Why Down by the River?--Chapter 2

The Search

My wife and I had looked at houses for sale along a road on the Lehigh River for about a decade before we bought the land our house is on now. A couple of years before we bought it, we actually had a contract on another property on the same road, but the sale was contingent upon the owner, a postal worker, getting a transfer to Phoenix, Arizona. This explained the Western décor in their house. The transfer didn’t happen and after six months we let the contract expire. Then in 1999, we learned that the township had changed the zoning of the farmer’s fields behind our previous home so that a large shopping center could be built there. Though we really liked that house, my wife and I decided to start looking again in earnest for another home. We decided, however, that we would only move if we found something we really liked that was in a location that would not likely have a shopping center built nearby anytime soon, if not ever.

We had one other requirement. My wife and I are members of the Baha’i Faith. Baha’is do not have paid clergy—or any clergy for that matter—so the way we take care of the administrative functions of the Faith is through spiritual assemblies. On the local level, whenever there are nine or more adult Baha’is (age 21 or older) living in a municipality, a Local Spiritual Assembly is formed, with new elections held each year. My wife and I were, and still are, on the Local Spiritual Assembly in our community, which at the time did not have a whole lot of Baha’is. So we felt we needed to stay in our community so that we could continue to serve on the assembly.

Our realtor took us to a lot of houses in the area and my wife searched the Internet. We found a few places near open fields, but we were wary about the township changing the zoning rules elsewhere. For a short time we placed a preliminary contract on an undeveloped lot with a local contractor, but this fell through, too. Then my wife saw that another house down by the river was for sale at an unbelievably low price. She called our realtor to set up an appointment for us to see it.

Our realtor told us later she thought we’d never buy the property, the house on it was so bad. Built in the late 1800s, the only thing good about the house was the location, as was pointed out several times by the man who later did the house inspection for us. It might have been a farmhouse at one time, but a quintessential “Pennsylvania farmhouse” it clearly was not. Frankly, it was a mess. From the damaged chimney on the roof to asbestos insulation on the leaky oil furnace in the basement to a septic system that had to be replaced, the house was beyond repair by anyone on a budget. On every page of his report, the house inspector pointed out and had us initial a note at the bottom that stated in effect, “We understand that the inspector can only indicate problems that he can see and has access to. Additional problems may be hidden from view.” We were surprised that people were actually living in the house after learning all that was wrong with it.

Of course, when one considers buying any house, an early question is why are the people selling. It turned out that the owners, a couple who had bought the house from the wife’s mother, were planning to move to Turkey. The husband, who was Turkish, was in his homeland when we first saw the house, and we did not actually meet him until the closing. The wife was an American, local to the area, and a cartoonist by trade. She worked in a small room on the second floor, which was perhaps the nicest in the whole house. Placed next to the house was a new, well-built, sturdy shed the size of a single-car garage, which the couple had planned to turn into an office/studio for the wife.

The husband was an electrician and had obtained a teaching position in Turkey. He had done some work in the house, we were told. However, the house inspector rated much of the electrical system in the house as “amateur,” though someone else might have done this work. The husband did have a workshop of sorts in a separate garage, which had its own structural problems. Behind the garage stood—barely—a rotting shipping container, with a tree growing through one side. At the back of the property were an old goat shed, chicken coop and tool shed, all of which were overgrown with weeds. Farther back, was a drop off to the former railroad track bed, which previous owners found useful as a private garbage dump.

Before having the house inspected, my wife and I were considering renovating it. Estimating what we’d get for the sale of our present house, the equity we had built up, the lower price of this house and what we felt we could conservatively borrow, we figured we could make it work. But after the inspection, we changed our minds. The cost of redoing this house into what my wife envisioned it could be was simply beyond our means, or at least beyond what we considered to be a prudent amount we could borrow.

“So do we do now?” we asked each other.

Though we had different reasons, on one thing we had no doubt: Despite the house, the garage, the shipping container, the goat and chicken sheds (the “office” shed was clearly a keeper—I saw it as a place to store my canoe and the lawn tractor we would need), we really, really loved the property. And as I’ve heard many times, if you really want something, you just need to be prepared to make the sacrifices to get it.

For my wife, the property brought back memories of her grandparent’s former home in Scotland, particularly the position of the house by the road, the steps going up from the road to it and the hedges on both sides. The house itself wasn’t nearly as nice as her grandparent’s, but that didn’t matter. It also had a white fence, which was similar to their house. (Unbeknownst to us at the time, most of the fence posts were rotten below ground level.) After her grandfather died, her grandmother moved to the States to live with her only child, my wife’s father, and his family. She shared a bedroom with my wife until she died a few years later, and she and my wife were very close

The property reminded me of summer camp, for which I have lot of happy memories. I attended three YMCA summer camps as a kid, one in Pennsylvania and two in the Ozarks in Missouri, and worked one summer as a counselor at a Boy Scout camp on the Delaware River in New Jersey as a canoeing, rowing and archery instructor. I got the job even though I had never been a Scout. The property wasn’t like any one of the camps I attended in particular, but rather like all of them in various ways.

A beloved grandmother and summer camp. How could we ignore childhood memories like that?

We both also liked the big trees on the borders of the property, its mature deciduous trees and the wooded area behind it, with remains of an old railroad bed (though not the garbage) and a standing, unused telephone pole, one of formerly many that ran along the railroad lined. We liked the evidence of wild life in the area, deer, raccoons, squirrels, foxes, groundhogs, wild turkeys, sea gulls, turkey vultures, hawks, blue herons, cormorants and many varieties of other birds.

We liked the idea of living in a river valley. For much of my life, particularly after going to college in Colorado, my wish was to live on the side or top of a mountain. We have friends who live on ridges or high hills and have magnificent views, which I envy. But living near water, in an area that by evidence of flint arrowheads and other relics was clearly a place where Native Americans had lived long before, has a real appeal. It’s a place that attracts human habitation.

So this above all else was why we wanted the property: We wanted to live down by the river.