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sleeping in the Shaque at my abandoned childhood home
Wednesday, July 17 2024
location: rural Hurley Township, Ulster County, NY
[REDACTED]
The news from Virginia was that my mother is now rendered bed-ridden from arthritis in the memory care ward at a the "rest home" in Fishersville, where she has lived for about a year and a half now. It's bad when the elderly become bedridden, because without anything for their bodies to do, they soon whither away and it doesn't take much to kill them. Both my brother Don and my mother's power-of-attorney (a woman named Joy Tarder) had said she has maybe two months left. So today I decided to drive down to Virginia to say goodbye. I don't really like my mother and she's no longer in a state where it much matters to her whether or not she sees visitors, but I knew that if I didn't see her off to whatever is next for her (and I'm pretty sure I know what that is), I would regret it at some point in the future.
To avoid all the annoyance of charging on the road, I took the Subaru Forester, meaning my drive would only be seven and a half hours. It would also give me the ability to recover some big things if I wanted to take them. This was why I'd bought the bike rack when I visited the Tibetan Center thrift store yesterday.
For this drive, I didn't use navigation at all. I just took a route I used to take years ago, which is south on the Thruway to I-84, then west to Scranton, Pennsylvania, and then south down I-81 to Staunton, Virginia. From there, it's all muscle memory on roads I've driven on (and biked down) hundreds of times.
The only glitch in the drive came when I experienced a rare traffic slowdown on the Virginia stretch of I-81 just north of Winchester. I switch to navigation at that point to see how long the delay would be and then let it take me on a detour. As I was on that, I stopped at a gas station for some much-needed road beer, a six pack of imperial IPAs with 9% alcohol. I drank on of those on the way to Staunton, then stopped at the Staunton Walmart to get some provisions. I wanted to get Don a water pick for his teeth, since he'd expressed interest in one and is obsessed with certain aspects of his health (if not his hygiene). I also needed some toothpaste and a toothbrush for myself and maybe also a blanket, since I wanted to see if I could sleep in the Shaque (the insulated outbuilding I'd built to live in in back 1991 and which was my home until I moved to Charlottesville in 1996). But when the blanket came to over $50, I decided I didn't need it.
I then went to the nearby Burger King (the one on the corner of US-250 and Frontier Drive), where I ordered two Impossible Whoppers. The guy who rang them up must not sell many of those because he seemed astounded that two burgers alone could cost about $14. "Yeah, they're expensive," I agreed. By that point I'd cracked open my second road beer, which I'd only drank a little of by the time I pulled in to the empty driveway at Creekside (all the vehicles at my childhood home have been sold). My brother Don immediately came out, saying he was happy to see me (and perhaps other social boilerplate he has internalized over the years as a substitute for true social skills). I gave him one of the Whoppers while greedily eating mine in the driveway, figuring I'd quickly lose my appetite if I went into the trailer. Eventually, though, I did go in (if only to put my remaining beers in a refrigerator). It had that sour smell of a failing refrigerator, though it wasn't as bad as I thought it would be. It's possible that smell is just baked into the many materials strewn about the place. It's still very cluttered, though there is perhaps a bit less of the chaos that our mother's hoarding continued to feed back when she lived there.
Don and I didn't interact for very long before I announced that I would be sleeping in the Shaque. Fortunately there were some blankets in amongst a pile of clothes our friend Josh had brought Don, and they somehow even smelled clean despite having spent an unknown time in that sour trailer atmosphere. I took my laptop and a beer to the Shaque, where I managed to get the electricity working by flipping a circuit breaker. I then found a couple dusty old fans in the house and used those to blast fresh air into the mustified-interior of the Shaque. There was of course plenty of clutter (in the form of paper trash, mostly, the hoarding of which was a huge part of my mother's pathology) and I was so disgusted with it and happy to be free to get rid of it that I just flung it into the weeds. Then I proceeded to watch season two of The House of the Dragon from files I'd copied to my laptop. But things quickly became confusing because I'd started somehow with episode two. But then I watched episode one (as sort of self-engineered "flash back" discontinuity, you could say) and suddenly the hanging of the rat catchers had an explanation, medieval though it was.
Over the loud fans blowing fresh air into the Shaque, I could hear, for the first time this season, the sound of katydids. This would be early for them to be heard up in the Catskill foothills, but perhaps they begin doing their ominous late-summer sound earlier this far south.
At some point I realized I had absolutely no access to potable water. All the plumbing systems in the now-abandoned house I grew up in are defunct, and Don had locked up the trailer and didn't respond to my knocking on the doors and windows. I couldn't find an outdoor water spigot there, and as I contemplated perhaps drinking creek water (and risking God knows what), I remembered all the cucumbers I'd brought with me to give away. (But then it turned out that Don doesn't like cucumbers.) So I took one of those back to the Shaque and took bites out of it like an apple as some cannabis I'd eaten started to kick in. Initially, I thought I'd solved my potable water problem. But as I continued to eat the cucumber, it started leaving an increasingly sour signal in my mouth that indicated it wasn't exactly what my body wanted. It wanted water without all the other stuff cucumber is full of. (I'd thought of cucumber as being not much more than water, but if you eat one when you are thirsty, you will quickly discover this isn't true.)
As the cannabis continued to ramp up in my brain (getting more intense than I would've preferred), I eventually got a flashlight and went to poke around in the abandoned house, hoping to find a hoarded shrink-wrapped mass of bottled water. As much as my mother backslid on the environmental ideals my father had insisted on after he died, she apparently never switched to buying and drinking bottled water. I did, however, find a twelve pack of Coca-Cola in cans, and I knew that that would have to be good enough. Coke is cloyingly sweet when you just want to be hydrated, but it's better at doing that than cucumbers.
Meanwhile, the cannabis had me thinking all kinds of paranoid thoughts. Perhaps Joy Tarder had heard that I was sleeping at the Shaque and had called the cops, who would come bursting through the door. Or perhaps one of the redneck neighbors would've noted that Don's "rich brother from the north" was visiting and would come throw a bag over my head and hold me hostage until my family raised a five hundred thousand dollar ransom. Yes, those are the genuine concerns of someone paranoid from ingesting too much cannabis.
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