Cottage for Sale, Must Be Moved (7 page)

To begin a new venture from a position of financial strength makes sound business sense. If you are going to take the plunge, dive at high tide. It is counsel I have given others. The tide was low when I ventured out. You could smell it, even. There was the risk of plunging headfirst into mud. There was the chance that high tide would arrive in time to carry me in. You can dive, I realized then, when you know the water is high, or you can dive believing that the water will rise. If someone asked me now, I’d say wait for high tide if you can, but if you can’t, just make sure you have the deepest sort of faith in what you are about to do. The tide looks to be on the low side now. I don’t have three thousand dollars to spend on a cottage I may not be able to use. Or another thousand dollars for engineering plans for an addition that might never be built. On the other hand, the question of how far I am from the bog will have impact on any project I can contemplate, now or in the future. Clearly there is a corresponding benefit for that financial risk. And the cottage—well, if I don’t have faith in the project, who will have it for me? Besides, I think to myself, as I push open the blue door of the Health Department, if I can’t use my cottage, I can always run another ad in the
Pennysaver.
*

*
AT THE HEALTH DEPARTMENT COUNTER
, a white-haired man helps me. He locates the plan of my septic system. If I didn’t already have a copy of the card in my packet of plans, I’d be surprised to learn this official document is a three-by-five index card, with the location of my septic system sketched in soft dark pencil on the back. On the front, the number of bathrooms and bedrooms is indicated, along with some basic information about the system itself. On my card, it says I have three bedrooms. In fact, I have just one, but when we updated the septic, it was certified for three bedrooms. As always, I was thinking of adding on. I explain this to the man, who has introduced himself as Ed Barry. I show him the plans; he sees the single bedroom. “Well, if these plans are correct, and you are telling me the truth—” He pauses to get a good look at me, and I feel as though I have become Ralph Crossen’s “young lady.”

“And I am telling you the truth.”

“Well, then I don’t see a problem. You have a Title V system for three bedrooms. So you can add two.”

I restrain myself so he does not realize how thrilled I am at this news. I am Title V–compliant!

Ever since the Massachusetts legislature passed what is known as the Title V Septic Systems Regulations, the average Health Department official has had tremendous power in the life of the average citizen. Or more specifically, the average citizen who is not connected to a municipal sewer system. That includes almost every homeowner on Cape Cod. If you want to sell your house, it has to be Title V–compliant before the sale will go through. If you want to add on, Title V compliance kicks in before any building plans will be approved. If you are doing nothing except filling up your old septic system (or worse, old cesspool) with waste, you are okay—unless you have it pumped more than four times in a year. Time to upgrade, says the town, which tracks the destination of every pumping truck.

Title V is a good thing for the environment, another regulation I wholeheartedly support in theory. Especially on the Cape, where the water table is high and the land is low, we need to be mindful of where we plant our waste. The problem with Title V is that it costs a lot of money to comply. It isn’t uncommon to spend five or ten thousand dollars for a simple system. Some people can’t afford compliance. I had a neighbor several years ago who lost her home over a costly septic problem. She couldn’t afford the very expensive system required by her low-lying property, and she couldn’t sell her house without it. In a situation like that, the regulation seems intrusive, blatantly unfair. Yet without some regulation, we place our environment, and even our own health, at risk. For the second time today, I find myself contemplating the intersection of what we want and what is good for the land we borrow.

Mr. Barry warms to the idea that I hope to move a cottage, now that I am established as a truth-teller with two bedrooms on the way. He asks me where the cottage is now, how we’ll move it. While we speak, Tom McKean steps out of a back office. Tom and I play in the same community band, a wind and percussion ensemble of fifty pieces, give or take, in any given year. We sit at opposite ends of the group: He plays tuba and I play flute, and we don’t have much more than a nodding acquaintance. But we do nod and smile across the horns and clarinets that sit between us. From his baby face and clear blue eyes—and the two young children I know he has at home—I’d say that Tom is in his mid- to late thirties. That makes him one of the younger members of our musical ensemble, where I would place the average age somewhere around sixty-two.

Behind the counter, Tom hangs back, almost loitering; his curiosity transparent. He nods my way, but doesn’t interrupt. I notice his blue suit, his serious demeanor, the way he is listening in without joining the conversation, the way he doesn’t even act surprised to see me. I decide Tom is probably the boss of the Health Department. And I didn’t even know I had friends in high places.*

*
JANUARY FLIES BY.
I’m finishing up my big contract, writing reports and editing PowerPoint presentations. I haven’t worked for big business—ever—and the volume of their documentary requirements overwhelms me. But their timing has been perfect. I’ve been chained to my computer through November and December—months when my bookstore clients want me to leave them alone to sell books. Now this project is drawing to a close, and I’ll need to line up some other work—especially if I want to move this house.

I visit a longtime client in the middle of the month; we plan a series of management training classes. Back at my hotel, I hear from another client who is concluding a lease agreement on a new space in San Francisco. Can I fly there—in three days? Before I leave, I hear from another client, a bookseller in Maine, with whom I’ve worked for many years. He’s opening a second store in the fall. We’ve already worked through sales projections, budgets, lease negotiations; now he is ready to think about the space. I’m delighted to help, looking forward to the freedom to work in three dimensions instead of two. With three projects in the offing, it looks like I’ll have plenty of work for the spring.

While I am in California, Tony is on Cape Cod. He likes the small escapes from the city; he loves Egypt. Sometimes Anna joins Tony on a Cape weekend, but mostly he comes alone. He believes that Egypt needs some “guy quality time,” and it is his mission to provide it. I’m not sure what happens when I am away, but I know that movies are watched and lots of chips and salsa are consumed. And when I come home, Egypt is nonchalant about my arrival, the best sign of all that he is well cared for and happy in my absence. It is a perfect arrangement. Tony juggles a number of jobs while he is working on his dissertation. He teaches part-time, is coauthoring a book with one of his professors, works as a statistician at a sociology think tank, and also works for me. Sometimes his tasks are mundane—keeping my accounting records up-to-date—and sometimes they are more in keeping with his expertise—decoding the results of an employee survey for a client of mine.

This week when he visits, I have asked him to take some photographs for me. He is an excellent photographer, and I can’t think of anyone better to take some photos of the cottages being moved—since I can’t be there myself. While I am in San Francisco, the cottages will be lifted off their foundations and moved to another section of the property. Eastward wants to get moving on their project, and they have come to realize that they will not be able to sell and relocate those little cottages by the end of this month. They have found a place to put them. The colony will stay together, each cottage set on concrete blocks until an owner claims it, takes it to a new and permanent home.

Tony enjoys this assignment, though he tells me when we speak that evening that it was a cold, cold day. You can almost see that in the photographs; the blue in the sky is pale and blunt, clear in a way that speaks of temperatures in the single digits.

“It was pretty cool,” Tony says, now speaking of the cottages rather than the weather. “I saw them move two of the cottages, but they didn’t get to yours. Yours will probably get moved tomorrow.”

Tony can’t make it tomorrow. He needs to be in Boston for work, so we won’t have pictures of this first relocation of my cottage. I’m a little disappointed, but Tony assures me I will get the general idea. He watched the process twice and it was pretty much the same. He’s right that the general idea is really what we need. I sent him to take the photographs because I am thinking of writing a children’s book based on the cottage story. I’ve talked to my local postmistress, Nancy, who is also an artist, about the possibility of illustrating it. “Take lots of pictures,” she said, and so we will. For Nancy’s purposes, the photographs of any cottage being lifted off its foundation will do. But for sheer documentary purposes, for the thrill of seeing what I missed while I was in California, I wish we had a shot of my very cottage in midair.

“Hayden’s guys sawed through the screen porches first thing. So they just fell to the ground as the cottages went up in the air. It was something,” Tony says. The cottages were already loosened from their foundations when Tony arrived, so he didn’t witness that part of the process. But he saw the liftoffs and he saw the crashing porches, and he saw the cottages being carried on a flatbed truck to their new location. “And those guys—they really get right under the house. Man. There were two or three guys working underneath one cottage while they were moving it from the flatbed to the concrete blocks, and something slipped. They got out from under there so fast! One of them barely made it. And I was shooting the whole time. I was afraid what I might get on film. But those guys know how to move!”

Of course I am concerned for the house-movers, but this story of a house almost missing its landing worries me for the cottage as well. “Oh, they righted it just in time,” Tony says. “And after that, they decided to use the crane to lift the cottages off the truck. Mr. Hayden said they had the crane; they might as well use it. Even though it was really big for the job. I guess it was the only crane they could get today.”

“You talked to Mr. Hayden?” Somehow this surprises me, even though I’d told Tony he should get permission from him to take pictures. It wasn’t until Tom Howes made a call on my behalf that the house-mover returned any of my five—count ’em—phone calls. On that return call, he identified himself as Mr. Hayden, and so our uneven relationship of names and titles began. He was Mr. Hayden to me. I was Kate. Once, I think, he even called me Katie.

Mr. Hayden didn’t exactly apologize for taking so long to return my call. “I get calls from a lot of kooks who aren’t serious about moving houses. They just want to waste my time.” His voice matched exactly the gravelly message I’d heard so many times. I recognized it immediately, even at 7:30 in the morning, a time when I usually refuse to answer the phone. But I’d been rising early, waiting for his callback for many days in a row. I was as ready for him as I could be.

I assured him, as I had Tom Howes, that I was serious, but that I needed him to see my location, to make sure it was possible to move the house. I told him about the driveway access, the big spruce trees, the steep hill, the bog. Could he come take a look?

A weather-beaten man of few words, Mr. Hayden could just as easily be spearing whales as moving houses. He has a rough, reddish-blonde beard on its way to gray, and his matching hair has been styled by the time he spends outdoors. He talks in spurts and you have to listen fast to hear what he says. He is not fond of repeating himself. We walk the property; I show him where I want the cottage. I fill the space with details he may or may not want to hear. But I don’t know how to talk to him, or what he needs to know. He wrinkles his brow, he squints, he nods occasionally, but he says next to nothing.

“Need a crane,” he finally says. “Can’t do this mechanically, too steep. Have to get Baxter over here.”

“Baxter?”

“He owns the crane. Get him to figure out how to do this. If he says it can be done, it can be done.” Mr. Hayden almost smiles as he makes this pronouncement. Meanwhile, I am wondering, who is the missing subject of his sentences? Me? I need a crane? I need to get Baxter over here? Is he telling me to have Baxter figure it out, or is he telling me he’ll have Baxter figure it out?

“But what do you think?” I ask him.

“Need a big crane. I’ll call Baxter. You around?”

“Early next week?” I suggest. I am trying to get the hang of speaking to him in his own language.

“Be in touch,” he says, as he heads for his car.

“Thanks for coming out,” I say to the distance between us, wondering whether it is he or I who will be in touch.*

* “
THAT’S THE CRANE
that will lift my cottage,” I say, when Tony shows me the pictures. It is huge and red, and it says
BAXTER
in big block letters on the boom. Mr. Hayden brought Mr. Baxter over to see my site just before I left for my most recent San Francisco trip. John Baxter, who introduced himself with his first name, was friendly and chatty. In his presence, Mr. Hayden seemed a little more approachable. We paced out the landing site and John made calculations. He had a blue binder with him, full of charts and numbers. Distances, heights, ratios. Picking up a house with a crane—and landing it successfully on a new foundation—requires a lot of math.

I showed them where the cottage would sit and asked about the two big spruce trees between my house and my neighbor’s driveway. Erika’s father had managed to get Darcy from Conservation to make a site visit the week before. “What a nice spot,” she’d said when she got out of her truck. “Not too many places like this left on Cape Cod.” Her next remark was the one that worried me: “Those are gorgeous spruce. You won’t have to lose those, will you?”

They are beautiful trees, as old as the house, maybe older, at least fifty years. They are planted below the house, near the base of the hillside that leads down to the bog. At their widest point, the trees are about eighteen feet apart (we measured this). From the house, you see into the treetops, or tree-middles to be more precise, and often you can spot a cardinal, poised on the edge of a branch as if he were posing for a Christmas card, red against evergreen. When it snows, I feel like calling Hallmark.