House Lessons Read online

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  “BUT WHY THAT HOUSE?” my mother asked me—a question I found amusing, coming from Our Lady of the Christmas Tree. But my mother had good reason to be skeptical. Among the five kids in our family, my role had always been “the cautious one.” In addition, while we’d lived in four different houses while I was growing up, none of them had been more than twenty-five years old, and there hadn’t been much need for remodeling. So while Ben and I had made some changes to our Seattle home, there wasn’t much reason to think that I would want to take on, let alone be successful at, the complete renovation of a ninety-two-year-old house crammed with trash.

  What I find to be the loveliest bit of irony, though, is that the seeds of the desire to save the house in Port Townsend were actually planted by my mother, long before I even knew what a mortgage was. My mother loved books and always made sure we had plenty of them. As a young child, perhaps my favorite was Virginia Lee Burton’s The Little House. It tells the story of a small pastoral cottage that is slowly but surely surrounded by the city, growing more and more decrepit and forgotten until finally someone finds it, picks it up, and moves it out to the country again. Each time my mother read the book to me, I could feel the house’s happiness, then sadness, then joy. I wanted to live in its glowing early iteration. When the city came in and the house despaired, all I wanted to do was save it.

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  I THINK ANYONE WHO saves an old house has to be a caretaker at heart, a believer in underdogs, someone whose imagination is inspired by limitations, not endless options. When I was a real estate agent, I used to ask my clients how they cooked. They usually thought I was trying to find out what kind of kitchen they wanted—and that was true, in part. But the question was really a way to find out how they approached life. Those who had little interest in cooking generally had even less in home maintenance and remodeling. Chefs who loved the planning of a meal—from researching recipes to finding the right ingredients—often had the temperament to design their own homes, and they could envision stunning remodels. But a fixer-upper requires a different kind of creativity, the kind that you often find in a cook whose mind is awakened by opening a refrigerator to an odd assortment of ingredients, knowing that dinner must come out of it. A cook sees leftovers as a chance to make something new and beautiful, and when someone with this kind of personality sees an old house, they are likely to want to save it. Save being the operative word, because for this group, the relationship with the house will be extremely personal and interactive.

  I am a cook, a champion of underdogs—not just leftover ingredients, but long-forgotten novelists, stray pets, and, especially, houses. My children learned early on to divert my attention any time we passed a falling-down barn, or a house with good bones and paint that was peeling like a third-degree sunburn.

  “Mom’s going to want that one,” Ry would say, shaking his head.

  “It needs us,” I’d answer. But in the past, I’d never done anything about it. We’d driven on, and I’d held those enchanting wrecks in my mind, and at night when I couldn’t sleep I would mull over the possibilities of how I could save them, the same way other people count sheep.

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  BUT WHY WAS IT that house, out of all the ones I’d seen over the years? Did I see symmetry and balance in its shape? Did I see a project, an outlet for a frustrated mind? Was it the big, wide porch underneath that rampant camellia, a vision of a time when people used to sit in rocking chairs and call out to their neighbors as they passed? Or was the house just the equivalent of picking up a lost puppy, on a very large scale?

  I couldn’t have told you then. At the time, the back of my mind was doing the thinking, efficiently spinning through all the intricacies of the decision and finding the real reasons underneath. Maybe it knew better than I that I wasn’t ready to acknowledge the lessons I needed to learn, the ones the house could teach me. So among all the details, it grasped on to the delicate, undulating curves of a corbel, an unnecessary architectural flourish tucked in the corner where the front porch pillar met the roof, far above the trash, and handed that image to my conscious self. Said: Here you go. This is what you want.

  A moment of beauty. A glimpse of a slower life in the midst of chaos.

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  IT HAS BEEN MANY years now since that day. During that time, the house has been just what the corbel promised. It has also been the exact opposite. But in the end, the back of my mind was right—this was the house I needed. I just didn’t understand why yet.

  SPIRIT OF PLACE

  We had come without knowing it to our inevitable place.

  —Robinson Jeffers

  IT HAD BEEN OUR real estate agent’s idea that Ben and I drive around on our own and find houses we were attracted to, so that she could get a better idea of what we wanted. This was obviously not the scenario she’d intended. But being a professional, she promised to look into it. Two days later, she called us.

  “Well, you’ve got timing,” she said. “The old man died two weeks ago.” Her tone suggested that she couldn’t quite decide if we were psychic or ambulance chasers.

  “It’s not on the market,” she added, “but I can do some digging around. Are you interested?”

  I thought of all the trash we’d spotted through the dusty curtains, of the discarded furnaces and the disconcerting tilt to the structure. And then I thought of the sweet back porch with its multipane windows. The river rock chimney, its lighter and darker stones arranged in whimsical patterns. Those corbels at the corner of the porch columns that had made me look up above the trash.

  Possibility murmured.

  Over the years since, I have learned to recognize that sound. It comes when I get the first glimmer of an image that will later turn into a book. I have learned to trust the instinct, until my conscious mind understands what my imagination is giving me. But back then, when writing a novel still seemed as inconceivable as getting that house, I could only describe the feeling as yearning.

  “Yes,” I said, trying to keep my voice neutral.

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  GIVEN THE GO-AHEAD, OUR agent suddenly displayed the skills of a crack detective, tracking down heirs and elusive estate lawyers. As it turned out, there were several of each, a cat’s cradle of conflicting offspring and wills. It seemed likely the house would fall apart before there would ever be agreement among them.

  “But lawyers are legally obligated to show any offers they receive to their clients,” our agent told us over the phone. I could hear the thrill of the chase in her voice. “Maybe we can convince them it’s better to fight over money than a house.”

  So we made an attention-grabbing offer, subject to inspection. To sweeten the deal, we included a provision stating that we would clean out the house if they wanted. And then we waited. And waited.

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  IN A TYPICAL REAL estate transaction, sellers are given twenty-four hours or so to consider a buyer’s offer and make a response—but ours was no typical offer, and its window of opportunity was vast. Unwilling to lose the house simply out of impatience, we created monthlong deadlines and then renewed them over and over. Summer gave way to autumn, which lapsed into winter. At night, I would lie in bed and think of the house, uninhabited, collapsing upon itself. I would dream of water coming through that disintegrating roof, of the trash rising up and taking over, and I’d wake in the mornings with my hands clenched, tight even when I tried to open them. I began to wonder if I was getting arthritis.

  Every once in a while, our real estate agent would relay messages from the lawyers: a possible warming to the idea of selling, an interest in having someone else clean out the house. We would respond positively and wait for the next indication of movement. It was like playing a fish at the end of a very long line. So intent were we upon our goal, however, that it wasn’t until later that we began to wonder who was catc
hing whom.

  Sometimes, to break the tension of waiting, we would drive out to Port Townsend to make sure the house was still there. We would leave the city behind and drive winding roads through pastoral valleys that had been left behind when glaciers receded long ago. The mountains rose to our west, a towering backdrop. Each time I fell a little more in love with the quiet, open space of the Olympic Peninsula and the quirky little town at the end of our journey. Each time, it felt a little more like coming home—my own corner of a landscape I had chosen decades before.

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  I WAS NINETEEN THE first time I saw the Pacific Northwest, a sophomore in college traveling from Los Angeles to Seattle for a conference. The airplane banked, coming in low over an endless, intricate collage of blue and green, the mountains and bays and islands of Puget Sound curling around and into one another. My mind calmed, and it felt as if I became myself for the first time in my life.

  The ancient Romans believed in something they called a genius, or the spirit of a thing. The protective spirit of a place was called its genius loci, and the Romans believed in it not as some poetic metaphor or symbol, but as a living being. Over the centuries, the meaning of the term has shifted, and the usage of genius loci has generalized to the “feel” of a place. But I like to think those spirits are still there calling to us.

  And whether we pay attention to those calls or not, they influence us. We fall into some geographical settings as if they are the arms of a mother or a lover. We unconsciously prickle in the presence of others. My daughter gets hives when she leaves the city for any length of time, while my son, like my husband, relaxes into himself in the mountains. For me, that first time I saw the Pacific Northwest was like finding a geographical soul mate. When I returned “home” to Los Angeles on that trip, flying in over those miles and miles of houses splayed out in a seemingly infinite grid, I started to cry.

  It wasn’t until I discovered geographer Jay Appleton’s theory of prospect and refuge, however, that I found a framework to explain my reaction. According to Appleton, humans are most comfortable in situations where they can observe (prospect) and feel safe (refuge) at the same time. A window seat is a classic example—enclosed and part of the house, but with a view of what is outside—an architectural re-creation of the experience of being held in a mother’s arms.

  When I looked through the lens of Appleton’s theory, my reactions to the landscapes I have inhabited became clear. The intricate combination of the vistas and hideaways of Puget Sound is a textbook example of prospect and refuge, writ in geographical terms. Los Angeles, in contrast, is a former desert, a flat canvas painted in freeways and buildings, and when the air turns to smog and you cannot see the mountains, it can feel endless. During the years I lived there, I experienced a constant restlessness. It was hard to know who I was—not an unusual problem for me as I was growing up, but this felt different. Exterior in some way. I am the kind of person who will always take the chair in the corner, and living without geographical refuge meant that at some level I was constantly alert. I am an extreme example, certainly, but perhaps it is not all that coincidental that Los Angeles is the home of Disneyland and movies, fantasy and imagination. Sometimes the best refuge is in the mind.

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  IF THERE IS ONE thing that characterizes the genius of the Pacific Northwest, it is water. It slips down from the sky and washes up against our shores. It creates our silver-blue color palette, then softens it to pastels through the very moisture in the air. Long ago, water filled the deepest gouges left behind by those retreating glaciers, and created bays and lakes and inlets, a canal, a strait, a sound.

  It is mysterious water out there in Puget Sound, an average of 450 feet deep, and unrelentingly dark. Down below resides the world’s largest species of octopus—there have been reports of Enteroctopus dofleini as large as six hundred pounds and thirty-two feet across. Matter made fluid, their boneless bodies can squeeze through a space the size of their eyeballs; their brains circle their throats and travel down their arms. As unbelievable as Bigfoot, the giant Pacific octopi nevertheless exist, deep in the murky water, a reminder that things are still a little wild in this part of the world.

  That goes double for the Olympic Peninsula, the most northern and western portion of the contiguous United States. A giant thumb of land that lies between Seattle and the Pacific Ocean, it has been isolated from rapid development by the water that flanks its three sides. As recently as 1846—when the United States gained possession of everything south of the Strait of Juan de Fuca in a border settlement with the British—there was not a single white settler on the peninsula, and even the Native Americans tended to stick to the coastline. Back then, the most numerous inhabitants were trees, evergreen behemoths over 250 feet tall, with bases 14 feet across and bark up to 12 inches thick. It’s been said the sap could spurt like an oil gusher.

  In his book The Last Wilderness, Murray Morgan wrote: “God made the universe, and when he was finished, he dumped everything left over onto the Olympic Peninsula.” It is still mostly as God dumped it—3,600 square miles of mountains and rain forests dripping with moss, and a national park covering almost a million acres. The coasts are storm-smashed, with towns and the occasional Indian reservation scattered along their edges like afterthoughts.

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  TO MY MIND, THERE is something exciting about a place that’s still a bit wild. It’s probably the fault of all the Laura Ingalls Wilder books I read when I was child. Back then, I wanted to be Laura. One of my all-time favorite presents was a doll-sized replica of a cast-iron stove, on which I pretended to make meals for my thoroughly unimpressed Skipper and Barbie dolls. And I’m finding that the longer I live in the Pacific Northwest, the less affinity I have for the trappings of a cosmopolitan life. These days, I would rather see a well-stacked woodpile than a Broadway show, and that approach fits in just fine out here.

  It’s been said that geographical landscapes create their own cultural personalities. Perhaps our particular culture here in the Pacific Northwest derives from the contrast of the beautiful and the unsettling. Lying underneath all that photogenic prospect and refuge, there are earthquake faults. The shimmering water of Puget Sound is deadly cold. Mountain passes can snow shut, leaving you trapped on one side or the other, just like our pioneer ancestors. And Mount Rainier, Seattle’s most beloved icon, is a sleeping volcano. Mother Nature is still in charge in this neck of the woods.

  People in Seattle have a reputation for being friendly and pleasant but reserved. Perhaps it is because so many of its residents are still settling in. Or perhaps it is the knowledge—reinforced by those rugged mountains, that cold water—that you never know when you might need all your resources just to survive.

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  PORT TOWNSEND TAKES THAT personality and gives it a twist. Set on a peninsula where the trucks of unemployed lumberjacks display bumper stickers declaring EARTH FIRST: WE’LL LOG THE REST LATER, the town is a cultural oddity of a gently eccentric sort, its population a mildly simmering Crock-Pot of paper mill workers, artists, organic farmers, wintering Alaskan fishermen, and—more and more often these days—wealthy city runaways and retirees. One of its better-known bumper stickers sports the slogan WE’RE ALL HERE BECAUSE WE’RE NOT ALL THERE.

  Port Townsend is a place that is proud of its independence. It’s Washington State’s per capita leader in solar power, and the vast majority of its businesses are family-owned. Deer roam freely in town (a 2016 deer census counted 238 of them), and you can sometimes hear coyotes yipping in the night. In the upper town, sidewalks are rare, and people often walk in the middle of the street, a strangely liberating activity. Port Townsend’s calendar is packed with festivals, but my favorite is the kinetic-sculpture race, with its brightly colored collection of human-powered vehicles, which are more about self-expression than transportation. If this town has a genius, it’s likely wearing
a jester’s hat.

  It’s also a place that is fiercely protective of its heritage, and with good reason. Port Townsend is a movie set waiting for cameras, one of only three architecturally preserved Victorian seaports in the United States. The waterfront is lined with two- and three-story brick buildings scarcely changed in appearance from when they were built at the end of the nineteenth century. The bluffs and hills above them are scattered with charming cottages and Queen Anne and Italianate mansions. It’s a place out of time—although the reasons for that have more to do with luck, both good and bad.

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  “POVERTY IS THE BEST friend of preservation,” Clem Labine, the founder of Old House Journal, has said. In the late 1880s, when most of Port Townsend’s magnificent construction occurred, the dream was for a much larger city. At the time, the town was competing with Seattle to become the terminus for the railroad that was being built up the West Coast. While such a goal might seem far-fetched, looking at the two places now, back then only New York City had more marine cargo traffic than Port Townsend. Seattle, tucked far down Puget Sound, was at a distinct disadvantage when it came to trade.

  The people of Port Townsend decided to take fate into their own hands, starting their own railroad heading south. Their optimism was infectious; land prices exploded, and suddenly the town of seven thousand had six banks and three streetcar systems. In 1889, the Oregon Improvement Company declared that Port Townsend would indeed be the terminus of the West Coast railroad. By the next year, however, the OIC had gone into receivership. Expansion and building in Port Townsend froze. Almost overnight, its population shrank to two thousand.