Eleanor Whitney
In 1969 my Dad purchased 13 acres for a borrowed $11,000 on Arrowsic. A seemingly remote Maine island, it had been inhabited by the Abenaki Indians before the English settled there in the 1600s and was the site of several bloody confrontations between the native communities and the British. There, a diminutive, white clapboard lighthouse stood a lonely watch over a dangerously rocky section of the Kennebec river as it churned relentlessly towards the Atlantic. Granite crags jutted into the river, where twisted, windswept pines clung to shallow soil. Cattails whispered in the gray green marshes while osprey circled above.
The island felt isolated in time and place, despite being just across the river from a busy naval shipyard in Bath. It was connected to the mainland by a series of 1950s green steel bridges that spanned “upper hell gate,” a branch of the river full of dangerous rocks that had been widened by the army corps of engineers in the late 1880s. It was this geography that had given the island its original name, Arrowseag, meaning “place of obstruction” by the Abenaki.
My father, a forester, had been hired by the owner of a large swath of land on the island to subdivide and sell it. When my father first visited the island he stood in a field on top of a small rise with brush that reached above his waist, looking down across sumac and pasture pines to the Kennebec river. Two bald eagles soared overhead. “Well, if this isn’t a spot,” he thought.
The lot he bought included the overgrown field and a forest full of stately pasture pines that overlooked a salt marsh that turned golden in the fall. The woods were bisected by stone walls marking old property boundaries and one could still draw water from a well in the field with an old metal hand pump.
In 1979 my parents built a single room cabin they considered their wedding present to each other. “Well, I paid for it,” my Dad remarked, “But it was ours.”
“Maybe it was his to me,” my mother conceded.
The cabin had been designed on a napkin by an architect who had bought the neighboring lot. It had a huge picture window looking out onto the salt marsh, but no insulation, heat, or running water. The center of the cabin featured a wood burning stove, which heated the place up to sweaty hot on winter nights, which were sometimes so cold that frost would collect on the nails inside. The property also featured an outhouse, designed and built by another neighbor, which cost $500. “It was expensive for its time,” my mom explained, “But it was a nice outhouse!”
For me, the cabin was a place of rural childhood dreams, and of refuge and escape for my parents. There I could run wild through the woods pretending to be astride a unicorn pegasus, build sprawling tree forts in the pasture pines, and painstakingly construct imaginary homes: a stick lean-to for my Eeyore stuffed animal — forever my spiritual sibling with his sad-eyes and sighing cynicism — and “fairy houses,” ephemeral constructions of leaves, blades of grass, and woodland flowers. My parents and I took canoe trips, raked leaf piles, went skiing and snowshoeing, and took hikes through a mossy, mysterious woods to the small lighthouse. This was the kind of Maine idyll my parents must have pictured when they moved to the state for good from Boston in the late 1970s.
I can still remember every detail of the cabin: the tarnished silverware we kept in a wicker basket under the counter, the crocheted, rainbow wool blanket on the mattress in the loft where my friends and I slept, and the fold out, yellow canvas captains chairs that sat around the blonde wood trestle table that had been custom built for the space.
When I was a teenager we moved from a suburban village to a more rural one and used the cabin less and less. I left home for the west coast and then, later, for college in New York City where I settled in Sunset Park, Brooklyn in 2002 and never left.
In many ways, moving to New York was an escape for me, much like the cabin had been for my parents. The city was a respite from Maine and from my family which both still felt too constricting, conservative, and set in their ways. I craved New York’s expansive possibility, the way it beckoned me to wander forever, and the possibility to grow into who I wanted to be, separate from my parents’ expectations. This must have been similar to the way that moving to Maine felt to them in the 1970s.
Part of me imagined adulthood meant shaking off my parents and all the contradictions and complications of our relationship. Yet even as it was expansively diverse and far from Maine culturally and politically, the reality of the city felt stifling — increasingly expensive rents, exhausting commutes, jobs that never paid enough or satisfied the ambition that drove me to New York in the first place. Still, in 2009, towards the end of the recession, I faced the reality that my life, career, and friends were all in the city and I adabonded my plans to “someday” leave New York City for Paris or the West Coast or somewhere I had yet to imagine. My parents stepped in with a proposal: they were selling the cabin and the proceeds from those 13 acres could help me buy a one-bedroom apartment in Sunset Park. I encountered the building one morning, biking to work. It was on top of the highest point in Brooklyn, across the street from the park, a six-story pre-war building from the 1930s with a banner out front boasting newly renovated condos.
I looked at the fifth-floor apartment on a Sunday afternoon, and even though it was half-finished, the original, 1931 parquet floors beckoned, shining in the golden hour light and I knew it was the place.
I could picture where I would place my desk to write, how the open kitchen and living/dining room would host parties and houseguests, how I could sink into the bathtub and rest my head on the cool marble bathroom walls, how I could fill the west-facing bedroom with plants. My parents drove down the next weekend to look at it with me and afterwards we sat at a picnic table in Sunset Park and wrote up the offer letter. My mother insisted that we add a closet to the bedroom, an addition I would always call “mom’s closet.” My parents jokingly called the apartment “camp Brooklyn,” and I marveled at how 13 acres of Maine woods and fields could suddenly be reduced to 840 square feet in South Brooklyn. On the day I moved in my parents loaded up our 1996 Chevrolet pick up truck and drove the seven hours to New York, navigating the BQE and all its potholes with the back of the truck filled with furniture, among them the trestle table and captains chairs from the cabin and a mid-century teak desk and lounge chair my Dad had bought in the mid-70s after the end of his first marriage. Over the next ten years I packed friends elbow to elbow around the table for dinner parties and brunches, covered it with pamphlets and fliers for neighborhood political gatherings, and argued about how best to care for the wood with an adamant and alcoholic ex that I later threw out of the house. For Christmas in 2009 I made my parents a photo album of the apartment, including the blazing sunsets that lit up the western sky that I would climb out on the fire escape to observe, suspended five stories above Seventh Avenue on a web of girded steel.
At 4:49 pm on April 3, 2019 my phone rang. I was three weeks into a new job, working in a sun filled, historic office building in Soho at a startup. Before I picked up to hear my friend’s voice on the other end, I knew. It was a crystal clear spring day with gusty winds and my building was on fire.
As I jogged up the hill, through Sunset Park, I saw a crowd of people gathered, eyes to the sky, gawking at the six-story, brick edifice, the anchor on the corner of 44th street and 7th avenue since 1931, smoke billowing out of the windows and across the scrubbed spring sky. I listened to walls of sirens as the entire roof and sixth floor of our building that had felt so solid turned to ash and was carried away on the April wind. I filled the immediate aftermath with administrative tasks: canceling utilities, filing insurance claims, forwarding my mail, registering with the red cross, finding a rental apartment, going to therapy. I floated numbly through the city, pulling together the shreds of my life into something that looked like an existence that was mine.
I sank into the cold, dark waters of grief, a place my parents, for all their love, care, and concern, could not reach. I was cold and snappish as they offered consolation, asked questions, and suggested tasks I had settled weeks before. I lashed back, listing instead every responsibility on my shoulders, every question unanswered by building management, the fire department, my neighbors. Every phone call, text, and email I received sent my heart pounding, as I braced myself for the next bout of bad news.
The fire opened up a new emotional landscape. My parents insisted on driving down from Maine to see me. I met them in Sunset Park. I saw them before they saw me, looking frail and fragile, two thin figures leaning against the April wind that blew sharply off the harbor, silhouetted in their deep green Barbour jackets clashing with the park’s garish spring grass, the Manhattan skyline rising behind them. Through their vulnerability I saw my own. The tables had turned. My life had been bisected by before and after, and as I waded through grief, rage, and confusion, I also had to rely on myself for care, organization, and administration my parents could no longer provide and that I no longer wanted from them. I felt guilty, almost, that they had to go through this, wishing I could protect them from their own feelings about my loss. I had entered another unknown territory of adulthood. I finally was able to enter my apartment after weeks of asbestos abatement, structural support installation, and constant downpours on our now roofless building. I walked up five flights of stairs in a hazmat suit and N95 mask, the walls dank and dripping. Water pooled in the middle of the living room. The trestle table, where I had sat with my parents eating sausage and eggs and watching the sunrise over the salt marsh as a child and had served as the heart of my home as an adult, had been sawed into pieces by a contractor, reduced to mere kindling. The teak desk was buried under detritus, and plant pots were smashed and scattered throughout. The clothes in “mom’s closet” were soaked and covered in plaster, a hole punched in the bedroom wall from a burned beam.
The last time I was in the apartment, a shell of its former self, sooty and damp, the books ground to a mushy pulp on the buckling floor, the golden hour light still poured in, illuminating the whole space. If I squinted hard enough I could almost convince myself that nothing had changed.
“You’ll see that afternoon light again,” a friend had assured me, but I knew that I wouldn’t.
“It’s just stuff,” people told me and I told myself. But objects contain stories and are physical manifestations of our memories. There’s a reason we visit museums and use objects to tell the stories of our culture and our history.
I began to obsess over the objects that I could save from my apartment, as if by salvaging them from the smokey murk I could salvage my life. After the fire, these objects became a stand-in for nurturing family connections I had backed away from. Among the objects I rescued: My Mom’s leather LL Bean tote bag that her father bought for her in the 70s as she embarked on her career. Beans had originally sent a larger size bag to her by accident and he kept insisting she keep it because the bigger one was more expensive than the one she had paid for. “He always wanted something for cheaper,” she sighed. He was a banker.
My Dad’s 1956 Langlitz Leathers jacket, made of horsehide due to continued post-war materials rationing. He wore it on his motorcycle trip around the country in 1957. I only learned of the jacket’s existence when he informed me he planned to auction it on eBay, because it could fetch up to $3,000 from a collector. “Do you know what an heirloom is?” I wailed, beseeching my father not to sell it. Instead he gifted it to me. Wearing it is like donning an exoskeleton. It pushes my shoulders back and forces me to stand up straight. There’s no way to zip it up over my boobs. It’s not a worn in, relaxed leather, but one that was made for protection from road rash and whipping winds. It was the first thing I went looking for, reaching blindly into the dark, mildewing morass that had been my closet to pull it out, intact.
My Dad’s mid century teak desk with a drawer and wide desk top, perfect for arranging piles of books and papers for projects. As a teenager it sat upstairs in a hallway in our cape house from the 1700s and I sat at it to make my zines, covering the desk top with scratch and glue stains. My friends Bill and Lee carefully extracted the large desk from what was left of the “office” in my apartment, moving burned and broken furniture out of the way and carrying it unsteadily down five flights of sooty stairs. The desktop was covered in ghostly stains where my laptop and library books sat on the day of the fire. I spent nearly a week sanding the desk with increasingly fine grains of sandpaper and dabbing it with teak oil until gleamed golden, smelling of solvent and rebirth. My laptop sits in the same spectral square as my old one as I sit here to write this.
The mid century lounge chair and matching ottoman with bent walnut wood designed by Alvar Aalto, a design which inspired millions of Ikea knock-offs. A purchase after my Dad’s divorce in the 70s. He got it from a Danish modern furniture store downstairs from his office in our small, suburban town. The chairs had occupied various rooms throughout my childhood home, but I never thought about them. They were ubiquitous and so seemed without value. After the fire I couldn’t imagine my future living rooms without them — no Ikea knock off would suffice. I found a modern furniture restoration company in a warehouse on Sunset Park’s waterfront, teetering on the edge of New York harbor, as if it was about to slump in. I ordered an entire cow hide and a half for new cushions in an office stuffed with hundreds of upholstery sample books, sunlight filtering through dusty blinds, open just enough to reveal the Statue of Liberty in the distance. Heiti, who ruled the workshop with a sharp tongue, quickly explained how they would find the exact canvas for the chair backs, how they would restore the water damaged, splitting walnut frame. After the restoration, the leather on the cushions was impossibly buttery, the bent walnut legs gleamed. I sent a photo to my father. “They look better than when I bought them,” he wrote back.
The provenance of these objects was clear, the inheritance they offered me concrete, and reckoning with them was straightforward: salvage, assess, research, restore, and integrate into my new life. The provenance of other inheritances I reckoned with after the fire was murkier. The rubble of entitlement that the fire exposed was something else entirely to sort through. The fire disrupted a carefully planned financial future for me and legacy for my parents, a chain of support that stretched back generations that enabled me to assume a certain safety and comfort as I moved throughout my life. Whiteness and property have long been legally intertwined in the US. Legal scholar Cheryl Harris writes in the Harvard Law Review that its core characteristic is “the legal legitimation of expectations of power and control that enshrine the status quo as a neutral baseline, while masking the maintenance of white privilege and domination.” The fire disrupted the status quo and gave me a chance to look into the face of the supposedly “neutral baseline” of expectations I made about my life that this kind of often obscures to those who hold it.
While I continued to wait for a resolution of the building’s sale and multiple lawsuits to work their way through, I was able to leverage what assets and credit I did still have, to another 840 square feet — this time a 1958 homestead cabin on 2.5 acres in the Southern California desert. I had gravitated towards another place my parents were not connected to. Where my parents had found their grounding and escape in pasture pines and a saffron-colored salt marsh filled with the pull of the tides, the unseen ocean whispering just beyond, I was called by the arid expanse of the Mojave desert. The desert is the inverse of coastal Maine’s cold, evergreen lushness, but parts of it were once an inland sea. When I look out past my sandy backyard I see creosote covered hills, mesas, and mountains rolling like the Atlantic to a vast horizon, punctuated by boulders and Joshua Trees, spindly messengers from another world.
The house is situated on land once inhabited by the Serrano Indians, in front of a mesa studded with sandstone boulders and dark lava flows they called “Ate ‘ivyat” or “Rocky Place.” Many of the Serrano were forcibly removed or weakened by disease throughout the 1800s, and the area was opened up for homesteading after California became a state in 1850. After ranchers and miners had worked over the land, decimating the delicate balance of local ecology, the Small Tracts Act in 1938 allowed homesteads in the high desert to be parceled out on “useless” land in smaller, 5 acre lots. Veterans and middle class families looking to escape the growing population and pollution of Los Angeles for the healthy air and recreation possibilities of the desert flocked to the area, constructing dwellings haphazardly throughout the region. I marvel that my house is the same size as my apartment and I try to picture how the two would fit together, how the layouts compare, superimposing my old life on my new, or my new life on my old.
Before I had ever been to the desert and felt its pull, my parents visited Joshua Tree National Park and warned me to be careful there, knowing I was curious about it, much like they had warned me about New York City. In the desert, they warned me, trails disappear into sand and cross themselves, all the rocks and trees look the same, the heat will suck your life and bleach your bones. The Marines at the nearby base engage in war games, thudding supersonic explosions adding a foreboding quality to the landscape that felt utterly alien to an east coaster. When I moved to the desert my Dad sent me a compass. It hangs on a hook by my front door unused.
I once thought that I could shed my ambivalence about my family and frustration at their unexamined privilege by moving away, pushing myself into other environments that felt more in line with who I wanted and saw myself to be. The tension between the support I was raised with, how I resent it, the unspoken contract it came with, and a sticky web of complicity and growth is what actual adulthood looks like, not a clean break with my home and family like I naively hoped for as a teenager. I see more clearly the emotional, legal, structural, historical, and financial ties bind me to my family and my homes, and with it a tender, imperfect clarity.
But I still had to contend with the objects. Faced with a storage unit full of sooty furniture in Brooklyn and an empty house in California, I decided to crate and ship my rescued furniture west. On a June evening in Brooklyn I loaded the teak desk still covered with ash, faded from water stains, along with the plastic wrapped and pristinely restored lounge chair and ottoman into a waiting cargo van. I waved to them as the driver sped off towards the BQE. “See you on the other side” I mumbled, a quiet prayer for safe passage. I imagined them in their crate, protected as if they were museum pieces, as they lumbered across the country. It felt like a miracle when they arrived on my washboarded dirt road, intact and wrapped in plastic, ready to start their life again.
About the Author
Eleanor Whitney
Eleanor C. Whitney is a writer, musician, and community builder based in California’s high desert and Brooklyn, NY. She is the author of Riot Woman, a celebratory but critical look at the Riot Grrrl movement, and Promote Your Book, a guide to book marketing, published by Microcosm Publishing. She holds an MFA in creative nonfiction from CUNY Queens College. She currently serves as the Promotions Editor at MAYDAY magazine.
Her website is eleanorcwhitney.com/
