Column by Hal Walter
Rural Life – December 2007 – Colorado Central Magazine
The Hantavirus Hotel, which is what I not-so-lovingly call my garage, has now been gutted and converted to something that resembles a giant, wood-sided beer cooler.
Allow me to explain. When we bought this place more than 16 years ago, one of the amenities was a roomy detached two-car garage. It initially seemed like a big, open, clean space to park vehicles, store stuff and work on things. In fact, as we were moving up the hill from Wetmore, we first put a lot of our belongings in the garage while we did some minor remodeling in the house.
But there was some stuff that never made it to the house, and the inventory grew as the years went by. The Hantavirus Hotel stands about 60 yards uphill from the house, so it’s easy to store stuff up there and forget about it. As the years went by, the novelty of parking vehicles in the garage wore off, but it remained a convenient place to put little-used junk out of sight and mind. An attic-loft only made it easier to forget.
For a few years my friends Kevin and Bob used one bay of the garage to store equipment for their tour-guiding business, KB Mountain Adventures. During this time, I cleaned up inside the building somewhat, and Bob and Kevin helped keep it halfway tidy when they were housing their bikes, helmets, and climbing gear in there. But despite our efforts it was obvious the rodents were getting out of control.
Over the years other friends stored belongings in the Hotel, as well. Maddog O’Grady had furniture and bike parts in there. One friend put an enameled cast-iron wood cookstove and cast-iron cookware in the garage, along with some other furniture, moved out of state and never came back for them.
The mice were accumulating too. One day after a woodpecker bore a hole in an upper wall, I looked inside while patching it, and noticed mouse droppings mixed with the insulation several feet from ground level. The garage had literally become a high-rise condominium for rodents. Upon further inspection, mouse droppings were piling up in the corners inside the building.
I had become more and more uncomfortable with the idea of going in there, often wearing a mask in the event I needed to fetch something like a chain saw. I’m really not that squeamish and actually go inside barns and outbuildings where mice live on a daily basis as part of my work as a ranch caretaker. However, this trepidation over the garage was further fueled by the death of a local man due to hantavirus this past summer, preceded by several others in the region over the past few years.
The biggest problem with the Hantavirus Hotel is that the previous owner insulated it with fiberglass and then covered it up with one of the worst sheetrock jobs I’ve ever seen. The mice simply moved inside the walls, through gaps between the floor and cracks in the exterior wood siding.
It was clear something had to be done. I decided the place should be cleaned out and then gutted, but not after carefully weighing the possibility of simply burning the structure to the ground and starting over.
I began by surveying the contents. My new neighbor was interested in the furniture, stove, and cookware, so I gave it to her, figuring the previous owner hadn’t been back for it in the 12 years it had been stored. O’Grady said the remaining bike parts were junk and could be trashed.
We ordered up a big contractor’s dumpster from Veltrie Disposal Services, and contacted a local handyman named Jason who said he didn’t mind working around sheetrock, insulation, and mouse droppings.
The day Jason arrived I was not completely prepared. He helped me move some of the stuff from the ground level outside in the sunlight and I started to go through it as he took down the sheetrock. I wore a mask at all times but Jason refused to wear one until my wife, a registered nurse, insisted. I ducked out as much as possible as he began tearing out the fiberglass insulation. I focused on sorting through items removed from the downstairs, placing a good amount of junk in the dumpster.
After the first day of work we called Veltrie and they brought a second dumpster and hauled away the first one. I took a deck-sprayer with bleach water and sprayed, then brought in a hose and wetted down the dusty floor in order to sweep up insulation, sheetrock, and mouse turds.
ON THE SECOND DAY Jason helped me carry boxes and boxes of stuff down from the loft and set them off to the side of the garage before he started to gut the loft level. Some of the stuff I had not looked at since we moved here in 1991, and all of it was salted with dust and peppered with mouse droppings.
There were suitcases given to me by my parents when I graduated from high school. I found boxes of copies of the Mountain Athlete, a magazine I published in the late 1980s, and more boxes of newspaper and magazine clips of articles I’d written, some dating back to high school and my years at the University of Colorado. Other boxes contained knicknacks, doodads and just plain junk that dated back to my childhood. A lot of this stuff had followed me from Nevada to Northern Virginia to Craig, Colorado, then on to Boulder, Pueblo, Wetmore, Leadville, and back to Wetmore before arriving here. Some of it had taken a side-trip with my parents to Wyoming before reaching this angle of repose in my garage.
There was so much that I couldn’t even place and some that I remembered vividly. There were boxes of silverware and cookware. My first 10-speed bike. A microscope kit. A plastic crate containing dozens of record albums on actual vinyl, an interesting collection of music that included a Beatles “White Album,” several Jimmy Buffet records, Led Zeppelin “Four,” Johnny Paycheck’s “Country Spotlight” (“I’m the Only Hell [Mama Ever Raised]” ) and the Eagles'”Hotel California.”
Though this was the Hotel Hantavirus I was beginning to feel like I could check out anytime but could never leave. It’s a difficult thing to look back on decades of accumulated possessions and try to make sense of your life as well as a quick decision about what to keep and what to put in the dumpster. I reminded myself that in recent months two of my favorite old guys had passed on and I noticed neither of them took any boxes of junk with them.
So into the dumpster went every remaining copy of Mountain Athlete. All the writing clips. All the trinkets and doodads from high school. During this trash-fest one newspaper clipping fluttered to the ground and I stopped to read a piece I had written about an attraction at the Colorado State Fair when I was an intern for the Pueblo Star-Journal back in 1981. I couldn’t remember writing that story. There was a breeze blowing and I had a difficult time getting the little piece of newsprint to land inside the dumpster. I kept the vinyl records, a metal filing cabinet that contained some photos and other paperwork, the microscope, bike and very few other things.
By the time Veltrie’s driver showed up again that day, I had said goodbye to a lot of junk and a good deal of my past. I felt refreshed but sad, and strangely exhausted.
FOR THE NEXT STEP in reclaiming the Hantavirus Hotel I called my farrier Caleb, who has a spray-foam insulation business on the side. One day he brought his equipment and a helper and sealed the walls from the inside with an inch of foam. With most of the junk removed and no home between the studs, the mice now had nowhere to hide.
The Hantavirus Hotel remains a work in progress. I still need to hose out the upstairs, wash the windows and do some other cleaning. Some paint cans and other liquids must be hauled to the landfill. But I think it’s probably safe to breathe in there now. I doubt I’ll park my truck inside because it’s a pain to get in and out of the garage, but I might move my woodworking tools from the tack shed and set them up in there.
The other day my wife took my son for a walk in the field across the road. She came home with a yellowed newspaper clipping that she found in the grass. The headline read, “Students, teachers use video.” The byline said “by Harold Walter, for the Camera.”
I don’t remember writing that story for the Boulder Daily Camera back in 1980, but for some reason I’ve added it to the mass of accumulating papers on my desk.
I’m not ready to throw it away just yet.
When he’s not accumulating or cleaning, Hal Walter writes from 35 acres near the ghost town of Ilse in the Wet Mountains
