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My awareness of the profound shift in my family’s circumstances was every bit as dim as was appropriate for a 6-year-old. I mean, I must have been cognizant of the fact that we no longer had to urinate outdoors, but it’s not as if I remember standing goggle-eyed before the toilet. I did not linger at the entrance to every room, flicking the light switch on and off and on again. I suspect my youth kept me from fully grasping the contrast. Kids are nothing if not resilient and accepting, and I have no reason to believe I was any different.
The assumption of a mortgage and the suddenly commodious nature of his surroundings did little to dampen my father’s enthusiasm for thrift. Here was a man who would follow his children (my younger sister having been born during our occupation of the rented inn) throughout their new home, darkening lights in their wake. Here was a man who, along with my mother, slept in the living room on a sprung pullout sofa bed for years, rather than spend the money to acquire a more formal arrangement. Here was a man who could stand to waste nothing, not even the lingering heat still trapped in a pan sitting above an extinguished burner: His most famous kitchen creation was “coaster cakes,” the half-raw pancakes he “cooked” on a rapidly cooling griddle. To this day, I cannot abide a pancake that is even slightly underdone.
Look, to many, none of these things may seem particularly radical. I know that. There are plenty of kids with similar memories and plenty of parents who are even thriftier, driven either by circumstance or compulsion. I’m not trying to lay claim to anything exceptional; I’m merely framing the rough context for the origins of my personal relationship to money.
I don’t want to get too psychoanalytical, but it is hard to ignore the financial aspects of my lineage. A spendthrift grandfather, a thrifty-if-not-downright-cheap father: How might these inform my own relationship to thrift and abundance? One could make an argument for either extreme. Perhaps the wastrel gene would skip a generation, further mutated by rebellion against the paucity of my childhood. Or might the lessons of my grandfather’s plight, coupled with the uncomfortable truth that apples rarely fall particularly far from the tree, resonate through the generations?
It seems to have been the latter, although I’m only 40 years old, and there is still ample time to reverse course; after all, my grandfather managed to hold on to his assets until the waning years of his life. The difference is, of course, that I don’t have millions of dollars to hold on to. I don’t even have tens of thousands of dollars, which is the occasionally discomfiting result of having opted to put my faith in writing as a career path. In this sense my financial destiny has been chosen for me, though it could just as well be argued that I could have chosen a career that would have painted an entirely different financial backdrop. After all, I was offered the educational opportunities that might have made this possible, but I chose not to take them.6
Still, my prevailing point remains intact, which is that even before Erik came into my life, I’d embraced a relatively Spartan existence. The story of how we came to acquire our land and build our house is a fine example of this embrace.
My wife, Penny, and I bought our land in 1997, back when I was 26 years old and before Penny became my wife. At the time, we were living in a tent we’d pitched on land belonging to friends, saving our loot, and waiting for the right property to present itself. Although I remember this time with no small degree of fondness, it is only the gift of hindsight that allows me to do so, for the tent was dark and lousy with mold, and I spent much of the summer with a cough that would not relent. We established a rudimentary kitchen of sorts in an old canvas army shelter, but the roof leaked profusely, a defect that was exacerbated by a summer of record-setting rainfall.
Then quite suddenly it wasn’t summer (this is generally how it happens in Vermont; one day, you’re dripping sweat in your skivvies, the next you’re shoveling 2 feet of snow off the driveway), and I was still coughing and we were still in the tent. If the rain had been a certain type of challenge, the snow was another, altogether. Unlike rainwater, it did not run either off or through the roof of our humble dwelling; the threat of our tent collapsing beneath the snow’s accumulated weight was a constant companion. We poked at our canvas ceiling with a poplar branch we’d liberated from a nearby tree (ah! Another threat: deadfalls and windblown branches), but we couldn’t reach the center of the tent roof. This is to say nothing of the cold, which the thin layer of canvas did little to abate.
This was not the first tent we’d lived in and, frankly, it was an improvement over the sad array of decrepit cabins we’d inhabited over the previous years as part of our savings campaign. At this point, we’d budgeted $100 per month for rent; looking back, I see how brazen and patently absurd this was, and yet, for many years, we paid no more, although it meant inhabiting structures that made the bungalow of my childhood seem downright opulent. Still, we had little choice in the matter, because the income we earned back then came from my part-time job fixing bicycles and writing the occasional newspaper or magazine story, and from Penny’s work on a vegetable farm. Between us, we brought home maybe $600 per week, and often, much less.
Still, over the course of about 2 years, we managed to save $15,000, a feat attributable to little more than an extreme tolerance of substandard accommodations and a studied avoidance of anything but the most essential expenditures. To save on gas, and because our car was often disabled, Penny and I both rode our bikes to and from our respective jobs. At the end of her shift, she would fill her backpack and carry home the gnarled, unmarketable carrots and rutabagas, which we would stew with pasta in water that had been hauled from wherever we could find it. The too-frequent result was a sort of “mushy-vegetable-broth-over-linguine” style of cuisine that we generally ate straight from the pot, since washing dishes meant hauling more water.
As mentioned, we did have a car, a little rust-bitten Volkswagen, the mid-1990s equivalent to the Beetle my parents had owned when I was a child, but it was so bereft it lacked a passenger-side rearview mirror. This was not because its mirror had been lost or stolen, but because the friggin’ thing had come straight from the factory without one. The car was the epitome of utilitarian transportation, little more than motor, steering wheel, and tires. This explains why it had appealed to my father in the first place, who had driven it until his mechanic had deemed it unsafe, at which point my dear old dad gifted it to us.7
Our search for land had proven frustrating. Mostly, this was because our vision and our bank account could not come to terms. The former looked out across acres of rolling fields and verdant forest; we’d plant a garden and some fruit trees, and in the spring, we’d frolic naked through apple blossoms that drifted on the breeze while a small flock of soft-fleeced lambs grazed in a distant meadow. There would be no neighbors to see us, because there would be no neighbors in sight. We’d build a house with our own hands, just the two of us, something small and funky but replete with the luxuries we’d forsaken for so long: Running water. Maybe even hot running water. A bathroom. A roof so sturdily constructed no amount of snow could conquer it. Ah, and insulation. Definitely insulation.
That’s what we saw. What realtors saw was a pair of scruffy young lovebirds with a mere $15,000.8 Sure, it was a fortune to us; it was our life’s savings, and more money than either of us could ever have imagined laying claim to. We were so stunned by that trio of zeros, it might as well have been $15 million. Except, of course, it wasn’t, which explains why we spent a dispiriting summer-and-a-half being dragged across logged-over stubble and cedar-clogged swamps. We were told these parcels had “potential,” although precisely how that potential might be realized—and even what that potential might ultimately reveal—remained suspiciously vague.
Our luck changed on a cold and wet October day that foretold the months of cold and wet still to come. When non-Vermonters think of the climactic hardships we must surely endure, they tend to think of deep winter—the frozen realm of January and February, all ice and white and numbed extremities. But I tel
l you what: The shoulder seasons are much, much harder. At least in January, you know pretty much what to expect. Yes, it’s gonna be snowy. Yes, it’s gonna be cold. Damn straight, there’s going to come a day when you seriously consider chucking it all in and making a beeline for the Mason-Dixon Line as fast as your sorry-ass little VW Fox can take you, watching with glee as the snow-covered landscape disappears in your rearview mirror. But at least you know to expect this.
October, on the other hand, is a reckless, capricious thing. It can be 70 and sunny one day, the sky azure and boundless, the air a soft caress. The first killing frost has come and mercilessly dispatched the insects that find their succor in human blood. But it does not last; it cannot last, and, as one who has passed nearly 40 Vermont Octobers, I assure you, it will not last. A day later, 2 at the most, and you’ll be stuck in a towering drift of autumnal snow. It’s not that the weather itself is so bad; rather, it’s the schizophrenic, almost psychotic nature of it. It is constantly shifting. There is nothing on which to hang your hat.
By October standards, the day our luck changed was neither bad nor good. Yes, it was cold and wet, but it could have been colder and wetter. And the landscape had a stark beauty to it that the older I get, the more I appreciate. The birches looked like tall bones against the gray of the day, and the state’s vaunted maple trees had shed all but the most stubborn of their leaves. The ones that remained were brittle and tarnished orange, but the rain had both softened and brightened them, and from a distance, they looked almost like fireflies against the stolid sky.
We’d found the real estate listing almost by chance, a small advertisement in the back pages of a local newspaper. For months, we’d been ferreting these papers back to our cold, moldy tent, where we’d scan the classifieds by the light of our headlamps. This listing promised 40 acres, with about 10 in pasture. It was set far back off the main road, with a vaguely worded reference to a right-of-way and absolutely no mention of electrical service, which of course meant there was no such thing. Most crucially, it was $30,000, a figure that was particularly resonant, for we knew the banks would issue loans for bare land only with a 50 percent down payment, which was exactly what we had saved. Here, finally, was real potential.
On that cold (but not too cold) and wet (but not too wet) day, we trailed the realtor as he pushed through wild raspberry whips, looking for the rusty barbed wire that marked the boundary lines. His rubber boots left deep impressions in the damp soil. I remember liking the fact that the boundaries were marked this way; it whispered agrarianism, honest toil, and history, and it felt to me as if I could make a life on land that whispered these things. The property sloped gently to the southwest; it was rectangular, topped by the overgrown pasture, which fell into another 30 acres choked with black cherry, fir, maple, poplar, and spruce. There were even a few red oaks, a rarity this far north. Across the valley, we could see the long, low barns of dairy farms and the patchwork of fields rimmed by stone walls and dotted with Ayrshire, Holstein, and Jersey dairy cows. We pretended to listen to the agent’s selling points, pretended to be careful, cautious buyers, pretended, even, to be taking notes, but already, we knew. “I love it,” I hissed to Penny and she nodded furiously, her eyes as wide as the far mountain views from the height of the land. We made an offer that night.
The bank matched our $15,000, although the interest rate was rapacious: 12 percent. Our good friend Jerry, a fast-talking New Yorker who’d fled the city for rural Vermont with the proceeds from the much-coveted taxi medallions he’d inherited and sold, lent us another 10 grand with which to build a shelter. The interest rate was only slightly less insulting. Jerry was a friend, not a fool, and he charged us 10 percent.
With the loan from Jerry, we built what I euphemistically termed a “hippie shack.” It was 16 feet by 32 feet; concrete piers for a foundation; a loft we accessed via an aluminum ladder; and, for the first year and a half or so, no running water, although we did have a well drilled, upon which we installed a hydrant. Dishes and bathing were done at the base of this hydrant with great rapidity, and creative use of profanity. Still, it was a giant leap from the haul-water-in-the-backseat-of-the-car-to-our-canvas-tent-kitchen arrangement, and we tried not to be ungrateful. Another friend gifted us 3 weeks of labor as a wedding present; it was just enough to get the shell up and keep the rain off our heads.
Within 3 years, we’d repaid Jerry’s loan and convinced a different bank to lend us $50,000. This was no small feat because the money was intended for the construction of a home that would be situated at the end of a 1,300-foot driveway, and the home would not be—nor would it ever be—connected to the electrical grid. Banks aren’t really down with alt energy, but at this bank there was a family connection from way back, and he called in a favor or two and badabing, bada-boom, we had our money. Or credit. Or whatever you want to call it. I remember being slightly stunned by it all; only a few years before, I could hardly imagine being the master of $15,000, and here I was in possession of more than three times as much. I didn’t really think about where the money had come from; like most people, I had a vague notion that the bank had lent me 50 grand of its money. The truth, of course, is that they had simply assigned numbers to my account. There was no money, or at least there wasn’t until I spent it.9
Via this odd arrangement, we jacked up the hippie shack and poured a real foundation under it, along with a basement for an addition that by itself was larger than the original structure. I remember well the day this happened, for I was on the whipping end of a particularly tight writing deadline and could not afford to miss a day of work just because my house (and therefore, my office, which consisted of a desk wedged into a corner of the loft) was about to get a few feet closer to the sun.
“Do you think it’d be alright if I stay in the house while yer liftin’ it?” I asked Gary, assuming the regional dialect in hopes of connecting with the fellow on a Vermonter-to-Vermonter basis, and thus earning his approval to remain on task. Gary was the contractor we’d hired to lift the house, which demanded both exceptional delicacy and brute force, a pairing of qualities that seems dichotomous but which in rural Vermont is actually quite common.
I’d come to like Gary quite a bit. But I liked him even more when he rubbed his stubbled chin thoughtfully and cast a glance at the cabin, which was to be raised a total of 4 feet. Already, not yet having been moved a single inch, the cabin looked disturbingly vulnerable with its foundation piers removed and replaced by a latticework of cribbing, as if the damn thing was sitting on a bed of pick-up sticks. Gary looked at me, then back to the cabin, as if making a mental calculation regarding my tolerance for risk and his responsibility not to kill me. Finally, he broke into a grin: “Can’t see how it could hurt.”
My desk was situated at a window that looked out the northern gable end of our little home, and it was there I sat, typing away, as the house slowly rose beneath me. It felt as if I was levitating, and it is not a sensation I will ever forget. Every so often, the cabin would sway from side to side, like a cradle. And yes, I hit my deadline.
With our house in the air and our loan approved, we bought materials: Towering stacks of lumber and roofing and drywall. Windows. Doors. I took the summer off from the bike shop, and Penny starting taking 3-day weekends. Our friend Bob, a skilled carpenter possessing a torso that has always reminded me of a beer keg, came every weekend with a truck full of tools and a lifetime of experience warehoused in his stocky frame. Our energy and enthusiasm seemed boundless, and by the end of the summer, our shack had become a house. It wasn’t finished, of course, but if you stood back far enough and squinted, you could sort of imagine what it would look like with siding.
That winter, our first child was born, a boy, and we named him Finlay. Appropriately enough, Penny went into labor at the lumberyard, where she was picking out shower tiles.10 “I just want to have the shower finished before the baby comes,” she’d told me, which would have worked out fine if Fin had been oh, about 3 months late. A
s it turned out, our place was in such a state of incompleteness that when the midwife arrived to assist us with a homebirth, she swiveled her head with evident distaste and said, “You’ve got a long way to go.” And this was after I’d moved the miter and table saws to the basement to better facilitate the birthing process. She then parked herself in a rocking chair set in the doorway of the bedroom and promptly began to snore. I never had liked her much; I liked her even less after that.
Fin’s arrival slowed our progress for a few weeks, but frankly, not as much as I’d expected. The little duffer slept remarkably well, and we suffered little of the fatigue that tends to afflict first-time parents. By the next summer, our house was finished enough that the bank converted our construction loan to a regular mortgage, which dropped our interest rate from 9 percent to a less draconian 6 percent.
For the next 6 or 7 years, we did everything in our power to pay off our mortgage, and to the extent I can point to a specific time when my aversion to debt became a life-altering force, this is it. I could not stand having that debt; it felt burdensome beyond all reason, like a whole-body flu I couldn’t shake. Intellectually, I grasped that it was a relatively modest sum (in addition to the $50K, we had another 10 grand or so that we revolved through a series of low-interest credit card offers, this being the era of seemingly boundless offers for 12 months at zero percent), and that our payments were well within our means. By this time, my writing career had begun to bring in enough cash that we felt downright flush. I hadn’t yet reached the heady heights of the $35,000 years, but in comparison to my bike shop wages, which hovered around 8 bucks an hour, we were walkin’ in tall cotton. I’ve come to understand that monetary affluence is largely a condition of comparison, and by the standards of my modest expectations, forged by both my childhood and the earlier years of my working life, we were loaded. We could well afford to service our measly $370 mortgage payment.