6. Before The Rains

Still thinking about the day before, I woke early to a much drier morning. The fog had thinned, the air was warmer, and I sat at the kitchen table drinking coffee and listening to music while, across the street, three enormous white Colorado Mountain Dogs barked at the mailboxes. They had been doing this for days. I was not sure what offense the mailboxes had committed, but the dogs appeared committed to making sure it never happened again.

My plan for the morning was simple: unpack the boxes stacked in the garage. But first, I needed to clean the garage. The garage reminded me of the one from my childhood in Southern California: dark exposed two-by-fours, dusty corners, layers of old spiderwebs, and the vague feeling that something might be living behind whatever you were reaching for. Only this garage had apparently spent decades supporting a thriving mouse and rat population. When we first unloaded the truck, we had noticed the droppings and decided we would deal with them later.

Today was later.

I stood there with my coffee, looking at the shelves and rafters. Droppings covered nearly every surface. Dead vines had grown through openings in the walls and twisted themselves around wires and hanging cords. Spiderwebs connected everything. It looked less like a garage than the ceiling of an abandoned theater.

No, not today.

Perhaps we would unpack one box each instead. Satisfied with this adjustment to the plan, I finished my coffee and walked outside. The property was already heating up. Tall grass, overgrown trees, blackberry brambles spreading across open areas, and rose canes that hooked themselves into my arms and legs whenever I passed the front porch. Above all of it stood an enormous tree near the front of the property, its branches covered in round masses of mistletoe. The whole acre seemed to be growing faster than we could understand it. This, too, felt like too much. So I walked toward the small bathroom and ADU. Surely two little buildings would be manageable.

The freestanding bathroom was an odd structure, roughly eight feet square and inexplicably tall, perhaps fifteen feet, standing alone in the garden like a small chapel. Inside were a toilet, sink, and shower. I turned on the shower. The pressure was good, but the water stayed cold. The sink had water damage around the bottom of the vanity. The toilet was surrounded by a dark yellow-brown mineral crust and, when I flushed it, the water barely rippled. On my way out, I flipped the light switch. Nothing happened.

Hmm.

Across the concrete walkway stood the ADU. It smelled exactly as I remembered: mildew. The room was larger than it appeared from outside, with a French door and two long aluminum-framed windows. Mildew covered the glass, the frames, and portions of the walls. The white wallboard had gone gray with moisture stains. Above us was a loft built from heavily cracked 2x6 beams and plywood, leaving perhaps three feet of headroom, just enough for someone to sleep in a bag if that person had no concerns about spiders, darkness, mildew or had any intentions of sitting up.

On the east wall was a hole that appeared to have been caused by water. Someone had left an old hammer on the window ledge. I picked it up.

This turned out to be consequential.

Almost without thinking, I tapped the wall below the window. The hammer went through. I hit it again. Another hole. Then again. And again. There was something extremely satisfying about this, possibly more satisfying than was appropriate.

I called Erin over. Within several minutes, what had begun as me showing her a soft section of wall had become our project for the day. We found a pry bar, gloves, a couple of masks, and whatever other tools looked vaguely suited to demolition and began pulling at the wallboard.

At first it was fun.

This was the version of ourselves we had imagined when we bought the property. We owned land. We had tools. We were fixing things. Look at us.

Then the wallboard came off in damp chunks. Behind it was moldy insulation. Behind that was plywood. Behind the plywood were insects. At one point I pried away a piece and what I initially believed were termites came pouring out.

Ants? Hundreds of them. Possibly thousands. They ran across the wood, up my hands and along my arms while I tried to brush them off without dropping the pry bar. Erin backed away. I dragged the infested board into the yard. Behind it, the framing around the window was almost completely rotted. Years of leaking had reduced sections of the wood to something closer to compressed mulch.

We kept going for hours. By midday the fog had burned off and the little building had become an oven. Dust stuck to our faces and arms. Fibers from the insulation clung to our clothes. We were sweating through our shirts and aware that we had no idea whether we were removing these materials correctly or just distributing them more evenly across our bodies. Every piece we removed seemed to reveal another material behind it, and every material seemed to be concealing something worse.

At some point we stepped outside and looked at the debris pile. It was not impressive. For an entire day of work, we had managed to make one portion of one small building look considerably worse. Erin was filthy. I was filthy. The ADU remained mostly intact. We looked at each other. “We need people,” one of us said. There was no disagreement. This was useful information. We decided we would find someone to help us finish it. Back at the house, I noticed the tree growing directly outside the dining room window. It blocked most of the view into the backyard, and I decided to take it down. I found a saw and began cutting branches.

By then, however, the temperature had climbed considerably. The back patio made things worse. Someone had built a kind of greenhouse over it: four rusting metal posts connected to a peaked metal frame and covered in rigid clear plastic greenhouse panels. The result was approximately sixteen feet by ten feet of accidental solar oven. It trapped heat and humidity directly outside the kitchen, and morning sun bounced through the plastic with such intensity that sitting beneath it required sunglasses. Three long rusty streaks along the frame suggested that water had been leaking through for years.

The tree I was cutting had grown beneath this structure in a 5x12' area of dirt right up against the house and bordered by the cement patio. It had flourished because the pergola, monolithic and plastic covered as it is, also leaks directly into that area before settling into the foundation at the low end. The entire structure had created its own private tropical climate. After removing several branches, I decided to cut the trunk about two feet above the ground and deal with the stump later. This took considerably longer than anticipated. I sawed and sawed until the tree finally fell, then dragged the entire thing across the yard and deposited it in the first open area I could find.

When I returned to the patio, the difference was immediate. For the first time, light came through the dining room windows. We could see the backyard. The backyard could also see us.

It felt like a win.

Two wins, actually. The ADU had been opened up. The tree was gone. I sat down and took inventory. The garage still needed tackling, the ADU needed to be stripped to the studs, and the outdoor bathroom needed plumbing, electrical work, and possibly a reason to exist. The pergola leaked and trapped heat. The orchard needed attention. The blackberry thickets needed clearing. The mistletoe needed addressing.

The house itself remained largely untouched.

But these things could be handled. One at a time. We would make lists, find people, fix one thing and then the next. There was only one problem I hadn’t accounted for.

The rainy season.

When exactly did that begin? October? September? Next week? I had no idea. Could the ADU be made watertight before then? Could the garage be secured? Could the pergola be repaired? Could any of this be done before months of rain arrived?

I sat on one of the outdoor couches and watched the last of the morning fog disappear. The sun came through with astonishing force. Within minutes, it felt close to one hundred degrees, and it was only two in the afternoon. The children were still asleep, maintaining the schedule they had perfected over the summer. Inside, Erin was back inside working and periodically shouting that the Wi-Fi had dropped her again.

It was clear we were going to need help. A lot of help. Erin had work that could not simply stop while we rebuilt the property, and the children were still finding their feet in a house where most of our belongings had yet to arrive. I had no job waiting for me, which made the work on Sexton Road feel like mine to organize. But even with the whole day available, I was beginning to understand how little one person could accomplish.

For the moment, though, we needed to stop working. We needed to remember that we had moved to California for a reason. We needed to explore. Find the beach. Drive toward the ocean. Eat somewhere new. Pretend, for a few hours, that the property was simply our home and not a rapidly expanding list of assignments.

The garage would still be there tomorrow. So would the ADU, the bathroom, and the pergola. And, unless I had learned absolutely nothing from the previous forty-eight hours, each of them would probably have something new to tell me.