The Last Word On Nothing

I close on a house this week. I’ve never done this before, not quite sure how the paperwork is supposed to happen.

It’s not much of a place really, almost a thousand square feet and a loft with spaces between the planks where my older boy pressed his eye, watching his brother being born on the couch next to the wood stove downstairs.

Few people live in these high river forks in the West Elk Mountains on the Utah side of Colorado. Forty houses are connected to the same spring coming off the pyramid of Landsend Peak, one of several mountains that gather around the watershed like a cradle. The nearest town is Crawford, CO, population 422. My mom and stepdad live down the road, and the Clarks, who’ve been here forever, still have dogs that come running at you out of the bushes.

The New York Times sent a reporter to do a spread on us: a writer, his wife, and two kids living off the grid beneath a pike of gray, igneous rock sticking 600 feet in the air. This seasoned Times reporter was terrified by the rock towering over the house. She had trouble not staring at it, unnerved by the way a mass of incomprehensible stone took up half the sky, its blank face not noticing us below. At one point she told us we could be called negligent for having children here, which thankfully she didn’t print. She could imagine our house crashed in as if by a meteor similar in size to any one of these half-ton lichen-decorated boulders lying around the property. We lived in a rock heap, an old one, thus the lichens, while she didn’t have a good sense of geologic time. The house was not going to be destroyed. Probably not for a good, long while.

When she said negligent for having children here, we stared back at her perplexed. “You live in Manhattan,” one of us said.

The rock sheds from time to time. I’ve seen pieces fall off. While getting water from the tap outside, I saw a boulder that must have weighed two tons let loose and fall without touching anything for a couple hundred feet. It struck the slope. Juniper trees exploded around it, branches flying. Rock debris never got near the house.

The landmark is called Needle Rock. Look it up, popular with UFO enthusiasts and those who believe in vortexes, places on the earth with naturally occurring spiritual resonance. It’s a special spot, whether one believes in such things or not.

The rock itself is an eroded piece of laccolith, a magma body that pushed toward the surface but never broke through: a hardened, unpopped zit in the earth. Weather and rivers whittled it down to this piece, a lonely vertical outcrop, out of place in the local geography as if dropped here from some ancient legend. You don’t live here for the house, but for the rock.

The landmark was an acquired taste for my wife. She liked spacious, coniferous woods, starry skies, and aspen leaves clapping all around her, not necessarily a Zeus-like bolt of stone sticking out of the ground, overshadowing our every move. When we first got together, she was living in a cabin that she built herself down a four-wheel-drive road in whispering pines. She had no running water. My house under Needle Rock did. This is where we settled.

We split up almost two years ago, after 15 years together. As if a bomb went off, we landed in different places. She ended up in a peach orchard the next town over, and I now live at the edge of a rocky, yawning canyon two and a half hours to the south at the foot of another mountain range. The boys get some of both. Two Christmases, as they say.

I’ve been coming back to the old house whenever I can, for sale sign at the bottom of its steep, hairpin driveway. In warmer months, I stop in and water the aspen trees we planted, and what’s left of the flower beds. I stare up at that rock wondering, did I do you right?

I bring the boys back now and again, let them hop around on their favorite boulders, jump in the dry grass they used to beat down with trucks and shovels. Ten and thirteen years old, they talk about how big the house seemed when they were smaller. They remember bouncy chairs and jumping off of boulders to test their bravery. In the empty house, I point out where they were born. You came out of her like a fish, I said. You opened your eyes for the first time and we saw each other.

When I walked the property with the buyer, I didn’t mention where exactly the boys had been born. The buyer said he was planning to smudge the place, something done with sage and a match, an old cleansing ceremony. It doesn’t get rid of ghosts, just settles them. Every house should have one before moving in, especially this house, reverberating with our memories, heated arguments and lovemaking, sleeping in the bathroom with coughing kids, the kitchen ringed with candlelight, children dancing, parents clapping.

I told the buyer it was probably best to smudge. Our wild and unruly ghosts can rest, and we can keep our memories, every loose tooth, every tender kiss.

Photos by the author. Maps from Google and USGS.