Hope all is well.

I've been catching up with your recent interviews with InTheseGoingsDown. Really enjoyed the content. He is a great interviewer. You were talking about your idea of a good residence.

I have few ambitions left in life. But I enjoy picking land and properties for people based on my training and experience in agriculture and real estate. I have no desire to homestead or own property and the only reason we have that house is that my wife is not in good health and likes to collect pets.

Here are some of my criteria for a good writers lair that might or might not work for you.

Good source of water.

Imperative and not hard. Throughout the US, one can obtain sizeable tracts of land in rural areas that have good springs and large subterranean caves for less than a million dollars. I see them for sale all the time.

Alternative septic.

To keep the water source pure.

Not in the path of progress.

Most of the old men in my business who made good amounts of money did it by anticipating the path of immediate progress and buying land in front of it that they sold for a massive profit.

Also the plot of Leone's Once upon a time in the West.

Obviously this is not desirable for a long term haven for men and books.

Best,

PB

Paul, thanks for the solid tips. Caves? I never thought of caves! I do recall you showing me various high valleys in the Ozarks and bottom lands in Missouri, and commenting on how Americans tend to look at property based on the view from the property. That I think is a legacy the same as the lawn, the blood memory of us being ruled by a baron upon a hilltop fort whose wife gazed down her long nose at us over the pastures where her sheep grazed to make wool for her maid servant’s looms.

You also suggested, that Mexicans looked at land mostly in terms of its use, which I suggest might also be a blood memory of their own peonage.

I never thought about buying in the path of progress as a money making prospect, but rather of avoiding progress. Your notes above remind one to gather real estate information and reverse the recommendation, exactly what the Brickmouse did, buying that house in Baltimore City behind the outward wave of hoodrat assault on the adjacent suburbs. I suppose, just like in boxing, selecting the sustainable privacy retreat, is all about “getting offline,” taking an angle off the axis of power commanded by your opponent. In this case, the opponent is the Worme, the Dragon, Leviathan, the ever gobbling Grub Civilization.

To revisit the question, posited to InThesegoingsDown by a writer out of Europe, the author, I think of Lovecraft’s Cat, if I had a million or few dollars, and had the mind to settle down, what type of place, and where would this be?

I would have to pick a mountain side retreat in the California or Oregon Coastal Range, the Cascades, across that Central Valley to the east, or, in the high deserts of Wyoming, Idaho, Montana, Utah or Colorado. New Mexico is a bit dry for my taste. I like four to five acres, a footman’s, not a horseman’s spread. I want to be able to see the property from my small watch tower, a little shed, with two benches, for reading, writing and sighting. I don’t want the house on the highest point, but prefer the highest points wooded, up behind the house, which I like facing the north, away from where most houses, thoughtfully built, face.

Three acres of clear pasture for goats ringed by two acres of wooded ridge lines, appeals to my myopia. A spring at the foot of the watch tower, feeding a stream, that feeds a small pond, fed also by melt off from the mountain faces of such a narrow high valley comes into mind. Places of the like I have seen, such as Pages Flats in the Ceder River Watershed, would be ideal. I want a lair set in a valley that is snowed in for three months, like some in the Bear Tooth Mountains of Wyoming/Montana. To have two married couples, a brewer/gardener and groundskeeper to take care of the goats and chickens would be ideal.

The structure, would have to be a Germanic hall, of the kind I wrote in Slave., as the feudal hold of the back tier Dast Lord. In that fiction, I sketched my dream house, a place with a long table and a great hearth for friends to gather. If I was fortunate enough to afford a lair, which I have never seriously considered as a possibility, then, after these seven years a tramp, hosted by dozens of welcoming souls, I would want a place suitable to return those many kindnesses. I sit here above Boulder Canyon and Coal Canyon, in a wonderful place, embarrassed that I drink a few too many pints last night, and recall that for 17 years, I held one ambition, to pay off and retire in that little brick duplex at 4711 Luerssen Avenue, in Gardenville, Baltimore, three blocks up the hill from where my brother Gerard is buried at Holy Redeemer Cemetery, to read and write and not have to hazard the walk to work. Yet here I am, writing under the roof of a hard-working western man near the roof of a distant land. At this point, every step along the road feels further from home.

Thank you Paul, for your hospitality, and to Matt, Erique, Dominick, Blake, Queen Ruby, Punky, Major, Mo, Nero, Cutie, Zak, Herman and Dove for your welcome ways, in this month of October. Life takes on a haze.

-JL