Departure: I try to keep checking out as simple as possible. Please load and start the dishwasher if needed, gather garbage in the garbage can (there are extra bags in the bottom of the can if needed), and message me when you depart. Check out time is noon.
Hiking: Please be careful to stay on our property, especially during deer season (November through February, more or less). Trails are not well marked. A nice, easy hike is to walk out the ridge and back. The trail starts west of the cottage (walk past the fire ring and you should spot it). Great place to walk your dogs.
Bird seed and suet: I load the feeders before you check in, but if you want to refill during your stay, suet and seed are in metal cans in the garage. Please remember to replace the lids or you will be inviting the raccoons to party out there.
Sheets: There are extra sets in the dressers in each bedroom if you need them.
Cooking: If the gas goes off, walk around to the back of the cottage and you’ll see two large propane tanks. Turn off the empty tank. Turn on the full tank. And you’ll be cooking with gas again.
Power outages: Being in the forest is fantastic, until trees fall and take out the power. It happens more than I’d prefer. There are candles and a flashlight in the drawer next to the silverware drawer, all the way to the right as you face the sink. When power goes out I get a text from the electric company with estimated restoration times, which I’ll forward to you.
Turn the round switch to start the fan on the fireplace.
Fireplace: It’s an insert. No need to open the damper. Just get a fire going and enjoy. Pro tip: There is a little ring in the lower right of the insert. Turn it to turn on the fan, which will make it MUCH easier to start and maintain a fire as well as redirecting the heat into the room.
Firewood: There is split wood in the garage to use in the fireplace, and there’s a covered stack of wood near the fire pit for use there. Please don’t use the logs stacked around the property. They’re still green and won’t burn well in the pit and will cause problems if burned in the fireplace.
This is the “normal” position for door lock. It will lock whenever the door is closed.This is the position for the door lock if you DO NOT want it to lock automatically when closed.
Front door lock: The door locks automatically when you close it. To stop this from happening, turn the switch that inside from the horizontal position to the vertical position. If the door isn’t locking when you close it and are ready to leave, check to make sure the switch is horizontal.
Lights: It gets dark out here at night. Really dark. I recommend you leave the. porch light on when you go out if you’ll be returning after dark. The switch is next to the door and is labeled. I also eave the light on the table in the upstairs hallway on to make it easier to see when you go up there at night.
We’re finding a lot of native orchids on our forest farm, which we’ve started referring to as Feral Bends Forest Farm. Among them is the Showy Orchis (Galearis spectabilis). The photos below trace the progress of one specimen that we’ve been watching since we first noticed it on April 10 …
I’m tucked into an entryway of the former high school along with Trunzo, who is doing his best Belushi, rambling, raving, chortling, but I’m transfixed by the traffic light as it shifts and shimmers from one unreal color to the next.
This blotter acid is coming on strong. Really strong. I’m a fairly experienced psycho-naut at this point. But damn. This is breaking down a few new doors, leading into rooms I’ll remember vividly more than 40 years hence.
Suddenly
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, silence. Trunzo wide-eyed in a rare wordless moment. How the fuck are we going to find our way back up to Alpine, the crumbling ice rink whose parking lot we have colonized and retreat to when parents/cops/reality intrude on our teen-age rage?
It’s the start of a magical, effervescent evening, a trip that in many senses, never really ended. We walked through Swissvale, dodging other people as if we were space aliens dropped in the middle of this working-class world. Snow falls, lightly. The sidewalks crunch under our feet. Every encounter is frightening/fascinating/transcendent, no matter how trivial the earthlings might think it. When we finally arrive at our refuge, a cracking asphalt parking lot surrounded by locust trees and subdivision-separating woods, we Yeeeeeeessssssh loudly, a sign to our fellow Alpinians that we’ve arrived home.
No response.
Just the quiet roar of the Parkway East in the near distance, cold infinite stars above, a stray dog giving two large, strange teenagers a wide berth as it makes its way through the winter wasteland. Mandalas are tangled in the leafless tree branches and we start to ease into the aftaglid, that calm, settled feeling in the wake of LSD’s initial tumult. God is in his heaven, and all is right with the world.
He called me the “Ugly Baby.” My brother was dubbed, “He of Cloven Hoof.” My dog, a portly mixed breed named Mitzie, was “Sputzie, the Half Keg on Legs.” Trunzo’s wit never waned, never hesitated, and even when it was cutting, it still left you howling with laughter. I don’t recall many dull moments when that fat-ass Eye-Talian was holding court.
He’s gone. He’s hanging out in some celestial parking lot with Shog and Glenmoe and Bilson and others of our time who have departed but are emphatically not forgotten. The Scorpions are screaming from a boombox. A keg is on the way. They’re sipping Cool Crisp Carl Colteryahn Iced Tea from a half-gallon carton while they wait. Youth Eternal.
Rich’s death was a gut punch. I started googling around to see if I could uncover details, turning up nothing about Trunz but stumbling into other painful reminders of my own mortality. Because in the end, it’s always about me, Solipsistic Shithead that I am. I find obituaries describing the lives of other departed friends, a former girlfriend’s recent death, a news story on a high school buddy’s tragic son. I’m casting around, peering into murky waters of the past, and I’m not liking the implications of what’s staring back at me. I suddenly understand why my parents scan the obits every day. I empathize with Jorma Kaukonen, whose Cracks in the Finish blog has become an ongoing tribute to the death of his peers. And I think about Trunz. Other psychedelic explorations. Visiting him after his mother died, wincing at his pain as he confronted the fact that their nuclear family of five had been whittled down to just him and his sister. His successful struggle to stay clean and sober after emerging from the clutches of a vicious opioid addiction that almost claimed him on multiple occasions. The time he visited us in Washington, D.C., where he roamed the monuments with childlike glee and proved beyond a doubt that his super powers weren’t dulled in the least by sobriety. Still funny, full tilt, drinking deeply from the chalice he’d been handed when he cleaned up. And the time we toured Carrie Blast Furnaces on the Swissvale/Rankin border, a rusting tribute to Pittsburgh’s industrial past. I wanted to visit for source material for the novel I’m perpetually in the process of writing (or, more accurately, talking about writing). I emerged with the inspiration for a short story I later wrote about Joe Magarac – and a day with Trunz that was every bit as magical as that trip we took four decades earlier.
I know Jimi Hendrix is reputed to have written The Wind Cries Mary after a battle with his girlfriend over lumpy mashed potatoes, but in my mescal-fueled musings about Trunz, after I listened to several hours of Frank Zappa while the fireplace roared and the dog and parrot watched warily from a safe distance, that Hendrix tune bubbled into my brain. It serves as a perfect tribute to Trunzo. Or lumpy mashed potatoes. And that somehow seems appropriate.
THE WIND CRIES MARY
After all the jacks are in their boxes
And the clowns have all gone to bed
You can hear happiness staggering on down the street
Footprints dressed in red
And the wind whispers, “Mary”
A broom is drearily sweeping
Up the broken pieces of yesterday’s life
Somewhere, a queen is weeping
Somewhere, a king has no wife
And the wind, it cries, “Mary”
The traffic lights, they turn blue tomorrow
And shine their emptiness down on my bed
The tiny island sags downstream
‘Cause the life that lived is dead
And the wind screams, “Mary”
Will the wind ever remember
The names it has blown in the past?
And with this crutch, its old age and its wisdom
It whispers, “No, this will be the last”
And the wind cries, “Mary”
— Jimi Hendrix, circa 1967
Shog
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, left, and Trunz hoist Bilson who is sitting on a beer keg, during one of the Bilson Boogie Barrel celebrations. All three of these Alpinians have departed but are always arriving in my mind.
Rest in Peace, Brother. Richard Trunzo August 1962-January 2023
