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Arvid Tomayko-Peters 

 

Carpentry is something I always wanted to do as a little kid. If you can believe it, my alias was "Arvid the Big Carpenter" for several years. I had a purple and white canvas tote bag that had just that written on it. "Arvid the Big Carpenter". My favorite toy was a wooden table with a vise on it into which I pounded nails until the whole surface became galvanized steel. Boy, was I in for a shock.

Maybe that is a bit of an exaggeration. I did love pretty much every minute of building our house, but I must have lived in 6 different places in that year: the Lutz’s, a huge modern mansion on the North Truro Bayside, the Fine Arts Work Center, the Hoffman’s cottage, the "Little Lutz’s" (summer house of a member of the younger generation of Lutzes), Nickerson State Park (yes, for two weeks that was the only home I had, anywhere) and "camping" inside our own house. That year my family and I including my little sister Sylvia moved about Cape Cod with the frequency of a double high C. We didn’t have a house to move into yet because we were still building it. My parents built the whole house from scratch. I helped. My parents are not carpenters, they are artists. I had always wanted to be a carpenter and now I was going to get my chance. It was, however, not glamorous. Of all those places we lived, we spent the most time "camping" at our new house ("the worksite"). I call it camping because that’s really what it was. We pitched a tent in what was to be my little sister Sylvia’s room. It was one of the only rooms in the house that had walls. We couldn’t be seen living there because it was, well, illegal. We were technically squatting. As a matter of fact, we were squatting for several years after that. The family, all four of us, slept in one tent together. The Sears tent was propped upon palettes to keep it off the wet plywood floor. Keeping out the nagging mosquitoes was a chore. My room was the kitchen. It was the other room that had walls. We had a hose coming in the window for a sink. It was our only plumbing. It spewed only cold water onto my hands. My room was also the living and dining room. We ate and cooked there. As for a bathroom, well, there was not one. There was a latrine down the hill; a hole dug in the ground. No shower. It was not comfortable, but it was home.

We were not lucky with the weather. We had lived in many places, including the Lutz’s mansion. While my family and I stayed there, the weather was fair, was as beautiful as Cape Cod weather can get. It was warm, sunny and I took frequent trips to the beach. Only now, as the family was perched precariously in its new house did it start to rain. It rained and it poured, it seemed like it was wet every day. Living in a wet tent in not fun. Nor is it fun living in a house without a roof that is wet. The only roof we had was the leaky plywood floor of the second story. Every time it rained we had to climb the ladder to the second floor to sweep the water off the floor with brooms before it could twist its way through the chinks in the floor and invade our tent. Opening the tent door after a rainstorm you would step onto a floor more like a sea than a floor. It would be wet. You would have to run upstairs and sweep off as much water as you could before the seepage wet the inside of the tent. The "kitchen" was wet. I was wet. The only dry place was in what is now my room. We had one corner lined with plastic. It was where we kept our clothes, our food, everything that could not get wet. The only shelter from the harsh and grueling elements.

There was no shower. We had to beg showers off of neighbors and friends. "Can we take showers in your house tomorrow? Please?" Father thought we could use a black plastic bag hanging from a tree: fill it with water, wait for it to warm in the sun then puncture it. We never did.

On top of the fact that we were camping in our new house, we used to be forced to "move out" periodically. Whenever the building inspector would decide to pay us a visit, we had to clear out the entirety of the house and make it look as if we were not living there. Luckily we lived frugally. It would take us several days to clear all our belongings from the house and move the tables and chairs from the kitchen. It could not look like we were living there or we were toast. On one visit the building inspector told father he knew we were living in the house. As hard as we tried we could not erase all of the signs of habitation. But, he decided not to give us any trouble if we only put a real railing on the stairs. He was nice — he could have kicked us out. That’s the way it was: move, move, move and move some more.

I remember walking to the latrine one day, a sunny day for a change. I was wearing mismatched beach-shoes (the tacky orange kind that slip on your feet if you don’t want to step on sharp rocks) that father had found on the beach. They were a right and a left from two different pairs and were slightly different sizes. I had other footwear, but these were sort of fun to wear. Flopping down the steep slope to the hollow in my eccentric shoes, I must have cut a hilarious figure. Apparently, however, the snake did not see it the same way. I was terrified. Just as I came up to the latrine, the sizeable serpent slid silently and spitefully up out of the ground. She raised her head, as if to strike and rattled her tail. ‘A RATTLESNAKE!’ I thought. I was sure it was. I was petrified of snakes. I ran and I ran. I ran so fast one of my little floppy shoes fell off. I was sure the evil thing was right behind me so I just kept on running. I remember going to my mother, almost in tears, telling her there was a rattlesnake and it tried to bite me. A rattlesnake on Cape Cod? Well, it did rattle its tail, didn’t it? Yes, but it was in fact a black racer, infamous for impersonating the deadly rattlesnake using dry leaves. That was certainly a serpentine episode.

Moving often and the challenge of living practically in the wilderness were always fun for me. Sometimes, however, my sister did not feel that way. Paranoid that we were going to move again, she would refuse to leave the house without first piling into the car a liquor store box full of her toys. What if we didn’t come back? She was only three. Bags and boxes were her favorite things besides the toys. She would carry her toys in an empty six-pack beer bottle case. If a new toy came in a bag she found it more appealing inside the bag than out. It was hard for her, trying to stay organized when the world around her was improvised from day to day. I never felt the need to be that organized (I still don’t). Mother and Father would take us to visit other houses being built to look at how they were constructed, see what the professionals did. Once Sylvia said, "Where is the family that is building this one?" She thought normal people did what we did. She thought we were a normal family. Ha! If those years living in random places and a blatantly unfinished house taught me anything, it was resourcefulness and the ability to ‘roll with the punches’ as they say. I got the feeling that you didn’t have to rely on others to make your shelter. That those who had never before built a house could do and do it well without much help. Mother and Father built it themselves (I did help a little) because we were broke, but it was certainly a rich experience.

Arvid Tomayko-Peters Squish the Squid Productions

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Arvid Tomayko-Peters Squish the Squid Productions

Arvid the Big Carpenter