When
Linda and I first got married, I owned a house in the city; a leftover from an
ugly divorce. When my ex’s lawyer pressed me for half of the equity in the
home, I showed him that if we sold it I could split what would be the remaining
debt with his client so she'd owe me a few thousand dollars, and instead he
sent me a signed quit claim deed. So, in fact I didn’t actually own the house,
I just carried a mortgage on the building in which I slept and played computer
games.
Linda owned a townhouse in
the suburbs, a product of having had her last landlord break into her apartment
numerous times, bent on playing with her underwear. As my home was larger and
we both worked in town, we decided she would move in with me and we would sell
her home. Of course, things never work out quite as planned.
It must have been nearly
the exact moment we had gathered materials and found a reputable real estate
agent that a local newspaper had discovered her townhouse “community” had been
built on the edge of a landfill, and that garbage had been used as fill against
the basements and foundations of the closest buildings. It wouldn’t have been a
huge deal if not for her unit being within one street of the edge, and for the
fact that radon was detected within the basements of her neighbors homes.
The expected sale price
plummeted to well below what she owed on the mortgage, so selling was
pointless. Linda has a hard time making decisions, particularly under duress,
so I came up with the big idea of renting, until the breaking news storm
quieted down. She wasn’t keen on the idea, but paying a large payment for a
place she wasn’t using didn’t please her either, so she eventually saw things
my way and we began to advertise.
Then I made the first of
two of my finest blunders ever. A woman phoned who explained to me that she was
homeless, living in a shelter for battered women with her children, and gosh
darn it she’d sure like to see the place so long as I could meet her somewhere
on a bus line, pick up and deliver her to the viewing. I got roped, hard. I so
wanted to “do the right thing” for humanity and all that jazz, that over the
suspicions of my new wife, the owner of said property, I created a lease for
the poor woman and helped move her into her new, wonderful home. I couldn’t
help it I suppose. She’d begun to weep when she saw the place, so overwhelmed
with the idea that she and her poor suffering children might have such a
beautiful, safe place to live that she just couldn’t stop the tears from
flowing. A year and 6,000 dollars in damages later the animal moved out,
leaving us in the same quandary. The market price hadn’t yet recovered, and the
mortgage was cramping Linda’s style.
Mistake number two.
I had this friend you see,
who just at that moment was estranging himself, if that’s actually a word, from
his wife, and desperately needed a place to live. Well dang it all to heck, I’d
known the guy for 10 years by then, we we’re the best of friends. He was the
best man at my wedding for goodness sake, and although he nearly destroyed the
marriage by driving my then fiancé to begin walking home from our campground
church rather than put up with his interference one more minute, I thought it
would be simply grand if we could see fit to help the guy out in his time of
need. He and I had nearly died together in a rafting incident, I couldn’t have
been closer to anyone in my life, and could certainly vouch for his sense of
responsibility.
Within a month he was late
on the rent; within two months he was late on the utilities, within three
months I was loaning him cash that he could pay to my wife so that she wouldn’t
hate him for the rest of our lives. A few months and a broken relationship
later, we put the thing on the market and sold at a small loss.
During this time, Linda’s
family was constantly avoiding us, unless we came to their turf. Her father in
fact would lecture me quite often about his daughter being a “country girl”
accustomed to the slow and safe pace of the outer ring of suburbs. He and his
sons silently refused to come into town to visit their sister/daughter, because
it was not only out of the way, but just too damn scary. (More than once I
offered to let them borrow my guns for the trip, so if any zombies were to
attack them at a stoplight they could blow the offender’s heads off and save
themselves from losing their brains. They didn’t think I was funny) The dad
unit would say “for God’s sake, get her out of there; she doesn’t belong in the
middle of no-man’s land.”
I ignored them in the
main. I was a city boy, accustomed to the occasional gunshots and car crashes,
the sirens and tire screeches, the drug dealers and whore houses that dotted
our fair neighborhood. Linda saw it as an adventure. She once loved the new and
different, the more challenging the better. And until she was accosted on the
street by a road rage madman, I thought little of her safety being any more
concerning than it might have been elsewhere. But then I started to notice,
shootings were getting closer to our house, old men were being beaten nearly to
death for pocket change within blocks of my doorstep. We were in what I still
consider to be a middle class, middle of the road neighborhood, with plenty of
diversity and very little if any poverty. Yet we were being pushed on by
sources just outside our area. The more the cops pounded on the tight part of
town, the more the dealers and punks fanned out onto our sidewalks and into our
alleys. So I had to come to terms with the concept that I wasn’t alone anymore,
and my lack of fear wouldn’t stop my wife from being hurt.
Sure, you might say the
same thing could happen in the “burbs”, but the reality is for the most part
the only place you’re likely to get stabbed out there is in the back, and even
then only metaphorically. In town, it’s more likely that you’ll find violence
graduated from metaphor, and your chance of being a victim is far more a
crapshoot than a lottery.
Between us we had a little
dough. I was just winding down the most profitable part of my life and what the
ex didn’t steal from me was hanging around just waiting to be spent. Linda was
fairly flush as well. So on a whim, shortly after a 12 year old boy had been
gunned down in a park two blocks east of us by other children looking to steal
his bicycle, we started combing newspapers for ads describing land for sale;
the bigger the parcel the better.
It wasn’t totally off my
beaten path to seek roots in the outback. When I was a teen I owned a horse and
spent every minute I could riding and walking with my pal. Most of my days
until I started working full time, and even then whenever I could, were spent
outdoors. I was a hiker and sailor, a motorcycle rider and camper, a white
water rafter and canoeist. I loved the big sky, and by the fact that I’m not
dead yet I’d have to say it loved me back. I had always had this little dream
in the back of my head, that one day, probably not but maybe, I would live in a
place where counting the blades of grass would be a good day’s work; where
neighbors didn’t look over your shoulder as you stood in your kitchen making
ham and eggs on Sunday morning, and where, when you really, really wanted to,
you could urinate in your bushes without setting off a flurry of 911 calls to
the coppers complaining of indecent exposure.
I say “dream” with
reservations; I never had a “dream/goal” I actually believed in. Oh I’d come up
with them now and then, but it was more of the “my high school has been overrun
by communist terrorists and I must rappel into the gymnasium where all those
creeps that treated me like crap will have to witness me saving their lives,
and then have to suffer the indignity of owing me their pitiful thanks forever
and ever amen”. Anything else would only end in failure. I hated disappointment
so I never thought too big, unless, as in the previous example, it was so big
even a comic book writer couldn’t make it believable. But here I was, dreaming
about a life in the countryside, building a house from a plan I developed,
creating an arboretum where as many native trees and shrubs as I could round up
would live together in peace and har-mo-ny. It made me a little giddy actually.
Dreams are dangerous that way.
