Do You See What I See? by Russell Targ

Author:Russell Targ
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781612830070
Publisher: Hampton Roads Publishing

Joan, with her plans for the Hayfields subdivision

(Photo courtesy of the San Francisco Chronicle)

It took us many years to realize that some of the people who were delaying us were simply waiting for their customary bribes. But, we were too inexperienced to know it at the time. However, we became experts in pier and grade-beam foundations. The result was nine beautiful houses in the development that we called the Hayfields. But it was not the intentional community of our dreams. It simply cost so much money to do all the phases of development, that the friends who had wanted to live with us could no longer afford the price. We sold eight of the houses to various buyers, and kept one. I lived there until 1992, when I left because of personal tensions in the family and the dangers of riding my motorcycle to work each day through the hills in the rain and the dark—and also a health emergency that I will describe shortly. The previous year, I had a serious accident in which a pickup truck ran a stop sign and hit the front of my cycle at full speed. The bike was destroyed, while I sustained only a broken wrist, which kept me in the hospital for a week as they pinned me back together. I looked formidable for the next six weeks, with two large pins like turkey skewers sticking out of my cast. Today they wouldn't have let me on an airplane. It was a time when I was doing a lot of traveling for Lockheed, between San Francisco, NASA-Langley in Virginia, and our laser contractor in Palm Beach.

I still own the beautiful hilltop house that Joan and I built. Perhaps one of our children or grandchildren will eventually live there. It was a very intense and challenging ten years from 1976 when we bought the property until 1986 when we finally moved into our house. But, it was this continuing focus of attention, mainly on Joan's part, that eventually allowed us to achieve financial independence. My four decades of work as a wage slave in aerospace would never have accomplished this. We did what America wants you to do—borrow lots of money and build something. But, I can tell you that building a nine-home subdivision from scratch, on undeveloped land, is not recommended for the faint of heart. If we had known that interest rates were going to 20 percent in the middle of the project, we wouldn't have undertaken it.

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