Once, when Dan and I were younger, we built a house in Truro.
This wasn’t just any house. Through various fortunes and misfortunes, we had come into a little bit of money, and we decided to build a vacation home on Cape Cod. Our dream was to be on the ocean. We narrowed our search for a suitable piece of land to the towns of Truro and Wellfleet. It didn’t take too much looking to discover that most of the land on the market was either priced well beyond our means or was unappealing in one way or another.
But there was this one lot. Located in a subdivision high on a bluff overlooking Cape Cod Bay, this one oceanfront lot had not sold rapidly as had the other oceanfront lots in the subdivision. The problem was the hill. It was bad enough that the lots were high on a bluff – 110 stairs down to the beach, 110 stairs back up again, every time. But this lot also had a hill on top the bluff, which blocked the ocean view from the natural building site on the lot. Who wanted that? The price was discounted accordingly.
We studied the lot and studied the lot, and Dan thought he could see how to build the house into the hill on top of the bluff. We bought the land.
We designed the house ourselves. We were young enough that the days still lasted a long time, and we could fit a lot of activity into them. Into the nights we drew working drawings on drawing boards on top of our desks. Dan marked up a set of construction specifications – red pencil everywhere – and I typed them on my Osborne computer.
We grew the house and our son Adam at the same time. I have photos of myself silhouetted first against the framing, then against the openings where windows and doors would go, and finally against the installed doors, increasingly pregnant as the house went up.
Of course the construction was late. Fortunately, so was Adam. Expecting tenants the next day, we moved the furniture in on my due date. The contractor was still laying the hardwood floors in the living room, still building the front porch stairs. My father, who helped us move, advised that we find good motel accommodations for the tenants. Dan and I set things up all night long, and the next day, our arriving tenants agreed to come back later in the afternoon as we finished work.
I never considered the danger of going into labor at any moment. (By gosh, this WAS labor!) I naturally assumed, this being a first pregnancy, that I would have hours and hours of labor in which we could safely get back to Boston, if labor were to start while we were on the Cape. Two weeks later, Adam made his appearance after only two and a half hours of labor. As nearly as I can tell, if he’d decided to get finished at the same time as the house that he grew with, he would have been born somewhere on the Southeast Expressway.
What a feat of design! The driveway climbed the back side of the hill to an entryway that appeared at ground level, but was actually on the landing between the main living level and the master bedroom level. Enter the house, and from the landing you looked down into the cathedral-ceilinged living room, down into the rounded window corner and through the windows, and down into the blue ocean over a hundred feet below.
A deck spread out along the living room, where we could watch the sun set over Provincetown.
On the lowest level were three more bedrooms that walked out onto a patio along the base of the hill. The house was beautiful. The site was stunning.
We should have been happy – but we weren’t. There were problems. The subdivision had annoying covenants. For example, you couldn’t hang your wet towels over the deck railing to dry; it was considered unsightly. To the east side of the house, ugly houses in the subdivision popped up from the moors like giant prairie dogs frozen in their holes. There was no escaping looking at them.
Also, it was perennially windy on top of the bluff; the wind whipped sand up the side of the bluff with such force that it penetrated our closed windows and storm windows and piled up in the corners of the windows inside the house. One night we had guests and cooked chicken on the grill on the deck, keeping the grill almost vertical against the wind to keep it from blowing away. “Gale-force chicken.”
Worst of all, the beach access path and stairs for the entire subdivision went along the side of our property. Not just our neighbors but all kinds of strangers made use of this access – at all hours of the day and night and often quite loudly.
We decided that we could do better.
Real estate values on the Cape had been going up considerably, and we could more than double our investment by selling the house. We would then have money to buy something else someplace else and do something better. Somehow, the decision was made. Maybe it had something to do with the time that teenagers from heaven-knows-where drove their vehicles loudly around and around the house of our neighbor on the other side of the walkway at three in the morning. It was kind of scary. We weren’t comfortable.
The house sold quickly.
But meanwhile, the value of everything else had gone up as well. We had thought we’d find some other creative opportunity to build value, but we couldn’t. We lost a bidding war well over the asking price for a lot surrounded by Cape Cod National Seashore, where only a small house could be built on the existing footprint of a ruined cabin. We searched in Nantucket, where lots with only distant ocean views at best sold for more money than seemed possible. Nothing we found could replace what we had given up.
We grieved.
We blamed each other.
We had never imagined that the loss of the house in Truro would hurt us so much.
After four years, Truro still hurt deeply. The house on Block Island was a gift that grew from the pain of that loss. Because of that pain we were willing to overextend ourselves on the land on Block Island, paying for the land alone an amount that had been our budget for the whole project, house and land both. We needed to do it to become whole again.
