Louie Frazier, Master Builder and Fox

Louie's World, Part One

In the mid-’80s, I went up the coast to the Mendocino County town of Pt. Arena to visit to visit my ex-nextdoor neighbor Jack Williams, who had built an off-grid homestead in the woods. After I shot photos of his house, Jack said, “There’s someone up here who wants to meet you,” so we drove about five miles east into the hills, then down a long gravel road through redwood trees until we got to a clearing. And there sat the most beautiful little building I’d ever seen. Everything about it was right, right down to (or rather, up to) the crystal glinting at the top of the building’s mast.

Out from the open doors came a 60-ish year old guy with a twinkle in his eye, carrying a battered copy of my book Shelter.

He didn’t even say hello, but crouched down in the doorway, had me do the same, and opened the book to page 4 where there was this painting of a Mandan (Native American) lodge, and said “Look up,” at the interior framing of his shop … identical!

Painting of Mandan earth lodge in Shelter

Louie’s shop followed the same framing pattern of four posts in the interior to provide extra support for the rafters.

Crystal on top of shop’s copper mast. I drove up there one morning, parked, and the sun was hitting it perfectly. It was like energy being generated by the universe.

“I built this from your book,” he said. Moreover, he said he’d built his Japanese-style home across the (Garcia) river from the drawing of a Japanese farm house on page 21 (bottom right sketch) of Shelter.

Louie’s house across the river, reached on a 500-foot zip line — which I’ll show in the next post.

Wow! I’d been publishing fitness books for 20 years, and it occured to me that if Shelter inspired buildings like these, maybe I ought to check out the building scene now — 27 years after Shelter.

And so, Home Work, published in 2004, turned out to be the sequel to Shelter. It featured Louie and his creations foremost, and had many other buildings inspired by Shelter. And it got me into two more decades of publishing books on building

Louie instantly became my best-of-all-time friend. We clicked on all facets of life: building, design, fishing, homesteading, having fun, exploring the world, red wine, marijuana, and above all: music. We’d both grown up (he was about 6 years older) pre-TV, and listened to the radio. I think we both knew a thousand songs. There was also some, um, bad-boyish behavior in our past lives.

We got together well over 100 times in the next 20 years. I’d drive the three hours up to Pt. Arena, or he’d come down to Bolinas, and we’d often spend a night or two in San Francisco. Every moment with him was a delight.

Louie’s sauna, built on the chassis of a Toyota Tacoma truck, on a swimming hole in the Garcia River. In the winter, when the river was high, he would pull the sauna up to higher ground. Early one summer morning, when Louie, Donna, and I were in the sauna, we saw a group of river otters splashing around and sliding on a mud bank; a rare sight — otters are very spooky —they didn’t see us inside.

I can’t count the number of psychic coincidences we had over the years. Many, many times I’d be thinking of him and the phone would ring.

His work merits more than can be put in one post, so, like my trip to Baja, I’ll do a series of posts on him — not necessarily in order, but once in a while: a dose of Louie’s world.

He passed away a few years ago. I knew he was close to the end, and on a late afternoon I went down to the beach. The tide was pouring out of the lagoon, rushing out to sea as I called his number. His friend Bill picked up the phone and told me that he’d passed just a few minutes before. It gave us both a chill, that Louie had gone out with the tide.

With him gone, there’s a huge vacancy in my life, but there are also the memories (and photos) of this extraordinary person and the joy he left behind

"Perfection is a Direction"