Letter From America: Stuff
Most Americans have more stuff than they can fit into their homes, but every little piece of it is essential to their lifestyle and happiness. Ronnie Bray thinks that the storage unit industry is the perfect business to be in.
I am of the opinion that the perfect business to be in is the storage unit industry. It is perfect because of its low overheads and large profits.
All that is needed is a couple of acres accessible to a large population, a series of prefabricated steel and concrete units of varying capacities with roller shutter doors, a large attractive sign, and a small office. The only moving parts are the roller doors and the automatic security gates to keep out unauthorised visitors who might want to take things that do not belong to them, so there is little to go wrong, and that keeps expenses at a minimum.
Customer’s pay a monthly sum based on the size of the storage unit they rent. The rental agreements includes a clause stating they have to buy their secure padlock from you, so you make a few extra dollars, and customers agree to a page of do’s and don’ts, all standard stuff.
The owner, or manager, sits in the office taking up credit references, recording credit card details, and enjoying an easy, stress-free life. People come and go, putting stuff in, taking stuff out, and the money keeps rolling in. They are low maintenance, having no power or light supplied to the units, and in cases of default on rent, the owner puts a lien on the goods, and eventually sells them off to recoup his losses.
The market for such a service is never-ending and expanding. Most Americans have more stuff than they can fit into their houses, garages, and sheds, but every little piece of it is essential to their lifestyle and happiness, so parting with any of it is out of the question. Hence the need for storage units.
When I lived in England, I put stuff in the study, the attic, the spare bedroom, the shed, and into the trunk of the car. My Alder Street home didn’t have a basement or I would have filled that up. My favourite haunts were second-hand and antiquarian book shops, from which I filled my library from floor to ceiling with books on Christianity, religion, anti-Mormonism, Bible studies, history, biography, cooking, Yorkshire, and anything else that took my fancy. At its height, my library boasted over two thousand publications of one kind or another.
When Gay and I decided to move to the US, I sold what I could of my library, and the rest, apart from about a hundred essential volumes, I gave to a Jewish charity. With some reluctance I hired a rubbish skip and jettisoned tons of non-essential items. What I chucked into the skip was of such transparent value that a constant stream of people came to the door asking for it. I was happy to see it find a home other than the incinerator.
The rest, which I deemed indispensable, was packed into cartons and shipped by sea and road transport to a warehouse in Phoenix, where it was held to ransom by a young thing in a US Customs uniform who waived all dues, and a pirate in no particular uniform who brandished a waybill for road transport that he laid to my charge and waived nothing!
When, some $250 later, it was liberated from the warehouse, it was packed it into a storage unit in Mesa, Arizona, along with tons of stuff that Gay had in storage in a shed at her home. We didn’t want to use it just then because we were headed to Tennessee to serve as Church Educational System missionaries for a year and a half.
Preparing to leave Tennessee for a few weeks in Mesa before heading out to the North West to live my dream involved packing stuff into cases, boxes, cartons and shipping it Fed-Ex to Montana, where some of it went into the Gentry’s homestead and some went into their storage unit.
After we found a home to rent on Bull Lake Road in Troy, we pulled everything out of storage, including that which we had towed behind our rig from Mesa in a U-Haul trailer and stashed in a temporary cache at Starlite Storage in Libby.
Our three-bedroom doublewide home was spacious, having the most cupboard and storage space I have ever seen in a home, but we didn’t have room to unpack all our boxes and put everything away. We simply had too much stuff! We tried giving some of it away, but everyone had more possessions than they had room for, so we were stuck with it.
We discovered that material possessions, although they can be pleasant and rewarding, have a habit of taking over one’s life.
The amount of stuff you have dictates the size of the home you must have, and the time you have to spend caring for it will rob a body of valuable time, especially when, as I have done, one has reached the age where time suddenly gets more valuable than it has ever been before.
When Gay and I visited Libby’s Heritage Museum to see how people used to live, we were impressed by the stunning simplicity of the things that let them live in rough but reasonable comfort in the wilderness. Most astonishing was the one room shack in the museum’s grounds. It was roughly twelve feet by eight, made of crudely hewn logs, chinked with moss and grass, had a leather hinged door, and a single glass-paned window.
A small, round cast-iron woodstove provided heat in the long winters. A bed in one corner provided a resting-place, and a table and two chairs furnished the dining arrangements. The narrow veranda housed a pot-bellied galvanised washing tub, and together with the posser and rubbing board close by took me back to the scullery of 121 Fitzwilliam Street and its scenes of busy Monday washdays of my own olden days.
A small wooden shelf on one wall held a candleholder, a paraffin lamp, a couple of battered tin plates, an equal number of grey tin mugs, a well-thumbed Bible, and a couple of early novels. On the floor besides the stove was a cast iron boiling pan and a small frying pan, in which the meagre fare of the early pioneers had been prepared, no doubt to be eaten with thanksgiving at the corner table.
Strange to say, Gay and I agreed that the little cabin contained all that was necessary for a good quality of life, and we would have been pleased to dwell in it. It reminded us that when we were first in Tennessee, we had an apartment at Cedar Bluffs that was quite small, but in which we laughed, loved, entertained friends, and had everything we needed.
But, at the same time, we had a storage unit in Mesa measuring eight feet wide, eight feet high, and fourteen feet long that was packed from floor to ceiling and front to back with our ‘essential’ possessions, and we didn’t miss a thing!
We thought that we had learned a lesson about our need for the stuff we had, but it seems that it will take a long-acting general anaesthetic to separate us from most of it. We gave a huggin of stuff away when we left Montana for Arizona, but now, whenever I go into the garage, I see how much stuff we still have in sealed boxes that we will probably never lay our eyes on again.
It is a hard thing to realise that people do not possess things, but that things possess people, as our essential non-essentials possess us and dominate our lives by their grim presence.
In solemn contemplative moments I hear their taunting voices in ghostly whispers, redolent of the corpse in a Boris Karloff film that was sat on the driving seat of the Hansom carriage as it chanted mouth-locked to a grim-faced terrified Body Snatcher driving hard through an awesome moonlit landscape with the thudding of the horse’s hooves beating out the rhythm of the corpse’s insistent other worldly monotone, "You’ll-never-get-rid-of-me, never-get-rid-of-me, never-get-rid-of-me … "
In my own dread, I have reason to fear that they might be speaking the truth.
Copyright © Ronnie Bray 2004
