The McParland Mountain Retreat

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The sketches that Doris had been making—for years!—gradually became more detailed, and the couple located a 40-acre parcel of country property outside Port Huron. When they were satisfied that the sun angles were properly arranged and the floor plan was to their liking, Doris prepared a scale model of the home. Roger began the site preparation work in 1973, and the first of the concrete was poured before the cold weather came. The Mc Parlands were alarmed to discover, however, that their 40-acre retreat was a little less tranquil than they had anticipated. A nearby tavern catered to sometimes raucous motorcyclists in the summer ... and come the winter months, the snowmobile crowd took over.

This affront to their peace and quiet—coupled with the considerable discontent that the McParlands had been feeling over the weather and the tax situation in the Great Lake State—caused them to decide to stop construction and look elsewhere for a place to build their home. After checking out the sunbelt from coast to coast, they settled on western North Carolina ... and purchased 60 acres, set two miles back from the main highway, in Cherokee County. Eventually, the Michigan property was sold, and the purchaser inherited a partially completed, 105-foot-diameter slab and basement. (Roger chuckles today when he recalls the phone messages he got from the confused new owner, but admits that—in the end—the fellow did a good job of working with that semicircle of cement.)

THE NINE LIVES OF THE CAT

Roger and Doris made the move south in March 1976, and rented a house in the nearby town of Andrews while they cut a road in to their building site. Banking on the experience he'd gained doing earthmoving work in Korea, Roger bought an old D-6 Caterpillar bulldozer and improved on an existing logging cut that snaked for two miles up the valley to the south-pointing ridge where they intended to build.

Although the venerable machine (with a little massaging) faithfully scoured out the roadway ... when it came time to level the steeply sloping ground for construction, the amateur heavy-equipment operator learned something about the civilian breed of Cat. It seems that the standard models aren't equipped with guides to hold the track in place when "sidehilling" on steep ground. After replacing thrown treads many times, Roger got frustrated enough to call in help from down in the valley.

Then, as a professional—with his specialized machine-chewed away at the hillside, Roger carefully leveled a building site with his flatland dozer. The dugout ledge, situated on a ridge, was a far cry from the topography that Doris had in mind when she designed their passive solar home, but—with one al teration-her original plan and orientation worked out perfectly: Since the access to the building would have to be from the west, it made little sense to keep the garage on the east end as Doris had planned. And, by simply flopping the original layout (to put the garage on the west end of the structure), they saved the cost of cutting out another ten feet of dirt bank and of laying out a circuitous driveway.

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