April 2007

33 Moves

by Lindsay Thompson

In New York, a citizen is likely to keep on the move, shopping for the perfect arrangement of rooms and vistas, changing his habitation according to fortune, whim, and need.
— E.B. White, “Goodbye to Forty-Eighth Street” (1957)

The New York Times Style section keeps me up on things people are obsessing about in the better circles of big cities, things I’d have never worried about otherwise.

They ran a piece about how some people, a number of them celebrities, feel the need to revisit old family homes. Apparently Goldie Hawn turns up on the doorstep of her childhood manse with some regularity.

If I wanted to visit “home,” I wouldn’t know where to begin.

My first nine moves were my parents’ doing, across five towns as my dad moved up the career ladder. Then I was an academic nomad for a decade. That period accounts for the next 13 moves. In the 1980s in Portland, three classmates and I got a Multnomah bungalow for $90 each a month. It had gone unsold for a long time. The yard was a mess. I set about restoring it. It looked great by midsummer. The house promptly sold. The new owner offered to let us continue living upstairs as long as we paid the sharply upped rent (to cover her mortgage) and became vegans. I moved on. Several times.

I managed six years in a cave-like Vancouver apartment done up in 1970s brown colors, with acres of wall space for bookcases. I had a lot of those back then.

In 1991, I moved to Kelso. Sixty-two trains a day ran across the street from me. It was Eraserhead’s pad, only above ground.

I moved to Seattle in 1993. I landed an apartment in a century-old shotgun house a dentist ran as a tax loss. There was a spectacular view across Lake Union, from St. Mark’s Cathedral to Queen Anne High School. I could seat 12 for dinner. The garden — again — was a right mess. Three years later, just as the revived yard was reaching maturity, the dentist put the house up. I’d another one sold out from under me. The new owner loved the garden. She offered to let me stay on as long as I paid the sharply upped rent. She expressed no views on veganism. (Later, she let the yard go back to ruin, and last fall the house burned down.)

By then, however, I had fallen in love. The ex (to jump ahead a bit) persuaded me the sale was a sign from the real estate gods to buy a house together. We did: a new, shiny townhouse on the street where they filmed the grunge-era Seattle comedy Singles. The real residents of that apartment building turned out way weirder than their movie counterparts, but I got to start a garden from scratch. It was filling in nicely our fourth summer there, when the ex’s e-mail came inviting me to move on — and out.

The new owner loved the garden. He didn’t invite me to stay on under any circumstances. I didn’t learn his thoughts on meat consumption, either.

A client happened along who’d bought a big, subdivided, Tudor pile on North Capitol Hill. I got a smart bachelor flat. After a year or so, I made my shortest move — about 15 feet down the hall from 201 to 202. It was a beauty: 18-foot ceilings, a big kitchen, huge fireplace and windows, a loft bedroom. There was a lawn service, so no garden to restore. I wouldn’t let them sell this one out from under me, I thought. I devoted myself to making my flat worthy of Architectural Digest, and when my client sold the building, mine was the display unit for a stream of condo developers. In due course, I got three pounds of paper offering to sell me my 910 square feet for $335,000. I liked it, but not that much. They sold it to someone else for $480,000.

Farewell, Capitol Hill: I decamped to West Seattle. Great neighbors, wonderful water view, a garden service, and no redecorating. It was a nice set of digs, albeit with a unique set of eccentricities attending occupancy. After two years there, and 13 in Seattle, I began to ponder life without an hour commute each day, without endless civic debates about the provision of basic services and infrastructure, of life generally in a city that has gotten to taking itself way too seriously. Seattle granted me my 15 minutes of fame. I figured I’d run through it when a one-time neighbor and sometime friend sent me an invitation to a fundraiser and put someone else’s name in the salutation.

Long ago, on a visit, I filed Port Angeles away in mind as an interesting potential home. Talking over my life — an imploding mess, I felt — with a friend there, he said, “C’mon up. It’ll do you good.” So I did. The movers told me my life — home and office — weighed 6,480 pounds. Crossing the Hood Canal Bridge, I picked up a Canadian station on the car radio. The program reminded me of when I was in law school. One Saturday afternoon, Garrison Keillor, the host of radio’s A Prairie Home Companion, read birthday greetings from my North Carolina family on the air. “That young man,” Keillor added, “has gone about as far from home … as he can get.”

It seems I have. 

Lindsay Thompson practices in Port Angeles and can be reached at barnewseditor@wsba.org.