Behind the Woodpile

Living “off the grid” is a romantic notion until you don’t have a choice.

I think we all have nightmares about walking around with only a T-shirt on and no underwear. I can tell you with certainty, it is much worse in real life.

For 17 years my mother was married to a man named Ray. She can recall that he was charming and handsome when they first met (I was two at the time). I remember disliking him. He was just as fond of me. He and my mother had two children together, my younger sisters.

Ray was gifted at spending other people’s money, mainly my mothers. After a failed attempt to run a horse farm on Bainbridge, and filing for bankruptcy, he decided that he wanted us all to move to a piece of raw land in Indianola where he could build a home. Not just any home mind you. Ray, the king of tremendous ideas, decided he wanted to build an underground home. Now, I’m sure that this concept, in the capable hands of an expert, would produce excellent results. However, Ray was a twit.

Somehow we managed to scrape together enough money to buy a few acres and to build a small barn in the little, neighboring town of Indianola. After we moved into the barn, Ray proceeded to dig a hole in the backyard the size of an Olympic swimming pool. It was the perfect visual metaphor for our lives at the time. Everything was going down the drain and this guy decided that he needed to dig a new and even bigger one.

It gets better. In the process of digging his hole to China, he forgot to take care of two important, basic necessities. Number one, we had no running water, and number two, he never built an outhouse. In the 4 years that we lived there, we NEVER had an outhouse. I remember thinking that even my childhood hero, Laura Ingalls Wilder of the book Little House on the Prairie, had an outhouse.

There was a local man who ran on Indianola road every day. He was well known for waiving at each and every car that drove past him. He took a keen interest in our project. The only problem was, once the hole was dug, there was no more progress. For years, he ran down our driveway to ask how things were coming along. It was a cruel reminder that nothing ever happened and nothing ever was going to happen.

Trying to hide how we were living was challenging. I was 14 and trying to fit in at a new high school (I never invited friends over). Because there was no outhouse, my sisters and I named a special spot on the property “Poet’s corner”. If you were going to visit poet’s corner, you took a shovel and a roll of toilet paper with you.

One day I was home sick with the flu. I was alone and I woke up from a nap and had to pee. I was sleepy and disheveled and the only thing I was wearing was an extra-large tie-dyed t-shirt. I was already outside when I heard someone pull into the driveway. It was the UPS man. I wasn’t going to make it into the house in time, so I ran behind the nearby woodpile.

This guy must have been new on the job because he was relentless. He knocked and knocked and knocked on the door and then he began walking around the yard asking loudly, “Is anyone home?…Hello!…I have a package, is anyone home?” I could hear him clearly because he was only about 6 feet away, but I couldn’t see him because of where I was hiding. At one point, I was convinced that I had heard the pitch of his voice change from “Hello!” to “Hello?!?”. I was positive that he had discovered me. In a total panic, I answered back feebly “Hello?” Then I realized, with horror, that he had not seen me and that I had just given myself away.

He walked slowly around the woodpile and just stood and stared. There I was, sitting on the ground with my legs stretched out in front of me. I did my best to make it look like nothing was out of the ordinary. I was just kicking back in my T-shirt with nothing else on, holding a roll of toilet paper. He must have thought that he’d walked onto the movie set of Deliverance.

There was a very long pause.

He finally stammered, “Uh…I need you to sign for this package” as he handed me a note pad. In the most dignified manner I could muster, I remained seated while I signed my name. He then handed me the package and sprinted to his truck where he proceeded to drive like a bat out of hell away from the barn and down the driveway.

As mortifying as the encounters with the runner and the UPS driver were, what I really resented was that I wasn’t going anywhere…and they got to leave.