The Property
The property’s six miles outside of Olympia, on a lush peninsula jutting north into Puget Sound. We’ve been married a year, on these ten acres a year and a half. We walk them at least once a day, occasionally reminding each other of something imminent and life-changing, but around the next tractor-plowed bend, between a moss-bearded apple tree and a dark fir grown through with bleeding drops of holly, we’ll forget. Lost watching the six dogs weaving and peeing—or pausing, ears up—Michelle and I will be floating again in content stasis, around and around the quarter-mile backyard loop, hand-in-hand.
Sometimes we’ll slog the back marsh and wander south, through the barbwire gaps, onto our neighbor Mark’s property. Other times we’ll weave the dim track into the towering hemlock, pushing through ferns along the east fence line. But it all returns to Dale’s tractor loop, until soon again we’re strolling past our single blueberry bush, so faint in the winter, barely noticeable in its field of pale yellow grass.
In the fall, when the bush dies, it burns an impossible, phoenix red. Before that, in late summer, it fills with enough blueberries to keep our crepes stuffed all month. Harvesting’s best in the morning, the fruit dew-chilled, and moving on we’ll pause at the scant thimbleberry bush, at any of the sprawling blackberry patches, the dogs crowding in to snatch anything we’ll toss. Inevitably, though, they grow impatient, big jaws nibbling the lower branches. Same with the thirteen apple trees—as we pick, the dogs jump for the fruit, crunching the crisp flesh, and soon they’re farting up a chorus.
• • •
We once lived in a tidy neighborhood a five-minute walk from downtown. Mostly, we thought of leaving. We didn’t hate Olympia, but didn’t feel we could trust it. Nineteen months I’d been in Washington, Michelle ten. I’d left my tiny mountain town in Colorado, after my first marriage and my lecturer position withered, to live near my older sister. Michelle left her teaching job, in her city on the shores of the Japan Sea, to move in with me. But she couldn’t find work in Olympia, and my own job was temporary. With nothing to hold but each other, too afraid to put roots in loose soil, we tried leaving. We wrote grants, applied for teaching gigs or more graduate degrees, but nothing panned out. We didn’t know where we were, in life, in time. “Why don’t you guys have some patience?” my sister suggested, “Move out to our place until something opens up?”
• • •`
We rent the original farmhouse at the front of the property, next to the laurel hedge, under the ancient big-leaf maple. Its trunk is more than twelve-feet around and there’s a knotted rope for scrambling into its palm. Ten-feet up, I can sip a beer and read while Dale drags the front four acres with his tractor mower. It’s hard to imagine the property wildly overgrown, every inch, or, long before that, as a bona fide poultry farm. Dale showed me photos from his purchase. You could barely see our farmhouse. Blackberries and maples, he pointed out, had grown right through it. But instead of razing it, he tamed and patched it, adding our large bedroom with its four-by-six window. He didn’t have much choice, night and day, trimming and building to keep his mind off his divorce. He built the Tower next, fifty feet behind the farmhouse and a tad to the south. He lives up there, in the top two stories, with my sister. We yell out our windows if we have extra dinner, fresh coffee, or if we can’t see the dogs. Jess’s heart was badly broken before she met Dale. She didn’t want to fall in love with him, and when she started to, three years ago, she told him goodbye but he said no. He said, “You don’t know me enough to break up with me.”
On more than one occasion, from the dark of our bedroom, Michelle and I have watched Jess carry margaritas out while Dale’s mowing. He slows way down and she climbs aboard. Weaving the black walnut trees, they flip on the headlights and mow right into the night, every now and then a laugh bursting above the noise of the blades.
• • •
Sometimes, if Jess works late or they’re fighting, Dale comes down. I grab my good tequila, and he tells me my sister’s threatening to move out, tells me she doesn’t listen, tells me she just needs a good ol’ down-home spankin’. He’s six-two, 230 pounds, and leans back with his eyes glinting. Looking around our kitchen, he says, “I should raise the rent,” so I put the lid on the tequila and he laughs.
Dale laughs a lot, laughs like he understands how simple the most complex things are. I love his company, but feel almost worthless around him. He’s always building things—the Tower, the fire-pit, the cabana, the pizza oven. In his shop, there’s a ’59 Fury half-refurbished, and he even built his own 38-foot, steel sailboat. When gusts bend the poplars, he shouts, “Let’s crank it up!” and we sail out past Tugboat Annie’s. He turns off the motor I try to stay out of his way, but at the same time I want him to tell me to help. He shows me how to read puffs, to steer by tell-tale, to keep the rudder loose in my hands. I try to focus, but there’s so much. Seals popping their heads up, jellyfish drifting by, cormorants skidding the surface.
• • •
The back and front parts of Dale’s property are divided by the tractor path between the two ponds. Our pond is shallow—four feet—but stretches all the way across the property’s width, a hundred and fifty yards. Mark’s is twice as deep but only thirty yards across. They’re not actually ponds, but seasonal wetlands, drying completely by October.
We finish our walks by skirting the front acreage, following the pond’s west edge to where it seeps into willows and a thicket of paper birch. Sometimes we get grouse in there, or a transient owl, but we do have a full time red-tailed hawk. Our first month here, it was puny, but now it’s the largest I’ve seen. It wheels lazy and slow, plucking garter snakes from the pond path, lifting off as they writhe.
The dogs try to kill the snakes, so I go first, scaring them back to their homes. There’s one, dark black with a yellow stripe, that’s four feet long. It’s not magic, just appetite, the right place at the right time—in spring, the frogs get so loud you can’t hear anything else, and there’re newts, too, but I don’t know if they’re snake food.
An adult newt, I read, contains enough poison to kill a thousand field mice, and we have mice galore. Before all three of our cats vanished, they’d leave tiny carcasses on our stoops. Bald eagles often drift overhead, but my bet’s the coyotes got the cats. We never found their bodies, but once, back in the birches, when the blackberries brambles were at their height, I heard cats hissing. I stood there picturing Meow Meow, Bat Child and Genki gone feral and dreadlocked, still on the property, but colonized and independent.
Other days, it takes more imagination. Other days, I hear the freeway’s din and, with the snow-flattened underbrush, glimpse houses between the bare maples. The people to the east dump old furniture in the woods, and the northern neighbors have a friend squatting in a weathered Airstream. He has drunken parties and fires his guns at the coyotes. I fantasize digging pitfalls in the woods, luring him out. I need the coyotes. Around midnight and dawn, they’ll light up. The pack stalks the eight-mile length and four mile breath of our peninsula, navigating fences and gravel drives, sticking to the dark forest margins. In morning fog, they’re grainy, out of focus, always burning off with the sun. The great blue herons have the same ethereal power—I’ve seen three at once, in the low-red evening mist of the pond’s far side, lined up like the ghosts of old fishing buddies.
• • •
Dale wears shorts even in the damp cold, a faded Carhartt jacket and Teva’s that show off his mangled toes, the nails green where my sister painted them. He drives a short, retired school-bus to his twenty-plus rentals, to garage sales, to Bayview Lumber for shit-talking with his buddies. He was born here, went to high school here, raised a family here. You can’t go anywhere without him chatting people up. He radiates a confidence rooted in something much larger than himself. Rich, poor, strangers or friends, he squeezes your shoulder, leans in, and starts telling stories.
Up until a few months ago, Dale’s dad frequently dropped by so Dale could show him his latest projects. You could see how proud the old man was, how alive he was in his son. But soon, as Dale puts it, his father will be “getting the dirt bed.” It’s a Dale-ism, like “slabbage”—when the weather’s warm and I’m in the yard grading papers, he hops out of his bus covered in saw-dust and waving a hunk of bloody meat. “Nate-ski! Slabbage!”
I grab beers and build a fire in the recycled quarry pestle. Dale dumps his concoction in a yard sale Dutch oven—jalapenos, carrots, onions, tomatoes, squash. Soon we’re eating with rusty cleavers. He asks if I need help grading papers, if he should grab his smiley-face stamp. Or he’ll talk about the property, what he’s building next, horseshoe pits or bat houses. He’s says “we”—what we’ll build—and I let myself get caught up. Other times, he’ll grow suddenly serious. He can’t understand why his ex won’t come over to the cabana and hang out with him and their girls, with my sister and me and Michelle. I say that at least she’ll talk to him, because my ex-wife wouldn’t if her life depended on it, and Dale whips out his phone, grinning. “Where’s Michelle? Let’s have that gorgeous woman bring out the tequila!”
• • •
To the dogs, the property’s strictly business, the lines piss-clear. In summer, they chase the sweeping barn swallows, in the spring, the laughing gulls, in the winter, the Canada geese. The autumn crows are another story. After the walnuts drop, their green flesh rotting, the crows snatch them up, swoop over the road, and drop them on the asphalt. But they fly just low and slowly enough to keeps the dogs in tow. It’s like they know the property’s all theirs if they can only get the dogs into traffic. . . .
Our county road’s not busy—that’s the problem. It’s still, a tempting, three-mile stripe of black. From their city neighborhoods, street-racers make their pilgrimage, zooming past in one direction, shooting back in the other. Last spring, when the sun showed and we were gulping chardonnay in the front yard—reading essays, the dogs snoozing, all around us apple blossoms bursting pink and white—a crotch-rocket screamed by. I sat cussing, but Michelle grabbed the wiffle-ball bat and stormed out to the middle of the street. I ran after her just as the biker roared up. “We goddamn live out here!” she shouted, but he weaved around her and gunned it.
• • •
A few months back, Michelle landed a position at the college where I work. Then the economy faltered. She’s laid-off and I’m down to two classes a quarter. We walk the property discussing our options until we’re left wordless, standing on the pond path, the dogs circling. When the water’s high, I think about how it’s a waste to not be able to walk out our backdoor and catch dinner. I picture crappie beds and catfish, largemouth bass in the reed shadows. I want to drive to Long Lake, catch a bucketful of perch and dump them in, but I know, eventually, the water disappears.
Nate Liederbach lives in Olympia, Washington.
