69: Dream House

Ira Glass

It wasn't Amanda's dream house, it was her mom's. And it wasn't one you would usually think of as a dream house. 500 people living in a 10-story building, dorm style, right in the middle of the city.

Ira Glass

Where they moved is an experiment in communal living that, at the time, had been going on for 25 years in Chicago. Nobody owns private property, everything is shared. The TVs, the cars, everything.

If you need pocket change, you go to a room called "the money office." And if they've got cash, they'll give it to you. Remember, this is 500 people.

And if all this is beginning to sound like a big socialist collective in the middle of a modern American city, let me add just one more fact to make this picture complete for you. The community? It's Christian. Run by a group called Jesus People USA.

Ira Glass

At 16, a year and a half after they first moved to this community, Amanda says that she doesn't think of herself as a Christian anymore, which, understandably, upsets her mother, who moved here partly so that Amanda would live in a Christian environment and learn Christian values. It's kind of a tense subject between them.

Ira Glass

In a way, this story is not so unusual. How many of our parents move somewhere, some dream house, some vision of a new life in a new place, moving the family with them, settling new suburbs, migrating because of layoffs and divorces, and just hoping that it's going to work out for the kids in the long run? Though kids, of course, are all about the short run.

Amanda isn't happy at the Jesus People community, but she is the exception. Most of the teenagers living there actually seem to like it a lot. And like any good parent, Amanda's mom did consult with her about the move. Amanda even agreed to move. Though, the final decision wasn't really hers.

Ira Glass

From WBEZ Chicago, it's This American Life, distributed by Public Radio International. I'm Ira Glass. Each week on our program, we choose some theme, invite a variety of writers, and documentary producers, and performers to tackle that theme. Today's show, Dream House. Stories about parents who had some utopian vision for their family's future and who built their dream houses to try to realize that future.

Act One, Meema's Adventure. In that act, a family dreams of life in rural Maine, moves there, and then, well, things start to get very complicated. Act Two, Blue Sky Dream. David Beers explains the gorgeous, modern vision that drew his parents and tens of thousands of other young families to California in the '50s and '60s to work in aerospace, and what happened when they arrived. Stay with us.

Ira Glass

Act One.

In 1976, Meema Spadola's parents decided to move from the Upper West Side of Manhattan, where her father was a math teacher, out of the city to build a house in Maine. It turned out to be a pivotal and redefining change in all of their lives. Meema prepared this story about her family's move. It's partly the story of her parents' dreams and partly a story of her own.

Meema Spadola

I don't have to guess at my parents' dream for our family when they moved us from New York City to Maine. They wrote it all down in a book. My mother actually wrote an entire children's story, 83 pages long. My dad did the illustrations, and I picked the title, Meema's Adventures. I was six.

Meema Spadola

When she wrote this the winter before we left, my mom was getting her master's degree in education. She thought that our move raised some interesting questions about early childhood development. Like, how do you help children deal with the consequences of their parents' decisions? Mom writes in the introduction, "In thinking how best to prepare my children and, indeed, my husband and myself, I came upon the idea of creating a story that we might, when the move comes, actually reenact."

Meema Spadola

That's my dad with the real beginning to our adventure in Maine. It was really his dream that got this started. For seven years, he'd been working as an administrator and teacher at a private school in New York. He didn't want to do that anymore. He was living the wrong life. He envisioned a homestead in the country with farm animals, gardens, maybe a windmill. Perfectly self-sustaining and efficient.

Meema Spadola

Her dream of our life in Maine was this. She'd bake bread, put up preserves, raise the kids. My mom was a nice Jewish girl from the Bronx. To her, it seemed like a great idea, and it didn't seem far-fetched. Dad was a country boy. His father had built their house. He'd grown up with pigs and chickens in rural Rhode Island.

But let's make this clearer. Here was his plan. We'd live in a tent while he built a house from scratch, completely by himself, on a raw piece of land on a mountain in the middle of Maine in one summer. So that was the plan. And it didn't seem crazy at all.

Meema Spadola

Our lives didn't just change. For me, it's the beginning of everything, of who I am, of who my family is today. Four years into the project, the house wasn't finished, and my parents were separated. My mother moved out. My younger brother, Emilio, and I stayed with the house, with dad. 21 years later, my mother, brother, and I live in cities, as far from rural living as you can get. My father is remarried and is the last one of us living in the house. It still isn't finished.

Meema Spadola

I look through photos with my mom of our first summer in Maine. We seemed so optimistic and playful in these pictures, our family before the fall. Mom and dad are young, good looking, working on the building site together. Emilio and I eat breakfast outside the tent and help hammer nails. There's one of us posing proudly in front of our new outhouse.

I couldn't have been happier. If dad's dream was to have a project of his own, I had my own six-year-old dream, Little House on the Prairie. And I'm not talking about that horrible TV series. I mean the books that Laura Ingalls Wilder wrote about her family's experience of moving West, building a home, and surviving blizzards, droughts, marauding wolves, and illnesses.

In New York, I'd been obsessed with the Little House books and would act out scenes from them with friends. In Maine, I got to play Laura every day. I saw everything through the filter of the Little House books. I'd pick blueberries up on the mountain, and mom would make a batch of pancakes over the camp stove. Dad would cut two by fours for the house, and I'd stand by and hand him nails. I felt like I had arrived.

Meema Spadola

In fact, when summer was in its last days, we had only a hole in the ground. There was no floor, no walls, no roof, no house.

When I look back now, I think the moment the ominous music starts is here.

Meema Spadola

In reality, when the first snow came on October 3, we were still living in the tent. And believe me, there was nothing cozy about it. The only thing we could do was set up camp in the unfinished house.

Meema Spadola

It was impossible to stay. We moved out of the house to a small summer cabin a few miles away. The pipes there were frozen, so there was no running water.

A word now about where this adventure took place. Searsmont, Maine. Population 500. You've never heard of it. You didn't go to camp there. Don't think L.L. Bean in Kennebunkport. Think Appalachia, hardscrabble, not quaint. And my dad's plan in the middle of this was to do everything himself.

At one point, he spent a week at the bottom of a 30-foot hole with a pickax trying to dig a well. We didn't have electricity or a phone then. Nothing came easy here.

Sometimes when people go after a dream like this, they make an innocent decision for innocent reasons that has profound consequences.

Meema Spadola

Let me explain because this might not seem like a big deal. A view means back from the road, which in our case means back from the road, past the field, up through the brush and trees, on the side of the mountain. Which means a really long driveway. And when I say driveway, it doesn't exactly capture this. There should be another word for what this was.

During the winter, when Emilio and I would get home from school, the sun would be setting, and we'd struggle up to the house through drifted snow. My parents couldn't get the cars up, so they'd walk up and down carry supplies and groceries on a sled.

Once it was totally iced over, and we could barely walk up and down. For parts of the driveway, we literally had to crawl on our hands and knees.

And I remember once-- and this seems straight out of some Arctic expedition. Late at night, Emilio and I were so tired, we tried to lie in the snowbanks to rest. My dad pulled on our arms and yelled at us to get up or we'd freeze to death. We all had to deal with that driveway, but it was the worst for my dad.

Meema Spadola

It's amazing that with all the construction, and machinery, and my dad's general frenzy that he didn't kill himself. There was a series of accidents. He cut his nose on barbed wire, hammered his nose, fell off staging two times, broke several ribs, collapsed a lung, nearly ruptured his spleen. And then there was the worst of all.

Meema Spadola

That's my brother, Emilio. He's 25 now. He was about 5 at the time.

Meema Spadola

If my dad had his dream of a rural homestead, and my mom had her dream of being Earth Mother, and I had my Little House on the Prairie fantasy, what's interesting is that Emilio had no dream about our move to Maine. He was just four. And as best as any of us can figure, he was the only one of us who didn't see the whole experience through a romantic haze.

By August that first summer, he was asking dad, "When are we going to go home?" Meaning home to our apartment in New York. And Dad had to tell him, "We are home."

Meema Spadola

Talking to Emilio, I was surprised. I hadn't really thought about this, but it's no accident that my mom called the book, Meema's Adventures. This was my dream, not Emilio's.

Meema Spadola

For Emilio and me, the move to Maine was the central fact of our childhood, one of the central forces shaping who we are. As we've grown up, we've found we both have our father's mania when it comes to taking on big projects. We've both worked ourselves, literally, to the point of injury.

As a teenager, Emilio tried to embrace rural life. He threw himself into rock climbing, got wilderness first aid certification, led hiking trips. He was as obsessive about rock climbing as my dad was about building the house.

Meema Spadola

Emilio's moving back to New York to get his PhD in anthropology, just six blocks from where we lived on the Upper West Side, 460 miles away from our house in Maine.

Ira Glass

Meema Spadola's story about her family's move to Maine continues in a minute from Public Radio International when our program continues.

It's This American Life, I'm Ira Glass. Each week on our program, of course, we chose a theme, bring you a variety of different kinds of stories on that theme. Today's show, Dream House. Parents who try to build a brighter future for their families, and what happens to them when they try. We continue with Meema Spadola's story about her parents' move to Maine, and what it did to their family.

To do this radio story, I went home to Maine for the first time in two years.

While I was home, my dad and I talked constantly about the house, the move, the summer of 1976. We'd never talked this much about that time. We walked the boundaries of the 63 acres of land and visited all the old sites, where we put the tent, the outhouse.

I asked dad to give me a tour of the house as it stands today. The porch in front is half completed, the floor is unfinished, Sheetrock isn't up in most rooms, the bathroom isn't done yet. And I guess I hadn't thought about this up until now, but it really embarrasses him.

These days my dad's an architect. He took pains to point out he's finished a lot of houses now, except this one.

Meema Spadola

While I was home doing these interviews, there were a lot of times that my dad got uncomfortable. And I'm embarrassed to say that I didn't understand why, so I kept pushing him. And finally, after days of this, he told me something I never understood before. We shared this experience, the move to Maine, but we didn't see it the same way at all.

Every time I talked about it as a heroic adventure, he'd just cringe. For years, he saw the move as a grim series of failures. He dropped out of college, and this was his biggest attempt to redeem himself, to make something of his own. And every snowstorm, broken-down car, every unfinished part of the house, every single crisis was a referendum on his character. No matter how desperately he struggled, things kept slipping out of his control. And even as I say this, I feel incredibly resistant to seeing it this way because it means that I have to reconstruct my entire heroic vision of my childhood.

Turns out my dad would be more comfortable if I didn't see him as the hero of an adventure story.

So we walked to see where the outhouse was. But the structure was gone, and the hole was filled in, healed over like it never existed.

My dad told me he doesn't want to be judged on that one period in our lives when we moved to Maine.

Meema Spadola

I don't think that's entirely true. For years, he couldn't work on the house. He just stopped. Like if he stopped trying, he'd stop failing. But over the course of talking about this for weeks while I put together this story, something changed. It happened after he told me about feeling like he'd failed.

Somehow after that conversation, it felt like there wasn't anything more to say about that time. And for the first time in years, my dad started working on the house again. He called me the other night. He says he's already finished the bathroom, put in a beautiful tile floor, replaced the ugly, old toilet. Sheetrock is going up.

Ira Glass

Meema Spadola is a documentary filmmaker living in New York, an hour subway ride from where she was born.

Ira Glass

Act Two, Blue Sky Dream.

David Beers

Ronald Reagan made my family's tract home into a dream home. Just about the time of his landslide reelection in 1984, Ronald Reagan knocked out the north and west facing walls of our house. He tore out the linoleum floor and the flocked ceiling of the family room. Ronald Reagan gave my mother a kitchen twice the area of the old one. He gave my father a shop of his own just off the garage. He got rid of--

Ira Glass

That's David Beers reading from his memoir, Blue Sky Dream. Ronald Reagan built his family dream house by funding the strategic defense initiative, Star Wars. David Beers' father was an aerospace engineer. And back in 1957, after the Russian satellite Sputnik scared the nation into a new defense industry boom, Beers' family joined tens of thousands of others who went to work in aerospace in northern California. Beers' father worked at Lockheed on secret defense projects through the Cold War and the Vietnam War.

Those these days the suburbs get criticized as a place of sheer materialism, Beers writes that it was not materialism that was attractive to his family when they moved out to the California suburbs. It was the emptiness of the place. It was the fact that you could create new, modern lives out there, hopeful lives, crafting new traditions.

He writes that, at one point, his mother actually decided that the family was Irish even though, really, they were only one-fourth Irish.

David Beers

Whenever I think of the house they bought and the development surrounding it, the earliest images that come to mind are of an ascetic barrenness to the streets. The snapshots confirm it.

There I am with my new friends around a picnic table in the backyard. Shirtless boys with mouths full of birthday cake. In the backyard, nothing but implanted dirt, a stripe of redwood fence, stucco, an open sky. That was the emptiness being chased by thousands of other young families to similar backyards in various raw corners of the nation.

"Didn't the sterility scare the hell out of you?" I've often asked my mother. "Didn't you look around and wonder if you'd been stuck on a desert island?" The questions never phase her.

"We were thrilled to death, not afraid at all. Everyone else was moving in at the same time as us. It was a whole new adventure for us. For everyone." Everyone was arriving with a sense of forward momentum joined. Everyone was taking courage from the sight of another orange moving van pulling in next door. A family just like us unloading pole lamps and cribs and Formica dining tables like our own. Having been given the emptiness we longed for, there lay ahead the task of pouring meaning into the vacuum.

We were blithe conquers, my tribe. When we chose a new homeland, invaded a place, settled it, and made it over in our image, we did so with the smiling sense of our own inevitability. At first, we would establish a few outposts, a Pentagon-funded research university, say, or a bomber command center, or a missile testing range. And then, over the next decade or two, we would arrive by the thousands and tens of thousands until nothing looked or felt as it had before. Yet whenever we sent our advance teams to someplace like the Valley of Heart's Delight, we did not cause panic in the populace. More likely, a flurry of joyous meetings of the Chambers of Commerce and Rotary clubs. You could understand then why families like mine tended to behave with a certain hubris.

In the spring of 1962, the Valley of Heart's Delight was covered with blossoms. Back then the cherry and plum and apricot trees would froth so white and pink that driving around the place felt like burrowing through cotton candy. Spanish colonizers had planted the first of these glades.

On warm evenings in the spring of 1962, this is what my father and mother would do. After dinner, they would place my baby sister in her stroller, and the four of us would set out from the small, used house they were renting in an established subdivision, already half a dozen years old, named Strawberry Park. We would walk six blocks and run out of sidewalk. We would pick up a wide trail cut a foot and a half deep into the adobe ground, a winding road bed of waiting blacktop.

At a certain point, we would leave the road bed and make our way across muddy clay that was crosshatched by tractor treads, riven by pipe trenches. We would marvel at the cast concrete sewer sections lying about, gray, knee-scratching barrels big enough for me to crawl inside. We would breathe in the sap scent of two-by-fours stacked around us, the smell of plans ready to go forward.

Finally, we would arrive at our destination, a collection of yellow and red ribbons tied to small wooden stakes sprouting in the mud. These markers identified the outline of lot 242 of unit 6 of track 3113, exactly 14,500 square feet of emptiness that now belonged to us.

All around the outline were piles of cherry and plum and apricot trees, their roots ripped from the ground. The spring blossoms still clinging to their tangled-up branches.

Our rite evolved with the season. Early on, my father would go from stake to yellow-ribboned stake, telling us where the kitchen would be, where the front door would go, which windows would be getting the most sun. Later, after the concrete foundation and plywood subflooring were in and the skeletons of walls were up, we would wander through the materializing form of our home, already inhabiting with our imaginations its perfect potentiality.

Within a decade after the coming of aerospace to the Valley of Heart's Delight, developers were shelling out nearly $100,000 per acre for any land left that might still be covered with blossoms. This should give an idea of the quiet force my people exerted whenever they entered a place. Power enough to undo a century-old economy and strip the blossoms from a valley once and for all.

My people did sigh at the extinction of those blossoms. But honestly, we did not mourn their disappearance in any deeply felt way. Certainly, we didn't feel guilt. We had not, after all, come to the Valley of Heart's Delight to join the circular rhythm of nature. Our imagination was linear, proceeding forward and upward. And our lines did not curve back on themselves, as did the seasons. We saw promise in the clean possibilities that arose once every blossom had been erased, never to return.

Several valleys over from ours, Joan Didion watched the coming of my tribe with dread. We moved her to write, in a 1965 essay, how it felt to be a native daughter. To have come from a family who has always been in the Sacramento Valley and to see that the boom was on and the voice of the aerospace engineer would be heard in the land. 15,000 aerospace workers, almost all of them imported, had arrived on the outskirts of Sacramento to join Aerojet General, a maker of missile boosters.

Joan Didion's family was, like the orchard people of the Valley of Heart's Delight, a family tied to agriculture with 100 years of circular rhythms behind them. Hers were a people primly insular and tragic-minded, according to the native daughter. Her valley was a place where incautious children visiting from out of town often would drown in the river, disappear forever. And the old locals would see a proper lesson in that, would say, as Joan Didion's grandmother did, "They were from away. Their parents had no business letting them in the river."

In another essay written five years later, Didion gets at the profound difference between her people and mine. She writes of "growing up convinced that the heart of darkness lies in not some error of social organization, but in man's own blood." She reveals herself, in other words, to be a pessimist about human endeavour, engineered and executed on a grand scale. How different from my tribe who would say instead, "If incautious children might drown in a river, let us erect a cyclone fence. Even drive the river underground, leaving behind a manufactured surface that was dry and safe, empty, and speaking of promise." That, after all, is what was done with the creek the ran by Clarendon Manor.

Within 10 years of my family's arrival, the Valley of Heart's Delight was no longer green. It had become a vast matrix of expressways, and freeways, and Clarendon Manors, a vast matrix of companies making technology primarily for the government. The population had grown many times over in those 10 years, and we no longer heard the Valley of Heart's Delight called that anymore. In fact, no one I knew had ever used that sentimental name. While I was growing up, my family simply had called it "The Valley." Or as it was officially termed on the government studies in the plans of various developers, "the Santa Clara Valley." It would not be until a time distant, well into the 1970s, that we would begin calling our home "Silicon Valley."

There was yet another rite of spring practiced by my family, a rite that became possible once the invasion of my tribe was all but complete, once nearly all the blossoms had been replaced by settlements like our own.

On an evening that was bright and windy, but too warm to be winter anymore, my father would come home from Lockheed with a kite or two, balsa sticks wrapped tightly with colorful tissue paper. If the next morning was a Saturday, he would put the kites together for us. Tear us a tail from an old sheet, make a string bridle that held the kite just so. Help us launch the kite, and send it up over the tract homes. For just this very purpose, my father kept what seemed a mile of twine on an enormous spool. And so the kite would climb higher and higher until it became a shimmying dot against the blue.

At that point, my father would go into his garage and make a small parachute. He would unfold a paper napkin and tie its corners to four strands of string, drawing the other ends of the string together, and knotting them around a bolt for weight. He would stick a bit of reinforcing tape in the center of the napkin and pass through that a bent pin, making a hook that poked out of the top of the parachute.

Next, my father would write our phone number on the parachute with the words, "If found, please call."

"Ready for take off?" my father would say, as he grabbed hold of the taut kite string. And then a miraculous thing would happen. Driven by the wind, the parachute would skitter up the line, joining the kite high in the sky in what seemed an instant. When it reached the top, my father would say, "Give her a jerk." And the parachute would fall away from the kite and drift in whichever direction the wind was blowing, until we could see it no longer.

Then we'd begin the wait for the phone to ring. The wait for someone to call and say they had our parachute. If hours went by, my mother might suggest a prayer to Saint Anthony, finder of lost items. "Tony, Tony, listen, listen. Hurry, hurry. Something's missing. You have to believe."

If we said the prayer and did believe, the ring would come, and someone would say, "Got your-- I guess it's a parachute here. Landed in my backyard. Almost ran over it with the mower."

My father would write down the address, and he would get out the street map. He would pinpoint our destination, and we older kids would set off on our Stingray bikes, having been given a reason to trace a route we never would have traced otherwise, so empty and so much the same was every street for miles around. We would leave our cul-de-sac named Pine Hill Court, where there was neither a pine nor a hill, and we would pedal far beyond Springwood Drive and past Happy Valley Way, ending up in some cul-de-sac we had not known existed. And there would be a man about my father's age with a similarly receding hairline and knit sport shirt. A man who seemed to be pleased at the serendipitous fun our parachute had brought into his Saturday. A man who safely could be assumed to do blue sky work for a living.

Anywhere we cared to drop a parachute from the sky, there would be someone like him. A house and a family like his, and like ours.

Ira Glass

David Beers' memoir is Blue Sky Dream.

Ira Glass

Well, the vocal stylings of Mr. John Wayne. Our program was produced today by Nancy Updike and me with Alix Spiegel and Julie Snyder. Music help today from Mr. John Connors. Today's program was first broadcast back during the 20th century, all the way back in 1997.

This American Life is distributed by Public Radio International. Our website, www.thisamericanlife.org, where you can get our free weekly podcast and listen to old shows online for absolutely free.

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WBEZ management oversight for our program by Mr. Torey Malatia, who's going to buy you a puppy--

Ira Glass

I'm Ira Glass, back next week with more stories of This American Life.

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