positive intentional community. That did seem to happen somewhat.
   Many of the neighbors in the early 90's were quite argumentative among
themselves, some often violent and requiring police referee. My own crowd
was quite tame by comparison, probably due to having little material wealth
and territory to argue about.
   I maintained complete autonomy financially with the roommates, and they
mostly with each other as well. We had no formal meetings ever, mostly due
to my prohibition of it. I encouraged and engaged creative construction
with some success, and we all brought home interesting garbage of all sorts
to share or play with. Shared food was often prolific and a challenge to
manage.
   Security was never a concern. Virtually nothing was ever taken
improperly and I permitted no locking of the house. Occasionally a house or
car in the neighborhood would get robbed and I would puzzle about that. Once
my own car was rifled with nothing missing, once three nice books
disappeared and once a roommate left with everyone hating him, inspiring
him to take a few items that weren't his.
   I put no limit initially on the number of roommates, allowing anyone to
move in who could determine an unclaimed space they were willing to live in.
I set the cost high enough to cover actual out of pocket expenses, for a
while making the lower cost spaces $25 a month. With inflation, EWEB
increases and neighbor harassment about too many people, the cost of the
cheapest space is now $70 a month.
   Eventually, perhaps related to reduced use of amphetamine, the three
most violent neighbor households worked out their internal differences. One
of them, who had from the beginning anonymously called the Land Use
enforcement people quite often, managed to win a measure of respect from the
city people, commencing a shakedown with me of minutiae land use regulation.
From the start of that I was able to establish a fairly positive rapport
with the enforcement people. My fondness for cobbled equipment, ragged
vegetation, and prolific associates was initially unchallenged for the most
part.
   Real Estate turnover during the housing price bubble replaced many of
the more ragged households with people who appear to be more private and
more upset by the presence of ragged people. My own household evolved
similarly, though in neighborhood presentation nothing looked any
different. This was tested in a dramatic way one day, with the arrest of
three people in a camping area of the backyard for possession of meth
amphetamine and possible production. An officer determined that I could
verify the contents of two other outbuildings near the camping area, and as
a result the quite exhaustive search carried out by the police completely
omitted those buildings and the main house. My phone had apparently been
tapped for quite some time prior to the bust, convincing the police that
the drug activity was being hid from nearly everyone, and that my word
could be relied on in their purpose.
   At the time of the bust the population of the household had hovered at
just over twenty souls for a couple of years, with no important unrest.
Though some were defiantly indigent, expenses were not an issue and rapport
was easy to manage. Many local neighbor children came to play in the house,
some of them daily. I had established a babysitting arrangement with a
friend, taking care of her son two to four days a week and evolving a
parental identity. Though I haven't personally had much openness to using
mind altering drugs, I had no issue with being around others who do. I
regretted the loss of the extra camping people and the senseless curse on
meth amphetamine use.
   For most of my twenty year presence here I have made a point of
conversing with neighbors often, on whatever terms they are easiest with.
Some I would formally visit, some I would catch in their yard for ten
minutes or so, and some would come over to chase their children. None of
them seemed particularly hateful or a danger to my wellbeing. Even the
couple who called the Land Use people so often eventually eased up about
me, at least as someone to converse with.
   In May of 2006 that ended. An anonymous coalition of three neighbors and
some supporters called in a more serious complaint, including a written
form with pictures of my property. The result was a huge expensive disaster
and total souring of my rapport with all the neighbors that appear to be,
or to empathize with, the attackers. My girlfriend expressed empathy for
the attackers also, estranging us somewhat. I wrote an article online at
http://www.efn.org/~wolfe/neighbor.htm describing the bust.
   One of the attackers spoke to me on the day of the bust, expressing his
confusion about it and his quandary with being around my style of society.
Two of the anonymous attackers had made a point for quite some time of
expressing bubbly friendliness, sometimes with gifts. Except for the one
fellow, everyone denied involvement and offered no clarity about the social
context. The overt lying about involvement on the part of most of those
involved, combined with the confusing friendliness, has made me loathe to
converse with neighbors at all, particularly those supporting the written
bust. The recent presentation of a proposed city bus route through the
neighborhood also brought out dingy self-righteous remarks representing the
official neighborhood group as a black balling organization that may well
have inspired doing an especially brutal bust against me.
   The bust also raised the serious question of the actual role of the code
enforcement people in the neighborhood. Of the 36 households with which I
have become familiar in my twenty years here, only four are in buildings
that I have not observed being remodeled without a permit. Most of the
remodels have been quite major and easily observed. Since I spend a huge
amount of my day on the front porch, and I have evolved an intense paranoia
of the white cars of City of Eugene employees, I am fairly confident that
no inspections have escaped my notice, and in recent years all the permits
are viewable online. One neighbor had a concrete driveway inspected, one
other had an electrician lengthen the service post, and four buildings were
built from scratch. There were also two other construction busts called by
neighbors against another fellow.
   I have rarely observed or heard of anyone calling in a bust out of a
concern that something was unsafe or a fire hazard or being constructed
improperly. No-one has ever even suggested that that would even be morally
defensible. A call to the code enforcement people is always an attack, a
deliberate wrecking of someone's life, and no-one ever gets a permit for a
remodel unless they are certain they will get busted by an enemy. Getting a
permit is clearly not a moral or legal imperative to anyone. Code
enforcement has become entirely a weapon, and has no relation at all to the
actual quality of the current housing in my neighborhood.
   Land Use and Parking enforcement are similarly never called to address
neglect. Always the purpose is to restrict someone's deliberate cultural
style or liberty, or simply attack them. Neglect of a vehicle or a yard, or
the presense of suspicious visitors, nearly always inspires a neighbor to
make a direct appeal to those responsible.
   Having been so much the object of these kinds of attack I have come to
view a lot of my neighbors as sinister people. Even friendliness is suspect
as a possible sinister expression, used by some to determine which cars are
mine or whether I have too many people, or just to throw off suspicion, so
making friends among the neighbors has gone sour for me.
   Presently I am living with my girlfriend Sara, and four fellows, Isaac,
Wayne, David and Julius. Isaac has a camper truck next to the carport in
the backyard, David has a bed in the one bedroom, which Sara also uses for
an office, and everyone else has a bed in the living room. No-one shares
finances or food very much. Everyone has a computer and most are obsessive
users of it. Julius and I work parttime for friends, David and Isaac have
full time regular jobs, Wayne is on unemployment and Sara has a rental
house. I have two cars which I don't use and a huge ship, all parked in the
yard. Sara has five cars and three vans. Two of the vans are in the yard
and the rest move around. Isaac has the camper truck, and no-one else has a
vehicle.
   I have had a permit to build a three bedroom addition under the house
the last three years and peck away at it occasionally, calling an
inspection often enough to avoid loss of the permit. I have lately been
studying the ideas of the Zeitgeist Movement and doing some articles about
that on my website. I have several odd bicycles that I built and use and I
still have my friend's son Reese hanging around the house some. He's eight
years old now. I eat mostly raw food, green smoothies and steamed
vegetables, and maintain the appearance of a street drunk. I work on
Saturday's at my friend Marshall's house, running the power tools that he
can't use in his huge and endless home decorating project. I stay overnight
in his yard and walk to another friend's house to do farmwork for a couple
hours, and then get a ride home.
   Isaac composes music using piano and the computer, and he has several
water treatment alchemy projects in the camper and parked around the yard,
and he studies the subject exhaustively in books and on the internet. He
has also studied exotic supplements of all kinds and lately Quantum Touch
healing. He works at the Kiva Grocery and gives all of us quite a bit of
food. He has the appearance of a classic hippie and generally dresses to
match.
   Sara does property management for herself and her son and daughter, and
has a very major role doing camping coordination and setup for two food
booths at the Oregon Country Fair. Four of her vehicles are solely used
for that. She studies health on the internet, particularly related to
weight and blood pressure control without drugs. She has a few friends that
she hires to assist her in material handling and cleaning. This was a
particularly big deal after the Fair this year due to much of the equipment
being wet, muddy and in disarray afterwards. Keeping track of what goes with
each tent is always a big project. She is fairly embarrassed to be living at
a ragged house.
   David spends virtually all his spare time playing with his geek toys in
his cramped office, packed full of parts of dozens of creative technical
projects of all sorts. He works at the Clockmaker's Gallery, repairing
clocks and watches. He often does show and tell with small but amazing
devices that he collects. He likes to dress like a psychiatrist or engineer
and looked quite out of place here for years.
   Julius is a teenager who grew up here since he was 11. His father has
since moved to Springfield, but visits a lot, sometimes three times in a
week, bringing his younger sister. Julius often does babysitting at the
Springfield house also. He is very fond of sharing Skype phone calls and
role playing games with friends on the internet, often til very late at
night. He leaves for a month at a time every now and then to work with
Northwest Youth Corps on projects in the national parks.
   Wayne is a guitarist philosopher, with no inclination to meet any kind
of commercial goal. He studies esoteric symbolism and stories, using mostly
books and the radio, writing endless notes, mostly only comprehendible to
him. He takes long walks playing his guitar improvisationally.
   The front yard has a sign just off the sidewalk and fairly hidden
nowadays, that says in coathanger wire, Gooble Dell Public Park. In 1996 I
did some reconfiguring of my Citizen paperwork, and included establishing a
Land Patent on the property, and a declaration of the yard as open in the
daytime for anyone to use like a public park. My intent with that was to
cancel the unspoken assumption of a no trespassing sign that I feel in
other people's yards and don't want anyone to feel in mine. I also placed
an ample amount of seating and tables in the yard that anyone is welcome to
use anytime.
   The 30 foot ship is a silly art project that I built in 1996 on top of a
racing sailboat that I'd taken to Fern Ridge reservoir a few times and
burned out on using. I used to have the giant square rig mast set up, but
it has become too weak from age to be safe in the wind.
   That's the nature of Gooble Dell.
 
     Adrian Wolfe, October 22, 2009
   
  
   
   
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