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BY GREGORY J. RUMMO
LIFE IN THE BOONIES
It was almost 18 years ago when we moved from Paterson, the urban center of Passaic County, to northern Morris County, "The Boonies," as my brother-in-law characterizes it still to this day. It's here, on the fringe of the Highlands where the obnoxious thumping of music booming from hotrods and the crack of automatic weapons fire on hot summer evenings has been replaced by the sweet symphonies of crickets and katydids stridulating overhead from the leaves in the deciduous canopy.
We moved here because we knew the public schools in Morris County were superior to those in Passaic – at least that was the case in the 1990s. And when we learned that our younger son was profoundly deaf, we wanted to be able to send him to the Mountain Lakes school system where there is a deaf program beginning from early intervention through all four years of high school.
I remember the day we decided to say goodbye to our house on the corner of Wabash and Alabama Avenue in the Lakeview section of Paterson. Both of our boys had been born there – well, not literally there, but that's where they spent the first few years of their lives. I was in the middle of making a cup of coffee. As the water came to a boil, the ceramic house-shaped container I used to store the ground coffee in slipped from my hands and shattered on the floor. It was prophetic. Since my column "Life in the Boonies," will be a regular feature of this site each week, I thought I should start from the beginning and tell you how and why we got here in the first place.Since my column "Life in the Boonies," will be a regular feature of this site each week, I thought I should start from the beginning and tell you how and why we got here in the first place.
We began house hunting in late June 1992. We didn't know exactly where we wanted to live, only that we had to be residents of Morris County. We drove around looking at different developments of new homes where either the prices were way above our budget or the area wasn't to our liking. It was, quite frankly, depressing.
I finally gave in and called a real estate agent to help us in our search. We drove the poor guy crazy for a week. He took us all over showing us several newly constructed houses in our price range. None of them felt right.
So finally we did what all great thinkers have done since 1955; we met at McDonald's for lunch for a powwow on a hot and muggy day before the Fourth of July weekend.
"Do you mind if I pray," I asked before we dove in. "I always pray with my family before we eat."
"Sure," he answered. "I think that's a great idea."
We joined hands – the real-estate guy, too – and we bowed our heads and closed our eyes. I unashamedly prayed out loud, asking for God's leading to find the right house as well as his blessing on the food.
Satisfied that perhaps since we had now invoked the Almighty, He might help us decide what we were looking for more quickly (and he would earn his commission.) "So tell me," he probed, "what are you looking for exactly?"
"We want a new house, on a quiet street, with lots of mature trees on the property, on a small lake all for less than two-hundred thousand dollars."
It got real quiet – for a McDonald's that is – and he finally broke the silence with a nervous laugh, saying, "I suppose you want green shutters, too."
We finished our burgers and left shortly thereafter, driving up Route 23. We turned off on Boonton Avenue and headed south for a few hundred feet before turning off on a side road.
Almost immediately the scenery began to change. We were driving on a winding road through the woods. We finally stopped in front of a vacant lot where the salesman had told us a new house was to be built. There was a small lake behind this lot and because of that he thought we would be interested to at least look at it.
What he didn't know was that two lots over, there was a new house that had been listed that day. As he stood with paper in hand, scratching his head, I literally took off in the direction of the new house with the "AVAILABLE" sign spiked into the dirt out front.
"Wait, wait for me," my wife hollered, with the two boys in tow.
There it was ... a new house with a front yard full of sugar maples. There were oak trees out back. And the backyard fell away gently to the shore of a four-acre stream-fed lake. I was thinking to myself, there's no way we will be able to afford this house.
"Please call the phone number on the sign," I begged. He called it. Unbelievably the house was in our price range. And the rest is history.
We've lived here for 18 years now. Our older son graduates from college in a month and our younger son – the deaf one – graduated from Mountain Lakes High School with honors last year and currently attends Gallaudet University in Washington.
Oh, by the way, believe it or not, the house has green shutters.
Gregory J. Rummo is a businessman, syndicated columnist and author of "The View from the Grass Roots." Contact him at GregRummo.com
