Part 8: To homeless or not to homeless...
Welcome back again, it's been a minute. So, here it is more of the story about me and the mountain.
To catch up, here's part 7: ""The toilette paper-apocalypse and the lung-butter that comes with it."" And if you need more than that, here is the start of all this, Part 1: "How I wound up on this mountain..."
If you are current, below is Part 8 of this odyssey, my journey to get away from people because most of them suck.
I mentioned in the last post that one of the things that helped us build up here in this remote location was that I landed a GIS job working on "cadastral mapping", now before you say "Jesus dude, hike you glasses up a little further you fucking nerd!", let me explain... Okay, never mind that's fair. Here's the TLDR on what that means.
Cadastral mapping is the detailed recording, defining, and mapping of property boundaries, land ownership, and parcel dimensions. And it is as fucking bad and as boring as it sounds. And it is as thankless and a "bullshitty" as one might believe.
However, I was grateful for the opportunity and the knowledge, and also some of the people were okay. The pay was "meh", I mean like really "meh". That being said, without that job we never would have been able to build our house up here above the clouds. Also, we would have never been able to qualify for the construction loan. So it was a god send, as torturous as it was.
Lets go back a second. I have forgotten a few things, we will get back to this cadastral mapping crap in a minute. But there were more important things happening at that time.
We had upgraded the corner house as much as we could. We had rebuilt the fence, we put a new roof on the garage, trimmed the trees way back away from the house. We put in a brick fire pit and we completely redid the yard. We even replaced the front door, repainted the house and cleared all the pipes. She was ready to sell, and not a moment too soon. We needed out.
We put her up for sale in September of 2020, October is when everything closed, not even twenty days later.
During that super quick sale, we were frantically looking for a place to stay, like I said, the market got weird, like rich people weird. Sacrificing goats in the bohemian grove kind of weird.
We had no idea it would be so hard to find a place. There was a point when we thought we might be living in a storage unit for a while. Every time a home would go up for rent, at least one that accepted dogs, it was rented in 24 hours. Not a house, not an apartment, not a trailer, not a garage or a shack was available. Camp Trailers, R.V.s, and most likely tents were also sold out, like "wait list of over a year sold out".
Panic set in around the time we got our first offer on the house, that was the point of no return. We took the offer and then ran around screaming like decapitated chickens with dysentery. We had no place to live once the house was sold. All of our stuff was in storage and we were living on enough to fit in a very small moving truck. Still had no where to put it.
Time and time again a listing would go up and we would make the call, grab the keys and go, hoping that we could get into a place. Each time we would arrive and there would be 10 to 20 people milling around the front lawn waiting to be let in like stray zombies looking for brains. Me and wife would unload and head in with them. We would all stink-eye each other as we shuffled and grunt about how much it sucked.
We would all make offers and try to sell the landlord on why we were "best". And each time, we didn't get into a place. Someone else always had a better sales pitch.
Then, it happened. We showed up at a run down place in an older neighborhood. There were fifteen people waiting to be let in. There were heavy sighs from inside the car, but we got out and went in just in case. It was that "just in case" that got us a place to rent while we built.
While talking with the land lord I gathered that this was the last group of people he was bringing through almost 100 people had already looked at it and they had almost all handed in applications. After us, he was heading back home, which was a several hour drive, to make a decision.
I saw the opportunity, and I played the waiting game. I gave him my application, I got a card, and I faded into the crowd of desperate people and disappeared letting all the other applicants mob him. Two days later, when I knew he'd be home, I called and inquired about our application. I was buttery polite and dropped the bomb on him: I would be in the neighborhood where he lived and could give him first, last, and deposit in cash on the spot and he wouldn't even have to drive anywhere. He liked that. I said it could happen tomorrow, and he agreed- we were gawd damned saved.
Homelessness was no longer on the table. As it turns out, we got one of only 5 available houses (that would accept dogs) in our home town of a couple hundred thousand people. It was around that time I started my new job mapping for the county. And it was also around that time, me and the wife started planning the house we wanted to build.
Cheers!
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