The Big Tiny: A Built-It-Myself Memoir (6 page)

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.

I launched into a story about a trip that Doug and I had taken to Guatemala the year before and the impact it had on me; how I’d gotten to see how most of the world really lives: without running water or a decent toilet. I explained that I felt like a cliché in Guatemala, like a typical wealthy American tourist speaking English to the locals and pantomiming when that failed, wandering around with a fanny pack and a floppy hat, feeling nervous about getting dysentery or being robbed. “The people there,” I explained, “are constantly crapping their pants with preventable diseases.”

I went to Guatemala to help build a school but left wondering what “help” would really look like. Many of them lived without electricity or access to medical care. They lived with
the memory of a civil war; a war that included babies being ripped out of their mothers’ arms and thrown into the forests like cordwood, as a priest had described one day. Even the little town where we were working, a town smaller than the ten square blocks that made up my neighborhood, was under curfew with barricades in the street and
policía
patrolling at night. The people I worked with and met were great; they barely had enough food to eat but always offered to share what they had; and even though I hadn’t ever experienced a war and poverty, or what it felt like to watch a child die from diarrhea, they never for a minute treated me like a spoiled white lady. I hadn’t prepared myself for how humbled I’d feel, or how hard it would be to find my footing when witnessing a cycle of poverty that seemed to defy any sort of help.

Doug chimed in and, together, we positively gushed about Guatemala—how spider monkeys walk like old men with artificial hips and bowed legs; how there are more butterflies and banana trees than coffee beans, and how the kids play soccer like the pros. I explained that the trip had challenged my interest in continuing to pump money into my house, paying four-hundred dollars for wood trim along the ceiling in the living room because, according to my logic, “it would really pull the room together.”

It was a compelling explanation for wanting to give up my big house and build a tiny house. And it was completely true, but so was the unstated fact that I was a bit lost with my heart.
I didn’t know what to do with the way my heart problems had become so predominant in my life—the way I felt my mortality just as clearly as I felt my vitality. It’s hard to explain why you love the morning sunlight because it proves you too are a miracle for waking up.

It’s not exactly the story you offer to a stranger.

Doug asked me about Guatemala as we were driving home; it was the first time I’d talked about the trip this way, and he was curious. “Well,” I explained, “there was no way that he would believe that story about the squirrel costume.”

Later that night, I tried to describe Jay’s house to Doug’s wife, Alecia. I talked about the cedar siding and the woodstove, and the way you could pop into the sleeping loft through a little cubbyhole near the kitchen. I explained how the space felt small but not claustrophobic, simple but not crude, and functional in that everything had a purpose and a place. I talked and talked, describing this detail and that feature, but ultimately, Jay’s house was more than all those things. It was bigger.

The house reminded me of the road trip I had taken when I was in my twenties: I wanted to leave the Midwest permanently but couldn’t just yet, so I recruited some friends to drive with me to Colorado for a weekend in the mountains. We left Kansas City after dinner and drove all night across the Great Plains with nothing but the moon and the idea that if we kept switching channels, we might find something better on the radio.

We drove until we finally hit Boulder, where we stopped at a Get N Go gas station with a sign that emphasized GO, but suddenly all we wanted was to stay, because as soon as we opened our car doors, as we stepped out into the predawn cold and let the mountain air hit us, the pine tree pitch settled into our arms and we realized . . . we had arrived. We could finally stop all our rushing and let the smell of the forest—now mere inches from our fingertips and still hidden in the early-morning shadows off the highway—settle into our lungs. Everyone was quiet, happy, suspended in the moment, with one foot still resting in the car and a hand still holding the door latch.

Jay’s house was like that.

Doug and I spent the next couple of days planning, talking about the trailer configuration and walls, yammering through dinner and while we were out walking the farm, as he showed me the place where he sometimes found morel mushrooms and the spot where his goats kept chewing through the fence. We tried to pin down how long it would take to build a house similar to Jay’s, and I estimated two or three weeks—the same amount of time it had previously taken me to build a short ramp (a single piece of wood) for a friend’s cat to enter and exit through the cat door. Doug figured it would take longer, but I was so excited to see the final product that I completely ignored his more realistic calculations.

On the plane ride home, I doodled little floor plans,
dreaming about where I’d sleep and cook, and how I’d build the floors and walls. I imagined how the door would open and I would walk into a place that felt like home, whatever that meant, however that played out.

I imagined that my house would be modeled after Jay’s but different: It would be roughly the same size, set on a trailer, then I’d build an open front porch where you could lounge like you were having a tailgate party, and a kitchen and living room that would open up through skylight windows, like walking into an empty barn with light pouring in through the cupolas. Simple. Kind. And as E. B. White said in
Charlotte’s Web
, “like nothing bad could ever happen again.”