Turn Here Please-- a family history

Turn Here Please-- a family history

We live on a dead end road, with no fewer than two large dead end signs at the road’s inception. There’s the standard Dead End, put up by the town on a yellow background, and there’s the rather poetic and too alluring, “Road ends in private dooryard” which fairly begs tourists to come see for themselves. We can’t say Private because it ain’t; it’s a town road that gets plowed and is six inches, literally from our back porch.

So in school vacation weeks like this one (in Massachusetts at least) we get a more or less uninterrupted parade of “lost” tourists coming for a look-see. Many of them are armed with badly programed GPS systems telling them they’ll get to the ski resort a mile away (wrong) or Somerset Reservoir (dangerously wrong) if they just come down our road and insist that it doesn’t really stop in the pasture. Or that that road’s real name is Greer Place.

They are generally pretty nice. When they drive across newly seeded lawn, they apologize, especially if my husband makes an innocent appearance with the chain saw. They often just apologize for invading our space. Which I deeply appreciate.

It’s the “I’m-on-foot-so-it-doesn’t-matter-if-I-come-look-in-your-barn” types that irk me. Or the ones who bring untethered, disobedient, wildly excited and maladjusted dogs. “What a pretty spot!” they exclaim as their behemoth takes a dump in my flower bed.

“Do you have a leash for Spot?” I ask gently.

Usually not. They are in the country, on vacation, and Spot needs to run like a real country dog. So their fantasy collides with my reality.

That the apologies are a relatively new phenomenon gives me some hope that manners are improving. When I was a child, a tourist drove into our dooryard and yelled, “How much do ya want for that beat up old barn?”

The unoccupied little house down the lane was broken into over 20 times, and my father caught a lawyer from Connecticut digging up a little evergreen on its front lawn.

“What are you doing?” my father inquired.

“I didn’t know!” cried the lawyer.

“That it doesn’t belong to you?”

And so forth. Experiences like this and the ever-encroaching ski developments that have sprung up made my parents almost paranoid in their fervor to protect not only their privacy but the undeveloped woods as well.

What’s interesting is how our sense of territory changes depending on where we are. The walkers who assured us they were “just walking” as they headed across our lawn and up a path into the woods would be outraged is we arrived at their home in Darien (say) and traipsed across theirs. I am tempted to enter the beautiful Woolworth Building in lower Manhattan just to see the astonishing mosaic work in its entryway. But I don’t, because it’s no longer public; it’s a condo building with people who pay plenty for the privilege of walking in the door and calling it home.

Not only are we drawn to beauty. We covet it (“Is your house for sale?”). Some people even make the leap from coveting to claiming, as did the woman who wrote saying her daughter liked a particular spot and wanted to make her home there, that it was only right that we sell it to her.

In her book On Beauty, Elaine Scary writes that people’s natural reaction to something beautiful is to somehow copy it: to draw, photograph, or film it. All forms of laying claim, holding onto. Seen in that light, I blame the interlopers less. How many hundreds of times have I tried to capture the new green of spring or the swooningly beautiful coral of a particular maple in October? It never works.

For my parents, every trespass heralded a chipping away at paradise. And not just their little piece of it. They were prescient. Down came the trees with a sickening crack and up went bars, condos, and yes, parking lots. There are now plenty of places in Vermont that look just like any strip mall in New Jersey.

So it made a wacky sort of sense that my father painted a little sign and planted it beside our road, halfway up a particularly treacherous hill only the most foolhardy driver would attempt. It said Turn Here Please.