Out of the arcives, a memoir of days gone by.

Aaron Smith

English 111 F05

9/25/03

Personal Essay

The Parish Clan

19140 Randal Road: I’m sure this sounds like just another random street address somewhere in the great American suburbia, I can tell you, it isn’t. This humble two story house twenty miles outside of balmy Juneau, Alaska has been a place of learning and growth for me. It’s been almost eleven years since my mother moved into the residence of Mr. David Jo Parish. Though I’ll admit now that originally I was less than thrilled with the idea, this house and the family dynamics I have witnessed eventually proved to serve as a standard that I will judge my family against. The work I did, the tools I used, even the house itself and all of its intricacies have shaped me. Though no tool has had an impact above that of the people I came to know living there.

My stepfather, for example, Dave, values himself to be quite the weekend warrior, regularly fending off such demonic works as rotting staircases, iced driveways, and the ever-encroaching forest that’s taken a liking to our yard, annually requiring a day or so of concentrated effort to push it back. Every weekend he’s able to come up with something that just has to be done. “C’mon guys we’ve got to get the driveway shoveled before you mother gets home,” he says as my siblings and I tear ourselves away from whatever we where doing. There are golden opportunities and spiritual growth in store if you come with me.” These two phrases “golden opportunities” and “spiritual growth” were used so much that they lost their meaning as individual thoughts put together to form ideas, and became more like entirely new words that meant “In this house, room and board are free but that doesn’t mean you aren’t working for them.”

The front yard, the grassy part anyway, consists of a very neglected garden which boasts little more than chickweed and wild raspberries every year. Though our lawn is of considerable size, being large isn’t its greatest feature; the best part is that it’s level. Though this may seem an odd thing to prize a lawn for in the middle of the forest, I personally helped level it by dragging a massive pressure-treated timber around it, sideways, while my mom stood on it, talk about feeling like a draft horse in a lumberyard at the end of the day. I guess when it’s important to have your very own little piece of open flat Nebraska it’s important.

This piece of old black timber sticks out in my mind like a pick would to in the mind of an industrial era coal miner. It’s a tool that makes your job easier but that doesn’t change the fact that you’re under-paid, union-less, and rapidly developing black lung, or blisters in my case. The garage is filled with “teachers through suffering” like that old timber.

Another fine example of such tools is one of my favorites, called a digging bar. The ground in Juneau, or at least around our house, is mostly decaying soil intermixed with large rocks topped off with a massive system of intertwining evergreen roots. To get any digging done, you often have to hack through the roots and either break or pry the rocks out of your way. This is where the digging bar comes in. The digging bar is a hexagonal, seven-foot rod made from solid steel one and a half inches thick. This fearsome monolith weighs about twenty-five pounds and has a round spear-point on one end and a wider flat chisel-point on the other. Whenever we have to do any serious earth moving, Dave says, “Go get the digging bar.” When I see this solid steel earth breaking monolith come out I know it’s going to be one of those ‘two shower’ days. Though the contents of the house have some stories to tell the house itself does as well.

Until 1985, when Dave completed the house, his first wife and their three kids were living in what is now the garage. There’s still a bathroom and a little bedroom down there that are like relics from a past age. The toilet is used so rarely that the water evaporates between flushes. The garage, however, isn’t the only place with an interesting history.

There is a massive room on the north side of the house that was originally supposed to be a sunken master bedroom. Sadly this dream proved to be impractical after Dave’s next kid came along, and especially after my brother and I moved in. Fortunately this was only a minor setback to someone like Dave. He just shrugged, smiled and did what needed to be done. First he raised the floor by building a second floor over the first that leveled the bedroom off with the room just outside and then he put up a wall that split it into two good sized bedrooms. These rooms where delegated to Julia, who is four years older than me, and Bahiyyih who is barely younger than I am. With this little addition there was a space left between the old floor and the new one. My overly inquisitive side became apparent to me for the first time when my devilishly crafty sister, Bahiyyih, and I discovered the trap door that led from her room into the forgotten area between the old floor and the new one. Though the space wasn’t quite big enough to sit up in it was big enough to crawl through quite comfortably. The area quickly came to be known as “UNDER THE FLOOR” (thunder claps, organs play). This place became similar in stature to the tunnels that run throughout UAF.

The great thing about being under the floor was that A) our parents never looked for us there and B) Bahiyyih and I could use it to get into Julia’s room as the rooms where only split from the new floor up. Honestly I don’t remember there being anything terribly interesting in there, I think it was just cool that we figured out how to get into her forbidden room without her knowing. Sadly the authorities, namely Mom and Dave, eventually found out about it and sealed it off. Now whenever I have the urge to explore my first “adventure into the great unknown” comes to mind.

The growth I have experienced in this house is from a blended variety of sources with one exception, the man of the house. My relationship with Dave has been more like an apprenticeship than the classic father-son duo portrayed by modern American culture. Having spent hours as his gopher (go fer this and go fer that) taking tools to him from the garage to wherever he’s working I’ve discovered that there is no limit to what the human mind and enough willing troops can accomplish. At the peak of its size, the David Parish workforce numbered eight plus himself. Nine people may not seem like a whole lot, but. I’ve seen two-and-a-half acres of the most hellishly wet, devil’s-club-infested land that hasn’t felt human presence in years cleared in about a week, using little more than mismatched gloves and machetes so rusty they make crayons look like scalpels. I’ve seen a 2000 square foot driveways cleared of more than two feet of snow and an inch of solid ice in an hour. I’ve seen entire septic systems replaced in a matter of days with only three of us. I’d like to see the “Jones” and their new plasma TV get their 2.2 children past mismatched gloves.

The unfortunate, or perhaps fortunate, thing is that no matter how much I despised Dave ripping me away from whatever computer game had absorbed my soul at the time, I always learned something and could victoriously look out over what ever battlefield I just left knowing I earned my sore back and splinter-filled hands. If 19140 Randal Road and its host of characters have taught me anything it’s the power of human endeavor and the intrinsic reward of perseverance.