I wondered what kind of man would choose to live in a house that small when he obviously had other options. He didn’t live in Ireland, where a person might build a little Hobbit hut and live happy as a wee elf. This wasn’t Mongolia, Africa, South America, or China, where people regularly lived in houses that were barely big enough to keep the sun and rain off your head; this was America, where everything is BIG.
Maybe Tiny House Man was ill, suffering from a mental disorder that made it impossible to make wise decisions, like Ted Kaczynski (the man who made shoe-box-size bombs and mailed them out all over the country), who ended up pleading insanity, using the small size of his cabin and the fact that it didn’t have running water as proof of his problems. I thought about what might constitute normal or normal-ish behavior, wise and not-so-wise decisions, and ultimately, I hoped the tiny-house guy was similar to me: a sane person without a big agenda, who simply wanted a way to make sense of the world, to create a new map with a big X in the middle labeled “Home,” even if that meant shrinking his world down to the size of an area rug.
My life was normal (or at least, normal-ish), though my new diagnosis and machinery made me feel chaotic inside. Before leaving the hospital, I had a defibrillator implanted—a gadget that would normally be delivered in a suitcase to the side of an ailing patient, but in my case was all sewn in, corkscrewed into my heart and wired to a battery that floated in my belly. It worked like this: If my heart rate suddenly spiked, causing me to pass out, the box (as I called it) would deliver a jolt of electricity to send me flying forward like I’d been donkey-kicked in the ass. It was like being Tasered from the inside out. My friends and I joked that I was the only one of us who could likely jump-start a car by running in place, or who could reasonably ask her lover to wear rubber boots connected to a grounding wire. We joked about it; but it unnerved me.
I never knew when my heart would quit and my defibrillator would fire. My doctors and I couldn’t connect it to the food I ate, water, beer, sex, vitamin deficiency, exercise, anxiety, thyroid problems, stress, joy, monotony, my job, scary movies, or the number of times I’d shot myself off a ladder doing home improvement projects. There wasn’t any specific behavior that triggered my weird heart rhythm; it was a mystery, and that left me feeling lost inside.
One week, in spite of all advice to the contrary, I went for a run; three miles, up to the top of Mount Tabor and back. I wanted to test my heart, challenge it to see if it would explode like a water balloon in my chest or simply stop, like releasing a doorknob after you walk in the house. I raced up to my house and doubled over with my hands on my knees, like I always do, expecting to crumple into a wad of fluff on the porch. But nothing happened. I was fine.
And then two days later, as I sat at my desk, writing a report, my heart seized. It was like a switch was thrown, like the pffft out of a wall socket when the fuse pops; I nearly fainted, but instead I drove myself (against all reason) to the urgent care facility.
My heart made me see everything different, like looking at your over-sized legs dangling inside the water at the edge of a pool. I found myself stalled out at the grocery store, ogling the rows of produce, dishes, pots, scrub brushes, and soup ladles, imagining the people who may have spent their life propagating, harvesting, designing, and building these genius goods; items that were now a dime a dozen, expected, disposable, forgettable. I found myself staring out the window at the birds and the clouds, at the way rain gathered into tiny river deltas near the base of the windowpane. One day I started crying at a stoplight because the red color was so brilliantly beautiful, and the idea of stoplights so perfect in a civil society. Later, I had an epiphany while trying to fix the vacuum cleaner, bending over it with a pair of pliers, with little parts fanned out on the rug all around me. I thought: This is what the living do. And I swooned at the ordinary nature of the task and myself, at my chapped hands and square palms, at the way my wrists bent and fingers flexed inside this living body.
Another day, I found myself telling a city inspector, a complete stranger, everything about my life. He had come to the house to evaluate why rats had burrowed into a hole in the front yard, and why they refused to leave even though I had purchased something called the “sonic emitter”—a contraption that was supposed to produce a high-frequency noise, inaudible to humans but ear-splitting to rats and guaranteed to send all varmints packing.
The inspector spoke with a southern drawl and wore an orange safety vest that made him look like a traffic cone. He explained the serious nature of pest control and how some people “just don’t give a fiddle-faddle,” and how he once saw rat turds in a silverware drawer but didn’t say anything to the homeowners because they “weren’t the sorts to take a note on it anyways.” And then, for some undefined reason (some bizarre, oddly satisfying reason), I told him the story about how I’d just gotten out of the hospital, and how I felt like I was walking around with a hole in me that every living thing seemed to fall into. He gave me a little tap on the hand as he handed off the inspection report and pointed to his listed recommendations. “Change what you can, darlin’. That’s my best advice.”
I remember thinking: What would I change? That’s easy. I’d be on a perpetual vacation where I’d swim with dolphins and eat mangos every day, and I wouldn’t have to work or pay a mortgage. I’d travel to stunning, wild places; visit my family, and hang out with my friends and let their toddlers put cereal in my hair, cry in my arms, and poop in my lap—not because I like poop but because that is exactly the sort of real-life stuff I would want to have in the mix. I’d walk the Pacific Crest Trail from the Mexican border to Canada if my heart could handle it, which led me to what I really wanted to change: me. My heart. If I could change anything, I wanted to not think about my heart every five minutes. I wanted to have the nurses stop scribbling “congestive heart failure” in my medical chart, and I wanted to quit imagining that I was dying a little bit every day. I wanted to stop looking at everything so intensely—studying my housemates, the neighbors, my friends, the clouds, the way the sun warms me like it’s filling in the cavities between each and every one of my 4 trillion living cells. I wanted to stop looking at everything and thinking how perfect it is, and how much I was going to miss it, and then feeling so sad because I didn’t want to miss anything.
As I sat there in the waiting room, waiting for the next round of diagnoses, the idea of building a tiny house seemed to make all the sense in the world. Somehow, it would shrink my life into a manageable mouthful and connect me to the trouble-free kid who raced around her backyard catching fireflies at night.
And building would be fantastic—a monumental project that would absorb every brain cell, and every ounce of focus and ability, and then maybe I’d stop staring at the sun like the most stunning act of God ever imagined. It would put all my home repair and remodeling skills to the test, and I’d have a chance to build something perfect; something warm and kind, and made out of materials that didn’t make me feel like I was lying to myself every time I claimed to be an environmentalist. I could build a little house like Tiny House Man, and if it made sense, I might even be able to move into it and let go of my big house—a move that would entail letting go of the perfect backyard, the beautiful gardens, and the accommodating floor plan, along with the mortgage, the utility bills, and the hours spent laboring to keep things from falling under the weight of time and the elements. Maybe I could walk away from all that. Maybe.
Deciding that I needed to take some kind of action, I tore the article out of the magazine and smuggled it out under my shirt like porn. When I got home, I stuck the picture on the refrigerator, and for the next week, every time I caught a glimpse of the pointy little roof, I’d get happy-melty feelings.
I convinced myself that I needed to find Tiny House Man. It was a completely logical course of action, like tracking down Jonas Salk for more information about his polio vaccine, or finding the manufacturers of a particular produ
ct to see if there were any small pieces that presented a choking hazard. I needed to know the details, and a week after staring at the Tiny House Man and his perfect creation a thousand different times, studying the magazine photo in the same way a jewel thief would ogle the Queen’s crown, I decided to call directory assistance in Iowa City—that’s where the article placed Jay Shafer, The Tiny House Man.
My hands started sweating as I stood in my kitchen, then paced from the oven to the kitchen sink, holding the phone, and then dialed the operator in Iowa City and asked for Jay Shafer. A moment later, she offered me his phone number. Just like that, I had the winning lottery ticket. I simultaneously wanted to barf and scream. I grabbed RooDee and went for a walk, talking to myself along the way: “Hello, Jay Shafer, this is Dee Williams and I wanted to . . . I was hoping that . . . I like your house and . . . your house is really cool and . . . I want to . . . hope to . . . build one too.” So it went for a half an hour, then an hour as I worked my way through the neighborhood, up and down the same street over and over, trying to find the right way to ask Jay for help. I stood in my kitchen like I did when I was stealing myself for an inspection, tucking my hair behind my ears and standing up straight, chest out . . . like a lion tamer ready to invite his opponent out of its cage. “Hello, Jay,” I boomed in a false bravado, “How you doing today?”
In the long run, five minutes after I hung up the phone, I couldn’t remember what we had said, or how the conversation had played out. I had asked him a few questions about the house, what it cost and how long it took to make, and then we had made a tentative plan to get together if I ever came to town. We had laughed a lot, and I’d hung up incredibly satisfied with myself. And then I bought a plane ticket.
Tiny House Man
I am not a graceful traveler. I am frenetic. I constantly search my pockets for my boarding pass. I give myself a little pat-down as I stand in line at the security gate, and then again as I race from one monitor to the next, where I mumble the gate number and my brain goes ding like an oven timer, and I check for my boarding pass again. I was particularly goofy en route to Iowa, and left my wallet in the bathroom, which meant I had to trek back through the terminal, around suitcases and wheelchairs, and past annoying people wearing smug “I know exactly where my boarding pass is” looks and irritating people bottlenecking the corridor, making it nearly impossible for me to get to my wallet, which, as it turned out, was in my hand the whole time.
The truth was, regardless of my usual worries, I was incredibly nervous about meeting Tiny House Man, and I wasn’t sure why. I had called my brother Doug, who also happened to live in Iowa City. I explained why I wanted to visit, and he had purred little questions into the phone like a therapist. “So you want to find the Tiny House Man and build a tiny house?”
“Yes.” I curled my arms reflexively over my head and cradled the phone to my ear, wondering what Doug was thinking. Did he think I was crazy, behaving irrationally, or headed for some terrible crash landing?
“Okay,” he whispered back. “We always seem to figure it out.”
So, just like that, I had enlisted my brother. I explained that Jay had invited me to come visit, and Doug was game for the adventure.
Growing up on our farm, Doug had been my accomplice in a number of backyard experiments and building projects. We built hay forts and made hidey-holes, and crawled through the attic looking for treasure. We caught tadpoles and fireflies, and lay out on hay bales, staring at the sky, daydreaming about the candy we would buy (M&M’s, Jujubes, or chocolate bars) when we were “old and rich.”
As the eldest sibling, I was typically the instigator of our shenanigans, suggesting for example that we make a catapult to throw each other across the yard. Doug, who was nearly as big as me even though he was five years younger, would usually team with me to take care of business, to (for example) work with me to bend a tree sapling into a tight U-shape as a perfect catapult or slingshot. We would then usually enlist our younger brother, Mark, to support our brilliant ideas, asking him to sit at the whip end of the tree (again for example) with a soup kettle on his head for protection. In the case of the catapult, we were ultimately foiled; the thing didn’t shoot straight because the physics were off (Mark was too heavy, he wouldn’t sit right, and he appeared to be crying), and besides, the tree was too scratchy and my mom screamed when she saw what we were doing.
Another time, my brothers and I convinced ourselves we were kung fu masters. I still have a lump on my leg from the day I attempted a complicated ninja move from the barn loft, where I had tied an extension cord (the closest thing I could find to a rope) to a rafter near the peak of the roof. I figured I could swing out the second-story window, turn around in midair, and fly right back into the barn, where I’d land catlike on the floor, somersault, and come up with my hands poised in a karate chop. I imagined this would be my coolest trick ever, and I think I yelled “Hey, watch this!” to my brothers as I grabbed the cord, took a running leap, and shot myself out the window into the blank airspace above the cows.
Moments into the ride, I felt the rubber cord stretch with my weight, and the knot loosening as I hit the farthest point on my swing. I flailed my legs and twisted around, and that’s when I knew I was in trouble. I came back at the building, knees first, scraped along the barn wall, and dropped eight feet into the barnyard manure, where I lay conscious but unmoving, trying to assess the damage to my legs, my ninja pride, and the damaged extension cord (which my dad would later shake his head over and spank me for ruining). Meanwhile, my brothers thought this was the funniest thing they’d ever seen: “Just like a cartoon!” they cried. “Do it again!”
Doug became a Methodist minister, a vocation that complemented his ability to witness people do dumb shit and then help them pick up the pieces. He had recently flown to Portland to be with me after my defibrillator was implanted. I woke up in the cardiac care unit to find him sleeping next to me; he’d stayed up all night listening to the heart monitor, and had finally dozed off in a nearby chair. When he woke up, he found his “ass crack on backward,” so he’d crawled up on the bed beside me, lying on his back. He had dangled his legs off the bed to avoid accidentally bumping my bubble-packed chest and the sea of associated tubes and wires, and then crossed his arm over his torso so he could tuck his right hand into his left pants pocket, leaving him looking like a leaf of wilted lettuce. He looked “here but gone,” which was just how I felt.
Everyone needs a good accomplice, and in some weird way, I knew finding the Tiny House Man in Iowa City was a good thing—like divinity or fate was working in our favor—simply by the fact that Jay lived in the same town as my brother Doug.
Jay’s house was in a residential neighborhood, tucked behind a larger normal house, and as we walked to the backyard, we found him standing on his porch, waiting for us, looking incredibly large given the small scale of his abode. I found myself approaching him with a mixture of complete excitement and hesitating fear . . . like a four-year-old seeing Santa at the mall. I was too nervous to say anything funny or weird, and instead smiled and shook his outreached hand and mumbled, “I have a photo of you and your house stuck to my refrigerator,” which instantly made me feel like a miniature copy of that article was stuck in my teeth.
“Doesn’t everyone?” he said, putting his hands on his hips in a Superman pose and looking off in the distance like a statue. Apparently, his sense of humor was on par with mine; I immediately liked him.
Before we went inside, while Doug and Jay talked on the porch, I walked around the house, gunning my hand along the siding and patting the window sashes. I loved Jay’s little house and found myself wanting to hug it, to lean into it and smell it or get my picture taken next to it like I was standing with the president. Inside, Jay gave us a short tour (a little joke at the time) and then we sat down around a tiny table with our knees touching. It felt like the sort of thing you’d do at a noisy café, where you’d naturally
scoot in to hear each other and accidentally touch toes or kick each other when you crossed your legs. Jay pulled out a wad of papers and photographs, spreading them out on the small table between us, and then showed us floor plans and elevations, construction details, and sketches of some of the other houses he had designed. He and Doug chitchatted about how the house was connected to the trailer and how the walls were reinforced, and all the while I was mostly quiet. I glanced around at the knotty pine walls, the kitchen setup with its shiny galley sink and stainless steel countertop, and the way the cabinets were joined together. I casually cocked my head, trying not to seem overly nosy as I read the titles of books stacked on the shelves—books about cabins, barns, tree houses, yurts, converted vans, an “Earthship,” old hippie wagons, shepherds’ wagons, chuck wagons, hay wagons, boats, and old Airstreams. His bookshelves looked like an expanded version of my own, and like my favorite part of the local bookstore where I’d spent hours in the past month crouched on a movable step stool, pouring through books; sitting there till someone tapped me on the shoulder, telling me it was closing time and I might as well collect all the books and just put them on the nearby stack table so an employee could reshelve them later.
Jay wanted to know why I was interested in building. I hesitated for a second and then joked, “I want a house that goes with my squirrel costume.” I didn’t want to talk about the real reasons, about my mortgage and the way I was tired of working all the time, or about my heart stuff, which was way too personal and private, and far too confused for polite conversation.
He smiled and gave me an uncomfortable look. I knew that look; it was the way I sometimes stared at someone when I thought they were holding something back. It was an intuitive thing, where you get a sense there’s more to the story, and it was also something that I’d refined through work. I’d learned how to watch a person’s eyes to see if they looked up and to the left like they’re accessing a seldom-used part of their brain, which would be their imagination and a sign that they were lying. So, as I was sitting there with Jay Shafer, as I looked up and to the left and made my little joke about squirrels, I realized I wanted to come clean; I at least wanted to offer more of the truth, even if I couldn’t offer all of it.
The Big Tiny: A Built-It-Myself Memoir Page 6