Pescadero Memories

June says: Russell, I remember meeting Merrill. He’s the man I met at AN, near the big sculpture with his address on it. There were numbers carved in it.

Russell Towle says: Cool.

So you met Merrill!

He was amazing. He had an old Willys 4WD station wagon. When it came
time to lift the 6X12 rafters and 12X12 ridgepoles into place, just a
month or two before those photos were taken, Merrill contrived a
bizarre thing out of driftwood and weird old stuff he’d bought at
junkyards. Let’s see. A funky trailer made from an old pickup truck
bed. To that attach a 5-horsepower gasoline engine. To that attach a
winch with a hundred feet of cable. To the funky trailer attach long
beams spliced together by overlapping them and bolting them together,
to make a boom. Attach an old pulley to the top of the boom, and run
the cable through it.

Then winch the heavy 6X12’s into the air. However, the boom canted so
far aft of the trailer that at the slightest provocation the weight
would overbalance, and first the trailer itself with engine, winch,
and all would lift into the air, and then the back of the Willys would
lift into the air.

What was required was to drive the thing in low range, first gear, and
never ever turn at all sharply. We’d hoist those big beams up just a
few feet, the rafters, and then drive them around to the side of the
house they belonged to. Then, temporarily brace the boom, and winch
them higher. Higher. Nerve-wracking. Each one weighed hundreds of
pounds. Plus each 6X12 rafter had a very precise “birdsmouth” cut
(Merrill called it) to fit around the 12X12 ridgepole, which was on a
45-degree angle like a diamond. So the rafters were cut to fit around
that corner of the 12X12. Once in place, a few spikes would secure
them long enough for me to climb up on top of the ridge and drill long
holes with a 3/4-inch augur bit eighteen inches long, through both
6X12 rafter and 12X12 ridgepole. Then I would run a long bolt through,
galvanized, which Merrill had picked up at some junkyard, used PG&E bolts I believe, and add a big washer and nut and tighten it all up.

So the framing of the Big House was quite an adventure.

R

HalfMoonBayMemories (HMBM): I remember a huge piece of driftwood; maybe it looked like a fist, but it was very big, and it had been planted in the sands near Ano Nuevo. I always thought of the driftwood as an address and I think a sculptor made the piece of art.

Russell Towle (RT): Well I can’t say for sure but that sculptor sounds like my old friend Merrill Bickford. If so, I was his caretaker. That was my official role while living in that tiny driftwood cabin. And I helped Merrill
build his fine adobe and redwood-bridge-timber house, now a ranger residence. Merrill was amazing. His wife at the time, Janet Creelman, was a mentor of mine, and I named my daughter, Janet, for her.

Merrill once had the pseudonym, or alternate name, Stuart Harwood. It was supposed to be more artistic. His sculptures were displayed at some of the most prestigious museums back East, in the 1950s. In the
1960s he landed at good old Peninsula School in Menlo Park, which is where I met him. The Duvenecks of Los Altos founded the school in the 1920s, classic CA Bohemians.

Merrill was a wild man of many marriages and somehow the alternating names helped him keep clear of past wives. We built a raft sixty feet long and thirty feet wide on the little lake on their Año Nuevo property, the frame was of discarded 6-inch iron irrigation pipes fromthe Rossi’s adjacent artichoke and brussel sprouts fields. Merrill had a huge crew of hippies working for him at that time. I was the welder, he taught me how to do it. We’d take a length of pipe, sledge-hammer each end flat, and then weld it shut. As it turned out these pipes ended up leaking an taking on water, but we stuffed all kinds of rigid foam and so on under the thing and it floated well enough, with a wooden frame atop the iron pipes, and plywood deck.

Upon that deck we erected a 40- by 20-foot greenhouse, installed a wood stove, and there Janet and Merrill lived for two or three years while we finished the Big House, which was not so big. But impressive,
with its ancient redwood timbers, adobe walls, tile roof and tile floors, and sculptural driftwood cabinets and finishing touches.

But the greenhouse was quite magical. The eternal northwest wind kept it rocking and bumping about gently, on its raft, and we could hear the waves thundering on the beach, more than a quarter mile away. It
was at one end of my bird-watching reservoir. Canoes tied up to one end of the raft. We had a little floating sauna I built at one end, made from eleven ancient redwood doors from Coastways Ranch. Willows and tall tules and cattails almost surrounded the greenhouse. It was amazing. No running water, no electricity. A wood stove for cooking. Merrill was a great raconteur and I heard many stories of his fabled life in that greenhouse. In WWII in the Pacific, he was a SeaBee, bulldozing out landing fields for aircraft on remote tropical island paradises. Returning to California after the war, he became a building contractor in the San Diego area, and managed to cut off one of his fingers with his power saw, late one afternoon, in an exhausted hurry.