Under One Roof: How a Tough Old Woman in a Little Old House Changed My Life. Barry Martin

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      Alzheimer’s.

      It’s a hell of a blow, when you hear your dad has Alzheimer’s. It doesn’t matter how old you are; your dad is still a huge figure in your life, especially a dad like mine, who was always competent, in charge, and in control. You can’t picture him becoming disabled, forgetful, unable to care for himself. I tried not to imagine the road ahead of him too much. It was just too hard to think about.

      But oddly enough, for my dad, it was just the opposite. I went up to see him right after the diagnosis came through, and I could see right away that he was a lot calmer. It was almost like his frustration wasn’t about forgetting things; it was about not knowing why he was having the problem. Being given an answer, a name for the problem, seemed to make him feel better. He was always a problem-solver; give him a situation and he’d figure out what to do. Now that he knew what the problem was, it was almost like he was saying, Oh, well, why didn’t you say so? Now we know what we’re dealing with so we can figure out how to deal with it.

      We knew it wouldn’t always be that easy, of course. But at least some of the steam had gone out of the pressure cooker.

      As I drove home that evening, I found myself thinking about going fishing with my dad when I was a kid. There was one time up in Canada, the first time he taught me how to start a fire. We’d gotten rained off the lake, and climbed up on a hill, on a game trail under the trees. There were a bunch of us there, huddled together: my dad, my brother, some friends of the family – all guys, that morning. The women were more fair-weather fishing types, and had stayed back at the campground. I watched carefully as my father gathered up some pine needles, put a pine cone right in the middle of them, and leaned some dried sticks from dead branches on the pine cone. He lit the pine needles with a match. While the fire was starting up, he found a piece of willow, or maybe it was maple, and cleared the bark off it. He gutted the trout we’d pulled out of the lake before the rain started, and stuck the stick through the back of the fish, and out its mouth, and held it over the fire. Maybe it was just the moment, but that trout tasted about ten times better than it ever could have tasted at home. I can still taste the crisp skin, the buttery flesh, the feel of the oils from the meat of the fish sliding on the sides of my tongue.

      It was usually a family affair when we went camping, and sometimes another family went with us. But as I continued my drive home that night, my thoughts drifted to the time I got to go fishing with my dad, just the two of us. I was probably about twelve. My mom had taken my brother and sister to visit some relatives in North Carolina, but I couldn’t go, because I had a paper route. So that weekend, my dad took me fishing over to Nason Creek, near the Wenatchee National Forest. To get there you drove over Stevens Pass, which was really cool, especially for a twelve-year-old. Up there in the mountains, you felt like you could see a thousand feet down to the bottom, to where there were boulders, vine maples, and the beginnings of a river. On the opposite side, near the bottom, there’s an old highway and a train rail. The rails had a shed roof over them to try to keep the snow off, and whatever else an avalanche would bring down. It was abandoned a long time ago because it was too hard to maintain, so now it just sat there, and as we drove by it looked like an old toy train set that someone had just gotten too old to play with.

      It was really special, having my dad all to myself. He was a soft-spoken guy, but a jocular one, and as we came down off the mountain and glided along those long, curvy, tree-lined stretches of Route 2, the sky big and high around you, the clouds puffy and still, he was doing what he always loved to do, which was give you little brain teasers, stuff to make you think. Like coming up with oxymorons. “I got one,” he said. “Jumbo shrimp.” I don’t know why, but at the time that struck me as about the funniest thing I’d ever heard.

      We slept that night in a camper on the back of his pickup truck, and as I was falling asleep, my dad started telling me fishing stories. I’d caught more fish than he had that first day, and he said, well, he was just waiting. “I don’t like to mess with the little ones, the way you do,” he said, just a hint of that jocular tone in his voice, like you couldn’t tell how serious he was. “I’m waiting for the big one. You’ll see.” We went out early the next morning, and sure enough, about an hour before it was time for us to head back, his line went tight, and he landed the biggest salmon I had ever seen. He needled me about it the whole ride home: “Don’t you worry, Barry, those little fish you caught will taste pretty nice too,” or “Well, I guess it’s good that you didn’t try to land any big fish this trip; wouldn’t want you to hurt yourself.” I pretended to be ticked off when he razzed me, but he could tell by the look on my face that I was about as high as the clouds. I gave him a playful punch on those big strong arms of his, as he steered the pickup back into the setting sun, headed home, just my dad and me and a big old cooler full of fish.

5

      Edith’s house, which looked a little sad and lonely to begin with, was looking even sadder once all the buildings around it were torn down. It resembled some last outpost of a bombed-out village after World War II, which probably wasn’t all that unfamiliar to Edith, given what I was learning about her past. The block was empty now except for Edith’s house, and a place called Mike’s Chili Parlor on the far back corner of the lot. Mike serves some decent chili dogs – they got kind of famous, actually, when he appeared on the TV show Drive-Ins, Diners, and Dives – and I will say I ate a lot of them during the project. The Bridge Group decided early on not to try to obtain that building, because they were afraid somebody would go after historic status for Mike’s. He’s been there since about a week before forever. Besides, he was outside the perimeter of the shopping mall site anyway, so it wasn’t a big deal. Not like Edith’s house.

      There were other issues on the project, though. For one thing, the soil on the site was contaminated with lead. It wasn’t that much of a surprise; lead is usually a by-product of manufacturing. The material was all fill that had been brought in back in the twenties to bring the site above sea level. The fill must have been contaminated with the residual lead from some kind of plant – a smelter, maybe – and there was a little arsenic in the soil, too. It all had to go.

      So there we were, digging twelve feet down on a rectangular city block, which meant we had 48,000 tons of contaminated material to dig out and haul away so it could be disposed of properly. It was a long and noisy process, but Edith didn’t seem to mind. In fact, I think she was enjoying all the hubbub going on all around her. She would come out and watch the goings-on and wave to the workers when they’d walk by, and they’d wave back with a friendly “Hi, Edith, how’s it going?” All in all, a pretty copacetic relationship.

      It wasn’t just the soil we were concerned about. On a job like this, when you’re digging a huge hole, you also have to worry about the pressure of trucks going by on the adjacent roads. You have to sink massive I-beams, three feet wide, into the ground for support. You have to stick them twice as far in as they’re going to stick out, so basically the beams were about forty feet long. It was a big deal, but it had to be done: no beams, and the road could have collapsed into the hole.

      You never know what you’re going to find once you start digging. One afternoon, when I was walking by the far end of the lot, I noticed that the track hoe had something big in its jaw. As I got closer, I saw a big metal tank of some kind, maybe an old oil drum or something. My first thought was, hey, we could cut that in half and make a nice little site barbecue – but when I got a little closer, I could see that it was actually shaped like something more dangerous.

      A bomb, in fact.

      It looked like one of those bombs they used for carpet-bombing during World War II. It didn’t have fins on the back, but it did have four bolts where the fins could be attached. I asked the track hoe operator what he thought it was, and he said, “I dunno, but there’s a whole bunch СКАЧАТЬ