Republican Party Reptile(59)
Once you’ve chosen a town, the next step is to choose a house. There is a general rule about houses in New England: the worse the architecture, the more authentically Colonial the house. If a house has a grand appearance, handsome layout, and large airy rooms, it’s Victorian junk. But if you can’t, at first glance, tell it from a mobile home, it was built before 1700. Of course, it isn’t fair to say that. Very few mobile homes have five-foot ceilings, basements full of water, or sill rot. Anyway, when checking for authenticity, make sure the rooms are the size of bath mats and that the electrical system looks horrid. Our colonial forebears seem to have been notably poor electricians.
One thing you will not have to worry about is your view. Every authentic Colonial house in New England has a splendid view. Just ask the real-estate agent. “View?” said mine. “Of course there’s a view! Climb out this window onto the porch roof, Mr. O’Rourke, and shinny up that chimney—absolutely breathtaking.”
Actually buying the house will be no different from buying a house anywhere else, except for the title search. New England deed records go back 350 years, and in every one of those years somebody made a mistake. This results in unusual deeds. One property I looked at had fifteen acres. Two acres were in front of the house and the remaining land ran in a three-inch-wide strip fifty-five miles north to Lake Winnipesaukee. Be prepared to pay a large legal fee. “You know,” said the local lawyer doing my title search, “that land originally belonged to the Indians. I had to go looking all over for them. I looked in Aspen, Vail, and Sun Valley. They weren’t there, so . . .”
And even after you’ve cleared the title and paid for the house, it won’t be called yours. My house is “the Yateman place.” There hasn’t been a Yateman in Jaffrey for fifty years. And I don’t think a Yateman ever owned my house anyway. “The Yateman place” is just a device to rag newcomers. Though I have been assured that my house will eventually be called “the O’Rourke place.”
“Everybody’ll call it that,” said a neighbor, “just as soon as you die there.”
Another thing, no matter how stately the home or how much land or how many outbuildings, the only thing the natives will ever say about it is, “You know that place sold for eight thousand in 1976.”
It will take time for you to get used to these country ways, not to mention getting used to the country itself. The climate, for instance—we have two seasons in New England, winter and getting-ready-for-winter. I was used to banging on my apartment building’s pipes when I wanted more heat in the middle of the night. I’ve found this doesn’t work with my own wood furnace. Nor are municipal services exactly like the city’s. I was putting trash out at the end of my driveway for three months before I noticed . . . well, I noticed three months’ worth of trash out at the end of my driveway.
Just running simple errands is a problem for transplanted New Yorkers. We are brusque, fast-moving people. But there’s an unwritten law in New England: Anytime you go anywhere to conduct any type of business, first you have to have a little talk.
When you go to the butcher shop, you’re not going there to buy meat. It’s a social call. Even if you’ve never seen the butcher before, you say, “How’s it going?” and “Come on by sometime” and “Give my regards to your wife if you’re married.”
He’ll say, “Black flies bad up at your place this year?”
You’ll say, “Getting any wood in?”
And so on. Anything to do with pot roast is strictly incidental, and the subject cannot be raised politely for at least thirty minutes.
This frightens me. I know people do it to be friendly. I try to talk for hours with everyone I see. But I’m scared that if I call the fire department and yell “Help! My house is on fire!” I’ll get someone on the other end of the line saying, “Ah-yep, fellow down at Antrim had his house on fire too. Must have been just about this time, 1981. Black flies bad up at your place this year?”
The local newspapers are a great help in catching the spirit of country life. These publications show that rural New Englanders live in a different world than New Yorkers, possible on a different planet.
I’ve been collecting items from the papers in my area. This headline was printed large on page one of the Monadnock Ledger: “Spaghetti Supper Set for Friday.” It’s the sort of headline we could do with more of in the New York Post. “Motorist Damages Yard in Hit and Run Accident”—that appeared on the front page of the Peterborough Transcript. And here, from the Keene Sentinel, is my personal favorite: “Maine Legislature Goes Home.”