A couple of years ago, I left our home in the suburbs to drive to an assignment 10 minutes away. I knew that the environment around our house was not what it once was – gone were the pastures, wide sidewalks, semi-rural life – so I left early. Good thing because just under an hour later I managed to extricate myself from the construction surrounding our subdivision without hurting anyone and landing in jail. After another half hour through another construction zone I arrived at my assignment a frazzled wreck. This misery mirrored my wife’s daily commute. When I called her to rant we had our usual feverish exchange about having to get out of the city. She too had become increasingly more angry about the urban sprawl in which we felt trapped in too little space among too many people, vehicles, buildings, about the destruction of acres of land that was home to hundreds of living, majestic trees to erect yet one more condo, Walgreens, CVS, Walmart, charter school. That night we decided to throw in the suburban towel and move somewhere, anywhere, that still had room to breathe.
Out of state was out of the question. We did not have jobs out of state and did not have funds readily available for such a move. So we compromised. We would stay in state but find a county that was more rural. Much more rural. My wife wanted land and a barn. I wanted land and a lake. The only child of immigrant parents, I escaped from our lives of breathtaking anxiety and volatile arguments about life, me, money into the safer arms of Father Knows Best and Leave It To Beaver. In my childish perception, a house where families were not crammed onto one floor signified stability. I wanted a house where I could say, “I’m going upstairs.” We both wanted a fireplace and a relationship-saving second bathroom.
I immediately found a 5-acre property for sale in a rural forest area about an hour and a half from our current home. Secluded, check. Land, check. Two-story house with a fireplace and thank you lord, 2 1/2 bathrooms, check. Barn, check. We pored over the pictures, which were mainly of the inside of the house. It looked interesting – to be honest it looked downright funky but definitely worth a look. So we contacted a realtor and made an appointment.
As we drove out to the property, the landscape became more and more rural. Holy cow, there’s a living cow! And horses, pigs, goats! Our wildlife in the suburbs consisted of 2 raccoons whom we treated like royalty even though they made a disgusting mess of our outdoor cat’s food and water. Don’t judge – that cat simply refused to live indoors. We passed a white sign with the name of the town painted in fat red letters, then a run-down gas station, a seemingly closed run-down restaurant, a Dollar store, a post office, some kind of “inn”, a small building labeled Child Learning Center, what might have been a tiny library, a biker bar, a couple of churches, and turned onto the road listed on the realtor’s printout.
We had to stop almost immediately. Traffic jam. Not cars but a pair of sandhill cranes with their red heads, tall gray graceful bodies, and their two young fuzzy long-legged colts, leisurely crossing the road, not in a hurry. My wife identified them for me and explained that they mate forever. I had never seen a sandhill crane in my life.
Once they were out of harm’s way, we drove on, taking curve after curve, eyes on every sandhill crane family and every house number. Several houses were situated on lakefront properties. Hope bloomed in my chest. Maybe the house we were about to see was on a lake!
About 3 miles down the road we pulled up to a sign – Pavement Ends. Ahead was a bank of mailboxes and another sign bearing a sinister warning: No Outlet. Oh-oh. Where the hell was this place?
We ventured onto a dirt road that someone had tried to grade with incomplete success and encountered another traffic jam. A large tribe of goats had made their escape through a section of fence damaged by a fallen tree and were contentedly munching on vegetation on both sides of the road. In front of us, the realtor was waving her arms and pointing to a path through the woods. Deer! A doe and her two fawns, bob tails and tawny ears twitching, watched us for a few seconds before bounding into the safety of a cluster of trees. We will never hurt you, I promised.
Here the houses were much more spread out. We later found out that this unincorporated section of town is zoned for 5-acre lots. A half mile further down we finally found the house number we were seeking nailed to a weathered wooden post. A couple of signs tacked to a nearby tree announced that this was a sheriff’s office neighborhood watch area and offered a reward for information leading to the solving of crimes in the neighborhood. There must have been neighbors somewhere but we happily noted that their houses were not visible. No one was yelling, revving engines, running leaf blowers, sitting in beach chairs belching beer and blasting something that could barely be called music. It was so quiet – quiet enough to hear the distinctive chirps and calls of every bird, the rustle of every leaf, our own breaths as we took in this bit of nature that still had room to exist. I experienced a sudden intense feeling of grief at the thought that we would have to leave this place to go back to the suburbs. I knew that we were home.
The electronic gate stood open under a sizable solar panel. We craned our necks for a glimpse of the house. Nothing. No structures at all, only a dirt path carved through the forest. My wife grasped my arm. “Oh my God”, she whispered. “It’s beautiful.” We drove slowly along that path, careful to leave plenty of room for the silvery rabbit hopping to and fro in front of us, a tiny self-appointed usher guiding us to a clearing surrounded by tall pine trees, sweet bay, oak, cypress. In the center stood a gleaming, white 2-story house with bay windows and a red-accented porch decorated with a stone facade, hanging plants, and wind chimes. That porch was positively striking against the bright while house. A barn stood about a hundred feet away and off to the side was a smaller concrete building that turned out to be the well house. Well? It had never occurred to me that water would not automatically be piped in by the city. Clearly I knew nothing about country living. I had a flashback to the much more primitive well at the farm near Vienna where we stayed after our escape from Communist Hungary while my father tried to obtain visas to the US. My mother, with her child star background and lady of leisure aspirations, was less than thrilled that she had to draw water from a well. I envisioned myself carrying buckets of water to the house but substantive piping brought the water from the well to all the taps and toilets in the bathrooms and the taps in the kitchen.
As we stood in that clearing in the forest, my wife and I were immigrants too, escapees from the oppressive, suffocating urban congestion, but we would be drawing water from the well in much happier circumstances.
A sweaty guy without a shirt was driving a riding lawnmower. I rushed over to shake his hand and introduce us. I didn’t know how many others would make an offer and I was going to secure for us every advantage possible. A woman was stuffing two minuscule protesting chihuahuas into a van. They could have been hoers d’oeuvres for our brood. The van was running so the dogs would have the benefit of AC. I liked her immediately. I told her there was no need to sequester her diminutive duo, we had dogs too, but she insisted that they would be in the way. When she was done I hugged her and thanked her for allowing us into her home. It turned out that these simple gestures made a positive impression and did give us a leg up.
My wife, the outdoor girl, attached herself to the guy and took a tour of the barn and the property. I toured the house with the realtor. I tried to take her advice to imagine the rooms without the ominous dark curtains and bulky furniture that served as inexplicable dividers, sentinels against all but the barest natural light. Despite feeling like I was spelunking in an underground cave, it all seemed doable until we arrived at the master bedroom located smack dab in the center of the first floor. Where are the windows? I asked, reason crowding out the insane hope that the little curtains tacked to the walls hid actual windows. The realtor hedged and finally announced cheerily, this room has no windows but think how you can brighten it up with accent lamps!
Meanwhile, my wife found out that the owners of this property also owned the adjacent undeveloped 10 acres, of which half was a wetland that the owner called “the lake”. Ok, sure, a murky wetland teeming with water moccasins, alligators, and who knows what else was not exactly the placid lake of my dreams and yet all in all, heaven on earth. But a bedroom with no windows? There aren’t enough accent lamps in the world. We went home depressed. Back to the drawing board.
We looked at another half dozen properties but that white house with the red porch and barn on 5 acres in the woods haunted our dreams. We had fallen in love with the forest, the cypress and raw pine accents of the house, the loft above the 2nd floor, the bay windows and little sitting room upstairs with a view of nothing but land and woods. One afternoon a few days later, we lay on the couch bemoaning our fate, staring out the window at the house recently vacated by our beloved aging next-door neighbor. With its new babyshit brown paint, the house seemed to have crept closer overnight, As we lay there, we were assailed by kidney-rocking rap music and the steady shriek of sirens and unfortunate dogs left outside without attention and water. In a fortuitous moment of enlightenment I suddenly thought, why must we leave the bedroom where they have it? Why can’t we move it, say upstairs into that big space that would become sunny and airy once the oppressive curtains and furniture were removed? Yes, it would be weird to have a bedroom in the same space as a dining area and kitchen, but then nothing about us occupied the center of the bell curve. We couldn’t dial the realtor fast enough. Is the house in the forest still available? Yes? We want to take another look.
Two months later we closed on our new home. We made an offer to include the adjacent 10 acres but the owner declined. He was hanging onto that land for his daughter but if he decided to sell, we would have first dibs. His wife whispered in my ear, “Those 10 acres are yours. Don’t worry.”
So we packed up our home of 20 years and moved 4000 boxes, 2 pods, 14 truckloads, ourselves, our plecostomus Moby Dick and his 70-gallon tank, our 3 dogs, and our 5 cats to the country. I don’t have at my command enough descriptive adjectives to recount the fun of wrestling panicked, once feral cats into crates. The moving company brought the larger furniture in an 18-wheeler that immediately got stuck in the front yard and had to be pulled out by a neighbor’s tractor, leaving deep scars in the earth that took months to heal. I was nonetheless grateful that those poor moving men huffed and puffed and dragged our bedroom furniture, behemoth wardrobe, and kitchen appliances up the 13 cypress steps to the second floor with only minimal dents, scratches, and loss of wood. To make a long moving story short I’ll just say that I will never move again. Never.
If we brought in a Mount Washington of our stuff, the owners had to remove a Mount Everest of theirs. It took them a month after we closed and to this day we’re still excavating old tires, bed frames, metal parts of trailers, wheelbarrows full of glass, and other miscellaneous items.
After the first nauseating, malodorous bath and sip of water, we knew we needed a water conditioning system. And we could not mow all that land with our push mower and my mother-in-law’s ancient Huskee that was missing some essential parts. We needed a proper riding mower. And a tractor. And a UTV. And the barn needed work. And the stones falling off the chimney facades needed to be replaced. And the oppressive red walls in every room had to go. We would have to repaint the whole place. The previous owner had built every structure from the ground up. He did some things very well, some very badly. Fortunately, the proceeds from the sale of our old house enabled us to make those purchases and repairs.
Then one night we saw our first black bear. Words cannot describe our thrill. At fist we hid in the house, afraid of being attacked, and watched through the lens of our night vision monocular as a dark 4-legged mass with a large black head and tan snout ambled along the tree line about 60 feet from the front porch. Another night, a sow came with her 2 cubs. They became regulars. Eventually, we ventured outside and discovered that black bears are shy, civilized, never aggressive, not intrusive. Don’t let those who lack respect for bear habitats tell you otherwise. We don’t put food in outside trash bins. This is bear country and we are the interlopers. Of course they will forage for food in the trash, especially since we have so irresponsibly obliterated many of their food sources. When there is no food in the trash they don’t touch it. We put our food garbage out once a week on trash day when we know it will be picked up within the hour. We never approach and neither do they but we walk freely, albeit warily, around the property while they watch from a courteous distance with apparent understanding that we mean them no harm. We respect them too much to treat them like pets and they must maintain their fear of humans in order to remain safe, but in the past 2 years we have learned to live together in peaceful companionship. Bear, deer, sandhill cranes, wild turkeys, rabbits, an assortment of birds and harmless snakes, the occasional alligator, bobcat, coyote, and cottonmouth, and the ever-present squirrels share with us this secluded bit of heaven. We could not be more honored.
We even have a few human companions, good neighbors with whom we share a fierce love and protectiveness of this slice of forest down a dirt road less traveled.
About a year after we bought the house on 5 acres, the owner decided to sell the adjacent 10 acres. He honored the promise that we would have first dibs but the asking price was outrageous. After months of constant worry that someone would buy that land and build a house next door, we negotiated a doable purchase price. At the closing, his wife again whispered in my ear, “I told you it would be yours. We wanted you to have it all.” And that is how we managed to acquire 15 acres in the forest that will forever be safe from development, hunting, raping of the land and wildlife habitats in any way.
I came up with the name Forest Ramblings-Footprints and Feathers in this way. Forest ramblings needs no explanation but there’s a bit of story behind footprints and feathers. My wife is the original barefoot girl. Sometimes she’s willing to walk around the property in flip-flops but she’d rather be barefoot. Her footprints side by side with those of wildlife and our dogs and cats make this a home. My Native American name is White Feather Creek. Given how many birds inhabit this place, feathers seemed like a fitting part of a title.
So, I will devote this section of Gadfly Journal to ramblings about life in the forest among the footprints and feathers of the wildlife, 3 dogs, 4 cats (our sweet Butch and our beloved pleco Mo left us last year), and 2 humans that comprise our society. I hope you too will be part of that society, perhaps only by reading but perhaps also by driving down the dirt road, through the gate, along the winding path to the clearing, and rocking on the porch with us in quiet companionship.
Drive slowly – the sandhill crane families and wild turkeys are abundant, deer and rabbits dash from the woods with no warning, gopher tortoises and snakes cross the road with no understanding of our potentially lethal vehicles, and black bear watch from the tree line. This is their home but you too are welcome here. The gate will always stand open for you.