Land Hunting with Jim and Lennie (Cigar Smoke 11-27-08)

For maybe the past 30 years I have had a dream of owning a little piece of land. Nothing spectacular or expensive — maybe a few acres in the country, or a spot next to a lake. Just a place of my own.

I feel like that big, thick-thinking guy Lennie in “Of Mice and Men.” Lennie is always asking George, his conflicted buddy, to tell him about how they’ll find their own little piece of land someday. George always soothes Lennie with the story, but (spoiler alert) they never get there.

Oh, I have owned a regular house before, but that’s always felt more like owning a little piece of a mortgage. I want something special. Something unique. Even something funky. I’ll know it when I see it. Maybe a piece of pornography by a stream.
Everywhere I go, I’m always looking in newspapers to find just the right spot. Whenever I get to some town in Montana or Idaho or Oregon or Alaska, I immediately turn to the classifieds and start dreaming. But I never seem to find just the exact right spot — basically, because I’m cheap and don’t have the guts to act. If it weren’t for those two factors, Lennie and I would be sitting on the porch right now spitting sunflower seeds to the squirrels.

One time this real estate agent took me out to a cottage on a lake in Michigan. She asked me if I would like to make an offer. I said, “How does $40,000 sound?” She said, “It sounds like $240,000 less than the asking price.”

Another time I found this perfect, funky double-wide trailer up in some isolated town in Washington state. In the damn forest, right next to a river. And it was only $20,000. So what does your gutless land-dreaming columnist do? I’ll tell you what your favorite spineless excuse for a little-piece-of-land-dreaming, coward-ass dork does: He says he will “think it over” for a while. And he thinks it over for two weeks, and when he finally calls to buy it, the owner tells him he has sold it to a guy who didn’t think it over. For $15,000!

I would have killed myself, but luckily I had to think that over first.

I’ve been searching for something for three decades now. (Some might say I’m looking for something other than a little piece of land, like maybe a friggin’ clue.) I still search the classifieds for that idyllic place. But now, because I am what? Because I am modern, I now search the Web and have become addicted to Craigslist.

Every morning, every afternoon, every evening, I pop onto Craigslist and hunt for that perfect place. I’ve got keyboard bruises on the tips of my fingers. And I have now physically gone out on three searches that my Web-surfing fingers have pointed me to.

A couple of weeks ago, I’m on Craigslist and I hit the California button. It takes me to a screen with all the counties on it. I go to the Humboldt County button, and damned if right off the finger-searching bat I don’t find a funky place for sale out on the Samoa Peninsula, next to Arcata, where I went to school at Humboldt State.

And I mean funky. It’s a manufactured home right on the bay. The agent and I go out there, and it is so foggy we can barely read the tsunami warning area signs. I’m not making that up, dammit! My dream home was in a tsunami danger zone. Pretty cool, huh?

Because it looked so promising, we wanted to go inside, but something stopped us. The urine stench. We opened the door, and that smell rushed out like an escaped convict, baby. We took a whiff, and then we took a hike. The last thing that smelled that bad had police tape around it.

My damn dream has been jolted again. But I don’t give up. I go up the coast to Crescent City and I find this really cool house right next to the ocean at the mouth of a rushing river. It’s beautiful. Ocean waves pounding, otters and seals lounging on the sand spits and rugged rocks, and redwoods on the hills behind the house. And best of all was that my new address would be 12544 Mouth of the Smith River. Wow! Can you believe that for an address!

So did I buy my dream house? Well, the price is a little higher than I wanted, and I guess I’ll have to think it over for a while. So, I’m still getting my mail at some loser address in Altadena.

I guess you all know that in the end, George had to shoot poor Lennie. It was very sad. While he was telling Lennie the story about the little piece of land for one last time, George put a bullet in Lennie’s head.

And just before Lennie died, he turned to George and said, “Would you check Craigslist for me in the morning?”