Abandoned House: Week 1

January 13th 2:05pm

He says out west is goregous. I wouldn’t know: I have always lived in the east and skipped over ‘the west,’ flying straight into Portland, Oregon, for a English conference. During those three days, I wasn’t convinced.

He says Nevada was a new place for him after his attempts to live—and die—in Pittsburgh. A clean start. No Internet, hardly any cellular connection, no beds. It was sleeping in tents in snow, showering in KOA facilities, wandering the area when there was nothing else to do. He shows me pictures, a long computerized reel, of him and his chainsaw crew. They saw down bushes and trees, creating a fifty foot circle around a sapling of a specific species, a type of pine I can’t recall, and flag with orange plastic strips the trees that animals live in.

It looks dusty there; the white shirts the crew wears that appear new in one shot are brown by the next with sawdust, dirt, and sweat.

I don’t like the pictures of the snow, the large clumps that float down seemingly harmlessly onto their tents. I can feel myself start to shiver.

“How did you survive?” I ask.“It looks freezing cold.”

“The tents were right on the snow,” he says. “And you know me. I never get cold.”

It’s true: he radiates heat. He walks barefoot on asphalt in November and leaves windows open in December. I simply have to lay my hand on his t-shirted arm to thaw off.

Sometimes, when I close my eyes, I see him as a silhouette of red, bright red, like blood freshly oxidized. When I put out my arms, closing my eyes and reaching for him, I am white. I am a clean slate ready to be dipped in dye and dried somewhere warm, bending and hardening how I please. At least, that is what I hope.

He is 24, turning 25 in July. He has seen and experienced more of the world than I ever will. I believe I am missing out, spoiled by inexperience and fear. 

What is there to be afraid of? I can hear him say. Go out and try it.

It’s drizzling—the only way I can tell is by the sound the rain makes against the leaves that coat the ivy and that disintegrate into one another.

The place I’ve chosen to write about is here, in Crafton, PA, on the street where Mark, my boyfriend, lives. On this road, there are three houses clustered together, hardly ten feet from the road it feels like. 

The furtherest one is Mark’s. He lives on the first floor; his neighbor, Ian, lives on the second. I’ve never seen Ian, only heard his steps above and the guitar he plays obsessively for an hour or two once a week. And I know that apparently he doesn’t mind if Mark forgets his laundry in the dryer.

I don’t know the people in the middle house. I once saw a black man standing in front of the gold car that’s always parked crooked. It forces me to walk on the busy road whenever I bring groceries to Mark’s place. The man seems to keep to himself; I feel myself liking him already.

It is this last house I am fascinated with. It is abandoned. Mark’s landlord has been trying for years to buy it off of the owner, who asks for more money than it probably is worth. So abandoned it sits here. I always park my car in the two parking spaces meant for the house’s owners. I often get out of my car and stare.

Now I am sitting next to it, squirming on cement blocks that keep my car from going off the hillside. I look at the ivy, seeing no movement from drops of rain. The ivy crawls up the stone siding of the house and hangs off the basement door in great clumps trying to find a way in. Why? I wonder. What is there inside worth getting into?

The front door of the house has a great curving strip of ivy that makes it look artsy. I tried to take a picture of it once, but it kept coming out crooked. I gave up after three shots.

Near the front door is a window that the ivy has already gotten through. It curls more tightly on the inside, clinging now to the wooden frame. Again, why? Why even bother going inside?

I keep my eyes away from the nature here. I see the blinds inside the house are turned inward, how my mother normally would prefer to have them, to better block the light while letting it in.

But there are some windows, to the back of the house, that have nothing covering them. I wonder if the curtains fell, if the blinds were ripped off, if perhaps there was nothing there to begin with. 

The rain has stopped for the moment in its drops, the kind that are singular and heavy. And now there are birds chirping—I hear various noises from them. I look up into the tree tops but see nothing. Mark keeps calling them with his whistles, but they fall silent, one by one, as the rain picks up again.

I asked Mark to be a part of this, to keep me on track.

“I want to know what you’re writing about,” he says. “But I don’t. Do you notice the bark on these trees? They look like stretch marks.”

The trees here seem massive, but really it is because there is ivy that clumps onto them. They ivy looks different than the kind that creeps into the house, almost like holly but the leaves don’t look spiky or waxy. 

There are some squirrels now. I hear their clicking and see some clump of a tree shake towards the top.

A medium-sized bird swoops down low—a robin, I notice now—and titters and hops along the ground, eventually blending in with the bricks that litter around. I lose sight of her (the breast was not brilliant red as I remember the males having) quite quickly.

There is garbage here: Dunkin’ Donuts clear cups, pipes jutting from the tangled mess of ivy and leaf, tires caught and suspended by the brush.

Despite Mark’s encouragement, for now I won’t go down and further to the backyard slope. I am determined in the idea that I will save that and the plant identifying for another time.

“I have another twelve weeks,” I say. He doesn’t seem impressed.

There are many things here and so little eyes and hands of mine to do it all—to dig into the compost of leaves and see what’s under; to brush back the ivy and see what plants it crushed the life out of; to identify the trees, old and sapling; to most importantly to me, not fall in what seems now like mush and cold; to not disturb what is here; to not put projections on this place when really all I want to do is steer away and write about things I do know.

It is cold here, not the Arctic cold from the week’s before that threatened to keep my car from running, not the naked cold from being in an RV overnight with no heat. Just wet cold, wanting-to-give-up cold. What is there to document or catalogue here in the now when there is the past? The holly bushes in Jackson, NJ; the pygmy bunnies in Nevada Mark nearly killed with his chainsaw; the boulders and vultures in Appalachia, in my backyard in New York—all of this to agonize over?

Mark looks at my notebook full of scribbles. I am ashamed of my rant now. I turn back to the ivy and think, oh, but I must try. 

The rain seems to fall harder.