The Big Tiny: A Built-It-Myself Memoir (15 page)

(OLYMPIA, WASHINGTON, DECEMBER 2012)

N
othing much has changed over the past several years. If you compared a series of satellite photos from 2004 up to the current day, you’d see that my little house has been perched in roughly the same spot from the start, looking like a small, shiny outbuilding, a shed maybe, tucked in the corner along the fence and back alley. Depending on the day the photos were taken, you might also see a blurry pink dot, which would be me, dashing across the lawn, wearing nothing but a bath towel, scuttling from Rita’s back door to my house after a shower. It hasn’t happened very often—maybe half a dozen times in eight years—but that is exactly the sort of behavior (the one-in-a-millionth moment, the one time you dropped your guard) that finds its way into a photo.

Rita’s shower has one of those fancy adjustable heads, where
you twist it one way and the water jets out ballistically, or twist it another and the water blobs out gently. I prefer the squishy water, but the other day I made a switch to see if the water-pick setting would remove construction adhesive from my hair. I was standing there with my head under the jet stream, with my fingers in my ears and my eyes shut (a protective posture), when I realized the shower noise inside my head was exactly like the storm noise inside my house a few nights before.

It was the first big rainstorm of the season, with wind blowing in and shooting rain at the roof like marbles, then rock salt, then frozen grapes, then a fire hydrant. It slammed into the house in waves, delivering a freakish amount of water, left to right and then back to front. The house rocked with the bigger wind gusts, making it impossible to go back to sleep, and making me wonder if the house was slowly being pushed toward the center of the yard.

At one point, the rain was thudding so hard I seriously considered the possibility that fish were falling on the roof. I’d read this could happen: fish scooped into a waterspout, a small tornado at sea, only to land a hundred miles inland; not a crazy idea, given the fact that Puget Sound was less than a mile away—just down the hill—and likely rising by the minute.

Lightning struck somewhere west of my neighborhood, and the giant flash of light gave me a chance to sit up and notice that the neighbor’s tree was bending sideways away from the wind. This was about the time that RooDee started panting and
shaking, keeping her eyes on me and her ears flat to her head, whining at me like the bed was too small a lifeboat. That was also the moment that I remembered I hadn’t reconnected the grounding wire to my electrical system.

“Shit!” I yelped. “Shitty shit shit!”

The grounding cable was about as big around as my pinky finger, and normally connected the solar electric system (the battery, inverter, meter, and panels) to a copper post that was pounded four feet into the ground. This was supposed to keep the system from frying if it got hit by lightning, and now (“Oh shit!”) I realized I hadn’t reconnected the cable after moving things around the other day. I had disconnected the wire while wrestling the solar panels into a new position in the yard, a spot near the brown scab of my garden—a spot that was bleeding a few weeks ago but now looked painful to the touch. At the time, I imagined that I was smart and clever for optimizing my position under the sun, but now I was screwed; the panels were lined with metal and sat ten feet above the ground like a giant two-thousand-dollar lightning rod.

“Not so smart! Not so smart!” I whined at RooDee while staring out the window.

I had labored over whether or not I even wanted electricity in my house; it seemed unnecessary because, as I had explained to a friend, “I have a headlamp to see which part of me is standing in which part of the house.” In my estimation, there are far too many lights in the world; streetlights, car lights, tiny
lights in the glove box; front and back porch lights, lights in the ceiling, under the cabinets, and in the refrigerator; lights working their way across undulating surfaces, so you could guess the couch cushions are soft and the bathroom sink will bruise your hip if you totter into it in the middle of the night.

I wondered if all that light was somehow causing us to forget things, blinding us to the truth that a little darkness can be a good thing. When I was in the hospital, lights were on all the time, day or night—lights from the heart monitor, the automatic blood pressure cuff, the nurses’ station. And then there were all the electronically induced noises: beeps and hums, and
pssst
-ing sounds from the oxygen generator. There were noises from my roommate; she was uncomfortable, but there was nothing I could do. I just lay there, hoping the noise would dampen, spread itself into the mattresses and the cotton blankets that they’d sometimes warm for us in a microwave oven. I wished for more silence, and then once she had passed, wanted more noise. I’m fickle like that.

But I was certain I wanted my little house to be as quiet as possible, to bypass the racket created by a humming refrigerator and a buzzing fluorescent light. I wanted a chance to hear myself breathe, and to notice that my inhalations jibe with RooDee’s and my heartbeat is making the sheet rustle. As a result, I decided to install a mere smidgen of electricity so I could cut carrots early in the morning without losing a finger
and avoid putting my shirt on inside out (something I’ve done plenty of times with or without a lightbulb).

I ended up with fifty feet of copper wire stringing four wall outlets and a couple of overhead lights together, and then connected that to one of the most expensive and mystical contraptions ever: a 240-watt solar electric system. It’s a small system (“more of a suggestion than the real deal,” one guy had joked when he compared my system to the “normal one down the street”) but still an impressive-looking setup, like part of a NASA space shuttle had landed next to my house, which made me feel that something intelligent was going on in the backyard.

To this day, I have no idea how the thing works—something about how the sun frees the electrons in the silicon panels, not by warming them but by simply shining on them, which made me wonder if I should install a mirror next to the panels to generate even more electricity, or place them in water to enlarge the sunrays like how my legs look bigger when I soak them in a swimming pool. These two ideas make me wonder if I’ve just proven that I don’t know the first thing about solar electricity.

Over time, I’ve gotten comfortable with my limited understanding of what is actually happening with the system. All I needed to know was that no electricity could be generated at night, less electricity could be generated in the long dark winter, and if I tried to run an electric coffeemaker, everything
would shut down (the system couldn’t supply the 1,200 watts of electricity needed to heat up the water). All of a sudden, I had to pay attention to what I was plugging in and for how long, and I also had to make sure everything with the solar electric system stayed in good condition.
Nothing
could ever go wrong with the magical panels, battery, inverter, or meter—nothing ever!—or I’d have to live with the consequences of getting dressed in the dark: one black sock and one white, which would seem to beam like a spotlight when I crossed my legs in a meeting.

Lightning struck again—blue-white light spun RooDee around in a tight circle, and then she began pacing from one end of the mattress to the other.

“Shit!” I shouted over the roar of wind in the eaves.

I stared at my dog for a minute, trying to decide what to do, and then suddenly shoved the blankets off and huffed down the ladder. A minute later, wearing my rain gear and a headlamp, I shimmied back up the ladder to help RooDee down to the living room, where she immediately started panting and shaking.

“Stay put,” I offered (like she had any choice), and then I stepped into the storm and closed the door behind me. The backyard was a lake, pooled up from my house to the foundation of Rita’s house. I stuck my feet in my boots and launched myself off the porch into the rain, running as fast as I could to Hugh and Annie’s garage for a wrench.

Years ago, I met a guy who had been electrocuted in his house while talking on the phone. He had been talking with his brother when lightning struck the house and traveled through the wiring, including the phone line, directly into his left ear. The jolt melted his ear and the phone receiver, and blew him backward across his kitchen. He tore the phone off the wall when he got tossed, landing on his back in his living room. The electric current entered his head and followed the lines of his vasculature, from his cranial fluid down his spinal cord, along veins, arteries, and capillaries to terminate at his left foot, where it melted the heel off his shoe. He woke up three days later in the hospital with third-degree burns and an electrical problem with his heart—a problem similar enough to mine that he also had an implanted defibrillator, which then gave us a chance to bond in the waiting room at the doctor’s office.

Somewhere in the mix of discovering we both had defibrillators, he told me about his accident and turned his head so I could see his ear was missing. “Wow, I hadn’t even noticed that,” I lied. And then he shyly let me know that my shirt was on inside out.

I was thinking about that guy as I ran from my house to the garage, wondering if all the fillings in my head, the buttons on my raincoat, or the eyelets on my boots were acting like small lightning rods. I grabbed a wrench out of the garage and headed back to the little house to reconnect the grounding wire.

When I got back, another bolt of lightning hit; this time it
was closer and turned the low clouds a strange blue-white. I stretched the cable from the grounding rod near the fence back over to the house. All the while, the hood of my jacket kept getting caught up in the wind, twisting into the headlamp so I was in the dark. I kneeled next to the house and ripped the hood back, letting the rain soak my head, pelting my scalp like sand thrown through a box fan.

Ten minutes went by as I tried to unscrew the wire nut that pigtailed out of my house. It was a stubby little green wire, maybe two inches long, that terminated in a copper fitting and a nut; “stylishly hidden,” I had once boasted as I showed off the way the connection was tucked behind the wheel well and under the house.

“What a complete pain in the ass,” I shouted in frustration.

The wrench kept getting jammed up against the trailer, and my wrists suddenly seemed to bend at all the wrong angles. Meanwhile, the rain had changed direction, causing me to shut my eyes and bow my head farther into my chest, shoving my shoulders up to my ears for protection. It was a praying posture, fitting for the situation.

My fingers were working blind: finding the nut with the left hand, twisting the wrench with the right. Scraping the knuckles on the siding, losing the nut, finding the nut . . . and so on. At one point, I heard myself making tiny mewing sounds, audible over the storm, and then there was a roaring electrical growl just before a massive
kaboom!

“Ack!” I yelled.

It wasn’t lightning. The transformer posted on the telephone pole in front of Rita’s house had just exploded like a bomb blast. I spun out of my kneeling position and landed on my butt, right hand still clutching the wrench, left hand landing in the garden mud.

“Ack!” I yelled again, dazed, and then I started to laugh. I realized I hadn’t been seeing lightning at all; it had been transformers blowing up all over town, wires crackling and shorting out as they were blown by the storm into tree branches.

I noticed that my house was likely the only house lit up in the neighborhood, the only surviving source of electricity in a multiblock radius. I lay faceup in the yard, letting the rain continue to drench me. It smelled suddenly sweet, like rain and mud and no worries.

“Oh my God,” I said to my dog, snickering as I walked in the house a few minutes later. “That was epic! Ridiculous. Let me tell ya what just happened.”

I like that my day-to-day invites a bit of monkey business with nature. Sometimes it’s a big deal like a rainstorm, and other times it’s something random like the day a squirrel launched itself off the fence practically into my arms (my theory is that it thought I was a short tree). Perplexed and a little frightened, I ran across the yard and locked myself in Rita’s house; maybe I didn’t want to be a friend to the woodland creatures (my childhood dream) after all. Another time, I followed
a line of ants swarming the edge of the sidewalk—an ant superhighway that went on for two blocks and ended with a cluster of ants carrying a Cheeto on their backs. It was surreal, and I took a picture of it to prove it happened.

Most of my interactions with nature are accidental collisions, like when I have to race from my house to Rita’s tap early in the morning to fill my water jug. I usually dash out wearing nothing but my underwear and a raincoat, grumbling at myself for failing to install a crazy little thing called “indoor plumbing”; I grouse and whine, and notice it really
is
raining hard enough to sting and that the grass has gotten so saturated it feels like a sponge cake. I might see that my new raincoat is perfect except for the fact that it doesn’t cover and the hood flops in my face, or I might notice that it’s not nearly as cold as it was yesterday, that spring has arrived, which makes me skip back to the little house.

I don’t remember noticing the subtle shift toward spring when I lived in my big house; maybe because I was so preoccupied with other things, or maybe it was simple proximity. Spring now launches itself like a space shuttle mission inches from my head, and so graphically I can practically hear the “Three-two-one, GO, GO, GO!” as the sun peeks over the garage.

Sometimes I worry that I’ll slide back into the mindless rotisserie of work and projects that guided me in my old house; I’ll fixate on one pimple in my life or get so accustomed to the way things work in the backyard—like seeing the rain grow
into a lake in front of my house (as it always does in winter), that I’ll grow numb to the way nature can leave me awestruck. I worry that I’ll fall asleep at the switch, only to wake up years later and find that I can’t remember what I did last week or the month before that, nor do I recognize the old lady staring back at me in the mirror.