Friday, January 19, 2018

10,443. RUDIMENTS, pt. 200

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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