My Dad's House by Peter Christopher July, 2000

I have lived here in this house on and off for most of my life. Twenty-Four years. And now I've owned it for about six months. I bought it from my Dad after he recently remarried and moved in with his new wife Jane. Somehow though, it still remains my Dad's house. I suppose that over the next few years it will become less and less his, and more and more mine. In the meantime while everything is still relatively fresh in my mind, I want to record some of my memories and thoughts about this place, and what it has been like to begin to make it my own.

I was born in December of 1975, according to the Chinese Calendar, the year of the rabbit. In March of that year, North Vietnam had deployed 100,000 troops in South Vietnam, and by the end of April, General Duong Van Minh of South Vietnam had announced the surrender of his country. The Vietnam Conflict had been "resolved" and it was obvious that America had not won. Republican Gerald Ford was President, and the Pittsburgh Steelers beat out the Minnesota Vikings in Superbowl IX.

My family lived in the middle of the tiny village of East Randolph, on State Route 14 in central Vermont. Interstate 89 through Vermont had not yet been completed, so traffic was constantly flashing by right in front of the house on one of Vermont's thoroughfares. My parents had been living there for six years when I was born, and they were considering building their own place a bit further off the beaten path They were part of the influx of liberals who had flocked to Vermont in the 60s and 70s. Peter and Bonnie Kawecki came from Chicago, married and looking for a safe place to raise children.

My mother, Bonnie, was teaching at the East Randolph School, an elementary school on the far side of town (about 3/10 of a mile). She had a liberal arts degree in teaching from the University of Chicago and was working part-time on her Masters of Arts in Liberal Studies at Dartmouth College while she was pregnant with me. She believed in the value of classroom education but, like many of her 60s compatriots, also believed that there were major problems in the establishments of civilization. She believed in making change within the school system, and she dedicated herself to modernizing the public school in East Randolph, Vermont; the state where John Dewey was born.

My Dad was different, different from everybody. He was of Polish and German blood, and had been raised an only child by his widowed mother Klara in Bavaria, Germany after his father was drafted into the Polish Army and killed in the Soviet invasion. He taught electromechanical engineering at Vermont Technical College, in nearby Randolph Center. He had a few friends from work, but I believe in many ways was a lonely and solitary man who had never learned to share his feelings with other human beings, or even to be aware of them himself.

My parents were both intelligent, hard-working, and idiosyncratic. For years, Dad was a volunteer fireman in East Randolph, part of his outreach to the community of n-th generation Vermonters who were now his neighbors. When I've heard him talk about that experience, I can hear a real unresolved discomfort in his voice. In many ways a perfectionist, he was never able to accept the fire-fighting strategies of the East Randolph crew. As an engineer and scientist, he probably did have some good ideas to improve the firefighting tactics. But, for whatever reason, the crew in East Randolph must not have shared the same enthusiasm for his approach to fire-fighting, much less the gall of an inexperienced firefighter to try to educate them. Combine that with the fury this man, my father, experiences when he feels powerless, and his inability to submit to authority. It is no surprise that before long he decided to spend his time in other pursuits. He began to retreat again into his own world of electronic gadgets, fantastic auction buys of broken furniture, and designing his own home. My Dad's House.

The history of the world, whether it be written as such or not, must certainly be filled with a vast number of odd men and women who retreat into the backcountries of their respective lands, unable or uninterested in dealing with their civil societies. And too, it must be filled with a long line of fatherless men, whether killed by war, or run off from their fatherly responsibility. To these two camps does my father belong. And in the woods of Vermont did my father seek his own father.

He was found in the person of Boris (pronounced Borees). Boris Korvin-Kroukovsky was a retired naval engineer who lived at the end of a dead end road with his alcoholic wife Genya. Boris, a pilot in the Russian Air Force who had been shot down in 1918, together with his wife escaped from Russia on the eve of the Red takeover on a ship bound for San Francisco. Quickly promoted in his first job at a machining company, he eventually designed amphibious plane floats and studied the hydrodynamics of waves, receiving an honorary doctorate and the medal of the Society of Naval Architects and Marine Engineers.

Boris and my Dad had a lot to talk about. They were both engineers; they were both idiosyncratic whackos who dreamt about having their own perfect worlds in the Vermont backwoods, self-sufficient in electricity, wood heat, and food, with enough gadgets never to bore. Boris had multiple metal lathes throughout his house and regularly made his own parts for his homemade electric tractors. He must have been quite a sight to see in his peak of retirement, sitting atop one of his electric tractors (of which there were 4), navigating through his garden. I only remember him as confined to a wheelchair, unable to visit even the second floor of his house or to use the darkroom he had built. Boris had hair growing way out of his ears and nose, and spoke with a throaty Russian accent.

Boris had about 100 acres of land, right up to the top of Hurricane Hill. His house was situated about 100 yards from a small stream, and had a gorgeous southwest view. It was on top of the world. Boris had fenced in a huge "garden" about 40 yards by 80 yards, with fence about 8 feet tall to keep the deer out, where he would reportedly try to turn over soil and cultivate with his electric tractors. My father saw the potential of this beautiful spot and asked Boris if he could buy five acres to build himself a home. The answer at first was no, but eventually Boris warmed to the idea, and in 1976 the transaction was completed for $3500.

My Dad quickly began planning for the construction of his house, secured a mortgage for the supplies, and jumped into the new project. I was one year old. My two adopted older brothers were had been in the family for a few years already and were adolescents. My mother was trying to raise three children while introducing new ideas in education to old-school Vermonters while keeping our house in East Randolph Village functioning. She resisted the idea of Dad escaping to build a new house, but apparently there was no stopping him.

The house was to be huge. Three stories tall, plus a basement at ground level. Thirty feet by thirty-five feet. Almost 3000 square feet, not including the basement. It would contain an apartment for Dad's mother, an office, a library, three baths, and five bedrooms. It would have a wood furnace and hot water baseboard heating, with electric backup; and it would have solar heating (this was during OPEC's madhouse, in Carter's presidency when the White House had solar water panels and certain energy efficiency expenditures qualified as income tax deductions). And my Dad would design and build almost the entire structure himself, working with graph paper and figuring out details as he went along.

Miraculously, the structure took shape. Bulldozers leveled and terraced; the foundation was poured; lumber was delivered and stored under a roofed structure. The house went up. And it still stands, majestic in its southern exposure, prominent; and yet with a certain clumsy awkwardness in design and function. You would enter the house through a makeshift plywood door with a makeshift eight-inch-long handle. After snapping on the light, you would find yourself in the basement, a construction and storage zone with no natural light, and then walk up the stairs, immediately stomping in your muddy boots right into the orange-linoleum-floored dining room.

Luckily, that's about as ridiculous as it gets but it doesn't get much more normal either. Walking up the stairs to ever-higher floors, you are traversing back and forth through dim hallways with no natural light except for what shines in from the doors to the bedrooms on either side (the "finished" state of the house for the first five years did not include doors for any rooms). Oddly, no one staircase is directly above another, making for noticeable wasted space both below and above the stairs, providing huge high ceilings over the dark, particle-board-sided staircases. Bathrooms, like staircases, have mostly particle-board walls and are hardly finished, only enough to be functional. So finally the house is "finished", and around the time when my sister is born in 1978, we move in. I am two years old, and my room is blue. I get assorted furniture from auctions, and a few odd posters. When I have a nightmare, I can scream for my Mom. Since there are no doors, there are no excuses either. She usually comes, but I remember that my Dad came once and was quietly furious that I was insisting on my Mom comforting me and not him.

I only have very few memories of the house during construction. One was when we the walls were being put up between the rooms on the second floor. I remember the studs in rows, and I remember being able to walk through the rows of studs. I don't know whether I knew they would be walls or not. Another memory is when I was standing at the end of the driveway with my mom and there was a huge woodpecker in the tree. I don't remember whether I saw it or not, but I know she told me to look at it. The last memory is from that same spot at the end of the driveway. It's from a dream. I dreamt that the house was burning and my mom and I were standing at the end of the driveway watching it happen. My dad was in the house. I was not overly concerned although I suspected he would not survive. I think it may have served him right to not survive. I remember how the walls were burning, and I remember the south wall falling down into the house on top of my Dad. Maybe I wanted for him to suffer and even die because he was leaving and not spending time with me. Maybe because he was building my Dad's house.

My grandmother, Dad's mother, did not live with us in the house in East Randolph for very long, if at all. I remember when I was four or five years old, and I wasn't sure where I was supposed to get off the bus, at the school in Randolph, or at my grandmother's house. I got off at the school, and I walked up to the third floor classroom where I thought my Mom was teaching. I looked in the window. I did not see her. I saw some boys in there and they were playing or something. There were some girls too. I didn't know them but I think they may have seen me through the window. I didn't want them to know I wasn't sure what to do. I walked back down the stairs and out of the school building, and I walked along the road I thought was to Grandma's house. Eventually I got to the place where Grandma's house was, and her house was there, and up the stairs in back, Grandma was there too. We called her Oma. She spoke German better than English, and she had geraniums on the porch and inside too. She made me buttered bread (she called it "Butterbrot"), and I liked it. She spoke German to me, although I didn't always understand her. My Oma was still well. It's true, I had never had a grandfather, but I had two grandmothers. And my Oma lived in my town, in Randolph, Vermont.

Not too long after that, Oma started getting sick. I didn't know what she had. I don't remember seeing her sick, but I know my Dad spent a lot of time at her apartment because she needed his help, and he was being nice to her.

Then Oma died. I was at home with my mother when the phone rang. It was a yellow plastic rotary telephone with a metallic bell, and my mother went over to answer it. Then she talked for a minute, and then she hung up, and then she came over to me in the living room.

"Oma Died," she said. It was my Dad who had been on the phone.

I asked my Dad about it when I saw him. All I can remember is asking him about

how he knew she was really dead. He said he felt her pulse in her wrist. I didn't understand. He showed me but I still wasn't quite sure. I guess death was one of those many things I would understand better when I was a grown-up.

My Dad and maybe some other people packed all Oma's things into boxes and moved them to the attic of my Dad's house. I know this because they are still there twenty years later. A few years ago as I was cleaning the house, I found some notes written by an assortment of people who were helping take care of my Oma when she was sick. She was sick for many weeks. She wasn't eating much, her digestive system was hardly functioning, her bowel movements were carefully noted and nothing you'd want to write home about. Finding the notes inspired me again to talk with my Dad again about his mother's death. Apparently she had had pancreatic cancer and was on a huge collection of daily pills to extend her life for just that little bit longer. I guess she was sicker than I knew.

My Dad started taking flying lessons about an hour from home. Maybe he was inspired by Boris's pilot stories. Maybe he didn't want to deal with the boxes in the attic. Maybe he didn't want to deal with my mother, or with me or my sister or our older brothers. Or maybe he just really wanted to learn to fly and thought it would be the greatest thing.

He did get his pilots license, and he was eventually qualified enough that he could fly me around in a small Cessna. I guess it may have been a coincidence with everything else but my parents stopped sleeping in the same bedroom. I think sometimes my parents were seeing other people "on the side". Apparently as far as they were concerned it was still the 60s or 70s, and as long as their primary allegiance remained to one another, this behavior wasn't a problem. I think this was one of those times when it "wasn't a problem." I remember my mom was spending some time with a man friend of hers named Marty. He lived in Shelburne and drove a huge, old green clunker. He must have been a great driver. At least my mom must have thought so. One time she spent the night up in Shelburne and I wanted to know why. I can't remember whether it was convenience or else because she wanted to. It didn't make much sense to me.

I don't know what my dad was doing at the time aside from flying lessons but I suspect it was not particularly admirable. Why else maintain an air of moral superiority unless you're covering something up? And he always maintains an air of moral superiority.

My mom planned to buy a house in Randolph. I wanted her to buy a house up on this one hill where the doctors lived. I wanted my parents to be rich. I wanted to be rich. Maybe I thought that would make up for pain in my own life. But my mom ended up buying a house in town. It didn't even have a view. Before long my sister and I were living there. It seemed like the natural choice for some reason that we would be. Dad says this is because we would have more friends there. I don't know whether I was consulted.

I was about eight. My sister was six. It was closer now to get to the elementary school in Randolph, where my mom worked. I was in her class. I was in her class from first to third grade; it was a multi-aged class called the Primary Unit. All the kids of the in-crowd liberal hippies were in the Primary Unit.

One day we went to the courthouse in Chelsea because my parents were being divorced. My mom and I took off the morning from school. I don't remember the court proceedings. I remember that when we got back from school one boy asked where I had been. I told him I had been at court for my parents' divorce. He asked who won. I wasn't sure. Did somebody win a divorce hearing? I didn't know. It wasn't me. I couldn't think of who it might have been.

My Dad probably wasn't sure who had won either. He bought a $10,000 kit to build a real two-seater airplane called a KitFox and started putting it together in his living room.

When I had been living with my mother in Randolph for a few years, one day my Dad called on the phone. He was out of breath. He said Boris had died. I was almost ten. My grandmother, his mother, had been dead for less than five years, and I believe my Dad had been spending a lot of time with Boris, though he rarely talked about it. Dad explained that he had been at home and had gotten a phone call from one of Boris's friends who were visiting Boris, who said Boris had died. I didn't understand why my Dad had run up so quickly since he already knew Boris was dead. He said maybe he thought Boris could be saved. And he had called an ambulance, which was on the way. Maybe he did think Boris could be saved. Or maybe he just wanted to have a chance to finally say good-bye and to tell Boris, the only father he really knew, that he loved him. It was the second time he had lost his Dad, and now all his parents were gone.

Boris willed his home and property to my father, a move which I at the time considered to be a gift from heaven. He did it of his own free will, having had over ten years to get to know my Dad enough to see that he was unable to deal with messes. Korvin's house was already in rough shape, a ramshackle construction with slanted floors leading from room to room. It began to deteriorate quickly. Burglars looted all rooms of the house, porcupine and squirrel shit spread out on all the floors; windows broke, stuff disappeared. Dad said that most of the good stuff had been taken out by Boris's friends in the few weeks after his death. But it was a lie. Korvin's house was full of treasures, furniture, books, papers, appliances, paintings. Dad would get furious later whenever someone broke into the house and more things were missing. He seemed more forgiving of himself that the place should rot and be worthless to nobody, than of someone who was scavenging old books or china to make ends meet.

Dad stopped working on his plane, and it just sat there in the middle of his living room for several years. He says the reason he never finished it was because the company had delayed sending an important part out to him. When he says that, it looks like he believes it too. The short runway he had bulldozed on Boris's property when Boris was still alive is still there, and still basically flat. I do not think it will ever see a plane on it, and all that has ever filled the hangar my Dad built has been my Dad's old parts cars. I don't think he went flying again after Boris died. There just seemed to be something more enticing about running away. He bought a windsurfing board, and tried to build a new existence on it, not knowing even what it might mean to have closure on his previous projects - his unfinished house complete with unfinished plane dominating the living room, his unused landing strip, his dead mother's belongings still in the same boxes in the attic, her ashes on a shelf in his home office, thousands of pounds of his unburnable trash which had amassed in boxes and bags in his huge unfinished house, and his latest: an entire separate house just inherited from Boris, just as full of trash and toys as his own. Not to mention the ashes of Boris and Boris's wife Genya. But I suspect it just wasn't convenient to deal with them at the time. Who would know where to start. And anyway, the wind was blowing on Lake Champlain. It was a good day for water sports.

I never know what my Dad may be feeling. He is el hombre misterioso, the mysterious man. Sometimes he is angry, sometimes he is pleased; always he is intent. I wonder whether he is really a man at all. Does he love women? He certainly seems to have been in relationships with a handful of them. I think he has always kept his relationships and his feelings about them secret from everyone in his life. Maybe it's because we are always too scared to ask.

Sometimes, after the divorce, he did have girlfriends. To me they always seemed so mortal and limited compared to this huge, infallible man. Not only were they different, they were usually stupid. A few times there were even girlfriends who moved in with him. Once I got to know them, I saw that they were the most stupid of all. I guess I never asked Dad why he was interested in these women. I figured there must be some really valid reason. Because Dad always had a valid reason.

When I was twelve, I went away for my first year of boarding school at Northfield Mount Hermon. I thought I was really something special; in fact, I knew it, because I was my parent's son, and everybody knew I was the smartest one anywhere around. A lot of the time I found out it was true. I performed admirably on math tests. I even learned what writing was all about. I am sure my Dad agreed. I was less sure of my mom, only because she seemed to think there was some redeeming value to my sister which outranked mine. I remember in elementary school I asked her whether my sister would ever be better than me at anything. She said probably. She said maybe writing. I guess my Mom wasn't as smart as I thought. Who cares how good people's penmanship is anyway. When I came back from summer vacation, I moved in with my Dad and learned to play the piano better than my sister.

Dad and I built a pond, too. At least we tried to. We had to have someone else finish it off. My whole life I had wanted to have a pond, even just a small one, because to me that was the ultimate status symbol. I had always loved to fish, and I had always loved rich people. I wanted to have my pond to fish in. Also I bet beautiful rich girls would want to kiss me or talk to me if I had a pond. They might also want to go fishing

The pond finally happened one of those summers when I was back from school. My Dad and his friend Mark had gone in together to buy a backhoe for six thousand dollars a few weeks before the beginning of my summer break. My Dad said Mark had a tree farm permit so they didn't have to pay any sales tax on it. A few days later my Dad had dug out a hole, in the area where I had told him I wanted the pond, on the land Dad had inherited from Boris. He didn't tell me he was going to start on the pond; it wasn't fair but I did want the pond. When I got home, he said he wasn't sure we were going to be able to build the pond, because the backhoe apparently had a bad hydraulic system. Then we went to look at it, and to move the backhoe. It didn't just have a bad hydraulic system, it also wouldn't budge, period. It was stuck. We got our tractor, and moved the backhoe at least a few feet, with me driving the tractor and him trying to maneuver the backhoe. It was a real bad mess. We tore up all kinds of vegetation. I thought we were almost as bad as the clearcutters in our devastation, in particular because we still didn't even have shit to show for our work.

Dad called this farmer who had a bulldozer, and a few days later the real construction team went to work. The guy who ran the dozer wasn't real tall, but he looked even stronger than my Dad. He was he-man. I thought he could have lifted the dozer out of a mess himself if he got it stuck. Dad said it was going to cost two to three thousand dollars, and I felt awfully embarrassed because that seemed like a lot of money. And it seemed like my fault because I had wanted the pond. And I didn't have the two or three thousand dollars. I guess my Dad decided it was an investment.

Once the dozer guy had pulled our backhoe out of the muck-pit, he went to work, and for almost a week he pushed the earth back and forth. Until he himself got stuck. I guess it was a really hard location for pushing dirt. I guess the price of the pond went up. Two days later this huge backhoe shows up on a semi truck and goes to work, first digging out the dozer, then digging out the pond, deeper and deeper. It got really deep. They just kept on digging. Then they put in a drain pipe in the bottom, pushed back and forth for a few days, put the stopper on the end of the drainpipe, loaded up their toys and left. I don't know what it ended up costing, but I guess my Dad ate it up. At least if he wasn't rich, he was resourceful.

The house my Dad had inherited from Boris had in the meantime begun to deteriorate. Canes of feral raspberries took over the small front yard, with tiger lillies flanking on the west. Vines crawled up the sides of the house and silently slipped behind storm windows. The wood floor of the garage collapsed under the weight of the '68 Plymouth Valiant.

Meanwhile, unwelcome visitors began to appear, leaving marks of their visit and taking what pleased them. The first ones were porcupines, which quickly staked their claim on several rooms, leaving behind their proud oval droppings. Not long after were the chipmunks. Usually all the animals did was to leave gifts. And then came the humans.

My Dad called me one day and told me that Boris's house had been broken into. Then the next day, he showed me where the window had been broken to gain entrance, and several places where cute old bookshelves had previously stood. All that remained were the shadows of those bookshelves, dark lines on a wall otherwise faded light. Unlike of the human shadows at Hiroshima and Nagasaki, it was here clear that the bookshelves must have been in their spaces for dozens of years, unmoved through the death of Boris's wife Genya, and unmoved through Boris's death. And as a consolation gift for the lucky landowner, the visitors had also left their pride in the toilet of each bathroom. Unfortunately, they neglected to consider that the water had been shut off. Their gifts remain.

My Dad was angry when he talked about the break-in. In fact, he seemed angry about the whole situation.

"To be an executor of an estate has got to be one of the worst punishments ever," he said. "And to have a co-executor to 'share' the responsibility has got to be the single worst punishment." Apparently not only had Boris left my Dad a few thousand dollars and his home, he had also left him with the responsibility of dispersing the estate according to the will. Boris had left his financial documents in an assorted shambles, and over the ensuing few years Dad had pieced together Boris's assets from quarterly brokerage statements. "And every time I had to send in a request to one of these brokerages, or to the bank, or even to sign a check, I had to send it to the co-executor first, to get him to sign it so that it would be official." He sounded really annoyed. I've learned now that some of his anger may be due to his own anxiety about his performance. It was pretty obvious that Boris's house was "turning to hell in a handbasket" as my Dad himself might put it.

My Dad did get the police to come up to the house and investigate the crime. They never located the stolen items. How could they: Dad didn't know specifically what was in the house to begin with, so how could he explain what had been stolen?

One time I was home from boarding school and my Dad was cleaning furiously. Never having seen such behavior, I had to know what was going on, but all he said was that it seemed like time to clean. Lots of stuff was relocated into the attic or rooms on the third floor. Much of the big stuff we got out of the house, and moved it to Boris's. We moved the airplane from the living room up to the cabin next to Boris's house, and moved a bunch of furniture right into Boris's living room. It was old ratty furniture and fit in nicely with the piles of faded Paris Match magazines and accumulating porcupine poop.

Dad cleaned the living room. Dad cleaned out an upstairs room. Dad put up a solid door on the bathroom instead of the sliding shutter-door. Then Dad cleaned the shower. He actually got down on his knees and scrubbed out that slippery, scummy stuff that accumulates in the bottom of the shower.

Then I met Rose.

The truth is, I can't remember meeting Rose particularly. It may have been at a folk-dance which are quite popular in New England; I'm sure that is where my Dad met her. She lived in Hartford, Connecticut, and sometimes my Dad would go down there. Sometimes Rose would come up. What I do remember is that I did not like Rose, and Rose did not like me. Rose was dumber than a door and more stuck up than a stick. Her last name was Hollow, which proved it. I was angry at my Dad that he had picked such a worthless person to associate with, and I was embarrassed too.

Rose was the second girlfriend who lasted more than a year for my Dad. The first one was nicer but then she ended up moving elsewhere, and my Dad didn't want to go.

Rose Hollow and I had a point system. Neither one of us liked the idea that the other one might have a prior claim on my Dad's time or his love, so we competed for value based on points. I explained that I had more points because it was my house and because he was my Dad. She said she had more points because she was his romantic partner, and because now it was her house too. She said she was going to redesign part of the kitchen. For some reason the point system didn't last too long. I don't think my Dad found out about it.

I know that Rose must have cashed in some points because we got a new stovetop and a new microwave, and Dad tore up the living room floor and put in southern yellow pine. I was mixed about the southern yellow pine, because it was sure a lot nicer than the particle board he had torn up. On the other hand, it seemed to be an indication that I was not such a big man after all.

Eventually Rose threw out all her points and left. My Dad was really sad. He said it wa really a bad sign that three intelligent people couldn't figure out a way to live together. "How can five billion people learn to live together, if three fairly smart ones can't?" He asked. But as long as Rose was out, I wasn't going to stress about it.

I often came home to my Dad's house when I was at boarding school and then at college. Sometimes it might be for part or all of a summer vacation; sometimes it might be for spring break, when I would boil down maple syrup; sometimes it might be for just a weekend. But since my parents' divorce, I had never really spent more than three months there at a time. The first time I tried was near the end of my Hampshire College degree, when I took a year off to refocus my studies in a new direction and to write my thesis.

I was proud of my plan. At 19, I was actually taking the step of educating myself out of the established educational system. I had fifteen months in which to plan and execute a study of childraising in intentional communities (the subject I had chosen for my senior thesis). It didn't happen according to plan. After three months, I had been in every state from Vermont to Washington, but had yet to visit an intentional community or begin reading or writing about my thesis subject. Luckily fifteen months is a long time. I regularly charted new courses for my thesis, from spending some time at a Kibbutz in Israel to dropping the subject alogether and focusing on education. By the time Hampshire College swung back into session in the fall, I had returned to my Dad's house, where I devised my first experiment: a 'student-taught egalitarian education class'.

By virtue of my volunteering as a group leader during Hampshire's new student orientation, I was on campus when the first classes started. After arranging with a faculty member to 'sponsor' the activity, I put up signs about the radical new class. I knew, however, that I didn't want there to be one set leader, and I didn't want to have to be there all the time since I was living in Vermont. So I arranged for someone else to attend the first class, actually explain the basics of how the course could function, then leave. Believe it or not, this course turned out to be a real success. A conference of alternative colleges was organized. A publication of student evaluations of courses was put out.

In the mean time, I left for another trip through the southeast U.S. with my friend Josh. We visited intentional communities and alternative schools from Virginia to Georgia. I finally felt I had some direction. Perhaps it was because my parents are both teachers; or maybe I was just freaked out by all the crazy hippies, but before long I had dropped communal childraising and was focusing my thesis research on education.

I got back to Vermont and started to write. Here I was, at long last making progress on my own education, (mostly) out of the context of schools. It was great. But it was also hard. And here I was living in my Dad's house. He was single again, and by this time the house had begun to accumulate lots of stuff in living spaces. It didn't bother me too much though. I guess I was used to it. I knew how to live with stuff around me.

What I didn't know how to do was live with my Dad. We had no idea how to communicate, and we had no idea what one another was feeling. When it came to personal stuff, we didn't even know who we were. My Dad seemed sad. I was often frustrated by the difficulty of my task (I was trying to write the last and final word on education, of course).

Then I found out my friends Tim and Tom had moved to Vermont, and I drove up to visit them. I had known Tim and Tom since high school. It was such a pleasure to see them and spend time with them again, although it was clear that in our own ways we had all grown apart, Tom master of his own universe as founder of a new seed company and, Tim quitting college altogether and feeling rather aimless, myself trying to prove that I had some value as a human being, by achieving a feat in educational research. Since we really hadn't kept in touch much in the meantime, it was interesting to think about the potential we had in getting to know one another again. Soon thereafter, I moved out of my Dad's house again and joined Tim and Tom in their house in Calais, Vermont.

At the time, I had a hard time accepting that my Dad had feelings, or that it might impact him that I was moving out. For the first time, though, he opened up ever so slightly as I was packing my things to go. It happened when we were sitting in rocking chairs by the woodstove. It wasn't particularly uncomfortable; warm woodstoves have a way of easing tension. My Dad started to look weepy. Then he said in a halting, slobbery voice, "I'm afraid you're leaving me, I'm afraid I'm chasing you away." It was one moment. Then it was gone. I went to stand by him, and he was quickly back to his hopeless, impenetrable self, "I've read, you know, that people often try to comfort one another to make the appearance of pain go away, but it doesn't actually make the pain go away." For a few moments, I felt my Dad was a human being with feelings. I wondered whether he would ever show that to me again.

--

I did move to Tim and Tom's. And I have never since talked to my Dad about how that made him feel. What I do remember is that a few months after I moved out, I remember driving somewhere with my Dad. He said he had some interesting news. He was getting married. He explained that he had met a woman he liked, who was a single mom living in Woodstock, and that he got along well with her and her family. Reportedly, he said, this woman's parents were religious, due to which she insisted on either a committed marriage, or no relationship. And so he had decided to ask her to marry him. And she had agreed. I guess he wasn't going to make the mistake of letting me meet a potential partner again.

Very soon thereafter, they did get married, doing their own ceremony on a hillside near Woodstock. In attendance were her kids, my sister and I, and my father's ex-wife, my mother. I didn't even stop to think how odd it was that my mother was there. What a weird family.

It is common for states to have "junkyard laws" which require residents to obey certain standards of cleanliness. In Vermont, a property qualifies as a junkyard when it has more than a certain number of junked cars. The number is around five cars. Theoretically, any property which qualifies as a junkyard must be surrounded by an eight foot solid fence. This property I have been describing, my Dad's house, which I have now bought from him, qualifies as a junkyard.

Convenient for my Dad, however, the State does not actually bear down on landowners of legal junkyards to construct fences unless the premises are located alongside a major road. This property, at the dead end of Town Highway 41, thus has never been cited for its lack of an eight foot solid fence, although it is legally required to have one.

There were almost twenty old metal cars: "Hero" (an old international) and "the Mercedes" among the oldest. Boris had left a few of his own on his property. Perhaps it was too much for these men to let go of their old treasures. Perhaps it was just too much work to call a wrecker and have them hauled off. Perhaps they were such perfectionists they could not imagine that there was no use left in the old wrecks. Perhaps, perhaps, perhaps.

Three years ago, in January 1997, no one was living here. When I graduated from Hampshire College, I decided to move in. I had about five thousand dollars of savings from assorted jobs I'd held over the past year and was hot and eager to apply my educational theories to starting a new elementary school, the Hurricane Hill School. Since the house was uninhabited, it seemed like the perfect place. I moved back in February, and Tim moved down in March, supposedly to work with me on the new school. I spent the spring recruiting college students to work as staff for the Hurricane Hill School summer session, learning about and going through the legal processes of starting a school, volunteering twice a week in a local preschool, and substitute teaching at a variety of local schools.

In my free time, I thought I would clean up the house and property. It seemed like it wouldn't take too long. Just a few loads to the dump.

Three months later, I had taken about three tons of trash to the dump: old moldy rugs, early computers, broken appliances, broken jars, broken furniture, broken sailboats. And there was still a long way to go. I guess there was a lot of trash. And I wasn't done yet.

The summer program did happen. With my Dad's permission, I had an antiquarian book dealer come to take what he could find from Boris's house, which turned out to be $1500 worth of books. And I sold an additional $500 worth of bookshelves and papers from Boris's house. Together with my savings, that basically financed the summer program, which otherwise had only a few thousand dollars of revenues from the small weekly fee.

And then I was exhausted and almost broke. There was no way I could emotionally or financially continue with a school in the fall. Indeed, I felt my entire motivation for the project itself was revealing itself to me to be rather unhealthy. I felt more and more that the whole conception and execution of it from the beginning was designed to be another way of showing how well I could achieve something spectacular at a young age. Rooted in my own insecurity about who I am, and in my strategy for dealing with the resulting anxiety. It didn't have much to do with the kids or the needs of the Randolph community.

I heard about a job teaching Physics I adjunct at nearby Vermont Technical College, where my father had been a Professor, and applied for the job. I got it, and put the Hurricane Hill School on hold.

At the end of my first semester, I was already fed up with teaching college. The pay sucked, it required a lot of my energy to be so responsible, and I didn't feel as much respect from the students as I thought I deserved. On the suggestion of one of my best students, I decided to go back into computer programming work, which I had learned in college.

By the first of the next month, January 1998, I was in Seattle putting together a new life as a computer programmer. Tim remained in the house in Vermont. He had never worked with the school, and our friendship had fizzled in the nine months we lived together in my Dad's house.

I had two jobs while in Seattle: the first, with a small consulting company, and the second with Amazon.com. I quit the first after a month to go to the second; I quit the second after a year, once my first stock options had vested, to recover from my grueling time there. I met a girl from Olympia, Washington who worked on an organic farm there, and I moved to Olympia soon after my last day with Amazon.com. I knew I would miss my top floor apartment, its beautiful view of the entire Seattle skyline, my friends at work, and the respect I felt from many of my co-workers. But I also knew I had to escape from the city and from the corporation.

For a while, I found some solace in Olympia. It was a nice place; I began running regularly and got into good physical condition again. And then I decided I wanted to leave before the gray of the next northwest winter. Ninety straight days of positive precipitation in Seattle had been a little too much for me. I didn't want to have to live through it again.

I sold my Range Rover (Roxanne) and my rabbit convertible, bought a '77 GMC conversion van (Naomi), loaded it full of all my stuff, and with my girlfriend Gina took a trip east. I knew that my Dad's house had been uninhabited for almost a year and planned to spend some time there. Gina wasn't sure what she wanted to do; whether she wanted to live with me wherever I ended up, or whether she wanted to be back in Olympia, or in New York where her family lived. I wasn't sure what I wanted to do either. But when I got back to Vermont, I started unpacking my stuff from my van into my Dad's house. It was going to be my home for a while.

The house was in terrible condition when we arrived. It smelled disgusting. The floors and counters were littered with rodent droppings. Everything was covered with dust. The washer stained all clothes brown and leaked water. The dryer didn't do anything. The microwave oven was broken. All my stereo equipment had been stolen. The fridge was a moldy nightmare (and died two months after we plugged it in). A white weasel was following us around the house. My Dad explained that he hadn't been able to rent it out. I wonder why not.

Within about a week, the place was at least partially livable. I found the source of the worst smell: a gallon jug of ground fish intestines (fertilizer) had been gnawed open by one of the animals, and the goop had been spread all over the room and on the radiators. We cleaned out the kitchen, caught ten mice in mouse traps, and threw their stiff bodies into the woodstove. We carefully scrubbed all the drawers to remove the smell of mouse piss, and took several boxes of disgusting, animal-shit-covered utensils to recycle in the metal bin at the dump.

I decided to stay a while, and for the last nine months Gina and I have been making progress cleaning out all the rooms of the house. I have rented out the cabin on Boris's property. Using the consultation of several contractors, I've decided that Boris's house will have to be torn down, and I've arranged to have all the remaining contents removed by a salvage expert. I've contracted to have all the cars removed; so far, three are gone, but there are a lot more to go.

And I bought the place. My Amazon.com stock options came in handy to make the purchase, and I still have more than enough cash to last me many years to come. I bought a chainsaw and have cleared several lots of trees that had taken over the view to the south. In the process, I've almost cut enough wood to heat the house next winter.

Next week my friend AAron is coming out to help work on construction work on the third floor so that I can rent out two rooms with their own kitchen and bath up there. Am I going to live here forever? I don't know. Am I ever going to be done cleaning out all the trash? I don't know that either. But at least I'm moving in the right direction.