Well this FB memory brought back some---memories. When I wrote this ten years ago, I never imagined living in NY. I never really imagined being retired because I could not imagine Pete not doing the work that he loved. Now we are retired and he's doing great while I feel unsettled and aimless without work to be done. Pete still wears the Rocking C hat that our client Bob had made. I am very grateful that we survived the "downturn" which is what politicians and journalists call something they are not actually living through.
Last weekend, we turned down a familiar road. Familiar because Pete designed it. Many years ago, a guy named Bob called and asked if Pete could design a subdivision for him. Not an unusual request since heās designed hundreds of places for people to live. What made it unusual was that the guy wasnāt a developer. He was a chiropractor. His wife was Grace and she was one of those crystal-wearing aging hippie types. Once we got to know them better, she kept giving Pete the same gift whenever he met with themāblack and white sketches she had done of raccoons. You would not think you could come up with so many different poses for raccoons but Grace somehow managed.
Bobās connection with the land was also not the norm. Usually, a developer just buys land because itās available. Bob had the land because it was his. The land had passed through generations. The only house on the land was a modest ordinary place that only meant something to Bob because it was his childhood home. He had wrestled for years with the idea of developing the 300 acres that were home and not justāa product. Finally, he chose Pete because he trusted that Pete would help him realize his vision for his birthright land.
Bob was so excited. He was involved in every detail. He and Pete designed roads that followed the topography. The lots were going to be big. Big enough, and rural enough, for horses. Dogs could roam and come home tick-covered. He wanted a pond and Pete said that the views and the lots were going to be beautiful enough that we might even move there. Bob named it the Rocking C. He had hats printed with the Rocking C logo and gave one to Pete. He also wrote a fiction book about cowboys or mountain men or something frontier-ish. He was going to self-publish the book and wanted me to read it and write a back cover blurb. I never read it but Pete did.
This was sometime around 2007 or 2008. As you might remember, things kind of fell apart right about that time. The housing market crashed right after the roads had been put in and Bob had sunk all of his savings into the construction. That land. He lost it all. The 300 acres that had been in his family for generations are now owned by the bank. Bob moved away to some town that needed a chiropractor. The raccoon prints are long gone. We havenāt heard from them in years.
I donāt often speak about that time, but our cycle ride along those beautiful roads brought it all back to me. We were part of that housing bust. I would guess that 85 to 95% of Peteās business was designing subdivisions. So what do you do when you lose 95% of your business?
First, you think it will just be a blip. It never occurs to you that all of your clients will let their subdivisions that Pete had designed go back to the bank. It never occurs to you that all of your clients will justādisappear. Go bankrupt. Retire. After a while, you realize that the business you had spent 15 years building was suddenly dead. You have a daughter in a fancy art school in Brooklyn and a son at Harvard Law.
You realize that you had better come up with a plan, any plan, to pay the bills. You lay off your one employee, but you make sure that he lands on his feet. You get him a job with an engineering firm so that he still has a steady paycheck and a retirement plan and health insurance and paid vacations while you yourself are waiting for the phone to ring with any work. You hear that this guy, whose career you saved, is calling your clients trying to poach what little work you have from them. You will never forget that.
I kept writing on Tumblr, buying groceries, and reading books, but I also started selling things on Craigslist. A refrigerator. Office furniture left from when we moved our office back home. Shoes and shirts. An old boat and a bike. Pete started landscaping. I helped. It was awful. We were too old and too out-of-shape, well, I was anyway. I remember planting hundreds of plants in a backyard on a Labor Day. I was crying. We moved 11 tons of rock from a neighborās driveway to her backyard in heat that was over 100 degrees. We had to wheelbarrow the rock down several stairs and I stood behind Pete and held on to his belt so that he wouldnāt get going too fast down the stairs. I cried then too.
My brother had a connection at the Claycomo Ford plant. Pete started driving cars from the factory to the mammoth parking lots. Since he was non-union temporary help, we never knew if he were going to work that night until they would call. Sometimes theyād call him in at 2 or 4 or 6 in the evening. Heād work all night, drive home in the early dawn, go to bed for a few hours, and get back up to see if he had any real workāthe work heād been trained to do. While he was working, Iād be sleeping. While I was working, heād be sleeping. We went from a couple who saw each other 24 hours a day to two people passing in the hall either just waking or just sleeping.
Finally, we had to sell my Prius, my second favorite car ever. After we sold it, we treated ourselves to McDonalds. I was crying so hard that snot was rolling into my Diet Coke. Sometimes we drive by that McDonalds and I get sad all over again. I really did love that car.
I tried collecting money that our former out-of-business clients owed us. They said that theyād lost the land; theyād lost their business. They certainly werenāt going to pay us what they owed us.
We were still the lucky ones. We kept our four-bedroom four-bath house. We still had a car (Caitlinās from high school) and our truck. We had cable and internet and food and air conditioning. We never touched our retirement money. We cut back and cut back some more and, with time, housing came back.
Things got better although weāll never recover what we didnāt earn in those four or five years when our business went from 100% to 5%. Most of our original clients didnāt survive so we had to rebuild from scratch. So we did. Pete is so busy that he works weekends. Weāve had some wonderful vacations in the past few years. But weāre carefulāmore careful than we used to be.
Caitlin told me recently that, now that things are better, sheās grateful for what happened. She said that she thinks a lot about what happened to her parents. Her parents with the rock solid business that suddenly wasnāt. She said that she is, now, all too aware of how quickly things can go bad. She is careful (maybe too careful) with her hard-earned money.
Last weekend, we rode over the land that used to belong to Bob. Itās still called the Rocking C. Some people have bought lots on that land. Theyāve built big houses. The pond hasnāt been put in and never will be. The real estate agent who is selling those lots has no idea that this was Generational Land. That this land belonged to a family whose boys hiked and hunted across the land with their tick-covered dogs.
Last weekend, we started to watch 99 Homes, a movie about all those who lost their homes during the Great Recession. We watched for about ten minutes and I said, āPete, I canāt watch this. Itās too hard.ā It cut way too close to the bone. A few months ago, we watched The Big Short which told the story of Wall Street and bankers and all those who went about their lives while ours crashed.
Sometimes we laugh about moving all that gravel down the stairs with me anchoring Pete with his belt. Sometimes we laugh about him driving cars and me selling a refrigerator.
But itās really not that funny. And we were the lucky ones.
(After we stopped watching 99 Homes, we watched Everest which was about those who died on the mountain in 1996. As I watched it, all I could think was that, however bad things got, I never had to climb that fucking mountain. And, for that, I was very very grateful.)
