Bad Land: An American Romance

10. Home

SLUICING DOWN INTERSTATE 5 IN THE RAINSTORM, the car was a boat at sea again. The northern suburbs of the city slid past in the gray like the twin coasts of an estuary in fog. I drifted cautiously over to the exit lane, and made a right, westward, for Queen Anne, and home.

For two years, I had been living with a story so American that some Americans would not recognize it as a story. These people came over, went broke, quit their homes, and moved on elsewhere? So? This is America, where everyone has the right to fail — it’s in the Constitution.

I drove along the puddled north bank of Lake Union, where the high bows of big ships almost touched the street. Russian factory trawlers, they had been moored in the same spot for as long as I could remember. The Russian ships came into Seattle for a winter refit, the unstable ruble sank against the dollar, checks bounced, crews’ wages went unpaid. The ships landed up in marshals’ sales, and more disconsolate Russian seamen joined Seattle’s swelling underclass. The usual American story.

Yet the homesteading experience was more than just another episode in the history of failure in America. It scorched people too fiercely to be shrugged off.

Men who came to the house to fix things — a carpenter, a gas fitter, an electrician, a compass adjuster — knew exactly what I was up to.

“So what’s this book you’re writing?”

Montana, I said. Homesteads. Deserted houses. The empty prairie. Dry-farming. You know.

Each time, the question was revealed as a device — an excuse to tell me a story. There was a homestead in the family, in Montana or the Dakotas; grandparents, usually, parents sometimes, who had “starved out” on their land.

Arm crooked around a branch of the Korean dogwood in the yard, I found myself discussing Campbell’s Soil Culture Manual with Marcus, the carpenter, grandson of homesteaders, whose son now farmed a high, dry stretch of benchland on the Palouse.

“He was crazy,” Marcus said. “Plow, and harrow, and disc? That’s only a way of making dust. They do the exact opposite now. Don’t touch the topsoil if you can help it. Don’t plow before you sow. My son’s into what they call the ‘no-till drill.’ ”

“Campbell was gospel in 1910,” I said.

“He’d have taken a garden and turned it into a desert,” Marcus said.

Every tree-lined street in the Seattle suburbs held memories, now fossilizing into myth, of 320 acres of dry prairie, a rusted coil of fencing wire, a collapsing house. I saw that the houses of Seattle, skulking behind tall shrubs, pointedly unaware of their neighbors, were a lot like homesteads, squashed into the fractional acreage of a city building lot. However tightly gridded the suburb, the houses seemed to live in some private version of western space and distance, a sort of internalized prairie.

Everyone to whom I spoke was proud of the tribulations of their grandparents, and took comfort from them, too: measured against that baseline, life here and now could hardly fail to appear feather-bedded and secure. They shared — and I took this as the most obvious grandparental hand-me-down — a manner of gnarled circumspection. Once bitten, three times shy. Look for the cloud in the silver lining. Read the small print backward. Preacher ran off with my wife and my dog …

The Fremont bridge over the canal was up, to let a NOAA survey ship go through. Traffic (too many Jeeps for comfort) was backed to the light on Stone Way. Queen Anne Hill loomed indistinctly behind a grubby lace curtain of rain. Almost home. Though if there was one lesson to be got from the homesteaders’ experience, it was that home was likely to give way under your feet, just when you were certain that it was for keeps.

Our house was built in 1906, in the aftermath of the Alaskan gold rush, and another flight of rainbow chasers to this part of the West Coast. It was a good house for an immigrant; its somewhat shaky footing on the hill matched mine. It clung precariously to the north slope of the hill, with one wall eight feet lower than the other, which gave it, to my eye, a nice resemblance to a fir on a ledge. Settlement — in the real estate agent’s euphemism for near-collapse — had twisted its character. There was a ragged crack in the brick chimneypiece. A ball would roll, of its own accord, and at speed, from my daughter’s bedroom down to the bathroom at the end of the hall. The door and window frames were out of true, and when the wind blew strongly, it would find a route from room to room, keening through apertures we had forgotten since the last storm.

In 1995, a modest earthquake (5-point-something on the Richter Scale) gave it and us a monitory shaking, in which a few books fell off a shelf, and the standing lamps rocked from heel to heel. For the next week or so, the local papers were full of earthquake supplements, accompanied by the news that Seattle was imminently due for the Big One, and that the city was as likely to be riven by a devastating tremor as anywhere along the San Andreas fault. I went down to the basement, and found a wall-to-wall crack in the newly laid concrete floor.

This was, after all, the unreliable West, where a sense of impending upheaval has always come with the territory. We bought a new flashlight, and some bottles of Evian water against the day when the earth would open up and divide the city into three parts, as in Rev. 16: 19.

Along Nickerson, past the 7-Eleven … left on Fourth. The house still stood, crowded by its own small wood of holly, fir and cypress. My three narrow stories in the far West. I parked the car, and made a dash through the rain to the steps. The dog didn’t bark at my arrival, and the front door, unusually, was locked. I got my key out, and shouldered it open. Like every other door in the house, its fit in the frame was imperfect.

At least no swallows clattered from their perches at my entry. An ironing board was open in the room that doubled as the hall and my wife’s office. A pile of mail for me. No note.

I went to the foot of the stairs, and called up.

“Anybody home?”