Late last summer, I took a day off so I could help my father install a new swamp cooler on his and Mom’s rental property. The rental is actually my mother’s childhood home, a smallish, post-World War II tract house that I suppose could be loosely categorized as a bungalow. My Grandma June lived there until the mid-1980s, when a stroke debilitated her badly enough that she could no longer take care of herself, and then my uncle Layne, the hard-livin’ biker who took his final ride last May, occupied the place for a while after that. But for the last 20 years or so, my folks have earned a little extra income for themselves by renting it out to strangers. Unfortunately, the Salt Lake neighborhood where the house is located isn’t what it was during the Eisenhower years, or even the Carter and Reagan years, so it’s difficult to find tenants who both (a) are willing to live there, and (b) give enough of a damn not to trash the place. The last bunch left an especially nasty mess behind when they abruptly split without notice — Dad went to collect the rent one month and found the place empty, save for filth and vermin, and I’m not kidding about the vermin — leading to an entire year of clean-up and renovation. Dad performed most of the work himself (and it’s actually not done yet!) but the task of hoisting a bulky, heavy air-conditioning unit up to the roof was too much for one man, even one as resourceful as my father. To be honest, it ended up being too much for two men as well: after a half-hour struggle that wouldn’t have looked out of place in a Laurel and Hardy movie, we ended up disassembling the damn thing and carrying it up the ladder in pieces.
Not so long ago, being around my father under those circumstances would’ve inevitably ended in disaster. The setbacks in the task at hand and my relative incompetence at that sort of work would’ve put him in a foul mood, which would’ve made me defensive, and the feedback loop would’ve quickly spun us into an angry shouting match over nothing at all. But recently it feels like something between my dad and me has quietly evolved. We seem to have somehow outgrown the alpha-dog pissing contests that defined our relationship for so many years. We still get testy with one another and occasionally bicker, but now it’s more like little border skirmishes instead of all-out global thermonuclear war. And as unlikely as the idea once would’ve seemed, I sometimes even find myself enjoying the time I spend helping my dad with jobs like this, when we’re just a couple of Men Doing Manly Things.
Anyway, our plan had been to have the unit in place before the day became too uncomfortable, but by the time we gave up on lifting it whole, broke it down, and got all the parts onto the roof, the sun was already well up into the sky, and heat was beginning to radiate off the unshaded roof like the wavy mirages that float over I-80 as it slices through the West Desert. And if the temperature alone wasn’t bad enough, the tar on the asphalt shingles was softening and our feet were slipping in the loosened grit with every step we took. After a frightening foot-and-a-half-long skid, Dad suggested we throw in the towel for now; he would come back that evening when it was cooler and finish the reassembly. I didn’t need much convincing. We carefully stacked the remaining parts and tools on the roof, locked the ladder in the garage, and piled into Dad’s beat-up old flatbed truck. He asked if I wanted to go grab a Coke; I said sure.
I expected him to drive straight down the street to the big new Maverik convenience store on the corner, as he usually did, but instead Dad swung the truck down a side road. He said he’d been going someplace else lately that poured a better-tasting Coke than Maverik, and also he wanted to show me something he thought I’d like along the way. I couldn’t imagine what that might be, but I had no better place to be on that blazing summer afternoon.
As we wended our way through Mom’s former stomping grounds, it occurred to me that places grow up and grow old, get sick and sometimes even die, just like living organisms. This place, for example. In the black-and-white confines of Mom’s
childhood photo albums, it could have been a backdrop from any random episode of Leave It to Beaver: rows of tidy houses shaded by elm trees, a place where the kids ran around outside until dusk, housewives let themselves into each other’s homes for a cup of coffee and some mid-day conversation, and nobody ever locked their doors. During my own childhood in the ’70s, the neighborhood was fraying around the edges, a little run-down and shabby-looking, but it wasn’t yet so bad that I wasn’t allowed to walk by myself to the Handy Pantry Market for an Idaho Spud candy bar and a comic book. By the time of Grandma’s stroke, though, the rot had penetrated deep, and by the early ’90s, the neighborhood was downright frightening. There was a period when much of the violent crime you heard about on the local news was within a block or two of Mom’s old house, and the surroundings fit the part.
Today, the patient seems to be feeling better. I spotted several shiny new houses scattered among the older homes as we rolled down peaceful-seeming streets, and for every dilapidated hovel with peeling paint and dead cars rusting on their brown lawns, there seemed to be another one that’d been recently cleaned up and was being maintained. I still wouldn’t live in that
part of Salt Lake, myself, but just being there no longer puts me on guard, the way it used to.
I mentioned my thoughts to Dad, and he agreed. Ahead of us loomed the towering embankment of I-80, which cleaved the landscape in two back around the time of Watergate; in my imagination, I saw how black tendrils of urban decay must have
spread out from either side of the newly constructed freeway, like gangrene radiating from a deep, hacked-in sword wound. But perhaps that was only the fancy of a hot day. Who really knows why neighborhoods go to hell?
A narrow underpass granted us access to the other side of the interstate and the unfamiliar terrain beyond. There were no more houses over here, just warehouses and giant industrial propane tanks and the thick trunks of the billboards that face the freeway traffic up so high above. We crossed over the Jordan River, which people from back east would say looks to them like a mere canal, but, hey, it’s the best we’ve got around here. And then Dad pulled off to the side of the road, and waved his hand in a “ta-da” sort of motion. There, tucked in among the unkempt trash-trees that grow wild alongside the
sluggish, muddy-brown waters of Utah’s Jordan, and practically invisible to passing cars unless you know where to look, was a mansion. A three-story Victorian mansion with rounded, turret-like corners and delicate arches framing its wide, breezy front porch. A bronze-colored historical marker gleamed alongside the polished wooden front door. A fairy-tale castle wouldn’t have looked more out of place in this location.
“That’s the Fisher Mansion,” Dad explained. “The Fishers owned a big brewery once. When I was a kid, everybody drank Fisher beer. Nobody around here had ever even heard of Budweiser then.”
“I’ve heard of Fisher,” I said. I half-remembered seeing a can with that label in an antique store. “Where was the brewery?”
“Right there.” Dad pointed to a cluster of low, industrial-park-type buildings adjacent to the mansion. “They tore it down
years ago, though. Before you were born.” I tried to imagine what it must’ve been like then. Before I-80 and the billboards and propane tanks. “Must be weird sometimes to see how much things have changed around here, huh?”
And that was when Dad said something that, coming from him — a hard-headed pragmatist who rarely seems troubled by the kind of broody introspection that his only son wallows in just about everyday — shocked the hell out of me.
He said, “Son, if I’ve learned anything in my life, it’s that the hardest thing you’re ever going to deal with is change.” He paused for a moment, then a rueful little grin tugged at his lips. “Especially if you’re like me and you just want things to stay the same.”
For a moment, it was as if he wasn’t my father and I wasn’t his son; we were just a couple of weary veterans sharing a very simple — and yet terribly enormous — truth. That moment felt significant. But thinking back on it now I can’t say exactly why, no more than I could figure out what to say in response to him then.
And then he put the truck back in gear, and we went for our Cokes, and during the long drive back home, he told me the story of how, when he was about 12 years old, he and his best friend had drunk their very first beers on a warm summer day while leaning on the trunk of his buddy’s family DeSoto. They’d lifted the bottles from the buddy’s fridge and pried off the caps against the thick chromed edge of the DeSoto’s bumper.
I can see it all so perfectly…
