RUDIMENTS, pt. 200
Making Cars
The first morning I woke up
in Pennsylvania, it was 12
below zero, until about noon,
when it settled up to 9 degrees.
Not bad, I was told, for a
January 17th. Northeastern
PA, Bradford County, Mt.
Pisgah. Highlands for sure,
a little unforgiving, and apt
to really trip up a stupid-ass
kid from New Jersey/New
York like me. I'd bought this
hunk of land and buildings on
my own dare, for 27 thou. It
went against the wishes of
most anybody I knew - 5+
hours from home, 13 acres
of mostly mixed-use land,
strewn with rubble, metal,
a few junked cars and tractors,
an enormous house, a huge
barn, modernized into an
upstairs hunting lodge type
place, 5 or 6 rooms and - for
some reason - a stack of
Arizona Highways magazines,
going back about 3 years. There
were also some old buildings
all filled with stuff, from when
it really had been a farm. It
was pretty cool, a dirt road
threading to it, and one other
house down off a ways, up the
hill at the cemetery at the end.
When you come right down to
it, I didn't really know what I was
doing - fleeing, really. I had to
leave NYC behind, like it was
on fire, and I had to get invisible.
It all worked. Had I changed my
name and my personal history, it
couldn't have been any better. I
totally transformed my character,
into the most awesome version
of a rube-hick nobody you'd ever
see. Perfect to fit right in. Bony,
stupid, pliant. Nothing irksome
about me at all. Wearing white
tee shirts and overalls, with a
dairyman's cap on, tending to
and milking cows, using tractors,
working for farmers. I even went
to Towanda, I think it was, about
40 miles east, back along Rt. 6,
and took the test, successfully, for
driving heavy equipment and such,
which for me included a stint as
the local backwoods school-bus
driver hick. (What better way,
I figured, to learn the land, the
roads and area, and the ways
of the real folk living there,
than by doing that).
-
It hadn't been my first choice,
this house. My taste ran to
deeper and darker places, but
through Strout Realty and this
guy named Jim Jankowsky,
who represented Pennsylvania
rural properties for them from
'Bentely Creek' (pronounced
'Crick'), I was brought to about
6 or 7 different places, all about
the same price-area, acreage
ranging from like 8-15 acres.
I finally settled on two choices,
and then my father muscled in -
he figured that without his advice
I'd only make the worse of the
two my choice. The first place,
the one I really wanted, was 8
acres, down in a hollow, really,
dark and wet, with a stream of
varying proportions (which probably
meant flood-tides too, but whatever).
It got about 9 hours maybe, of sunlight
in high Summer, the straight-up
walls of the deep decline letting
in only overhead light; not much
slanted light. It was surrounded
by woods, which added to the
acreage even though it was not
'of' the property. And somewhere
there, I was told, was a 'grove'
of walnut trees, a 'harvestable'
yearly crop, that went with it.
The simple house was about 4
and a half rooms, and the rest
of it, in place, was unfinished.
But finishable. Potential. (He
didn't say 'all you need is light
and dryness')... There was an
old truck on the property; that
went with it, and it ran and all.
The guy was about 100, and all
his sole life there, he'd been a
gravestone cutter. Really. There
were white marble or granite
gravestone things and he'd
chisel names and dates, cherubs
and sunbeams, mottoes and epitaphs,
and all that stuff, onto them, with
chisels. Nothing powered. Ancient
art. Stone-cutter. Hauling rocks.
In fact, he muttered some story
to us about how it was only some
7 years since he stopped using
his horses and the wagon to cart
stone in and out, and pointed over
to that (very) old truck to show
how he'd grudgingly 'modernized.'
The guy, and the whole place, was
biblical. He was understated elegance
if I'd ever seen it. Quiet, dark,
always busy, and seemingly caring
about nothing. I loved the place,
immediately wanting it. As I said,
he was old, and he wanted to
relocate to some sort of rest
facility, to die in. He said 'not
much snow reaches down to
here, that's never a real problem.'
Which is OK, but makes all the
problems just be up above you -
like roads, food, fuel, aid and
assistance.' He didn't 'rightly'
know how good of a place it
would be for a 6-month old
baby and a mother. Just kind
of scratched his head. I figured
he was already picturing the
whole little family, frozen
solid in death, and needing
their names and dates carved
onto one of his nicest stones.
But, nonetheless, I definitely
wanted the place. My father
felt otherwise. In fact, so did
Jim Jankowsky, but he didn't
really care one way or the
other. My father, on the
other hand was murderous
in rage, fit to be tied, that
this guy would have the
audacity - these two guys
actually - to try and sell
this sinkhole of a death
warrant to an unwitting
idiot son and his equally-idiotic,
soon to be doomed, family,
being infant son and wife, in
this case. I'm not at all sure
what the rural real estate racket
is like, but I'm pretty sure
they'd never before had to
face off a locked-in bull in
a box canyon hell-hole like
this turned out being, with my
father and all. Jankowsky did
back down, and said, 'Well,
maybe, yeah, this isn't you
place. The old guy just stared
straight off, saying nothing.
-
So, I didn't take that place,
and ended up with this other
one - to my father's liking,
large and airy, a nice open
field, trees, water, space. It
had a cemetery connection
too, in that up the top of the
dirt-road was a small cemetery
of graves starting about 1790,
of the people who'd lived there
- the few houses around, my
spot, and then my house, and
the one neighbor's place left.
The rest of the roadway and
hilltop and slant was a plain,
open, mess of wilderness, trees,
and water-springs. Large fir trees.
And a great view out. Mt. Pisgah.
Way out back was a local dump -
all sorts of really cool objects
from like the 1930's that no
one ever cared about looking
through. I had a field day. The
place was good. Turned out,
however, it didn't really have
any useful heating system, so
that had to be replaced quickly,
nor any good appliances, so
stove and washer and dryer
had to be bought, and the
kitchen floor, when you
really got to inspecting it,
was unsound, sagged, and
had holes covered over with
really bad slabs of linoleum.
A mess. But, we managed.
I cut into the chimney thing
with a Franklin Stove, and the
first Winter reckoning found us
basically heating with coal and
living' in a 15 foot circle mostly,
around the raging heat from the
that coal stove. The rest of the
big house I closed off until about
late March, when we began
discovering exactly what we'd
bought - all sorts of rooms,
spaces, entries, stairs - things
I'd not known about. That whole
first Winter, 20 degrees became
a holy pleasure. Mostly it was 10.
-
I hope this housing sequence here
didn't bother you too much, and I
hope it was nice and picturesque
for you in the reading of it, because
I'll be doing another one or two on
this subject now.
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