In going though some of my prints I came across a photo of our century old farmhouse in western Iowa as it was when, in the late spring of 2001, I returned from my life in Oregon to renew and resume a long forsaken life in the Iowa countryside... that safe place deep in rolling hills farmland that I once called Home.
The picture above is how it looked the week I returned.
No doubt you will agree.. not too pretty.
As one might imagine, when I arrived and walked through the yard full of weeds that many years ago was a neatly mowed yard of bluegrass, I began to feel a sense of hopelessness in my actually being able to bring the place back to life.. I knew it was bad but this was more than I had anticipated.
It had been 15 or 16 years since any human energy had actually lived there. Except for the occasional vandal looking for anything worthwhile to steal and other forms of lowlife (raccoons, ground hogs, squirrels, bullsnakes, bugs and of course the ever-present mice), the place had been deserted of any kind of real caring and preserving higher energies.
On one side of the roof there was a rotting hole the size of a volley ball that as I looked up from the inside, I could see blue sky and sunshine. On another section of roof a long stretch of shingles had blown off. Rain water had poured into the house in both places for who knows how many years. Parts of the flooring had rotted away where the rain had come in, carpets thick with mold and little red worms and animal feces...layers of dust and cobwebs and crawly bugs like something from a halloween movie.
This place I once called "home", that was at one time clean and warm and loving and very much alive, now seemed to be not much more than a stinking shell of abandonment.
As I cautiously made my way down rotted steps leading into the dark basement, I could see with my flashlight that a section of the foundation had caved in from years of rain, helped along by an ever-digging family of groundhogs that even now was living down there in the basement and had taken refuge in their holes when they heard me come into the house. I could see at least 6 inches of dried caked mud spread out from wall to wall on the concrete floor of the basement.
I remembered at that moment watching my father digging and building this basement by himself over 50 years ago and I was not pleased at what I was now seeing.
Then even worse and more disheartening, as I went outside again I could see that the whole house had actually shifted a little on its foundation. It now had about a 3 or 4 inch twist to it, a slight leaning or listing because of the washed out and crumbling foundation. I wondered how could I ever fix that!
At that moment I felt pure hopelessness seeping into my own inner foundations.
I found an old aluminum ladder that no one had stolen, leaned it up against the side and climbed on up to the peak of the roof as I had done so many times in my life. I sat there high up on the roof ridge, a tightening lump in my throat. With watery eyes, I just stared away and into the tree tops, feeling the loss of something important to me.. feeling the loss of my own personal history. One's own personal history can be a terrible thing to lose.
I had felt abandoned and forsaken before in my life. We all know what that is like. Everyone of us gets to personally experience such dark nights of the soul when, without relief, things just keep going badly again and again and again in our lives.
But this was my history now being brought down by natural law, those pre-ordained instructions from Above that all things must fall apart sooner or later. This was my psychological "safety net" from an outside world seemingly steeped in uncaringness, aggression and generalized lunacy.
This was the place of my arising, my teenager foolishness and a fair amount of adult years as well. Now, even my own history seemed to be abandoning me, becoming unstable and like a ship with a hole in its underside about to slowly sink into the deep.
I sat there on the roof of the house like I was sitting motionless in a saddle strapped onto some dead horse that had not quite yet fallen over. Consciousness was acute and I remember being struck by the irony of such a perfect spring day..blue skies above, perfect temperature and the sun shining so brightly upon me overhead, and there I was just sitting up there on the peak of my roof, rocking back and forth, tight throat, bleary eyed, helpless.. a silly little homing pidgeon looking sideways at nothing and not really knowing what to do next.
After a time as my butt began to hurt from sitting up there on the ridge, I skidded back down the slope and then climbed back down the ladder and into the weeds. Returning to the car, I drove back to my sister's house 16 miles away, thoroughly dejected and still wondering "what next?".
But of course, as we all know that was not the end of this little story, but only the beginning of a new chapter and I might add, a grand chapter at that!
I didn't pack it in and I didn't "hit the road, jack" and fly on to some 9 to 5 city grind that I had come to passionately detest. Life, in its occasional mercy upon we poor and wretched souls here on earth, surely did send to me in that first night an Angel of Transcendence to lighten up my dark heart and to draw me (and my history) back in and away from the abyss. In the usual form of inexplicable transcendence (and after a good nights sleep at my sister's house), I was by that next morning struck full face now with an overbearing sense of hopefullness! Amazing was the change of attitude and my new perception of reality (and along with it an urgency I might add. I had only a bit over 4 months of good weather, and very little money to make the place liveable before another bone-cold Iowa winter would be setting in.).
I would need to draw on all my blue-collar handiness & scrounge-ability to slam-bang the breathe-of-life back into the old place before the november snows began to fall.
I did indeed make it through that spring, the hot, humid summer and the following winter too. I chained-sawed a huge supply of wood for my heat (after making 2 barrel stoves), reinstalled basic plumbing and ran new electrical lines. By winter's edge I had won the race and settled in with my two cats, my computer, my music, my fire to huddle around and sip coffee by. And yes, many pats on my own back (literally) for having done the job and done it well, at least to best of my ability and satisfaction.
Of course the old hacienda didn't look quite so good that first year as it does now in 2006 as you see in the picture here. Much work was and is still to be done.
And thanks to my run in with Patti 3 years ago, I too seem to have mellowed and transcended my back-to-the-land "Jeremiah Johnson" phase. Not only does my... I mean our little history-house now sport used (but perfectly good) cedar siding and insulation, a new coat of paint and foundation jacks, but thanks also to Patti's insistence, we even have a hot water heater too!
(Oh dear! Am I now becoming all soft and wussy-like?!)
Well, perhaps just a little.
Still, ya gotta love them Angels of Transcendence, the ones that help modify perceptions of realty in the night as well as the one you can snuggle up with on cold winter nights.
