17 Eagle Street

A piece of writing I did for a school project this year.

You know how sometimes you see people and you just wonder what’s going on inside their head? Trying to actually comprehend other thinking beings can be so difficult. But that’s what makes it so intriguing. Trying to figure out if the sorts of stuff that goes in your head goes on in other peoples’ heads too leaves me a little bit mind-blown. Sometimes, I feel as though humans can’t be the only ones with thoughts and feelings, like pets obviously have something going on in there that makes them run and fetch and play and sit, and generally do what we tell them. I never thought I’d think the same about a house, but that was before I first saw 17 Eagle Street.

17 Eagle Street was probably a beautiful abode once. It has a beautiful balcony, and the adjoining second floor must have poked its colonial head above the rooftops of early Karori. Now it looks abandoned. A rusted out red sedan lies dead in the driveway. Grass is growing out of its tyres, and it sleeps in the shadow of the enormous blackberry bushes that lord over what was probably once a lawn. That was long time ago though, given the state of the half buried lawn mower that’s tangled in the base of the bushes. The garage door would have looked pretty slick when that coat of red paint wasn’t 50 years old and mostly in flakes on the footpath rather than on the door itself. I don’t think it was designed to hang bent on its hinges and sway back and forth with the wind like that.

At first I was sure it was abandoned. But 17 Eagle was one of those houses that made me wonder what was going on inside. What dramatic tragedies had this place seen? Probably none, given nothing exciting ever happens to me, but I had to find out. As someone said in a book I read but forgot the name of, “Adventure Beckons”, and beckon it did.

There was one thing that didn’t seem quite right. There were, and still are, cardboard boxes and various sizes and shapes of bottles, all filled with water, littered all down the path beside the house. There were also cardboard boxes filling the garage and the corpse of the sedan. I couldn’t shake the feeling that they were the first piece of the puzzle that was 17 Eagle Street.

I walked past there every day for a week before I worked up the nerve to take a closer look. I stalked about 5 metres down the path the first time, which put me just far enough to see the door. Surprise surprise, it was barricaded by cardboard boxes. Something was definitely up. If this house had just been left, then why were all the cardboard boxes there? I didn’t understand, and it ate at my mind for a few days. I lay awake trying to figure it out. It looked abandoned, except for the boxes and water bottles, which simply didn’t fit. But if it wasn’t abandoned, that meant someone was in there. But if so then why was the place so neglected. I couldn’t figure it out, maybe some old guy was dying in there, but that didn’t seem quite right in this day and age.

So I watched. I watched and waited for a sign, for the house to tell me what it was thinking. When it came, it changed my definition of life. It was cool evening, I was on my way back home from my paper run, so it was starting to get dark. As I walked past I looked briefly up at the house and did a double take. There was a light on. That meant two things, someone was in there, and they could move around. It was when I saw that light, when the house spoke back for the first time, that I figured it out. He was preparing for the apocalypse, the seemingly inevitable collapse of modern society. The cardboard boxes were left over from his hoarding of supplies, the water was there for obvious reasons. He must have let the place fall apart so that in his future world where we turned into savages, no one would expect anything and come looking for trouble. He was a survivor.

But it started on a train of speculative thought. This mystery man was living out his days in the shell of a home whose homeliness had been sacrificed. He was ‘alive’ but he wasn’t ‘living’. What is life if we spend it tucked away, fearing the end? If something like that comes, we can never be ready for it, so why waste our lives waiting for something that might not come anyway? 17 Eagle Street taught me that life isn’t breathing, life is doing, interacting. Like the house did with me. So I’ll always be grateful to 17 Eagle Street, even though I know everyone thinks I’m crazy for saying it, it taught me things in a most literal way. Someday, I’ll repay the favour, I’ll bring her back to health, nurture her and clean her wounds. But not yet, not until my mystery doomsday anticipator is gone.