Creating a Good Life

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It was election year 2000. My husband and I made a bet that if Bush won, we’d vacation in Sundance, Utah, and if Gore, in Italy. Since there was no clear victor, we bought some land in Arkansas. That’s what a hanging chad will do for you.

I’ll concede that it was a crazy idea—buy some land on the War Eagle River near Fayetteville, Arkansas and build our dream home, about 30 years before its time. David, my husband of 15 years, had just graduated (at 41, the eldest in the engineering program at North Carolina State) and I had just accepted voluntary severance from Nortel, where I’d worked as a technical writer. We had the time, we had the money, and we were ready to squander both. It helped that David also had the skill—he’d built houses for a living prior to college. So we moved from Raleigh, North Carolina, to the Ozarks in Northwest Arkansas, his childhood home. We were heady, full of risk. Clearly, we were childless.

Our history proved that we liked to move, and we both had a bad case of wanderlust. Or, it could be as simple as what David Sedaris said—when the sex gets old, all long-married couples eventually turn to real estate. We thought it would be the good life, the simple life, and this was before Paris Hilton made a joke of it. I was a romantic, the English major to his engineer. I’d dream something up and he’d do the math, and then actually create something. I was ready to live off the land, live cheaply, forget the inside-the-beltline values (forget that I’d never gardened in my life). I had delusions of romance with nature, so I traded my Lexus for a Jeep Wrangler.

We moved in with David’s father while we built, problem number one. His father had a two-bedroom, one-bath musty lake house that smelled like dead fish. His father also had a religious-extremist woman friend who called at all hours of the night. His father probably didn’t want us that close. Silly us, thinking he’d enjoy our company, some work, some meals. Right off, we knew we were in trouble. The good life comes with lots of baggage, and some really strange people.

We weren’t at the lake house much anyway, working pre-dawn to late night. We built the house in a record three months, just David, his Dad, and me. Some thoughts plagued me, though: Are the cliffs on our property really called the ABC cliffs where kids jump to their deaths every summer, screaming the alphabet? Is that trailer down the road inhabited by more than 20 mangy dogs? Is everyone here evangelical? Do I smell chickens?