Bobcat in the Belfry, Part One
It's definitely true. Growing up
and living your entire existence in
the urban jungle can really put you out of touch with nature. Being stalked by a primeval life form on the
other hand quickly can foment an all-too-personal ecological encounter of
intense weirdness.
At the time of my own, particular adventure in
a newly purchased gorgeous 3BR-2B-EIK-2.5 wooded acres, I was
crouched in an extremely uncomfortable, orange plastic "chaise lounge,"
on the deteriorating and splintery deck of a white elephant of a house
desolately plunked down at the far edge of town. It was the kind of place where raw,
unstoppable nature gently tickled a neat, slightly hesitant backyard, though unfortunately
the twain never did succeed in quite meeting. The house's faded olive green siding would have made a wonderful backdrop for a bad seventies movie about downward mobility, the ravaged front yard deeply suggestive of an abandoned trailer park. The whole ambiance as a matter of fact constituted a cross between the more blood-curdling aspects of suburbia and a scene from Deliverance. How had we landed in this galaxy??? After a soul-crushing, two-year search to find the perfect Escape-from- New York, my husband Sherwin and I had at last been admitted to the Twilight Zone of second home ownership. In our craving for semi-rural nirvana (not-too far-from-town), we had totally fucked up.
Even now, as I gaze back over the
innocent chain of events leading to that goddawful morning, I still have
difficulty understanding how it all happened, and why I was destined to play a
lead role in a schlock horror film. Our
misplaced longing for cleaner air and a "simpler" existence was
doomed from the start, but like complete morons in the foggy thrall of house
fantasia, we were clueless.
Perhaps the entire idiotic mess
just had to do with the differences in our cultural backgrounds, Sherwin's and
mine. I was raised in the kind of family
where Saturdays were spent at museums and summer days nestled inside
air-conditioned Manhattan movie theaters-- we never even owned a goldfish, much
less a dog. Sherwin grew up in a small
New England town, had two large,
auburn Labradors as childhood companions, and
a love of greenery embedded into his earliest consciousness. He was, in a word, homesick. So after endless discussion about the evils
of urban living and lots of nagging little misgivings on my part, I finally
acceded. Sherwin was to get his dream of
recreating the lost Eden of his childhood, at
least on weekends, and I would get the chance to chill out, far far away from Gotham .
The plan initially called for the
proverbial modest-crash-pad-with-just-a-few-civilized amenities; a base from
where he could indulge his addiction to trees, leaves and untrammeled paths,
and I could unwind from the daily madness of the city. Once the fatal decision was reached, we
wasted no time. We mapped out a radius
of one hundred and twenty-five miles and began a process of meticulous research,
successfully holding at bay predatory realtors and congratulating each other frequently
on being nobody's fool. Ultimately, we
even came to perceive ourselves as Informed Buyers. Yet somehow, after viewing hundreds of
shit-holes palmed off as "cozy" and "loaded with charm," we
still managed to settle on that Great-Little-House,
soon to reveal itself as a surreal knockoff from the The Adams Family, minus the laughs of course.
That May, when Midge Moore from Up
Creek Realty called excitedly to alert us that she was faxing a new listing, we
had all but given up hope of finding anything in time to get in by summer. Enmeshed as we still were in daydreams of a recurring
reverie of lush gardens filled with Russian sage and copious fields of
black-eyed Susans, we ran right up there to have a quick look. The initial
drive-by of the property unfortunately only fueled our insane fantasies, and soon we were
experiencing our first impulses of misplaced elation. The place, an imposing
clapboard chimera, was shrouded among pines and birches, ferns and bluebells; visions
of wildflowers, Walden, Louisa May Alcott and all things transcendental popped
up like magic mushrooms.
We drove up for
a second look the following weekend and became convinced we were doing a
really, really, really smart thing. We
ordered an inspection. Contracts were speedily drawn, bank accounts emptied,
paint colors selected and lawyers put on retainer. Sadly our misplaced euphoria
was not to last. After the closing, in
the first, miserably sweltering and soppingly humid week of July, something
that up until that moment had appeared to be a property of "unique design" and "private" in a raffish, country-cape
"fixer-upper" sort of way somehow began to present itself as an error
of bizarre proportions. The generous backdrop of shrubbery turned out to be nothing
more than gross, untended overgrowth and the tolerable little clusters of spring
gnats we first encountered there had been mysteriously replaced by swarms of
kamakazi-level black flies. What we once perceived as a bower of fragrant
blooms was in fact a bevy of killer weeds. We had to step around a seriously
rotted, fallen tree that was milling with carpenter ants, perilously hanging
over the shed, to get into the house.
Buyer’s remorse enveloped us almost at
once. No sooner had we sealed the deal on our "unbelievable find"
than we realized that even the "exceptional location," much like the
house itself, was in reality neither fish-nor-fowl, bird-nor-beast. The front of the land ineffectually attempted
to face down a handful of imposing, slightly outdated raised ranches belonging
to the town burghers, affable, gun-collecting residents; they seemed to favor an
assortment of hokey flags of weird birds and happy suns flapping erratically in
the mountain breezes outside their modest homesteads and boasted a bevy of
rambunctious, unleashed dogs, some of them quite large. The rear of the property backed up to what
had been described as a large "nature preserve." More about that later. . . .
(Part Two next week!)
