The Fifth Column

The deer have been a problem on Cavender Drive from the beginning. They will always be a problem until homeowners are allowed to include mines in their landscaping plans.

Of course, I didn’t always think so. The summer I moved here, I thought it was something magnificent to watch five or six of them graze in the yard across the road, watch them pull apples off the tree and go about their peaceful deer existence.

It was like something out of an old Disney film.

 

I stopped thinking so after I put in a garden.

The garden was my first real attempt to make a go at living here. As a boy, I remembered how my father had raised a garden. We’d had about half an acre and he’d converted maybe a quarter of that into mostly vegetables I didn’t much like, including zucchini, spaghetti squash, yellow squash, butternut squash, acorn squash and probably some other squash I’ve probably blocked out.

He also grew white corn –and hot peppers, which I once convinced my younger sister were carrots and then got her to eat one.

I figure if my father beat me, I probably deserved it.

As a child, I frequently deserved whatever violence was done to me. So much so that once, at a funeral for the father for one of my oldest friends, a cousin of the friend greeted me and said, "Don't I owe you an ass whooping?"

I shrugged and then said, "Probably."

I got off with a handshake.

Anyway, a garden was a way to mark the land, to tattoo it, to call it my own. I got myself a seed catalog, ordered my planned crops, which included, oddly enough, a couple varieties of squash –my 10-year-old self would have been appalled.

Winter fizzled out early and I got seeds in the ground early and everything was great. I had spinach and lettuce. I had beets, which I’d never really eaten before. By May, my tomatoes and peppers were thriving and then the deer showed up.

The antlered marauders wiped out my peppers and put a hurt on my tomatoes.

They did not, however, touch the zucchini squash or the pumpkins (which is another kind of squash).

I tried keeping them out. I put up fencing. They knocked it down. I hung tin cans on a string along the fence, put marbles in the cans to rattle when they tripped over it in hopes of frightening the deer off. They thought it was dinner music. I peed near the edge of the garden, thinking the smell might ward them off. They left mounds of deer poop in return.

In fact, the only reason my garden survived is because I put in a couple of ghost pepper plants, which the deer happily munched on, until they got hold of a single, ripe pepper.

I found that pepper a few feet from the garden, a discernible bite missing from it.

I laughed like a mad man.

The deer stayed gone the rest of the season, my tomatoes rallied and I did ok with the crops that survived.

I battled them again last year. Again, they did in the peppers, wiped out my eggplant and I never saw a single fava bean.

I didn't grow more ghost peppers. Other than as a biological weapon, they don't really have much of a use. You can't make salsa with them, take the stuff to parties, unless the point is a suicide pact.

This year, I’m using a spray that smells like a rancid baby diaper and probably tastes like a taco made from pickled human flesh. I’m also putting up new netting and may dig a trench around the tomatoes and fill it with sharpened spikes.

It seems like a lot of trouble to do all this, particularly since growing a garden seems counterproductive to my stated goal. It suggests an interest in staying and I argued about just that thing over the winter: Why grow anything if you’re not sure that you’ll be there to harvest it?

I guess because I don’t know.

There’s no telling how fast anything sells.

My Mom had a stroke a year and a half ago which left her with her mind, but wrecked her body. She can’t walk, can’t dress herself and has to rely on others for very basic needs.

Among other things, the stroke made her trade in her solidly middle-class four bedroom, two-bath house with a smallish kitchen, but a nice dining room for a double occupancy dorm room with a dementia patient for a roommate.

I need to add that I think she gets decent care. Also her friends come to visit her often at the nursing home. My sisters get their at least a couple of times a month and I visit maybe once every other month now.

Still, in order for her to continue to receive care there through Medicaid or Medicare or whatever, my sisters had to put Mom’s house up for sale. They had to just get it on the market, if only to show they were acting in good faith, but everyone was worried that the house wouldn’t sell. The house is old and it needed some work.

Expectations were low, but they put it on the market on a Tuesday and had an offer by Friday. That was last month. Closing is a week from now.  

It’s a good house in a nice neighborhood. I never knew how great it was until I lived in half the rat holes and dives I’ve lived in over the last 20 years. It was a palace compared to that trailer with the cardboard walls that shook and shuddered whenever a heavy truck went past the lot. It was a mansion next to the swampy, wasp-infested apartment I lived in with the gun-happy, junky neighbors next door.

I’ve lived in plenty of shitty places and next to even shittier people.

The house in Pinch isn’t so bad. I just can't afford it and just don't want to be there anymore. The people are friendly. Everybody waves, but they also leave you be. There's also a sheriff's deputy a couple of doors down. The police cruiser probably wards off meth addicts like a bulb of garlic keeps the vampires at bay and is helpful with pesky door-to-door salesmen.

Still, the old guy who had the house before me had it on the market for over two years before he discounted the price and people weren’t banging down the door to get in here even then. I'm hoping that's just the housing bubble collapse and the general stream of people leaving West Virginia, which would seem to me to make home buying more of a buyer's market than a seller's market locally.

But... we weren't fracking in West Virginia as much three years ago as we are now. Coal money is declining, butcertainly, any second now, this whole creative economy stuff I've been hearing about for the last 15 years is just about ready to catch on. Some hot shot video game designer is just dying to come live out in Pinch, telecommute to Istanbul or wherever quality first-person-shooters are made, and do battle in their off-time with the local deer population.

Maybe there will be four or five of them and there will be a bidding war. 

My dreams are made of this.

In the meantime, I've got reality. There isn’t a lot of wiggle room with my price, but I think the house is worth what I’m asking even if it takes a little while to get it. I’d rather whoever buys the place think it’s worth at least that, too.

So, if I have to wait a while, this isn’t a bad place to wait and if I have to wait, I’m prepared to battle the deer for a little while longer. At least, I’ll have plenty of squash to eat, and if I'm lucky, a few tomatoes.