Home Truths

Home is where toxic levels of arsenic are found in the ground water...and where the heart is, no?

 

Home Truths

By

Ann Reid

 

 

A few years ago I worked as a newspaper reporter. Then, without a doubt, my lead had to address the who, what, where, when and why in a story’s first paragraph. My editor, and the readers expected this�"and I delivered. It was a tidy, get-to-the point convention that introduced things succinctly in an easily-digestible order �"and I appreciate that now even more than I ever did when I was a reporter.  Life is rarely so well organized of it’s own accord�"well, my life, at any rate.

 

In the current, central story of my life we�"my husband David and I (middle-aged and newly, second-wedded optimists) �"are the Who who are the principle actors of the story, and who, it seems, are also principally acted upon.

 

What �" well, what indeed! What do we do? What will we do? Will we continue to shuttle between the US and UK �"from one consulting or writing job to the next? Will my husband take a job that was offered here in the industrial north of England, instead of just consulting? We are already in the process of shedding our past commitments in favor of a future we can only intuit, not see. My husband signed papers to sell his farm in PA a few days ago. It is one less tie that bound him and us to PA. Will we sell our house in suburban Philadelphia? Will we settle and make a new home here? And what then? Rent? Move? Buy? We’ve only just begun to explore and discuss these “what’s” and “What-ifs.”

 

When? Well, that’s just it. We wish we knew when we’d know when we’d have some idea of “when” all this might happen or fall into place.  My husband’s been offered a new, permanent job in England�"and it was first mentioned to him almost a month ago.  Now imagine the excitement of living in the cosmopolitan bustle and verve of an international city like London. Go ahead�"imagine how cool that would be: theatre, restaurants, fashion, book stores, watching cricket in Hyde Park on Sundays, shopping at Harrods, concerts at Covent Garden and taking in the V&A Museum on a weekly basis. Bliss, right?  And then take a deep breath, click your ruby slippers and forget all about it. The part of England we’re talking about was more like post-industrial Shamokin or Scranton, Pennsylvania, surrounded by a sea of isolated Montana wilderness�"except here in the U.K. we have Heathcliff and heather instead of sage brush. Just so you know.

 

Anyway, the strange thing about this position he’d been offered is that everyone began to act as if he was already responsible for this job,  and we still didn’t know how the compensation compared to the living he made as an independent consultant, traveling between the UK, US, Estonia, Belgium, Far East and South America. When would we know if he should trade all that to settle and work in Teesside? When?

 

My husband has dual UK-US nationality. He was, after all, born in Brighton shortly after the end of the war. But he has worked in Canada and the US and has traveled all over the world for the last 30 years. Was it time for him to return home to the UK and become a permanent resident again�"as his aging parents and loving sister hoped…  When would I know what I had to do? Did I have to apply for a visa, or is having married an English guy enough of a commitment to make it OK for me to stay here? Is it time for me to become a dual citizen, too? Will they let me in??? When will I know enough to broach the subject with my 23-yer-old son and 80-something year-old mom and aunt in Philadelphia�"as well as my friends? Yikes!

 

Also-- Where will we live?

We rented what we thought was a lovely, semi-detached house with big bow windows, just under the viaduct on West Street in the small village of Yarm.

A few weeks later, on the same day that I returned from a trip to pick up the mail and see my son in Pennsylvania, I went to the Spar up the street to buy milk and there was a copy of the Evening Gazette blaring the headline: TOXIC HOMES! The story sited our address and pictured our parked blue Mini and rented house among the 6 others built on or around toxic waste generated by the long-defunct Gas Works, which was located in what was now our home.

 

It turned out that the people who rented the house to us knew there was a problem and that the house was being investigated due to preliminary findings of high lead and arsenic levels in the soil and contaminated ground water.

 

But they never said a word about it to us when we signed the lease in March. It was the newspaper and the neighbors and the environmental testers sampling the water and the soil in the driveway and our courtyard who told us.  After the newspaper article appeared, I went to the Stockton Council to get the report I read that they’d prepared. The man mentioned in the article as the chief investigator  was very uncomfortable�"he and the Council really didn’t want to withhold the information, but the couple that owned our house had instructed them NOT to give us any information about the situation at all.

Oh really, I thought, beginning to redden with rage.

 

The man shifted uncomfortably in his chair. He didn’t know which way to turn. Finally, I’m afraid, I was growing impatient with his oh-so-very-polite evasions.  Suddenly, without expecting or planning to, I found myself saying in a voice reminiscent of the slow, even-handed, powerfully sensible, through increasingly exasperated basso profundo of Haas Cartwright (the big, bear of a cowboy in the 10 gal. hat) on vintage Bonanza TV shows,  “Well, I don’t know how you folks do things around here�"but where I come from you could be sued for collusion, and for withholding public information from a tax-payer and resident… Now, why don’t you save us both a lot of trouble and just turn that report over to me. You know it’s the right thing to do�"and I assure you, I’ll get it in the end. So why don’t you just save us both the unpleseantness…

 

I think Hass would of said something like,  “ Save me the unpleasantness of skinning you alive and stretching your worthless- document witholding hide out on a rack in the blistering sun, and feeding your entrails to the coyotes and criticizing yer ma’s looks and yer pa’s lack of book learning…” But since the closest I’ve been to the Ponderosa was a fifty-cent pony ride around a grassy baseball diamond at the Wissahickon Fire Company June Fair, I didn’t have a enough cowgirl in me to go as far as Haas might have gone… but just enough to make the Council guy wonder… and enough to compel him to turn over the report. Which, after a long, uncomfortable silence, he finally went and did.

 

I also found out that the only reason the people rented the house was because the buyer who wanted to purchase it could not get a mortgage while the investigation of contaminated ground water and toxic soil, issues of liability, remediation and possibly even demolition of the 7 houses on West Street had not been resolved.  So, the young couple who owned this house and had already bought a new one a mile away were stuck�"big time. Their solution was to rent the house to us�"out-of-towners who knew nothing about any of this�"and to tell the Council not to tell us anything. Amazing. Truly amazing!

 

 So… what now? I remember asking myself, and anyone else who would listen. Where would we live? Where did we want to live? Where would we go?

 

Also, WHY would we allow ourselves to be subjected to so many uncertainties at this stage in our lives?  Why on earth might it be worth it? I’m still wondering how we finally figured it out some 7 years, 8 moves, and two continents later.

 

At the time, I wished I could have answer that question. But not knowing what was on offer, exactly, it was hard to say. All I know is, at that time, whatever the uncertainties, we were certain that the quality of living in our new-found English village , to our amazement, captured our hearts. We loved the nuzzling North Sea breeze, succulent raspberries from York bought on a walk to the greengrocer on the High Street. We forever marveled at the friendliness and the goodwill of the people in the village�"landlords and Town Council member excepted.  We were enchanted by the white-capped sea and the sweeping, heather-tinged moors and green velvet dales of Yorkshire. We liked local pubs, pub grub and talking with people we’ve never met before over a pint of (amazingly) tepid lager. We loved the rambling roses and the riots of color exploding from hanging baskets and window boxes everywhere you turned. We liked when we heard that it was 98 degrees in Philadelphia, and that it was 55 degrees there�"and we were quite comfortable, thank-you very much. We loved inexpensive kippers from Tesco. We love the books of the week and afternoon and bedtime read on the radio.  We loved that first class mail actually traveled as fast as if it were on a Concord, and that people there are so used to such good service they don’t consider it a big deal. I was proud of myself for learning to drive in the moors without hitting the sheep --which was never part of the Pennsylvania Driving Test, I can tell you that!

 

For all these and many other reasons, we felt, at that time, that we were in the right place�"a place that we both came to for the very first time �" together--even if it was Scranton in a sea of heather-tinged Montana wilderness. What we realized, in the end, was that it was a place that despite the uncertainties, that felt more like “home” than the separate, long-standing homes we both had recently come from.  We were in love and we we were together: This must be "home." And even if we couldn’t say why, when, where or even exactly how this had happened to us, it had.

 

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Reviews

[Samuel Dickens]

Another engaging tale. I've always felt a close kinship with England, partly because of my name, but for other reasons as well. Home is where the heart is, and it sounds like you've chosen yours.