The Lost City of Valimar
I wrote the following for another project, and thought I’d inflict it on you guys. As a point of information, we live, if you’re loose with your definitions, in a Seattle neighborhood called Wallingford.
I’m not sure what made me think of this 30-some-year-old anecdote - possibly from watching the phenomenon lately in Wallingford of demolishing modest houses, replacing them with lot-devouring mega-residences and hanging 7-figure price tags on them, and knowing that the following bit of Wallingfordiana is not likely to be repeated.
We first rented, then purchased our house in 1975. Built in 1906, it had been in use as a rental for at least 5, and perhaps 10, years, and had suffered the amateur ministrations of absentee landlords, their brothers-in-law and, perhaps, tenants with the desire (but not the technical skills) to improve their fleeting sojourn there. It was, in a word, ramshackle, but it sat on what passes in Wallingford for a double lot, a feature we kids from the flat and ample platting of small-town Ohio thought valuable.
Until we tried to mow it. We didn’t own a lawn mower as tenants, so we rented one from Handy Andy when the sporadic impulse to play groundskeeper overtook us. What we found, on closer inspection, was that the luxurious sheaves of quack grass bursting forth in the fecundity of our first Seattle spring sprang from an unruly expanse of clumpy sod that the mower simply could not negotiate. Back to Handy Andy I went to rent a lawn roller, which I laboriously pushed over the turf with little effect except to rattle my bones.
The lawn’s condition was the result of a startingly industrious farming effort by a group of former tenants who apparently had made of the property something of a commune. Our landlady had hinted briefly at the endeavor when showing us the house, excoriating them for planting a plague of blackberries, and concluding, “They were nice kids, I think…just lazy and ignorant.” We felt the sting on our own pseudo-hippie spirits, but maintained a diplomatic silence.
A neighbor, B., later filled us in on more details of the “commune”, filtered through his own combination of perspective and, probably, wishful thinking. He was a large, amiable guy from Oklahoma, rumored to have played some football there, and the combination of his large frame, sizeable gut and two small, yappy dogs always tickled us. He would periodically come out onto his front porch, barefoot, in jeans and shirtless, clear his throat and launch a loud, Okie “hawk-TEWWWW” expectoration off the rail - prefatory to ineffectually admonishing his dogs when they yapped energetically, but at a safe distance, at friend and foe alike passing on the sidewalk.
B. said that our hippie commune predecessors had dug up the entire back and side yards and planted a variety of crops. To his consternation, they’d fertilized it with a mountain of wet chicken manure that he claimed stood as high as our garage when they’d imported it. He asserted that there’d never been flies in the neighborhood before that seminal act of counterculture agriculture. With each over-the-fence conversation, the census of naked hippies who inhabited this utopia multiplied, and B. hinted with what sounded more like envy than admonition at the unrestrained pursuit of free love.
For a long time, these terse anecdotes, and the word “Valimar” in Druidesque script carved into the gate of a fence, were the only remnants of our hippie forbears. Then, a few years ago, a guy showed up at the door, said he used to live there during that time, and asked to look around. My wife was there (I wasn’t), and to her he seemed nostalgic, maybe a little rueful, and told her a little about their sojourn there. He recalled helping to carve “Valimar” in the fence, and also cleared up a lingering mystery: Our kitchen retains the ceramic tile floor that was there when we bought the house, and there has always been this big chip - a divot, actually - in the center of the floor. The guy said that, during an argument, his girlfriend had launched some substantial piece of kitchenware at him, and his nimbleness in dodging it was our floor’s misfortune.
I have long since replaced the rickety old fence and its Middle Earth moniker. I also churned up the yard and laid new sod down about 25 years ago, only to have the vigorous native quack grass quickly displace it, although I’m now able to mow it when I’m so moved. B.’s college girlfriend suddenly re-entered his life, and they moved off to less fly-blown - and probably more affordable - climes. And for years now, we’ve had a most excellent vegetable garden in the back, probably owing to that roof-high load of Nixon-era chicken manure. And not all that many flies, really.
