Dwelling
EDITOR’S NOTE: Following is Chapter 12 of “Adrift in America: Diary of a Minimalist Mariner,” a work found in the nonfiction section:
Biddeford, Maine. May 31, 1986.
The most basic characteristic of a dwelling is not the materials it is made from but the fact that they form an envelope between the occupant and the outside world.
That’s the first thing I learn after I move from an 11-room house into a four-cylinder truck that looks ridiculously small in the circular driveway of the old mansion. This house, with double-bricked walls so thick you can sit sideways in the window sills and a granite cellar that can hold a February chill prisoner until August, makes the daily changes of weather a silent phenomenon to be observed with aristocratic indifference through the panes of the heavy casements. The truck, on the other hand, turns out to be reptilian in its comforts. The air temperature inside a truck, I realize as soon as I have to think about it, is never more than a few minutes from the temperature outside, and the elements are never more than a few millimeters of steel, fiberglass or plastic from entering the cabin. You don’t appreciate just how much velocity raindrops can develop in an eight-mile plunge from thunderhead to earth until they explode in mushrooms three inches above your head as you try to crank the roof vent shut.
But that’s OK. The envelope performs its function. The fiercest rainstorm in the world is no match for a truck, which simply imposes its contour into the downpour and turns the clattering pellets of water aside in obedient rivulets. That’s just the way metals and polymers are. And I will learn in a few short months that when those materials enclose a relatively small air space, even the most insidious chill – in Maine, it likes to slither around at 20 or 30 below for a while every winter – can be banished from that space, given some simple insulation, by an electric space heater or gas stove burner in the same few minutes that it took the warmth to escape.
The envelope’s function goes beyond the physical. I can sit in a supermarket parking lot so close to people that I can hear the key sliding into the lock of their car door, yet the walls of the truck keep me as anonymous as the boy helping my temporary neighbors empty their grocery carriages. If passersby do notice me sitting at a window, they would no more intrude with as much as a stare than they would expect me to get out and slide into their back seat.
The envelope can be any size. In one sense, it can be so compact that it can be folded and put away in a pocket, provided the denominations of the currency in the billfold are large enough. A more common envelope is carried on the back and pitched at night.
Traveling south out of Denver one day, about eight months before I get my truck, I meet a guy named Steve Lutes who wears his envelope.
– Sid Leavitt
Posted in Uncategorized |