A Visit to a Former House

Cold and snowy today, which transforms the landscape. Last Thursday, though, it was still fall, and I drove around to check up on some of the abandoned houses. I almost always start the circuit with the Boyd House, which is located at the end of Rex Road, were Mark St. crosses it. Well, that is to say that is where the house would be if the house were still there. But it’s been gone for about six years.

Back around 2000, when I first started tracking these houses, the Boyd house was the first one I ever saw AND also was able to go inside of. It was pretty scary, because even then, it was falling down. The roof had a great sag to it and big holes where the cedars shakes had decayed out; the walls had large openings; the floors were pretty hit and miss; the windows all broken out. But it was an interesting house. It was a small log house and the walls had many 4-6 foot paintings of Inuit totem animals. The fireplace looked like you still might be able to use it. There was nothing inside the house; i.e., no furniture or long-abandoned boxes of mouldy books (both of which turn out to be pretty common in these houses).

I took lots of pictures of it, and within a month or so had completed a small wall quilt memorializing it.







It wasn’t surprising that within a year or so it had collapsed under the force of snow and the winter’s customary big winds. And it lay all about on the ground for awhile.



One day in 2005 when I went to see it, the collapsed house had been disappeared. Instead, the land was covered with trailers. I couldn’t tell what was going on and I knew no one on the street to ask, so I just photographed and moved on.




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This week, the trailers are gone and, next door to the former Boyd house, a large new house with an elaborate garden has arisen. And the Boyd house, which appeared to be gone in the photo from 2005, now appears to be stacked neatly on the ground in various piles: logs here, stones there, foundation where I last left it.




I know a little about the house, or at least I have been told a little by various people who purport to speak with authority but I have no way of knowing what is true. Mr. Boyd, I am told, was a hippy who came here in the 1960’s and built this log house to live in. He was eccentric, even for a hippy, and did not have plumbing in the house. He would visit neighbors periodically and ask whether he could use their bathrooms to take a brief shower. Within the house, there were areas cut out in the floor down to the ground so that local small animals (raccoons, in particular) could visit the house. Mr. Boyd also had a girlfriend here in Point Roberts, but that’s part of the story of another abandoned house. At some point before I moved here, he died. And the property is said to belong now to a relative in Vancouver. But maybe none of that is true. Maybe the true story is yet out there to be gathered.