Of Nooks, Crannies & Gates to Nowhere

Above The Timberline

by Wayne Mergler

ANCHORAGE, AK—(Weekly Hubris)—10/25/10—I am in love with Bill Bryson.

Well, OK, too much hyperbole? My wife would probably think so. Not to mention Mrs. Bryson.

What I really mean is that I am totally enamored of Bill Bryson’s books, of his great brain, his imagination, his writing skills. The author of countless non-fiction books, all of them fascinating and enthralling, Bryson seems to me to be one of those few writers—Isaac Asimov and Umberto Eco come to mind—who seems to know absolutely everything.

I have never met Bryson. All I know is that he is an Englishman and that his picture, on the back of his latest book, makes him look jovial and friendly and amusing. The author of such works as A Walk in the Woods, In a Sunburned Country, and A Short History of Nearly Everything, Bryson’s newest book, just out this month, is titled At Home: A Short History of Private Life.

In this recent book, Bryson writes about his own home, a Victorian house, formerly a parsonage, built in 1851. He captured my attention immediately, on the very first page of his Introduction, when he described how he climbed (with some difficulty, using a ladder and wriggling through a narrow space) into his dusty old attic and found something he had never known was there: a secret door, not visible from anywhere outside the house, in an external wall of the attic.

He opened the door (of course!) and found that it led to a small rooftop space between the front and back gables of the house. He could not imagine what it was for, except just to look about from a goodly height. As he writes, “Victorian houses are often a collection of architectural bewilderments, but this one was starkly unfathomable: why an architect had troubled to put in a door to a space so lacking in evident need or purpose was beyond explanation . . .”

From this moment on, Bryson had me enthralled.

I have always had this thing about houses. I love houses. And the older the house, the better. I am especially fond of Victorian houses, those weird, garish edifices that are so cruelly out of fashion with architects and home owners today. Most of all, I love their “architectural bewilderments.” I once took a tour of restored Victorian houses in a small Midwestern city. The tour guide kept referring to the houses as “monstrosities,” to which I took some exception. They were not the least bit monstrous to me. I loved them. I thought them often beautiful and always intriguing. And the weirder the house, the more I am intrigued by it. I love houses that make no sense at all, that have weird rooms within rooms, halls going nowhere, doors opening into nothing practical. Nooks and crannies. Whoever said a house needs to be practical, anyway? My favorite houses are anything but practical; they are, like my favorite people, delightfully eccentric and a little bit crazy.

Once, when I was teaching high school English, one of my students, who was taking a class in architectural design, came to me and asked if he could design for me my “dream home” for his architecture class. I was happy to oblige him. I told him all the specifications that my dream home would have to have and he went merrily, laughingly, on his way to draw up the plans. A few days later, in his architectural design class, his teacher came upon him struggling over his design.

“What is all this?” the design teacher asked.

“My house plans for my client. I am having some trouble. He wants secret passages and trap doors and turrets and towers and winding staircases and dungeons,” said the budding architect.

“Stop right there!” the teacher said. “Is this, by any chance, for Mergler?”

The boy admitted that it was.

“Oh, forget about Mergler’s dream house,” the teacher advised. “He is just weird! Find somebody who wants a house you can actually live in!”

So, I never got the plans for my dream house. The poor boy was very apologetic. His teacher, my colleague and friend, just laughed and shook his head whenever I lamented that I never got my design.

In Bryson’s new book, At Home, he takes a tour of his Victorian house, leading the reader room by room and therefore managing to discuss nearly everything in the world by using each room as a starting point. The result is a dazzling read, so informative and so entertaining, that I read most of it in one long, marathon sitting, well into the wee hours of the morning. And afterwards, I found myself wanting to explore houses again, as well as gardens, and other intricately designed spots of weirdness and uniqueness.

My own house is disappointingly boring. It is a dull suburban tract house, ranch style, identical to half a dozen other houses on my street, but I like to think that in the 36 years that I have lived in it, it has developed some of the quirkiness of its inhabitants, enough to make it somewhat unique on my block. Over these three decades, the other identical houses have also developed their own peculiarities. Porches and decks and Arctic entries (a particularly Alaskan thing) have been added. The neighbor across the street has lifted his house and built an entire floor full of rooms beneath it. Another neighbor has put an observation deck and little tower on his roof. The neighborhood, so dull and colorless in the beginning, has finally started to show a little personality.

But my favorite houses, the houses that stay in my mind, the houses that capture and stimulate my imagination, are always weird houses, houses like no other houses. And I have always had this obsession with peculiar dwellings. When I was in the first grade, I concocted a tale for my fellow first graders about my own house. I told them that I lived in a tree house, high up in the branches and, each day, as I talked about my tree house, it grew more elaborate and fantastic in the telling. Inspired by the treetop homes of The Swiss Family Robinson and Tarzan, I enthralled my youthful listeners with tales of my unique home, until finally one of the girls in the class (It is always a girl!) said, “Uh uh! You are lying!” That was the beginning of my dramatic fall from grace. It had apparently never occurred to anyone else that I was lying (not even to me) but when that germ was introduced into the classroom, I was suddenly in disgrace, as everyone immediately began to realize that they had been duped. But no one was more shocked than I. I never thought of it as lying. I thought of it as story-telling. But the truth is, I wanted to live in a tree house. Or, sometimes, in a hole in the ground, like Bugs Bunny. Or, sometimes, in a huge haunted gothic pile, like in the scary movies. Any place, really, except in the boring suburban frame house in which I lived.

It all may have started with my aunt and uncle’s wonderful antique house in rural Virginia. Theirs was my very favorite house as a child and I loved exploring it. Built in 1810, it was a huge house (particularly to a child) with large, stately rooms; high ceilings and a fireplace, with great chimneys, in every room. Large, beautiful, and elegant as it was, it was its eccentricities, its nooks and crannies and promises of secret passages and hidden stairways and secret rooms that intrigued me most. There was, for example, a case of narrow, steep wooden stairs that wound precariously from the kitchen to a small hall upstairs. A door opened onto this kitchen staircase and another closed at the top. Just the idea of doors gave the staircase a hidden and secretive quality all its own. Then, best yet, at the top of the stairs, in the small hall or passage, was a secret room, its door nearly invisible to the eye, in which, it is rumored, the family who lived in the house during the Civil War hid their grain and other items from marauding Yankees. That room fired my imagination.

In the attic of that house, much as in Bryson’s house, there was a small case of wooden steps which led to a door which opened onto the roof. There, on the roof, was a railed platform called a widow’s walk, in which, as legend has it, women used to stand and watch for soldiers, Confederate or Yankee, coming up the road from miles away. The view up there was truly spectacular—the foothills of the Blue Ridge Mountains—and I loved just the idea of it all.

I have never been able to resist a door, a gate, or anything seemingly hidden; the nooks and crannies of old houses, the doors tucked away, the curious stairs that seem to go nowhere in particular. I was about ten years old when I first read Frances Burnett’s classic, The Secret Garden. And even though it was notoriously a “girls’” book, I read it avidly, loving every eccentric moment of it. It wasn’t the plot or the characters that intrigued me. It was the garden itself, its hidden secrecy, that drew me in. I loved the description of the mysterious wall in the midst of a large garden and of a small door hidden in the ivy; of the rusty key which fit into the door’s rusty lock, and of opening that door and stepping through it (and the ivy) into the splendid secret kept within. I wanted every garden to be a secret one.

One of the (many) eccentric traits I love about the British is that they seem to have this same mindset about nooks, crannies, and gates that go nowhere. Once, on a walk through the English countryside, meandering along a dusty path, I came upon a gate. A gate, suddenly and inexplicably. Just a gate across the path. There were no fences connecting the gate to anything. I could have easily walked around the gate on either side and continued along the path. But I opened the gate and stepped through it. It was a gate built for no purpose that I could discern. It was quite literally a gate to nowhere. A mile or so down the path, there was another one. Just a gate, going nowhere, opening onto nothing but more of the same path. Yet I cannot explain to you how delighted I was by the notion of these gates that were there just to be there. Shades of Robert Frost, who tells us that good fences make good neighbors. I think, in England, a good gate uplifts the heart, gives an odd sense of security to a large and sprawling space. Or something. Anyway, I loved them.

There were other houses in Virginia that fascinated me as a child. My parents took me to Mount Vernon and Monticello, historic homes of Presidents Washington and Jefferson respectively, and I loved both of them.

Mount Vernon I loved because it was so elegant and beautiful and so typical of its time and place. Monticello I loved for the opposite reasons: it was so bizarre and unique and quirky and so unlike any other house of its time or place.

Then there was the house which is still a great mystery to me today, a house my family always referred to as “the crazy house,” though surely it had (has?) some other, more respectable name. This was a house that we would pass while driving in rural Southwestern Virginia, a house that so enthralled and fascinated the child-me that I would badger my parents constantly with, “Are we there, yet? Are we at the crazy house, yet?” I remember that it sat on the left side of the winding rural road, a house all by itself, a house like none other in the world. Legend, according to my father, had it that it was built by a man who saw it in a dream. It was a wild, eccentric, unbelievable house, sprawling and purposeless, oddly shaped, like a house out of a fairy tale, festooned with turrets and gables and cupolas and towers and furbelows and doo-dads. And . . . well, it is impossible to describe. I used to see it fairly regularly as a child but, since then, I have never been able to find it again.

One summer, with my wife and kids in the car, I drove the roads and back roads of Southwestern Virginia until I was nearly exhausted, trying to find my magical house. But I never did find it. I have looked in Virginia guide books for a reference to a bizarre, crazy house in that area, but have found nothing as yet. Maybe someone reading this will know of my crazy house and will tell me more about it.

Many of the old Virginia houses owe their uniqueness to the simple need “to add on.” Other relatives of mine lived in a great old house with a long, long passageway that led from the house proper to the once-detached kitchen. At one time, the passageway had been open but, by the time I came along, it had long been walled up, so that it created a long series of rooms that opened one into another into another before you finally got to the last room, the kitchen. Many of the great old houses started out relatively small, then had wings added on and other appendages. One house I remember from my childhood, though I cannot remember whose house it was, was such a hodgepodge of architecture that it was made partly of wood, partly of bricks, partly of brown stones, and was so oddly shaped that I remember getting lost as I wandered around it. But being lost in that house was the greatest of fun.

As I grew up, my fascination with eccentric houses never abandoned me. As a teenager I lived in Europe, where great houses and castles abound. Castles have always thrilled me. When I was 13, I lived in a house in a small German city where, from my bedroom window, I had a great view of a castle on a hill. I would stare and stare at that castle, day and night, and would fantasize about who lived there. On my bicycle, I would roam the hills around the city, trying to find the right path to the castle, but I never did find it. I was too young, I think, to really explore the way I would have done in later years. But I did manage to see other castles. My parents would groan about how many castles they were badgered into taking me to.

“You see one castle, you’ve seen them all,” my father used to complain. Yet he always took me to the castles, if it was at all convenient to do so, and I never found one that didn’t thrill me.

In England, where I did some graduate study, I had a wonderful, dotty old professor (now sadly deceased) who lived in a delightfully crooked old house that was built in the 1490’s. She invited me there for a weekend and allowed me to explore the place to my heart’s content. I loved its strangeness. Its floors and walls were warped and misshapen with age, so that the house sometimes seemed to play havoc with one’s equilibrium. Its wooden beamed ceilings and wooden support posts in the middle of rooms were gnarled and twisted. Only the ground floor was equipped with electricity, heat, and plumbing; the upper floor, where I slept, embodied a leap back into the 15th century. My professor asked me if I wanted a flashlight (which she called a torch) or a candle to make my way up the warped old staircase to my room. Of course, I took the candle! And up I went, up and up, up the narrow, claustrophobic stairway to my little garret cubbyhole of a room, my candle flickering and making shadows on the walls.

Although I certainly prefer the old houses, I live in a place (Alaska) where no buildings are old. Everything here is spanking new. This could be colossally boring, except that, fortunately, creativity still exists among some home builders. The oldest house in Anchorage was built in 1915 and it is now a tourist attraction, restored to its authentic 1915 persona. But my friends in England roar with laughter at the thought of that. To them, a house built in 1915 is a new house. (Remember, my late professor’s house dates from 1490)

But there are some new houses in Anchorage that intrigue me. One I can think of is one of the weirdest houses I’ve ever seen. Really. Built in the 1980’s, it is a perfectly round house, perched on a cliff, overlooking a truly panoramic and spectacular view of mountains, glaciers, volcanoes, and inlet sea. There are no walls in the interior of the house, so that you can see anyone in the kitchen or dining room from any other room in the house. There is a bit of privacy in the bathroom, as the toilet is hidden in a little closet-like area, but the shower is the most eccentric thing in the house. The shower is all glass—clear not smoky—and it stands up in the center of the house, rather like a tall glass chimney. If you are showering, you are in full, clear, all-angles view of anyone else in the house, no matter which room they are in. When I commented on the eccentricity of that, my friend, the owner (a bachelor with a roommate, both males), said, “Well, we shower before our guests arrive or after they leave. We don’t shower when anyone else is in the house. Unless, of course, it’s going to be that kind of party. Then the shower is really popular.”

There is a bit of the Peeping Tom in me, I must admit. Not for any prurient reasons. I’m not interested in watching people in their houses or trying to catch inappropriate glimpses. But, at night, I can never walk or drive by a house with its curtains open without wanting to look inside. I want to see what the house is like. Every house has its own personality. When I drive through the plains and prairies of the Midwest or through the mountains of the Northwest or in the desert neighborhoods of Las Vegas, I always find myself wondering, “Who lives in that house, what are their lives like, do they know that their dwelling is unique and redolent of their own personalities?”

Like Alice trying to see through the tiny door in the mysterious house in Wonderland, I, too, want to  know what is behind every interesting door. The elixir made Alice small enough to get through that door and to embark upon her strange adventures, which led, of course, to other houses, other gardens.

And Dorothy on that yellow brick road. Didn’t you always wonder who lived in that house by the road, where The Tin Man is found in the yard; where the witch appeared on the roof and tossed a ball of fire at The Scarecrow? I did. And I also always wanted to know where Dorothy would have gone if she had taken the pink road or the blue road instead of the yellow one. And imagine all those houses that she must have passed on her way to the Emerald City. Who could have lived in those houses? What were their stories?

When I was in my 20’s, I went on a long, grueling hike through the wilderness of Alaska with my good friend, Doug. One evening, in the bright Alaska summer sunlight, we came unexpectedly and improbably upon a little log cabin by a trail by a river. The windows were open and smoke wafted from the chimney. As we approached the house, a plump, middle-aged woman appeared in the doorway and greeted us with great friendliness.

“Come in! Come in!” she said. “Are you boys hungry?”

We allowed that we were. (We had been hiking for days; we were always hungry.) She sat us down at her kitchen table and put before us two huge freshly baked blueberry pies. She had, of course, picked the blueberries herself only the day before. She had baked, she said, nearly a dozen pies.

“But I lost two of my pies to a bear,” she told us, as we gobbled and gluttoned our way through the blueberries . “I put them on the porch railing to cool and a grizzly came and ate two of them.”

Her name, I remember, was Rose, and she was originally from Brooklyn, New York. Why she was living in a cabin hidden away in the wilderness of Alaska remains to this day a mystery to Doug and to me. But after filling us up with blueberry pie and hot tea, she sent us on our way, watching us from her porch until we disappeared into the woods. I have always remembered her. So has Doug. And mostly I remember (besides the blueberry pie, still the best blueberry pie I’ve ever had) her little house in the woods by the river. It was just a small cabin, but so neat and tidy; so compact. Unlike the houses of my youth with their nooks and crannies there for no particular purpose, her house was a model of compact practicality. Everything was useful; every nook, every cranny stuffed with something useful, with dishes or utensils or tools or guns or bags of flour or sugar. Clothes hung from pegs; winter boots were stacked in a small alcove that seemed carved into the wall. It was a memorable visit.

But, like the crazy house in Virginia, I have never been able to find Rose’s house again, even though I have been in that area a few times since. It was almost as though it were a magical house, there for just a moment, with a warm and hospitable, gnome-like lady on hand simply to rescue two hungry boys with her blueberry pies.

Later, when I first read John Crowley’s wonderful fantasy, Little Big, with Mrs. Underhill, the fairy woman in the woods, I thought of Rose and her wonderful, eccentric, unlikely cabin. Perhaps even more than nooks, crannies and gates that lead nowhere, it is a dwelling’s mystery that I love; its magic that inspires me.