A tunnel of tall pines down a narrow gravel (and sometimes muddy) driveway led to our little piece of the world — two and a half wooded acres of pine trees, maples, oaks and everything else with patches of grass here and there. Our house was on a nice hill that overlooked the beautiful Chuctanunda Crick (which is Mohawk for stony). The backyard was filled with beautiful blue forget-me-nots, orange tiger lillies, black-eyed susans and daisies. [See my post about crick life.]
Built in the 1920s as a summer camp, our house was small and sided with grey wood siding and green trim. There was a front porch, a living room with a fireplace, a few small bedrooms, a bath, and a very rudimentary kitchen. A back porch with lots of windows overlooked the back hill and crick. Because it was the late 70s, my parents decided to side the whole house with T1-11 wood siding and stain it all burnt orange. They enclosed the porches for more space. A deck was added on the back and we started doing some remodeling to the interior. This would continue long after I got out of college. We put up dark brown shiny paneling in the living room with block ceilings and dark colonial trim (it was the shiplap of the day, ok?). Mom would hang her summer curtains (bright yellow block lace) and in the winter, they were these floor length orange florals but they were insulated since we had single-paned windows (with plastic stapled over it outside).
The living room was the nicest and only finished room in the house for quite a while. The kitchen was another story. I don’t know how mom did it, to be honest. There was a mismatch collection of cabinets and counters. For a while there were just open wooden shelves hanging on the wall (which again, is now “the thing”). She cooked with a wood stove for years, and the washer was in the bathroom. We had no dryer, just a long clothes line that went from the back deck to a tree in the back yard. There were plywood floors and no ceilings, just insulation. The same was true of our bedrooms. I can’t tell you how many nights I would lay there in my upper bunk reading all the white lettering on that black Johns Manville insulation board that was my ceiling. Matt and I shared a bedroom, and Sara had her own.
Our bedroom actually had a door that led to “the closet.” The closet was this eclectic space in our house. Originally part of the front porch, it was closed off and used for storage when they re-sided the house. Half of the room was used for food storage — shelves of canned food from the garden, and the rest was a long rack for clothing storage (like dad’s military uniforms and mom’s giant fur coat) and then all kinds of other odds and ends, books, papers, and the like. It was great for creating costumes and putting on plays, which we did from time to time. It was always curious what we would find in there… I remember seeing books like The Late Great Planet Earth, to Carlos Castaneda, to Foxfire and the The Last Whole Earth Catalog… Like I said, very eclectic.
Sara’s room got painted bright pink one year, because she was in her princess phase. I don’t remember our room being any particular color. We had a bunk bed that Dad built which was painted brown. One night in the middle of the night, I rolled over and fell off the top bunk and broke my wrist. A railing was put up after that little trip to the ER. Our room was usually a mess (hard to imagine, for me, but it’s true) until one day Dad was fed up with telling Matt and I to clean it. So he grounded us FROM our room and made us sleep in the living room. We cleaned it the next day. It sounds fun, sleeping in the living room… but it wasn’t. There was not a comfy couch or TV or anything really. All our toys were in our room. [On a side note — looking back, this is so ironic because Dad’s garage and shop was an explosion of … well, everything… and nothing was in any discernible order… but hey, you know. He was the boss, right?] The house was carpeted in various colors, often brought home from jobs Dad was doing. For a while it was all rust color, and then it was forest green. But it was better than plywood.
One day, Matt and I got off the bus after school and walked down the driveway to the house. As we came inside, we realized the entire roof over the kitchen and bathroom was gone, and there were big rough-sawn beams there. “What is happening,” we asked? Dad and Papa were there, hammers in hand, and Pop said, “It’s a new bedroom for your mom and dad!” They laid the floor with tongue and groove pine and soon the second floor room took space. It was wedge-shaped shed roof affair, with two small windows over the roof and a large sliding door facing the crick. A steep wood ladder went up through a space in the floor. Eventually this became a very steep set of varnished steps that every single one of us fell down at one point or another. I’m sure multiple times. The ceiling beams were stained dark and the floor was shiny and golden with varnish. This became mom and dad’s room, complete with a waterbed (which was the best when you weren’t feeling well). There was a little door off that room that led to the attic of the house. When we were a little older, Dad actually made part of that attic a room for Matt and I. We set up Matt’s trains and made a whole village of little houses and trees for our matchbox cars. We would ride our bikes a mile down the road to Smoky Hollow, a little hobby shop/video store, and we would buy various buildings and models. We would spend hours in that room playing and imagining.
Around this same time, Dad decided to tear down the fireplace in the middle of the house to make it more open between the living and dining room. This was a big project which involved us boys picking up lots of bricks, but it was needed to do what was to come in the next few years.
As you may have read in previous writings [here], we heated with wood. There was not a real basement at this time, but a small section that had been dug out on the high side of the house where the furnace was located. Since there wasn’t a basement, it was decided that we needed to have one. One day, a truck came with 4 massive I-Beams. Dad got to work and used his backhoe to pull those beams under the house. After setting them on edge, he proceeded to get the beams in place with bracing and then jacked up the house with hydraulic pump jacks under each beam. He then shored up each area under the house with railroad ties and blocking. Our house was now significantly higher, and ready for the basement to be dug. He rented a big wide tracked bulldozer and started digging out the high end. Because of our high water table the the prevalence of lots of natural springs, this quickly because a muddy mess and the bulldozer got stuck repeatedly in the clay. Also the house was very… bouncy, shall we say, and it was very delightful to jump around, much to mom’s dismay. She was not a fan at all. Once Dad got that end reasonable dug out, we poured some footers and put a block wall up on the high side. We were then able to set that section of the house on the new foundation. But that meant that there was a lot of digging to be done… by hand. I spent many many hours with a pick axes and a shovel digging through that hard clay, as did Matt, Dad, Papa, my friend Jason, a guy from church, Ray, and others who came to help. As we would finish sections, we would pour footers and add blocks. Through the long winter, I remember spending hours after school into the nights with Dad mixing mud and handing him blocks and being so cold. We finally got the walls done and the house set down, but we were adding an addition to the front where the porch / closet used to be. This would become Matt and I’s new bedrooms. It was cold and rainy, I remember, and we had just finished all the blocks for the new space. Dad was outside on the backhoe and all of a sudden we heard a shout and saw the front wall of blocks we had just finished setting, collapse because of the weight of the mud and rain. I didn’t know at the time, but that was a really difficult moment for Dad. Sara and I were talking about it recently. When I was a kid, I thought Dad was a superhero. Surely he didn’t have the same struggles, uncertainty, fears, or feelings of failure that I felt, right? Yeah. No. He did. Despite that happening, he did not give up. We had it rebuilt within a day or two. We set the new floor joists, decking and covered it with a tarp for the winter. The next phase would come soon enough.
It was fall when we decided to tear the roof off the house. We got to stay home from school, and Bob Ashley was there helping, all while cracking jokes and making us all laugh as usual. The roof came off and the first night, Matt and I laid there in bed, looking at the night sky with no ceiling. It was pretty wild. Around this time, mom left to go spend some time in Florida with Gram. I think she was about done with all this insanity. I have a photo of her raking leaves in the dining room with no ceiling, hanging wiring… yeah, I imagine it was a good choice to get away for a bit. The exterior walls for the new bedrooms were built and then the new cathedral scissor trusses went up, one by one with Dad’s backhoe, and plywood and tar paper covered the roof. Once it was shingled and water tight, life was good! Dad wired everything and I did most of the insulation since Matt was “allergic” and I was skinny enough to get in and out of the trusses easily. (Somehow I also had to do the tarring of the basement walls before Dad backfilled because I was the skinny kid who could fit in that narrow space between the dirt and the block walls.)
Matt and I moved to the basement and then the interior construction continued over the next couple years. We built a new bathroom and three bedrooms for us kids, and even had a nice skylight in the hallway to let in natural light. The vaulted ceilings were so cool to have and the house fit big and open. Mom eventually got a kitchen — a real kitchen with all matching cabinets and countertops and a gas stove. After spending way too long in that basement, our rooms were finally finished — complete with with wooden Z doors and rustic handles, and brand new carpeting. For the first time in my life as a 16 year old kid, I had my own room that was actually all finished. Painted drywall, carpeted, with closet doors and everything. It was amazing. But I also realized how much I missed being with Matt. We had always been together. So that was definitely a different change.
As time went by, Dad put in an oil fired furnace with baseboard heat in all the rooms. [Before then we would wake up to freezing cold rooms and lay there under the thick covers deciding who was going to run down and get the fire started.] Dad built a stone chimney and the house had real siding — all the same color. He built a proper front porch and a new deck, and it was finally all coming together. In the midst of all this, remember that crazy steep ladder to the upstairs that Mom and Dad would climb every day? I think they were done with falling down that thing (we ALL fell at one point or another), so one day, Dad came home with… an elevator. He was always finding all kinds of stuff (as evidenced by the various piles of stuff all over the yard.) But this was genius. With a big electric motor that sat in the basement, and cables that ran up a track on the wall, the new elevator sat in a corner of the dining room and quietly would go up and down from the dining room to the second floor bedroom. Dad built a bump-out to accommodate it on the second floor with a large window at the top so as you went up you had a nice view of the outside. It was a great space saving plan that functioned pretty well. Not without incident, mind you. Mom can be dramatic, shall we say, sometimes. One time Sara heard Mom yelling for her to come quick. She was on the elevator and it did not stop at the floor like it should have and she thought she was going to go through the roof. Sara hit the stop button and recounted to me that it really only went up a few more inches than it should have. But most of the time, it was smooth enough that even our dog, Tanner, would ride on it.
When we were kids, we had an epic swing set. It was old school with big steel pipes and it was like 14’ high with long chains attached to wooden 2×8 swings. We would swing so high, sometimes we would almost be parallel to the ground! Of course we were always standing up while swinging because that was the best way to swing. Matt fell off one time when he was pretty high and knocked the breath out of himself. I’m honestly surprised we didn’t get more hurt than we did as we would crash into each other and do all kinds of crazy stunts on those things. There was also a amazing wooden teeter-totter with these great iron handles. The swings went away eventually, but I am so glad we have a similarly awesome set at The Camp.
The property was just a great place to be a kid. There were so many amazing trees for climbing. (Matt was the tree climbing king.) One time, we were up in this massive pine in the front yard. Matt was way up high, and I was up there below up. I was coming down and Sara started climbing. I was on the ground and suddenly, Sara fell, bouncing from branch to branch, knocking the wind out of herself when she hit the ground. She was ok, but gosh, that was a scary moment. Matt was definitely the braver one of the two of us boys. I would come up with the dumb ideas and he would do them. Like, “hey, let’s pile all the bricks and put this board on it and you can pedal as fast as you can down the drive way and jump it!” Only when he hit the board at speed on his bike, the bricks fell over and he wound up with gravel in his forehead and dad having to pull the rocks out. Poor kid. We had a rope swing over the crick, all kinds of forts in the woods that we would build and it was just a rich place for the imagination. Matt was also fixated on building a dugout canoe and loved making rafts out of boards and inner tubes. Mom would not let us go in the crick if it was too cold, but somehow our rafts never seemed to work so we wound up in the “accidentally.”
There was a lot of work that we did. [See my post about wood splitting.] We kept everything mowed and cleaned up. In the fall there were plenty of leaves to rake. During the winter we would shovel the driveway. To this day, I still am mystified that Dad owned a bulldozer and a backhoe with a bucket, yet these two boys hand-shoveled that long gravel driveway. “It builds character,” Dad would say. He said that about pretty much everything that involved work though. One day we put up a steel flagpole in the front yard by the road and surrounded it with 4 railroad ties and planted a beautiful rose bush that my neighbor gave me. Dad’s business was called Earthworks. He hung a hand carved sign up there on the flagpole, and after that, we had people periodically stop by looking to buy earthworms. Below that field was the garden. This large area was the bane of our lives for a few years. Weed the garden, was always on our chore list (from mom the queen of lists… a trait which I definitely inherited) and a dreaded one at that. But it did provide us with lots of healthy fresh vegetables, and there was nothing like eat raw green or gold beans, or cracking open fresh snap peas. I was also not afraid to chow down on a fresh cucumber either. I mean if we had to be out there, might as well enjoy a snack!
Eventually the garden was no more, and a new activity took its place. One day we came home and dad said he needed our help to build a barn. So we built a little barn with a cool steel shed roof and a sliding door on the front and then it was off to our friend’s farm. We came home with a skinny little calf who we were instructed not to get attached to because he was being raised for meat. There was no water up at the shed, so that meant Matt or I had to stand outside and pump water from our hand pump and haul two 5 gallon pails up to the barn a few times a day. Stupid cow would often stick his nose in there and snort and fling the bucket of water at us. I would get so mad because then I would have to go get more. One cold winter morning before I was going to school he pulled his bucket trick on me and I got so mad at him that I grabbed the bucket and just whacked him upside the head with it. He looked at me at like, “you think that hurt me?” and then shot his ridiculously long tongue out and licked me in the face. So gross. From time to time he would get out of the fenced in grazing area. By then he had gotten pretty big, but he was wandering so I had to get him back in. I finally caught him and threw a rope around his neck but he was bucking and throwing his back legs up. Skinny 140lb me decided I would try and control this 1600lb animal by trying to get on his back. I am still amazed by my thought process here. Obviously, that didn’t work very well and I am lucky he didn’t stomp on my head. One morning there was the sound of a shot and the snowy driveway was red with blood. A few weeks later, we went to the butcher’s and picked up all these white paper wrapper packages of frozen meat. We ate really well for a long time on that cow. He was the only one we had. I think one was enough.
There are so many memories of living at the end of that row of pines. The dirt road at the top of the driveway that led to the various neighbors, waiting for the bus by the big boulders every morning – in the cold winter or the rain — and all the family get togethers and fun times we had there. So many family and friends have said that they always loved coming to our house because it was like an adventure. When I was a kid, I could only see that I didn’t have a nice finished house like the other kids did, with walls and ceilings that were painted, or siding that wasn’t old plywood. Now, years later, as I look back, I know that this place was a special place where imagination flourished, where character was built, where laughter, stories, music, dancing, wrestling, working, and deep conversations were woven though the fabric of daily life. And even if it wasn’t much to look at, it holds a deep place in my heart as a place that played a significant part in forming me into who I am today.
This is a beautiful memory Josh. We all loved going to your house in the woods, finished or not. Every time I came up there was a new room or one had been moved! What a childhood you had!
Very fun insight into your childhood! All these years and I never knew we both had a dog named Tanner. That’s ironic. Also, love the pictures!