Home Builder’s Project Is Just a Stone’s Throw From Being Rock Solid
Because of Danny Sass, the San Luis Rey River will run smoother and deeper through the Rincon Indian Reservation when the rains come this fall. Sass has pried loose more than 150 tons of river rocks, some of which weigh 100 pounds, to build himself a house.
Other Rincon residents only shrug or wave when they see Sass and his helpers head toward the riverbed in an old Chevy truck. Most are wondering if the blond, blue-eyed reservation resident has stayed out in the sun a bit too long during his 8-month effort.
“He’s always been a real fanatic about rocks,” said Merna Sass, his wife and an excited convert to the project.
“She was a skeptic at first,” Sass said of Merna, “until we started building the second floor. Now she’s full of ideas.”
The two-story home started last spring as a single-story, 10-foot by 10-foot rock house, a windowless room that was to serve as a storage place for the tract home the Sasses and their son, Tuukut, have outgrown.
Sass practiced by building a doghouse first. Then, there was a chicken house, which showed a bit more skill. That was followed by an extensive retaining wall before Sass launched into creating his dream house.
Rock by heavy rock, the structure grew into a 20-by-36-foot home that is 26 feet high. It will gain a few extra feet when the flat roof is in place.
The walls, two-rocks thick and measuring two-feet thick, are held together by a cement and adobe mixture. They are supported by a horizontal line of wooden ridgepoles, a building feature that is similar to dwellings of desert Indian tribes. The second story is full of windows and has a balcony.
Sass, who has a plumbing contractor business in Valley Center, has added plumbing throughout. Friends and relatives have helped construct wooden framing, electrical wiring and structural reinforcement bars.
The house may be a building inspector’s nightmare but it is sound, Sass said. He was inside when the Los Angeles-area earthquake hit Oct. 1, jolting much of Southern California.
“I was putting on my socks when it hit,” he said, “and I ran outside, one sock on and the other off, just in case it went down. But the quake didn’t hurt her a bit. No cracks or shifting at all.”
Sass has no problems with permits for his innovative architecture because local building codes don’t apply on the Indian reservation.
Building permits or not, Sass expects his work to endure. He plans to bury a time capsule by the front doorstep that is supposed to be opened in 100 years. It will contain a history of the family, the reservation and the building of the stone structure, which has attracted passers-by since it was started.
Visitors “have a lot of ideas” on what Sass should be doing. “I listen to them,” he said, “but I’ve got it in my head how I’m going to do it.”
He can always thin out a crowd of onlookers by announcing that he is making a “rock run” in Vieja Azul, Sass’ nickname for the old blue Chevy, and the curious melt away.
The usual work party consists of Sass and his hired hands, Aldofo Guzman Gomez and Herman Cortez Romero. Sass has not yet surmounted the language barrier with his Mexican workers, “but I know a few words like ‘rock’ and ‘cement’ and such, and I just take them over to a fellow’s place on Lilac Road and show them some good rockwork and then they do it.”
In the process of building the house, Sass has become a rock connoisseur. He can tell at a glance whether the stone is large, thin or flat enough to fit into the walls.
He also has a mental map of where he found the biggest rock, where he discovered the one shaped exactly like a bare foot, the one with etchings roughly resembling a recumbent
mermaid and dozens of others gleaned during his 106 rock runs, each of which netted about a ton and a half of building materials. Sass is also gathering decorative stones for a fountain he plans to put in the ground-floor recreation room and for a fireplace that his wife has ordered for a corner of her second-floor aerie. He also has obligingly provided three flat rocks jutting out to form supports for a shelf where she can keep her records and mementoes.
Merna Sass, elected to the Rincon Tribal Council last December, envisions the second floor as her hide-away office for reading the reams of paper work that go with the post and for just being alone, looking off across the valley to “our” mountain, or back to the homestead her father built for her family when she was a toddler.
“My father moved us back here to the reservation when I was just 2 or 3 years old,” she said. “That first summer, I remember, we lived outside in a ramada (an open structure formed by tree branches) underneath an oak tree.”
Now, she plans to plant a few oak trees around the house and maybe a few faster-growing cottonwoods for shade.
Sass can’t count the hours he has spent building the house or the stones. But standing back to survey his dream house, he said, “It’s all been worth it.”
“When you look at it at night, with the moonlight on the stones, it’s really something.
“It’s downright beautiful.”
