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Commentary: This Old House [1]

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Date: 2025-02-21

You don’t think you’ll become a ghost, and then one day you’re sitting in the total silence of everything you thought you forgot.

From a distance some laughter erupts. It’s your own apparition. A version of you from forty years ago. You hear your mom’s voice. It’s warm. You’re in the kitchen of the giant log home that you and your family built.

And I should caution: before you get sucked in by the romantic notion of building a giant log home with your family, don’t. It was stressful. We lived without plumbing for four years in camper trailers and old homesteads while my dad split his time between surviving the present and constructing our future. Oh, and it was cold. Colorado’s Never Summer Mountain Range speaks the truth.

This story takes place in the winter of 2022, when I visited my abandoned childhood home. The three-story log domicile with a garage that could safely house a diesel truck, a broken Jeep and several skinned elk. We began in 1979 by scraping away a half-mile driveway and would “finish” the house in 1983. I’ll get to why there are quotes. But for a family of five helped by whomever we could wrangle to assist us, it was one heck of a masterpiece.

I hear another ghost. It’s him. He’s home. We knew that dad was on his way before he got there because the way his log truck hit the cattle guard. My brother and I would tighten up at the sound. Soon we’d be out in the cold working on whatever his 1969 Peterbilt needed. It needed a lot.

My dad’s ghost stomps up the first flight of stairs. He hasn’t yelled my name to get to the garage so I relax. His kettle drum soundtrack followed him to the kitchen. Once we had the basic shelter built, we gave up on floor covering. Plywood is loud, and the lack of flooring had us begging our dad to finish the home with something a little more splinter free. Thus the quotes.

The ghost of my mom clatters to life. She’s petite but she’s got big complaints about the placement of cookware. A ten-year-old me hounded her for snacks while she attempts to find a spatula. There are actual dogs begging for food, too. Three of them ride or die for everything my dad does. Mutts. Dirty forest dogs found or rescued from various situations. They dance and squeal at our reunion. I used to joke about how their exuberant reaction suggested they doubted our loyalty, as if one day it would all blow up. Prescient beasts.

This empty home is so quiet now. I curse at the air for not being what I remember. It’s a vacuum. The warmth whisked away by the woods. My childhood laughter lodged in the walls. I can’t believe I’ve forgotten how silent it is. It’s 9100 feet in elevation in Gould, Colorado. You hear more vehicles hit the cattle guard now. More people have discovered the area and they’ve brought noise. They bring guns for target practice. They haul themselves around in dumb little dune buggies that are like the idiot offspring of a John Deere and a golf cart.

Not now though. It’s winter and the wind isn’t even around. It’s so still. A prey’s paradise, I think, as I imagine how useful it must be to hear a branch break or some ice crack. I don’t like being the prey, though, on the edge of being swallowed by grief. This home was cut out of Colorado State Forest land on an 80-acre lease that they don’t offer anymore. My dad was pretty much the last one who got the deal, and it was agreed he could live out its terms. But then a snowcat bed dropped while he was working on the engine. I still don’t know all the details. In the country there isn’t much of an investigation. The 911 transcripts just say “CODE BLACK: IT’S DON.”

I can hear my mom asking him how his day went. My dad answers with an exasperated sigh and an exhale of explicit haiku. Nothing rhymes, it seems, on these days we try to make ends meet. It’s almost the holidays and she’ll be making wreaths soon. She was a holiday-making superstar before the tumors.

After his death, my dad’s new wife would sell the home and then it sat. Empty. Cold would pour in and stay.

I would trudge through the snow or, on summer days, make the family hike through woods to check on the castle of my childhood. The house is hidden away like a muse on a hill. So many stories and secrets within. The door from the deck into the kitchen would simply slide away from its latch. The whole world would tumble out and overwhelm me.

You just don’t know when your past is going to shatter your workday.

A guy from the state forest had called me a few weeks prior.

“Is this Jared Ewy?” he asked.

“Yeah, what can I do for you? I said in the placidity of willful ignorance.

When my dad’s wife sold the house to the state, she mailed them my mom’s photo albums. They’re some of the pictures you’ll see in the video that log the journey of, well, the logs. He confirmed my address and sent me the photos.

I apologized when I finally walked inside the house. The wooden deck rotted with the steel stairs rusted and twisted. The 50-foot flag pole had nothing to wave. The struggle to get through the snow and ascend the tetanus trap distracted me from the apocalypse of my childhood. But then that door opened.

I couldn’t breathe. Gassed with memories. Those ghosts, you know, all rushing from every room to tell their stories.

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