Walden or Bust

Remember the opening sequence in Green Acres, when the young urban couple tells the locals “We’ve bought the Haney place” and even the pig laughs?

That was me, 30 years ago last summer, me and my then-wife Gail. We rented a small, old wooden house in Monkton, Vermont. The sun rose over Camel’s Hump and the Green Mountains to the east, and set over Lake Champlain and the Adirondacks to the west. It had a half-acre of yard, a small lake lay just downhill, apple orchards ripened just down the lane…. We should have listened to the pig.

The place was more like a hammock than a house. The roof dipped gracefully in a long slow curve from one end-gable and the other, and the attractive refinished hardwood floors had contours of their own: I would leave my soccer ball in the living room and find it in the kitchen. Nothing was level. As I typed away at my novel, everything on the table shuffled to one end and fell off. Shut doors swung eerily open on their own. One room was unfinished, and on our first evening in the house, Gail thought she saw a man in there, watching her from the shadows.

Still, the place had promise. If I mowed the back yard we’d have room for a lawn and a volleyball court, and Gail could start growing vegetables. Keeping a wary eye open for snakes and leopards, I started mowing up by the back porch. By the time I had reached the end of the yard the grass by the porch was nine inches high again. I started all over twice, then came down with a mysterious fever that left me sweating and hallucinating for three days and the inside of my mouth became so sore that anything I ate felt like razor blades. By the time I struggled to my feet the grass was over a foot long.

“Lawn get ahead of you this year?” inquired the town clerk. Our next-door neighbors, whose kid turned doughnuts on his dirt bike in the field across the road whenever I was trying to write, rang our landlord and complained that by not mowing the lawn we were devaluing their property. I went at it one last time and the mower cough, waved its little wheels in the air and died.

Undaunted, Gail started digging the garden, talking of French-intensive and raised beds. The soil seemed to have been untouched since the age of the glaciers, though, and came in vast hard clods turning to clay bricks as the spring rains gave way to summer heat.

The well water was undrinkable. The lab told us that the sample was three parts sulfur and one part iron. The well, they said, must have been drilled into a sulfur bed. It turned our hair red. I took a bath and my silver wedding ring came out gold. As soon as we used the washer our clothing started to stink of sweat and fear.

We had no money, of course, so I offered to paint the house. Heaven knows, it needed it, and the landlord said that in return for the paint work I could have a motorbike he happened to not be using. I borrowed a ladder, scraper and brushes and went to work. I spent every day in the high summer heat on the ladder, speckled first with flecks of old paint, then with spots of new paint.

Amazingly, I got the job done, and we drove over to the landlord’s house to collect the motorbike. “It’s in the barn,” he said. The bike had no seat, no mirrors, no battery, and was covered with bird droppings.

Yet none of this was as bad as the mosquitoes. At the end of a day of painting I accidentally left an upstairs window open and as we were sitting down to dinner the air was suddenly thick with the brutes. I rolled up a newspaper and went slightly insane, racing around and smacking the newly-painted walls so hard that all was left was a smear of newsprint. By the time Gail thought to slam the door at the door of the stairs and stuff newspaper into the cracks around it, we had killed fifty-eight in the living-room alone.

The following morning I bought insecticide bombs from the general store, dressed in boots, gloves and hooded parka and ran upstairs, where the windows were dark with the bastards. Two hours later we ventured up through the toxic air and found tables and windowsills coated with a thick dust of dead insects.

Even after we moved back into town at the end of the summer, the place continued to plague us. The landlord decided to put it on the market, and one day in September a realtor brought some potential buyers to look over the house. They were inside no more than two minutes. From what I could make out from what the landlord yelled over the phone at me, we must have forgotten to remove the cat door when we left. A neighborhood stray had gone in to explore the place, and left in the center of each room her own independent assessment of the property.

This was the first comic essay I ever wrote. It was first published in the Vermont Vanguard in 1983, and has been reworked many, many times since, in conversation, on Morning Edition (1991), and in print. It taught me a priceless writer’s lesson: nothing makes people laugh more than someone else’s disasters.