Max Liebermann:
Dutch Village Scene with Hanging Laundry (1890)

“Most immigrants were not intuitively gifted farmers, but unskilled workers.”

Nearly three years later, I graduated from Portland State University with a BS Degree in International Marketing, a field I was neither qualified for nor deeply interested in entering. My University education sort of happened to me, my primary interest being to get through it in as short a time as possible and with minimal fuss. Betsy, my first wife, had grown increasingly impatient to start a Fambly of our own, and my education was standing in the way of realizing that goal. In the end, or near the next beginning, 'we' became pregnant and our son Wilder was born three months before I'd graduate with my BS Degree. The degree itself, though, worked its magic as I had already been promoted at the job I'd taken to pay for that education. I became a supervisor before I'd even graduated, overseeing a small unit of clerks responsible for processing unusual payments. I was in no way qualified for that position, either.

That final quarter of school was a challenge. I was reduced to taking twenty-one credit hours to earn enough to graduate that May. Working my requisite twenty-five hours each week added to the difficulty. Also, our landlord had decided to raise our rent by the monthly increase in the consumer price index. This was during Reagan's brilliant effort to radically reduce inflation by bringing the economy to the ragged edge of ruin. Further, that same landlord, who lived just across the street, had expressed his distress that we would be adding a tenant in March, and had made it clear that he would be much, much happier if we would find some other place to live, and he hadn't even found the illegal cat we'd been keeping. We'd had it with renting.

We felt forced to look for a house to buy. It was the worst of times to even be thinking about buying real estate, for the interest rates were hovering in the mid-teens and prices were stubbornly high. Not high by present standards, but plenty high enough for then. We became coerced pioneers, the very method by which I assume most of my ancestors also became pioneers. Wilderness or urban homestead, the assimilation process seems remarkably similar. Some coercive force drives the decision to enter that market. It does not matter whether it be in a decaying central city neighborhood or some promised Eden at the end of the actual Oregon Trail. It always seems impossible to insist upon adequate preparation, for this was always a Hail Mary pass from conception, a choice reduced to what seems like a single option. Neither valorous nor brave, pioneers choose the one remaining option and then engaged.

We found a place that seemed the least unsuitable. With an open-ended loan from in-laws, we qualified for that 15.5% mortgage. I remember the morning our son Wilder was born, a nurse looked at me and, smiling, declared that now I would never be rich. He was, of course, wrong, for the presence of my son made me feel like the richest man in town. It transformed my notion of wealth. Wealth lost its association with money. Suddenly, none of the trappings of wealth seemed to matter. I probably became qualified to become an UrbanPioneer at that very moment.

The morning we moved into that first house, my parents had come over to help. I rented a van and we loaded it with all of our belongings and drove down from what had been our apartment overlooking Mt Hood and Mt St Helens down onto what we dismayingly called The Flats. I went to open the front door of our sad little home only to learn that the former owners had not started moving out yet. They were a retired couple planning to move to Spokane to be nearer family, and they were in deepest denial. Not a stick of anything they owned had been moved out of the place. Expecting an empty and relatively cleaned-out house, we were beyond dismayed. This Eden at the end of even this admittedly meager Oregon Trail featured snakes.

A Keystone Cops Production of moving in day ensued. A grandson was contacted who quickly contracted with a moving company to move them out through the backdoor while we set about moving in through the front. Of course, this tactic eliminated the possibility that we might move into anything resembling a clean house. No, the place had not seen a thorough cleaning since sometime early in the first Truman administration. The basement featured surfaces covered in more than an inch of mouse feces. We managed to move everything into the living room while we cleaned every other room. We slept fitfully on the dining room floor that night, wondering what we had gotten ourselves into while not really wanting to know.

We would live in that house for nearly fifteen years. In one of those strange paradoxes that define the real estate market, the lower interest rates fell, the value of the house fell lower, such that we could never refinance that place. We replaced everything but the house number during our tenancy. We repainted every verticle surface inside and out. We replaced the roof and much of the cedar shake front. I fixed the front and back porches and stairs. I fenced the yard. We were never able to create a third bedroom when our daughter Heidi arrived three years after we moved in, but we made do with the tiny kitchen and the oil furnace that almost killed us every time we refilled the tank.

Like my pioneer ancestors, I learned the pioneer's paradox. The land that first promised freedom would eventually become the owner's master. It would demand another tribute and the pioneer would be helpless to avoid contributing. I imagine that some people make money in real estate. We sold that house for 20% less than we bought it for, after servicing that 15.5% mortgage for all those years and leaving a vastly better place behind. Today, on land that was all once donation land claims, most of those original parcels are owned by a startlingly few people. Those settlers washed out for one reason or another. In many places, the government knew full well that no individual could long survive on a spare section of land, let alone the 320 acres The Oregon Donation Land Law of 1850 granted or the more standard 160 acres the Federal Law provided. The rain did not follow the plow. Most immigrants were not intuitively gifted farmers, but unskilled workers. Few actually knew how to build their own cabin. Us UrbanPioneers were no different. I left my share of Sunday Night Fixes behind when we sold that place to move into our divorce. Pioneering was always a personally punishing profession.

©2024 by David A. Schmaltz - all rights reserved

Tags: #Fambly, #PureSchmaltz