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

“SOAP STONE DON’T SLIDE.”

Part 2

I learned, years later, why the house had been abandoned. Mr. Bishop fell two and a half stories, from the roof into the blackberry thicket on the down hill side of the house. He lay there, calling for help until he died about a day later. No one came to his rescue, though the fisherman, who lived next door, had heard his calls for help, he didn’t respond. He told me “I thought the old man was drunk, had fallen down the hill …would sober up and crawl out. Besides” he said “I was on my way to the dock and was running late.”

The most serious issue with the house 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.

During 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 wanting to invite competition at the auction. But now that I owned the house, I could tell my friends. 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 “bargan 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 sign, they noticed the truck 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 land fill, 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 a very warn but the attractive fine old Kilim from the garbage truck.

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 agreed. I told him where it was and how he could get in touch with old man Anderson. The following weekend he and Anice went to see the house and contacted Mr. Anderson to buy the house next to mine. It took nearly a year of podding, before I was finally able to get Pierce 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 woman’s voice announced “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 get 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.

Over the intervening years I have rented the house. Some of my renters took good care of it. Others did not. Eventually the 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”. Should I grow old and poor, I could live in it on social security. I decided that I would take care of it, and if needed, it would take care of me just as I had rescued it when it was old and decrepit.

I couldn’t abandon it. In the summer of 2000. I signed a $35,000 contracted 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 were 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, so that instead of a basement in which I would bang my head on the ceiling, I 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. All of this material became a base for a narrow vehicle path to the house which was finished with several loads of rock and gravel. 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 2018, it has become an adverse possession easement. I have also built an interior stair to the basement, enclosed the front porch, extensively remodeled the kitchen dining areas, and added a back door off the kitchen onto a brick paved patio.

As it turned out, the Bishop house did come to my rescue when in 2006 my younger domestic partner found a man her age. I needed a place to live. While I was not poor the old house beckoned. And I moved to Astoria. At the time that I bought the house, the county owned all the land in the slide area west of the house with the exception of two lots next to my house. I have purchased both of those parcels. Over the summer of 2014, I built a large roof structure over the abandoned foundation of the house which was once there. 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.

END