The Road to Fryeburg

           Kate and I, as I mentioned in my Catching Up post, have bounced between several addresses over the past few years. When I met her in August of 2008, I was living in a condominium at Hamilton Harbor, an area south of Wickford, itself a village of North Kingstown, Rhode Island. It was an old factory building featuring brick walls and gigantic windows and a loft-type interior, all of which pleased my bachelor self hugely. But then the economy tanked in 2008, I lost job after job (including being laid off three weeks before our marriage), and holding onto the condo became an increasingly difficult challenge.

            In April 2010 I was diagnosed with ulcerative colitis--an annoying chronic inflammation of the colon--and a few weeks later landed in the ER when that inflammation led to a perforation in the colon. I was probably a few hours away from needing a colectomy--getting the whole thing removed--but I responded well to steroids, the colon cooled down--i.e. the inflammation went down--and was soon after able to resume living normally again. (Except for the  steroids I was on for a few months, which gave me an inhuman amount of energy. I averaged about 45 minutes of sleep a night for the next two months.) The most significant single event during my 3-day hospital stay, however, was Kate's mother looking me in the eye and telling me I needed to declare bankruptcy.

            Those weren't words I wanted to hear, of course. I'm all the more thankful now that she told me, though. That kind of direct honesty is one of the finest shows of love that can be. I swallowed the idea--it was bitter--and began thinking of ways to not go bankrupt. Even facing the possibility, me, a bank president's son, was humiliating enough, but I didn't want to crush my credit rating for the next seven years and deal with the awful bankruptcy laws recently rewritten to so favor the banks. I was determined to find a way to avoid it. So we sold our car--a Toyota 4Runner that we both loved--and downgraded first to a jalopy old Dodge pickup, which was about to break down a month later when Kate used her (much better than mine) credit to buy a new Corolla. We could manage the payments, and we found over the next four years that Corollas are the most boring, but probably the most dependable, and among the most economical, cars on the planet. So we had some quick cash to stave off immediate disaster, but I still had some other debts to deal with.

            That summer was the summer of the Deepwater Horizon, and I spent several months of it offshore, looking for plumes of oil in the water with sonar. It was a fascinating and awesome project to be involved in--the awe in proportion to the extent of the devastation--and I made lots of money. But that money was mostly going toward settlement agreements for a credit card and a few personal loans, and pretty much nothing toward mortgage payments on the condo, which at this point were 3-4 months in arrears. We had moved up to Kate's mother's and stepfather's home in Greenwood, Maine--a farmhouse we would occupy a few years later--and paid no rent, while I funneled all my earnings into settling my old debts.

            That left the condo, which I was trying to sell, and would have, for a tidy profit, had the buyer not (correctly) balked at the ridiculously high monthly maintenance fee. So we were left with a short sale, which was far better than a foreclosure. And having sold almost all of our furniture we limped off to one half of a duplex on Coolidge Street, about five miles down the road from our old condo.

            I have fond memories of that home. I forgot the wound to my pride from having to leave my prior home, and found raising our new child Eva--since Kate was working and I wasn't--to be a bigger challenge than any job I'd ever had. Learning to respond to, and care for, a little child who has very little power over anything, and has only her feelings as a means of influence, was an experience I'll always treasure. I got to know my own daughter, and I'll always be grateful that I wasn't working for those several months, and we had the chance to go down to the beach on walks (we lived about a mile from a scrubby patch of shoreline), or throw rocks at puddles (her favorite pastime), or just lie down and let her climb all over me like a jungle gym. The house was forgettable but our family wasn't.

            Soon enough after that I was sufficiently recovered mentally to start plotting the next steps in my stalled career. I decided pursuing acoustics and seafloor mapping at UNH made sense--it was more or less an extension of the seafloor geology I'd been working on at URI--and offered better prospects of a commercial career on the other side. But Kate was now pregnant with Eliot, and wouldn't hear of being marooned in an apartment while I spent days at school. It was pretty hard to deny her that--chasing Eva around while not pregnant or caring for an infant was work enough, as I'd learned--so our compromise was, we moved to within easy driving distance of Kate's mom and father-in-law. That meant Rumford Point.

            I've joked with Kate's mother--I now call her Ma--and Dave, her stepfather, that they're the subprime Trumps of Oxford County. Their business over the last several years has been buying distressed homes, rehabbing them, and either renting them out as budget dwellings, or selling them again. Dave had rehabbed a building in downtown Bethel and turned it into a Korean restaurant, Cho Sun, still successful and run by his son Brian. Ma had gotten her start in real estate buying a small one-bedroom cottage in the tiny enclave of Rumford Point, a village-in-miniature on the northern bank of the Androscoggin River, where Route 232 crosses on a rickety old bridge (now being replaced). A few impressive old homesteads are there, along with the decaying remnants of a few more, and a handful of tiny little homes. Ma had bought one of the tiny little homes, her very first real estate purchase, and more recently she and Dave had bought its tiny little neighbor, at 1750 Route 2. And that's the home Kate and I moved into in August 2011.

            Not much more than a week after we moved in, Eliot was born. Kate had shown signs of pre-eclampsia during latter stages of her pregnancy, and the hospital induced her. He shot out of her--she describes the birth as far more painful than Eva's, because of the speed--and now we had a son. He was very small--less than five pounds--and Kate wanted him right next to her almost all the time, especially for sleep. And now, as we settled into our new little home next to the river in Maine, we had a new little member of the family with us too.

            Our house measured perhaps 25 feet on a side, with a dug-out basement, and a mostly-intact barn attached behind, and features a 1/2 acre yard which showed evidence, the more I tended it, of once having been a gardening work of art, with perfectly placed shrubs, flowers and trees, and a beautiful little garden patch nearly as big as the house. The barn was the treasure, but also the liability: one corner was rotten and starting to fall down, and there was a large gap in the siding there. Not long after we moved in I began forming ideas of tossing a slab beneath the barn, rehabbing the interior into a post-and-beam bedroom/dining room/upstairs great hall. Big old barns have lots of potential, provided they're not falling down. But we had more immediate concerns, so Dave and I spent one Saturday racing to patch up the huge hole in the siding of the barn as Hurricane Irene bore down on us. We finished up and put the tools back in his truck just as the first drops were starting to fall.

            The family who lived there before us numbered 7: two parents, one son, and six(!) daughters. In a house of four rooms, where the bathroom was so small that it didn't have a sink. Seriously, the bathroom had a toilet and a shower, but to wash your hands or shave, you had to go into the kitchen. Eva had the bedroom, where the six daughters had slept. Kate and I were in the former living room, which was just big enough for our king size bed, the bassinet, two bureaus, and a bookshelf, and where the son had once slept on the couch. The small room in the middle, without windows, became Eliot's nursery, and had once been the master bedroom. (I'm not sure even a double bed would have fit in there.) And then there was the kitchen, almost as big as the other rooms together, which connected to the barn, and was really where we lived in that house. One corner with two love seats and the computer/TV became the coffee nook. The other corner became Eva's toy patch. Our table was in the middle and the rest of the place was ringed by shelves and counters. It was actually a bright and cheery little house, but we didn't have a woodstove and the electric heating cost more than our rent.

            As we were moving up--and Kate being pregnant, I did 95% of the work, and I was pretty glad to be moved in--I remarked to her that I felt like my life was taking a big step backwards, moving to a tiny town near the decayed remains of Rumford Falls, dozens of miles from anywhere. Kate of course started to cry immediately, as that part of Maine is where she grew up, and the house next to ours was the first one her mother had ever owned. My words were cruel but my pride was wounded at still being economically in retreat. But once we'd moved in, we began making a home of the place. I never entirely repented of my initial proud reaction, but I came to genuinely love that cute little home, and have an affinity for the arresting beauty and older-world charm of Rumford, in its several town centers.

            My first two jobs were to clear out all the brush on the front side of the house, and to clean up the dump behind it. Anyone who's moved into a moderately old New England home, or even just near one, has dealt with middens. Piles of trash left in strategically hard-to-see places, which in modern days, are composed of hundreds (or thousands) of bottles and cans. They're downright hazardous to people walking and living there. And this was a spreading pile of garbage and old metal debris, twelve feet by twenty feet, neatly tucked in the corner formed behind the house and the barn. Every week I made a point of taking some more trash for pickup. And slowly the pile went away.

            We were making our way through our first winter in Rumford, with me chasing down to Durham, NH two or three times a week, when Kate's mother told us in February that she had good news: we could move into their cabin in Greenwood, a larger home with wood heating and closer to her and Dave, that March, during my university vacation. Only Kate and I weren't so sure this was good news. Moving into the cabin, and staying at the same monthly rent (for now) in a nicer home, was good. (All this came about because some of their renters had washed out, and we were taking someone else's place in a more expensive property. It was a cash flow thing. The subprime Trumps have had their share of washouts to deal with.) But, moving, with three weeks' notice, in March, with an infant and a toddler, wasn't so good.

            But we decided we were game and went for it. Three and a half weeks later we were in the cabin, and had a big, haphazard pile of firewood in the driveway, and we were reasonably happy. The cabin was bigger, though it was certainly darker--the windows were smaller and far more scattered, and the place was surrounded by drooping pines and firs--it reminded me of Shelley's tomb in Ravenna, with the weeping firs around and overhead. Or the opening scene in Hyperion, deep in the shady sadness of a vale. Despite my distaste for the darkness, we both greatly preferred a hot wood stove to electric baseboard heating. I didn't see the same long-term potential for us to expand this house like I had the little one in Rumford, but I had no doubt we could be happy there for two or three years--basically until Eliot was big enough to need a genuine room of his own.

            Once springtime arrived I could start addressing the exterior. I never came close to doing that cabin's yard the justice it deserved. (Dave and Ma now, having moved back into the cabin, have mostly resuscitated the yard to its former beauty.) But one thing I did attack was the garage. At that moment, spring 2012, it was pretty much a tiny closet, with an even bigger mess behind it. See, Kate's mom has had several incarnations of a small farm at her houses through the years, including such animals as chickens (lots of chickens), roosters, ducks, rabbits (lots of rabbits), llamas, and a goat. Or two. I'm pretty sure the garage had served as a stall for the goat.

            Whatever the animals were that had been in there, their stalls were pretty much intact from the day they left. Sawdust, scat, everything. I meant to use that garage as a woodshed and workshop, which meant the goat scat and sawdust had to go. So I cleared out the skis and bikes and everything else in the front of the garage, got my shovel, and got to work on the sawdust and scat. It took me two and a half days, but I got that place cleaned out. (I counted wheelbarrow loads--I think it was 36.) After a week of that place airing out, I started building a wooden frame to hold the wood pile, next to my work bench. Soon enough I had a nicely stacked store of wood and a modest work bench. And of course Kate had added her touches inside the cabin, including the pillowed and lighted nook in the window at the rear of the kitchen, and we had ourselves our new home.  Eva had her own bedroom in the middle of the cabin, and Eliot his on the converted porch in front of Eva's room, and Kate and I managed to fit our king sized bed--now a handsome log version--into the master bedroom. It didn't leave space for much else, but so what? We love that bed.

           As spring became summer, the cabin's charm grew to its maximum. Warm evenings, when the rest of the world was ten degrees hotter, beneath the trees and next to the pond we were cool. In the late afternoon and evening the pond was a mirror, a second sunset from below. And even though our attempt at a vegetable garden was a disgraceful failure, still, the place was lush (too lush!) and peaceful. And as Eva's play (to a lesser extent Eliot's) began to move outdoors, it was good to have a credible outdoors for her to move into.

            In January of 2013 I was diagnosed with PSC, and what was already a rather dark home became intolerably, oppressively so, as I staggered with the new reality that my liver is a slowly sinking ship, and I can't assume my own longevity. I didn't necessarily associate the diagnosis with the house, but I came to hate, viscerally, the shadows and low windows of the place. Even the cool summer evenings with the sunset on the pond, like a bayou, couldn't make up for the angry panic I found myself in that winter. I knew I wanted to leave, and when we got the chance, once again care of Kate's mom and stepdad, we jumped.

            The move was to the white farmhouse, also in Greenwood, which they'd bought four years earlier. It turned out that they liked the cabin better, and now that we were there (and finally paying them a fair market rate rent), they wanted to swap. So, in May of 2013, we did. And we made a handshake agreement to buy the farmhouse, perched on the side of Noyes Mountain, once we were ready. The house is attached to an old barn, and has about 2.2 acres of sloping land and a small pond. We had the pond deepened, started clearing away some of the overgrowth (my tastes in landscaping are a little different from Ma and Dave's), and we began plotting what changes we were going to make on the 150+ year old house.

            Of course, my first course of action, other than some outdoor trimming, was another cleanup job. More animals. They'd kept a chicken coop in the ground level of the barn, and now that the chickens were gone, I wanted the coop gone too, so we could put down some pebbles and use the space as a garage. So, like before, I ripped out the wood, got my shovel, and started hauling. Only the chickens had been there for more time than the goat had been in the other garage, it seemed. Because it felt to me like there was twice as much sawdust and scat to haul. Maybe it was because it was raining, and maybe it's because the much-fresher chicken scat smelled worse--a whole lot worse--than the goat dung. Because our whole yard smelled like sulfur and urine for the next three days after I'd spread that stuff out below the pond. (On a related note, the clover and grass now grow phenomenally well there.) Once again, after airing it out for a few days, I had my woodshed. Of course, the Subaru barely fit in the ad-hoc garage--we would tap the foundation of the barn with the front bumper, and that's how we knew we could close the overhead door behind it--but we had a reasonably convenient winter setup. As long as you didn't mind a long, narrow staircase between your car and the living room.

            By the time we moved into the farmhouse, Eva was a talkative, active little girl who happily turned whatever room or house she was in into her own imaginative kingdom. Eliot was walking, but his demeanor to this day is quieter and milder than his sister's, frequently content to follow along with what she's doing, or quite capable of simply disengaging from people and focusing on something by himself. But our two kids began at once claiming the bigger, draftier house as their own.

            For my part, I came to admire how shrewdly farmers in years past built their homes to maximize the sun's effect, and minimize the weather. The house faces southeast, with eight windows drinking in sunlight, and is on the southeastern slope of the mountain, shielded by the mountain itself from the northwest wind. If we'd wanted to, we could've put thirty solar panels up there and just about gone off the grid altogether. That, and the pond and the sun-bathed acreage were the best aspects of the house.

            Of course, rehabbing an old house and barn is generally an expensive proposition. Though Kate and I were happy there--despite the several dozen mice (to the point that I resorted to poison that winter)--we were becoming fearful at the amount of money we'd need, on top of buying, to update everything we wanted to. And this didn't even include the repair work the barn foundation needed. Putting a large building on a mountainside, where gravity pulls the soil downhill, comes with inherent drawbacks. The barn was without a doubt the weakest point of the house. The previous owners had already put two buttresses in the barn foundation, but that wasn't enough. More work remained to be done. Even so, despite the increasingly dire condition of the barn, that place had an awful lot of good about it.

            I'm something of a survivalist. I believe that peak oil--the increasing scarcity of supply, and resulting increase in cost of oil--and global warming form two pincers which will do increasing damage to the global economy as years go on. (Peak oil already is. Crude oil (actual crude oil, not the crude-plus-condensate figure used nowadays) production very likely peaked in 2005, and that, plus rapidly increasing demand in China and India, led to the huge price spike in 2007 which produced the global recession we're still in. With oil never likely to become as cheap as it was even in 2002 again, our economy will never recover to what it was before. So I place great value in having a well-insulated home with good gardens and access to ample water. (A good library doesn't hurt, either.) In terms of gardens and access to water, the farmhouse could not have been better.

            But we wanted a newer home, with fewer nagging issues to fix. One night in late December 2013 found me searching online through some real estate listings, and the third I came to was a gorgeous house with a big wraparound porch in the town of Fryeburg. I got the feeling right away I'd found the place. Kate saw the picture, and as we looked through the rest, she got the same feeling. Two days later, we walked in the door with the realtor. The house was cold--it was January 2, and it was heated only to 60 degrees--but even so, Eva and Eliot came charging in, took off their coats and shoes, ran upstairs and began charging through all the rooms, playing. It was at that moment that I knew we'd found the house we wanted to keep.