In Garden City, Kan., I invented a game called Buying the Farm. It had nothing to do with death and everything to do with real estate. The point was, even in those pre-www.realtor.com days, to imagine living in, rather than passing through, a place.
Antsy and lonely in the middle of nowhere, I lurked around real estate agents’ storefronts, writing down addresses and particulars and then driving to houses that intrigued me. Living in Garden City would have been impossible, but pretending to be about to wasn’t.
Also, it was a good way to meet people.
I spent an afternoon with a highly eccentric drama teacher who had painted his old Victorian in squares of green and white, with draped velvet interiors featuring life-sized dolls. Scarlett O’Hara on acid! I even started calling him Scarlett. He seemed to like it.
Then I met a guy from Littleton who had grown up in Garden (as they called it) and had moved back home upon retiring from his job as a window salesman. His bedroom still contained his World War II-era comic books; the kitchen still operated by woodstove. The house had just landed on the National Historic Register, which is exactly where it belonged. It was easy to feel nostalgic for Bill’s family – whom I had, of course, never met. I own a few heirlooms, but not a single home remains in my entire family. It would be both creepy and fascinating to open a bureau drawer and see my great-grandmother’s everyday kid gloves, all lined up in a row next to her girdles. Bill could do this every day, if he felt like it.
All the Garden Citys
Once on the subject of fascinating-if-creepy, I need to say that I spent that year visiting all 29 places in the United States known as Garden City, as part of a doomed book project. I played Buying the Farm everywhere. In Garden City, Utah, home of the annual Raspberry Festival, I pictured myself running a raspberry milkshake stand – one of a half-dozen, but still a commercial proposition. In Garden City, Idaho, I spent enough time in a metal-detector store housed in a double-wide to imagine growing the giant red rose that climbed up over the roof. Houses were cheap there.
Not in Garden City, Long Island, which you could hardly get into for less than half-a-mil. It was no great leap to convert the Farm into a West Egg mansion – it was close to Gatsby country.
Garden City, Mo., was one of those dying, one-street villages, but deep inside it was a prefab Old Western town featuring fightin’ cowboy shows and dancehall girls – a town within a town. I was offered a role in the cheesy dinner-theater production. Minimum wage, but I still wonder if I should have dropped everything to play Golde the Gunfighter for a season.
It was in the Garden Citys of the Midwest that I first met people concerned with one-level living. Until then I had wondered why the beautiful white farmhouses I saw on every hill were crumbling. Because they had stairs, that’s why. People, looking far into their infirm futures, wanted to live where a wheelchair (or a gurney) could pass with ease. Hence, the ranch house, in which no ranching would ever take place.
Hog pens included
Homes in Garden City, Kan., came complete with hog pens, and I happened by on butchering day. There were dogs lungeing on short chains and mustard greens growing in hundred-year-old patches. I went to a church service in a Quonset hut that featured fire and brimstone, but also the rockin’est three-piece blues band it was my pleasure to hear. If I lived here, I thought, I would hire them to play at a wild and secular party out by the hog pens.
In Garden City, La., I wanted to buy a farm that came with fields of sugar cane, but the ancient woman selling it told me no, honey, working the cane will break you, and who wants to be broke?
In Garden City, Ala., I ate black-eyed peas on New Year’s Day for good luck, but it held only as far as Garden City, Fla., a dismal side-street festooned with signs screaming that unbelievers would fry in hell.
The best garden turned out to be an asparagus patch in Garden City, S.D., at a Hutterite colony where women still wore long dresses and white caps and spoke old, high German. It was a good farm, but it came with bad living conditions, if you liked such modern conveniences as television and birth control.
The hams of Garden City, Va., the bars of Garden City, Colo., the swanky funeral home of Garden City, Mich. They stayed with me a long time, and after my exhausting trip ended, I ended up Buying the Farm in places as disparate as Todos Santos, Mexico; East Thetford, Vt., and Manhattan, where a month in a claustrophobic loft runs thousands, but a slice of pizza is still a bargain. I began Googling towns ahead of time, trying to set an imaginary budget for my imaginary new home. I packed this information into my brain in the same way I always pack my electric toothbrush and my favorite jeans.
The only place I never Bought the Farm was Austin, Texas, which is strange because my family will be moving there soon, on short notice. I spent plenty of time there decades ago, and was so distracted by the live music and homemade tortillas that I forgot to hunt for houses. As a result, I’m moving to a place where I don’t know north from south, downtrodden from gentrified, or which neighbors long for one-level living.
Vertigo is a strong word, but not strong enough to describe this particular move. For obvious reasons, this is my last column for The Denver Post, although you probably haven’t seen the last of me. We will probably drive a lot of the same highways, past the same farms. Blink and you’ll miss me – I will be lurking around the barbed-wire fence, deep in unworkable dreams.
Robin Chotzinoff is a freelance writer who lives in Evergreen, but is moving to Austin, Texas.
