When I moved West 10 years
ago, there was one thing I never dreamed of seeing: a garage in my
backyard. A mountain lion, sure, John Elway and a real cowboy. But
not a garage.
I once had a garage, back East, in college.
It was handy for storing junk, my weights set and a trailered boat.
But the move to Colorado meant leaving the V-hull behind. “Where
would we use a boat in Colorado?” my wife asked years ago. (I
couldn’t answer through my sobs as my prized fishing vessel rode
off hitched to another man’s truck.)
But my wife’s garage
pitch was clever: “You can use the garage to hold your new boat.”
It would be joined by our only car. But I shivered. I saw myself
losing open space and gardening room in our modest backyard.
I enjoy parking on a Western street. I can commune with
nature by scraping ice off the car in winter, or sliding into a
500-degree driver’s seat in our ever-longer summers. I get to
contribute money to the city when I forget to move the car on
street-sweeping days. Best of all, I’m one of the few people on my
block who actually “exists” and is seen coming and going out the
front door and to the car each day. I get to see the few others who
do the same. It’s quaint.
And out of fashion.
A
garage, my neighbors tell me, shelters the car from hail, frees you
from digging out after a snowstorm, and allows you to almost kill
yourself via carbon monoxide while warming the car in January.
But a garage takes room. When I caved in to the garage
idea, I envisioned a cozy one-car thing, with plenty of room left
for the veggie garden out back. The contractor and everyone else in
Colorado laughed. “Son, you need at least a 25-by-25-foot set-up.
Property line to property line.”
“You need it at least
that big for the SUV,” one pro-garage neighbor remarked, unaware
that we drive a 14-foot-long Toyota. When one neighbor heard I
wanted a small garage, she looked at me as if I’d just stepped out
of the house in a skirt. “I thought you were a manly man,” she
said.
“Marty,” my beloved asked, “has anyone ever told
you, ‘I wish I had a smaller garage?’ ”
Garage-owning
strangers on my block (they’ve all been seeing me for years, though
I’ve never seen them — walking, that is) congratulate me on
my new “out building.” I feel like I’ve just brought a cute baby
into the neighborhood. I should place a cartoon stork on the front
porch with a sign reading, “It’s 440 square feet, flat-roofed,
8,000 lbs.”
Stranger still is the fact that I like my new
tool — my first electric garage-door opener. The building it
opens and closes makes our little backyard private, and provides
sound deflection from barking dogs, alley-speeders and shouting
street people. The walls give me a place to grow hops.
Since discovering that a garage can be a good thing, I joke about
the testy e-mails I sent my wife during construction: “Maybe,” I
once wrote, “we should’ve moved to Highlands Ranch to satisfy your
dream of owning a Monster Garage?” My favorite: “I fear I’ll never
step into the backyard again, into the shadow of the 22-feet by
20-feet tribute to SUBURBIA you’ve spearheaded.” Silly man.
I now spend my free time there tossing darts, dreaming of
workbenches, peg-board walls and Nerf basketball games. Could we
get cable out here? A crockpot? Sometimes my wife and I sit in the
car, vintage Springsteen blasting, better beers in our hands this
time around. Stranger still, I haven’t missed walking to the curb
for weeks. Or mowing the front yard. Or opening the front door.
Even the dogs head for the back when we grab the leashes now.
Sadly, there’s no room in the Camry castle for a boat and trailer.
That would cramp the dart tournaments, or require parking the car
on the street. And who does that?
Marty Jones
is a contributor to Writers on the Range, a service of
High Country News in Paonia, Colorado. He lives
and writes in Denver, Colorado.
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