I qualified for a $200,000 loan that I could pay back over thirty years. I remember sitting at the bank, sweating in my raincoat and sipping complimentary coffee out of a styrofoam cup, listening to the banker explain the terms of my loan. None of the numbers made sense—how could someone like me, a state worker making less than a schoolteacher, qualify for a nearly quarter-million-dollar loan? How could I plan for a thirty-year payback when I was still loath to commit to a weekend backpacking trip? Sitting there, I supposed I was simply lucky; my ship had arrived.
Shortly after that, I started driving around with a real estate agent, a lanky six-foot-tall woman who wore long gauzy scarves and a leather trench coat. Her excessive bigness made me feel safe, which was important given the fact that the house-buying process had reduced me to a twelve-year-old. She reassured me that home ownership was a snap, talking about the amazing “sense of home” (something akin to cinnamon buns and warm slippers) that arises through owning a house. She never mentioned that, the day before, she’d walked into a house that had been sealed up and neglected for nearly a year, and she’d almost turned and run away, then grabbed her scarf and wadded it over her mouth and nose, hiding from the overwhelming smell of mold and mildew, and the way the ceilings, walls, curtains, drapes, couch, and every other nappy surface in the structure was covered with a gray-black fuzz. “It was like an episode of The X-Files,” she’d told me months later, when I asked what was the creepiest house she’d ever been in.
Instead, she focused on the positive, and we gleefully began looking at the “best possible” houses, which I imagined would be something cute with a nice yard, in a good neighborhood where I could walk to the bus and ride my bike to my friends’ houses. Within an hour of driving around, I realized she was showing me only dumpy houses that were occupied by sad people who seemed resigned to their lives with moldy bathrooms, peeling paint, and a view of a flashing “Bare Naked” strip club sign. At first, I wondered if my agent had bad taste, or maybe she thought that I had bad taste—that I was attracted to houses that looked hungover, or that I would somehow find comfort in living next to the local bottle factory. After the fifth fixer-upper—a vacant house with porn videos in the upstairs bathroom—it dawned on me that this was what my life savings and thirty years of debt would get me: a lumpy, scabby house that needed a lot of love and elbow grease; that’s what $200,000 and thirty years of monthly payments could buy in Portland, Oregon.
A few weeks later, in the winter of 1997, I bought what the bank believed was the best possible house: a three-bedroom bungalow with a detached garage, wood floors, gas heat, and a fireplace. It was in an up-and-coming neighborhood, within walking distance of the grocery store, the bus, my friends, the bank, pubs, and restaurants. On paper, it was perfect; in real life, it was a “piece of crap,” as I had scribbled in my notebook when the realtor and I had visited.
My new house was an old house, built in 1927, when it was customary to set rings into the concrete sidewalk out front so your friends could tether their horse when they came to visit. It was an old house that seemed to have good bones, that may even have been a looker in its day but now reminded me of a boozy, broken-down prizefighter with two foggy windows on either side of the droopy bump-out porch, like it was squinting at the street, growling, “I could have been a contender” every time someone walked by.
It wasn’t quite what I had envisioned. The front living room, an expansive room that needed a lot of repair, became the woodshop. For nearly a year, when I’d walk through the front door, I’d confront an assortment of paint cans, tools, tile supplies, and a couple of eighteen-foot wood-skinned kayaks set up on sawhorses. For months, when I needed a break from working on the house, I worked on my kayak.
I never would have guessed that my new improved life and the “best possible” house would include an occasional rat sighting (something that would vex me for at least two years) or a refrigerator that you had to aggressively hug and then knee to get the door closed, but it wasn’t so bad. And more important: It was all mine!
I was the boss, and by setting the rent low, I was able to recruit friends and friends of friends to move in. Together we lived happily enough, with lumpy futon mattresses and three-legged chairs, and lamps and cups and dinner plates dragged home from garage sales or “Free” boxes. We once pushed a couch six blocks and through heavy traffic by balancing it on a skateboard, only to discover as we dragged it up the front stairs that it was infested with fleas and that a rat had made a nest in the bottom springs. We quickly reloaded it onto the skateboard and backtracked, screaming and laughing and scratching our scalps. Living on a budget may have been more fun than any of us cared to admit.
Over the next six years, I had eight different housemates—nine if I count Jenna, who moved in temporarily, sleeping in a small, unheated room off the kitchen that we called the “recycling porch.” It was a sweet room, not much bigger than a single bed, but surrounded by south-facing windows that created one of the more spacious, sunny spots in the house. Jenna moved in for a few weeks, but stayed for six months, until it got too cold on the porch, and she found a job and an apartment across town.
Before Jenna left, she turned her room into what would become one of my favorite spots in the house, repainting it a warm red-orange color and building bookshelves above the door, the window, and the coat hooks she’d screwed into the plaster. She made a comfortable enough bed out of plywood and a lawn chair cushion, and then permanently inscribed poems and pinned tiny bits of artwork on the window jambs. The space reminded me of the small hay-bale clubhouses and scrap-wood tree forts that my brothers and I had made as kids—high-up spaces where you could see things differently, where you could get your bearings and decide whether the argument you’d just had was fixable.
We eventually returned Jenna’s room to the recycling bins, but I’d still sometimes find myself standing there, catching my breath and reading the stuff that Jenna had scribbled on the walls and painted into the woodwork, imagining how simple things would be if the only space I had to vacuum was this tiny button of a room.
My weekend trips to the hardware store had slowly taken the place of my weekends in the mountains, and after a while I couldn’t remember the last time I’d touched my climbing gear except perhaps to dig for some art supplies I’d packed away in the boxes below it. I convinced myself that my house projects weren’t that different from climbing: They almost always involved some moment of fear—that I’d shoot myself off the ladder, nail my foot to the floor, or run a saw through the plumbing—and that moment was almost always followed by immediate relief. In either case (fear or relief) I felt like a champion because I was figuring shit out. I was a doer and a getter-doner, and it was okay to be identified by the neighbors as the little lady who had a dump truck of manure delivered, a load that made the entire neighborhood smell like a dairy barn for weeks.
I figured these house projects were making me smart, even if I didn’t always know what I was doing. I remember calling an equipment rental place one Valentine’s Day weekend, telling them I needed to rent a fourteen-inch “vibrator,” assuming this was the common word for the large vibrating pad sander I needed to refinish my wood floors. The guy laughed into the phone: “Ha, you and every other woman in Portland!” I was so caught up in the project, in getting the equipment and cracking a whip, that it took me a minute to get his joke.
Another day, I wanted to trim some branches off the big fir tree in the front yard; I didn’t want it to take long, just a quick up and down, so I left the ladder in the garage and scrambled up the fir with a tree saw in my mouth. New neighbors were moving in next door, ushering boxes up their front stairs, when I dropped out of the tree near their porch to say hello and welcome them to the neighborhood. They gave me very uneasy looks as I stood there, and then suddenly seemed to amp up their need to “get moving.” A few minutes later, I went into my house to pee, and as I washed my hands I noticed in the bathroom mi
rror that I was sporting half of a Fu Manchu mustache—long, bushy hair that started just below my left nostril and ended near my chin. My best guess was that I’d inadvertently wiped tree sap on my face and then nuzzled my dog, thus creating a curious wad of facial hair for the new neighbors to ponder. I spent the next month cleverly trying to catch them as they left their house, hoping to offer a casual “Hello” and show off my hair-free face to restart our first meeting.
The hard work (and possible social isolation) paid off, and over time, the house became home. The front living room was repaired, the woodshop was moved to the garage, and our lumpy couch was replaced with a nicer one—one that I bought from the want ads and that didn’t come with fleas and rats. The kitchen floor was replaced and new appliances were installed, and the house’s shabby exterior was rehabilitated, resheathed, and painted to look handsome and capable again.
In early summer one year, I cut open the back wall and installed two large glass doors so you could wander from the kitchen through the dining room into the backyard. Then I rehabbed the backyard into a little sanctuary, building a brick fire pit in the center of the lawn, not far from the deck that I salvaged from a friend’s house, one ten-foot chunk at a time, maxing out the load capacity of my car along with my luck.
On summer nights, my friends and I would gather at “Southeast State Park” (their nickname for my yard), and we’d throw open the glass doors so that whatever was happening in the kitchen could drain onto the deck and then spill toward the fire ring, where we’d set up our lawn chairs. That feeling of air and people floating unobstructed from one room to the next, from inside to out, was one of the best things about my house. Even in the winter, the big glass doors and windows supported that sense of openness.
I loved my house, but when I look back at it realistically, I was able to enjoy it only a small part of the time. Most of my time at home was focused on mowing the grass, repairing the hot water heater, cleaning the gutters, and trying to keep the garage from listing farther into the neighbor’s yard—that’s how I spent most of my waking hours at home. And more and more, the chance to enjoy my house was even more cramped because of my long-distance commute, racing back and forth for work and up to Olympia, a hundred miles away, which is why I’d chosen this particular moment to try (once again) to repair the bathroom fuse. Once again, the attempt left me slumped on the floor at the base of a ladder, yelling, “Akkkk,” but at least I was trying. And I could always clomp down the stairs to flip the breaker like always, like this is what homeowners do, and what I’d likely have to do again next month or some other day when I least expected it.
The Drive
(PORTLAND, OREGON, OCTOBER 2003)
L ast night, as I was driving home from work in a downpour, I slammed on my brakes after spotting three kittens about to saunter across the highway. I pulled over to the shoulder, then backed up, watching for them in the glow of the taillights. I wasn’t sure what I would do if I caught up with my little fuzz balls but was certain that something needed to be done. I hate seeing roadkill, and dead kittens would just crush me inside.
I got back to what I thought must be the spot and looked around, scanning the area through the rain and flipping the windshield wipers, craning my neck over the steering wheel as I flipped on the high beams and then the low, and then I spun around in my seat to squint through the dim light behind the car. “Crap,” I muttered, unclicking the seat belt and angrily pulling my hood over my head, then pausing to look in the rearview mirror for traffic.
People get killed on the highway. Years ago, my sister was nearly hit when she got a flat tire along the interstate. She had done everything right, crawling out the passenger-side door to avoid the highway traffic—a near act of God because she was nine and a half months pregnant and the size of a small army. She got to the trunk to pull out the spare and that’s when a semi came by and the wind shear nearly knocked her in a ditch. A passing motorist saw it—saw my sister in her tan wool coat that wouldn’t button over her belly anymore—so he stopped and changed the tire as my sister sat in the car, biting her lip, fearful that this stranger would help her and then pop her in the head with the tire iron. We were taught not to offer or invite aid because, like it or not, helping is a messy, confused proposition; sometimes you get it right and sometimes you get it wrong, and sometimes you have no choice but to trust that the man holding your tire iron, cussing at your old lug nuts, is a deeply kind human after all.
I threw open the car door and stepped into the rain, quickly skirting around the car to the far side of the highway shoulder. “Here, kitty-kitty-kitty,” I shouted in a singsong that I hoped could be heard over the rain. I continued walking inside the beam of my headlights, scanning the ditch as I walked, and seeing something that for a moment made my heart skip: a dead kitty that turned out to be a shoe. Ready to give up, I turned to walk back, and a movement by my car caught my eye; a hairy ball crept out from under the car. I got closer, shading my eyes from the headlights and wondering what the hell I’d do with the cat once I caught her, and a moment later, as I bent down to pick her up, I realized I was staring at a baby raccoon barely the size of a beer mug. “Shit!” I whispered as a semitruck plowed by, causing me to do a sidestep and tumbling the kit.
“Hi, little fella,” I said, squatting down on my haunches and wringing my hands together like I was holding a bug, afraid to reach out for the animal. In my mind, although raccoons are cute and I love how they can walk around holding an ear of corn in their mitts just like small children at a picnic, they inhabit the general category of fearful creatures called “varmints.” Like rats, they carry diseases, have teeth, and show up when least expected, like when you’re moving a stack of old flower pots in your garage; they are vicious when cornered and run in packs like street thugs.
“Where’s your mama?”
The baby suddenly veered left toward the ditch and sped up, like it was drawn by some imperceptible voice shouting, “NO-O-O-O! Do not walk toward the human!” I stood up and examined the ditch near my car, where I could finally see three sets of eyes looking back at me: two smaller sets (kits) and a larger, meaner set (their mother), which spun me on my heels and sent me racing to the car. I jumped in, yelped, and slammed the door behind me.
That was weird, I thought as I clutched the steering wheel, sighing in relief. Then another monstrous truck drove by, shaking my car and causing me to panic. My neck muscles were tighter than piano strings and I had a headache. I just wanted to be home; to walk into the living room and see my housemates up late and studying by the fireplace, to chitchat for a few minutes before wandering off.
I sighed and started the car. “Good luck, my friends,” whispering to the mother as I pulled forward along the shoulder. “Be safe.”
I was on the road too much lately. I knew it, and I was glad it would soon change.
At about the same time I purchased my new old house, I took a job as a State Hazardous Waste Inspector, which entailed popping in on various businesses to see how they were managing their chemicals. I’d check to see that they were abiding by the law, that acid wasn’t dribbling into the workers’ boots or out the back door, and that local farm boys out hunting weren’t going to fall in a hole filled with a thousand gallons of waste, something dumped and forgotten and so hot it would incinerate their legs within seconds. It was a perfect job for a person like me—someone curious and fidgety (according to some), and averse to sitting at a desk for too long—and it gave me a chance to see how things were made: imitation crab legs, bullets, paper plates, car batteries, applesauce, tar paper, wool blankets, bicycles, ballistic missiles, shiny water nozzles, and little horseshoe-shaped grills destined for use at a taco shell factory. Like a kid touring the local cookie factory, I looked forward to finding out what ingredients went into the production of a solar panel, a wine bottle, sticky tape, and biodegradable soap. The only real downside was that people often didn’t like to see me. A visit f
rom my cronies and me was akin to getting frisked by a cop or audited by the IRS. It was like having your teeth cleaned, and like any good dentist who learned to stand beyond the kicking radius of his patient, I learned to duck and cover, and to steel myself against the wave of ill will that sometimes surged toward me when I walked in the door.
I took classes and workshops, and studied various workbooks and manuals. I read and reread the law, highlighted various sections of the rulebook, and listened hard to what my mentors were saying. I even attended a class at the Federal Law Enforcement Training Center in Georgia, where I thought I’d learn to shoot a gun but instead simply learned that, at lunch, it was better not to picnic in the grassy area near the obstacle course because nearly every day a SWAT team would suddenly materialize out of the kudzu to charge across the field in their black commando outfits and practice busting down a door with a battering ram.
My class wasn’t as action-packed; we marched around in the woods, pretending to collect evidence off a truck that supposedly had flipped over and dumped drums full of chromic acid across the road. The truck and drums were there, tucked in the woods with the humidity, no-see-ums, and fire ants; the only part that was missing was the toxic waste—that part we had to imagine.
The main lesson I learned from this activity was that my job was a cakewalk compared with those of my classmates—Virginia State Troopers, New York City Police, Texas Rangers, and bomb squad guys. We stayed up late one night, lounging around on pool chairs under a flashing neon hotel sign, talking loud enough to be heard over the nearby highway noise and the grind of a nearby ice machine. We horsed around, flipping bottle caps over the pool, then tossing a pizza box like a Frisbee until it sailed over the fence into the highway chaff. At one point, as we were shooting the shit, I asked a general question like: “Have you ever been so afraid or freaked out that you peed your pants?” We were well into our beers and I figured this group of smart-asses would make some wisecrack like: “You mean besides the moment I saw your scrawny ass walk in the room?” But instead, they got quiet and reached into the cooler for another beer.
The Big Tiny: A Built-It-Myself Memoir Page 3
