Midstokke: Privilege is an empty house

In 1984, shortly after my grandmother had several of the veins in her legs relocated to her heart, my granny and her partner, Marge, moved into their retirement home on the sparsely populated edge of the Deschutes River. There, she spent the next couple of decades eating Egg Beaters and bran muffins, and befriending the few neighbors they had by trading chores or wood splitters or pie recipes.

We spent our Christmases there, trailing behind her Datsun pickup on inner tubes or sleds while Granny tried to make VHS tapes from the truck bed. We spent our summers helping her get firewood, floating the river, riding our bikes around the sleepy loop of neighborhood road, and running down the trail along the river to the one place it was calm. We’d collect huge polliwogs there and bring them home in a bucket to wait for legs to sprout.

Other couples retired there, too. Sometimes they built their house and came for holidays and summers, talking about when they could stay permanently. They became like summer camp friends, with neighbors caring for their houses over the winter. Most came and stayed year round, watching the high desert snow settle in billowing white until April, when it gave way for the incredible variety of birds appearing each spring. The nearby town had a post office and a grocery store and a wooden-floored gas station market, but not much else.

The pair did what retired folks do: They bought matching Mongoose bikes and rode them. They played bridge for nickels. They volunteered for Hospice. They manicured and curated a yard of bird feeders and watched the river rise and fall with the seasons. And they watched as their friends thinned like the trees. Some of them died. Some of them went to live near their children. But Granny and Marge stayed, the elders of the tiny riverside community, as it morphed into something else.

Then Granny died, too. Marge put in a new wood stove, decluttered a few closets, and continued to curate her yard and rock collection while still winning nickels.

Around her, lots were split and sold. Empty, inherited homes were listed in real estate magazines. New houses with huge windows, giant glass viewing walls pointed toward the river, popped up each year. A neighbor who was once “the second house on the right” became the “seventh house on the right.” And that most undeniable symptom of the disease of urbanization appeared: An HOA was formed.

“Can you take the garbage can out tonight?” Marge asks. At 93 she still does most of her chores on her own, but lets us help a little when we visit, mostly so we feel useful. “The HOA has a new rule that the garbage can only be set out the day before the truck comes.”

I’ve sat at enough board meetings in my life to know how passionate and volatile the debating of that important neighborhood legislation probably was.

This neighborhood was once bustling with the hobbies of the newly retired. Everyone walked the loop with their dogs, knew each other’s names, had pastimes like wood carving and fishing with the evidence proudly displayed in their yards. There was not a lawn in sight (except the plastic one for Granny’s dog). Now, it has boomed into a ghost town of automatic sprinklers.

Its properties are snatched up by those who fall in love with these towering desert pines and the rumbling river, the crisp air and the diverse population of small birds – most of them fed by Marge’s feeders. They decide they must buy-or-build one of these marvelous little-or-large sanctuaries for themselves. Who can blame them? It is beautiful here. But also strangely neglected.

This population installs full-window shades throughout their houses, then closes them for 50 weeks of the year. The houses become shells of homes: unlived-in, canned goods in the pantry, dated art on the walls, dust created by lonely walls.

At dusk, I walk the trail I’ve known for more than four decades. There’s a new sign with a leashed dog. The once-treacherous footbridges have been made less life-threatening with treated wood and handrails. The tree-lined canyon wall is now lined with houses, the highest ones looking down upon the others with a measure of pride and modern architecture.

From outside, their closed white shades look like spectral, milky eyes. The empty houses watch the river like sentinels of privilege.

I am certain they are responsible for the new leash rule.

When the sun sets, only a few homes warm with the amber light of evening life. I struggle to reconcile this real estate gluttony, though I know it is more complex than that. It feels like the antithesis of community, the bluff of conservation.

At dinner, Marge’s best friend (Neva, octogenarian, fifth house on the left) asks if I saw the beaver dam. I did not, but I saw several nibbled on trees.

“Over at the Watson place, the beaver took down 13 aspen trees,” Neva says.

This is a huge population of important trees in this highly flammable neighborhood. In the past, had it been a temporary resident, someone would have called them. It would have been important news in the neighborhood. The beaver would be encouraged to some less precious trees, the neighbors meandering down with their chippers and their saws and a pack of hotdogs to remedy the situation together. Stories of beaver shenanigans and nearby wonders of beaver industriousness would have been told. Someone would have brought a watermelon and a Folger’s can in which to spit the seeds.

“I guess they’ll find out whenever they come back,” Marge says.

Ammi Midstokke can be reached at ammim@spokesman.com.