Trying to paint a better picture

A decade ago, when I was a junior at Douglas High School, no one could have told me that in the near future the American economy, the world's most prosperous system, would take a dramatic nose dive.

I never would have believed that fear would one day grip the country, like a psychological plague, spreading across every state, creeping into every window, until finally the collective engine of our economy seized, pitched forward in paralysis.

As the markets continue to waver, blame rises to the forefront like a heady gas. Fingers fly to pointing. Words pop like firecrackers. But many of the worst perpetrators, the worst penthouse swindlers, have already fled, sailed off on shrewdly-conceived golden parachutes.

What's left is a populist outrage scourging the halls of Wall Street. Beneath the indignation, the pain is real and acute. For the economy's sudden contraction ripped shivering every stick-built storefront on Main Street.

Bill Henderson, the sales and marketing director of Carson Valley Inn, told me a few weeks ago that he's never seen anything like it.

"I worked at the Lake in the early 1980s when Highway 50 was closed in both Nevada and California from slides," he said. "At one point, we were cut off in two directions. But that wasn't as bad as it is now."

No one could have foreseen such a terrible and prolonged recession. It came like a reckoning of biblical proportions, perpetuated by the knee-jerk din of televised pundits and the nonstop scrawl of apocalyptic headlines.

As a reporter, I'm guilty of flaming the hysteria. At first, I tried to avoid the worst of it " the lawsuits, bankruptcies and suicides. But even if I didn't write about these things, their presence hung in the air like dark spots, leaking a black, poisonous ink.

Contrary to what some philosophers say, pessimism is the easy way out. Reporting bad news is a piece of cake once you get started. Looking for the upside is a lot more work.

One perhaps unforeseen benefit of the recession is that plummeting house prices have made affordable a whole inventory of houses in otherwise unaffordable communities, such as Douglas County.

My wife and I weren't planning to buy a house in Carson Valley until she won the lottery, or I published a bestseller, two improbabilities funny to mention but actually required in an area where a modest home cost $400,000.

But that was then. When home prices fell off the cliff, we jumped off after them. At the beginning of the year, we purchased a foreclosed home in Chichester. We chose the neighborhood because of the people we saw living there, friends from high school, young couples with kids, those kids playing football in the street or fishing the Martin Slough.

Chichester has a sunny, working-class, family feel to it; but that countenance has been eroded by the recession.

A few months ago, near the end of January, I was standing in the back yard of our new house. The day had been a rough one. Unemployment in the county had jumped an entire percent and was heading for the double digits. No job was safe, and what had seemed like a good investment the month before felt like the first doomed step towards capitulation and ruin.

The sun had already set behind the mountains, draining the sky of its color. A gray, malignant wind started blowing through the streets, bowing and creaking the wooden fence in front of me. I peered over the south corner of our lot and saw another house drifting in the half-darkness. It emerged from the gloom like a deserted ship, battered and forlorn, the victim of some incomprehensible storm.

It was a small tract house, not unlike the one we had purchased. It had teal siding and white trim, but in several places the paint was peeling, flaking onto a dead lawn. The few trees on the property had long outgrown their planters. One reached up against the house like a claw, upturning the gutter along the eave. Near the top, tangled in the branches, was a white plastic bag, thrashing in the wind like some derelict flag of surrender.

When I went to bed that night, an image of the house followed me. I imagined what kind of family, if any, had lived there. A young family with kids, a retired couple, a single mother. The whole dazzling drama of a family's life together in one place at one time " moments of happiness and outrage, despair and pleasure, moments sacred in the hearts of the actors, now gone, vanished, lost at sea.

James Joyce once wrote that history is a nightmare from which we are waking. That morning, I woke to the sound of voices coming from the backyard. I turned and kissed my wife, who had slipped into bed sometime after her swing shift, then I went to investigate. What I found, glancing over the fence, were two young men repainting the house I had seen the night before. They worked cheerfully in the cold copper sunlight, talking and laughing as they worked, spreading long clean bands of white paint across the rear eave.

"If you think you like something, you better swing now because the fence-riders are coming down," Danny Villalobos, a Century 21 Realtor, told me last week.

He said over the past month, a quarter of the houses for sale in downtown Minden and Gardnerville have gone into escrow, the majority in Chichester.

"Right now, it's certainly a great feeling, and it's shared among everybody," he said.

Since our conversation, I've noticed for-sale signs on my street disappearing, and more kids riding their bikes to the slough. I've noticed the spring sun spreading its light on the neighborhood like a warm, magnanimous gloss. And now, whenever I look over the back fence, I expect to see a new family there, though there's none. Just a fresh coat of paint. And a mangled tree starting to bud.