You will find short stories on this site. Most are autobiographical. Some are fiction.

“SOAPSTONE DON’T SLIDE.”

Part 2

Now that I owned the house, it was necessary to address the problems it presented. The most serious of these was access. Since the road was no longer passable, there was no way to get to the house without crossing the property of the dilapidated house next door. It looked like I would need to build an elevated walkway to go past the neighbor’s property. I eventually found a partial resolution to this problem. It came as a result of a friend who loved to boast about finding bargains.

At the time of my first phone conversation with old man Anderson, he had mentioned that he owned the dilapidated house which was between my house and the end of Grand Avenue, so when I had decided to initiate an auction, I called him to ask if he would be willing to grant an easement across the north part of his lot so I could gain access to the Bishop house. He said he would gladly do it, but since he was not going to live much longer, he needed to check with his son, who would inherit it. I called him back a week later. He apologized, saying that his son would not agree to give me an easement. Mr. Anderson senior, offered to sell it to me for “about $1,500”. I thanked him but declined, not wanting to rebuild two old houses in a slide area. His son was the same man who ignored Mr. Bishop’s calls for help, leaving him to die in the blackberries.

During the two years prior to the auction, I had not mentioned my interest in the Bishop house to anyone other than my wife, Maura. I didn’t want to invite competition at the auction. But now that I owned the house, I could tell my others. Among the first to learn were my colleagues in Phil Thompson’s architectural office. One of them was Pierce O’Doherty, a Landscape Architect, who loved to tell stories about great bargains he had found.

He told one “bargain finding” story as we were sitting in his living room sipping wine. It was about the time he and his wife, Anice, were dressed up and driving to a fancy dinner party. At a stop light, they noticed the truck stopped ahead of them, which was full of garbage, had something of interest. They could see, blown over the back of the truck, the corner of a carpet. They recognized it as a potentially valuable Kilim. Forsaking the party, they followed the truck to the garbage dump. As the truck driver was turning to dump his load into the landfill, Pierce jumped out of their car and ran over to stop him. The driver willingly gave him the carpet. Pierce retrieved the damaged Kilim from garbage in the truck. As he told this story, he stood up saying, “We took it to be cleaned and restored” and, pointing to the carpet on the floor in front of us, Pierce proudly declared, “and there it is”. We looked at the floor to see a very worn but attractive old Kilim.

When I told my colleagues about my purchase of a house for $500, Pierce was noticeably quiet. Later in the day, he came by my drafting table and wanted to learn more about how one can get such bargains. I told him that while there are probably none like the one I had purchased, there was a house next door to mine, which could be purchased for $1,500. “Where is it?” he demanded. I told him “I will tell you on the condition that you agree to grant me an easement if you buy it. He eagerly agreed. I told him where it was and how he could get in touch with the owner, Anderson. The following weekend he and Anice went to see the house. They contacted Mr. Anderson and bought the house next to mine. It took nearly a year of podding before I was finally able to get Pierce and Anice to sign the easement agreement. While I wanted it to be wide enough to drive a vehicle to the house, Pierce would only agree to grant a three foot wide path, saying “This satisfies my agreement with you.” Which it did, I had failed to specify the exact nature of the easement I expected.

The following summer, Pierce, Anice and I worked nearly every weekend on the two houses. My wife, would have nothing to do with it. We each camped in our houses and shared tools, barbecue dinners, and breakfasts at Pig ‘n Pancake.

About two years after I had completed remodeling the Bishop house and had rented it, I received a phone call. A brusk woman’s voice upset my day stating “My name is Martha Bishop. I am the daughter of Mr. Bishop, the prior owner of the house on Grand Avenue. You are illegally occupying my family’s home. I have hired a lawyer in case you are not willing to give me the house.” She then asked if I had title insurance. I told her that I did not bother with title insurance because I had purchased the house from the County and that they had cleared the title. I told her “Furthermore, if your lawyer told you that you have any claim on my house, you need to find another lawyer as there is no title more secure than one purchased from the county. She huffed “We shall see.” and hung up. It was the last I heard from her.

The house was a rental for many years. Some of my renters took good care of it. Others did not. Eventually, the masonry foundation became so fragile that I quit renting it. I tried to sell it for “$35,000 or best offer”. There were two parties who wanted to buy it. Neither could get a loan. No bank would make a loan on an inaccessible house with a crumbling foundation in a slide area.

Over the years I have thought of the “Astoria house” as my “safety net”. I decided that I would continue to take care of it, then if needed, it would take care of me. If I were to be poor in my old age, I could live in it on social security. I couldn’t abandon it, so in the summer of 2000. I signed a $35,000 contract with a mason to jack up the house and build an new engineered, reinforced masonry foundation under it. The foundation plan I drew included cleats. These six one foot diameter reinforced concrete piers extending from the footings, down into the dense clay-shale, or as Anderson called it “soapstone.” The mason added two additional courses of block to raise the house 16 inches, so that instead of a basement in which I would bang my head on the ceiling, I now have a basement in which I can walk upright with headroom to spare.

The process of demolishing the old foundation and excavating for the new footings produced a good deal of material. This material and several loads of rock, became a base for a narrow gravel driveway to the house. Then in 2018, I built retaining walls to make it wide enough for comfortable use as a single car driveway. Because I have been using it as a driveway since 2006, it has become an adverse possession easement.

As it turned out, the Bishop house did come to my rescue when in 2006 my younger Japanese domestic partner found a man her age, and I needed a place to live. While I was not poor, the old house beckoned. After retiring from Kaiser-Permanente, I moved into my house in Astoria. I have subsequently built an interior stair to the basement, enclosed the front porch, extensively remodeled the kitchen-family room, added a roof over the entry, and installed a back door off the kitchen onto a new brick paved patio. At the time that I bought the house, the county owned all the land in the slide area west of it, with the exception of two lots next to my house. I ha

ve subsequently purchased both of those parcels. Over the summer of 2014, I built a large roof structure over the foundation of the demolished house next door. I use it for dry storage of yard tools, our canoe, and fire wood. It is large enough to have barbecue out of the rain on those many wet but warm Astoria days. My partner, Carole, and I are comfortably aging in place in this fine old five-hundred dollar home.