Tender Goodbye to Special House

They’re moving out today.  

For the past year they have occupied the once elegant, Spanish-influenced bungalow that was built for William and Filomena Dutra, who arrived in our small burgh on the edge of Monterey Bay in 1938.

We’re going to miss these guys.  A “hippie rocker” and his 17-year-old son moved into the house next door a year ago understanding that it would be demolished in 12 months by the new owner. 

It’s been a temporary pad for the father, his son and a revolving door of teenagers who arrive at all hours, bringing more and more stuff: an old wood sailboat, various trucks and vans, mountains of bricks and concrete, piles of old furniture, surfboards, wetsuits and two large, shaggy white dogs that occupy the front porch and howl harmoniously like coyotes. Inside, they’ve set up a rock ’n roll music studio.

Being good neighbors, they always warn us when they will be recording, even cover the front windows with thick boards of sheet rock to contain the amplified music.

Brett moving out

The group put life into a house that had been fallow for several years since our original neighbors passed away. Today they’re moving out. That is, if they can get rid of all their stuff. If they cannot, soon the house will be gone, and I assume anything remaining will be bulldozed, scraped and hauled away. The end of an era.

I can still see Beulah and Lee, our first neighbors, in the corner window sitting at a table drinking coffee, enjoying their view and waving to us when we passed by. The wood-framed windows face southeast with unobstructed sightlines to the bay and the Santa Cruz Municipal Wharf.

They were retirees, had purchased the house from the Dutras so that they could spend their golden years near the ocean, absorbing the sea breezes and inhaling nautical aromas wafting from the wharf where a group of Italian fishermen and their families had for years tied their boats, operated fish markets and seafood restaurants.

Beulah and Lee loved tending to their gardens that surrounded the house. The flora included fruit trees: citrus, apricot and apple, strawberries, various flowers and shrubs, and a liquid amber tree whose leaves changed from green to dark bronze with the seasons, filtering morning sunlight from the east that washed into our kitchen.

I remember the day I looked out the window and saw Lee hanging from his apple tree. His ladder had fallen. I ran over, set the ladder up and helped him find his footing to safely get down.

“I owe you, Kevin,” he said, his voice a little shaky.

Lee was a retired butcher. When he got started on a tree-pruning mission, the result could be devastating, not necessarily for him but for the tree.

“I just can’t stop him,” Beulah once remarked, shaking her head.

Beulah outlived Lee by several years. Lee died on my 56th birthday, which I’ll probably never forget because of the date. He had been ill. It wasn’t a shock to his family. We attended Lee’s funeral at a local church. Dressed in black and white, with pearls, Beulah was the most beautiful woman, with a kind, loving spirit to match her physical radiance.

When our daughter Bryna was 12-years-old, she pronounced that Beulah was the “coolest” person that she knew. She was never one to fall for phonies. They had a solid friendship.

With Lee gone, Beulah remained in the house by herself, with the help of a string of young care-givers whose stories were so varied and unique that you could develop a Netflix mini-series about them, from a young male cartoonist to a troubled crackhead to a Native American rights advocate. Beulah became friends with each of them.

A tiny but well-appointed studio still stands, attached to the back of the garage. For many years, until a week or so ago, the studio was the home of a single man and longtime character of Santa Cruz known as “Automo-Billy.” A motor-head, Bill at one time ran a popular European car repair shop in town.

Bill can bear witness to the past 15 years of changes at the Dutra House. The recent mountain of materials between his studio and his automobile parked on the street evoked this comment:

“I’m walking through Dogpatch,” his Philadelphia accent lending a nice twist.

He has found a new apartment in Soquel. “I’m the perfect tenant,” he says. “I’m single. I don’t cook and I don’t have a pet.”

As for Beulah, she survived in the home into her early 90s.

The adult children of Beulah and Lee inherited the house, whose value had immensely increased due to its location and the generous size of the lot. Finding agreement about what to do with the house was like attempting to herd feral cats, of which there were many in the neighborhood. The family ended up selling the property for $2.2 million to a Silicon Valley executive who assured them that he would not destroy the beloved house of their parents.

 
After about a year of struggling with permits and design alterations, the new owner decided , instead, to sell. He said it was going to take him five years to complete his remodel. He claimed he had found his “dream house” in Marin County.

For several years, there had been no yard or house maintenance and the “Dutra House” had gone to seed.

A new buyer, also from Silicon Valley, snapped it up with plans to demolish the house and split the lot in half, build two two-story houses.

A 1500-square-foot house sitting on 14,000-square-foot lot is sinful to the modern developer, money left on the table. The pleasant open space surrounding the structure must be occupied by buildings, traded for dollars.

The city says it needs housing. The developer says he will provide it. The reality is the two new houses will be multi-million dollar homes out of reach of the once-typical Santa Cruz family. The new houses will likely be second homes of wealthy buyers and sit vacant part of the year. I could be wrong.

I can see a tear drop trailing down Beulah’s tender cheek.

The new owner did a simple clean-up, held an “open house” in order to rent the place for a year while he put his “ducks in a row” before demolition. Walking through the former residence of Beulah and Lee, and the Dutra family of years ago, I was moved by the simplicity of the house, only two bedrooms, one bathroom and small kitchen. The hardwood floors worn yet firm and natural, the living room spacious, where Beulah would sit and read by the fireplace, with a large picture window facing the street. A comfortably-sized dining room with a large front-facing window separates the living room and the precious corner nook off the kitchen facing the ocean.

Years ago, Barbara and I were driving through the neighborhood dreaming about the perfect place to live. On a side street a half-block from the ocean, I spotted a tile-roofed house with a long, expansive covered front porch with terracotta tile floor.

“That’s my perfect house,” I said.

Little did I know that one-day we would own the small house next door.

Today the two large, shaggy white dogs were howling again, perhaps lamenting that they will be moved out by day’s end. The hippie father, a builder himself, and I have developed a friendship, as I have with his son. They’re down-to-earth people. He says they found a place to rent nearby, but not as close to the water. He’s started to surf before work. He glows when he talks about his new ocean discovery.

Maybe the occupants of the two new houses will have the same revelation. Maybe it’s all going to work out for the better.

One thing for sure, when the liquid amber tree is cut down and a two-story building takes its place, I’m going to miss the many branches of pointed leaves that change color with the seasons.

From Silence of the Oranges ©2019 Kevin Samson, a working title memoir