Goodbye, Gloo

When I say "Goodbye, Gloo," it might sound like the sentiment of a teenager swearing off his favorite classroom inhalant, but I assure you I'm speaking of something many times larger and much more intoxicating.

By Gloo, I mean Igloo, the hut in the backyard of the house my girlfriend and friends rented in Lawrence this past year. The Igloo -- which has also been referred to as the Flinstone House, the Smoking Hut, or the Home-Away-From-Home -- is a structure the owners apparently built for their grandchildren to play in.

For such a whimsical little thing, the Igloo's architecture is rather impressive. The walls are built of some kind of adobe resting on a base of half-buried car tires. A number of open arched windows and about a half-dozen glass bottles built into the wall provide mini-shelves and a place for light to shine through. There used to be a Chiefs helmet perched on the roof, but that has since fallen to the ground.

As my friends prepare to move out of the house, a rush of memorable Igloo moments comes back to me.

The first event that really put the Igloo on the map was a taping of a Turnpike episode that featured the band Ghosty (bassist Mike Nolte is one of the house's residents). Host Tim Van Holten and his crew crammed everyone into the cramped quarters for the interview section of the show, which the show's producers tried to depict as taking place on the Dagobah system. Afterwards I planned to conduct a series of Native American purification rituals to counterbalance the exploitation of what I consider a sacred structure, but because I'm not Native American and don't know any rituals, I instead initiated an Igloo hanging-out campaign that went on for many moons. And what marvelous moons they were.

The Igloo wound up being a great destination for impromptu afterhours, especially when a friend or two visited from out of town. With a group of people seated on the benches and a communal 12-pack of PBR in the middle, it was sort of like visiting our caveman roots without even leaving the backyard. For Jennifer’s birthday that summer, we held a backyard barbecue, with the Flinstone House serving as kind of a prehistoric V.I.P. lounge.

More than once, the Igloo served as a getaway from the outside world. On the night of April 30, during the height of her roommates' obsession with "Lost" DVDs, Jennifer and I decided to seek shelter there. While a thunderstorm raged, we lit a few candles, shared a bottle of wine, and did our best to celebrate the old pagan festival of spring known as Walpurgisnacht. Though the wind did little to chill us, it did make the candles flicker so that they occasionally looked like blinking emergency lights.

Thanks to its cramped space and primitive design, the Gloo has an extraordinary effectiveness in bringing out the important things in life. In the same way that the mind is sometimes called a reducing valve for the world (or "mind-at-large"), the Igloo operates as a sort of reducing valve for life in Lawrence, boiling down the city as a whole to what I consider its essential elements: good people, interesting conversation, and the occasional intoxicant.

But for all the times there’s been a fun Igloo hangout session with friends, I’ve spent equally enjoyable time there alone. Like the stormy night I sat until 4 in the morning with a pen and a pad writing absolutely nothing. Or the early morning I went out to the Igloo to record some banjo music but wound up deciding to document bird songs instead. Or the Sunday afternoons I couldn’t think of anything else to do in town but hide out in the hut and listen to music.

Eventually, either the original owners or someone else will move back into the property and make use of the Igloo in whatever way they see fit. But for now, it is likely to be taken over by the abundant locust shells that we’ve periodically swept off the walls. In fact, at the aforementioned birthday party, acclaimed photographer and birthday-cake designer Tara Sloan plucked a locust shell from the Igloo and set it upon the back of the tiny decorative llama she used to decorate the cake. Tara was so amused with her creation that she set it up in the windowsill above the kitchen sink.

With the pots and pans, furniture and house residents disappearing around it, this mini-sculpture only grows more poignant: A locust shell riding a motionless toy llama on the windowsill of a beautiful, soon-to-be-vacated bungalow in Lawrence, Kansas. Sad and bizarre, yet somehow I can relate.

Yesterday I drank a beer inside the Igloo for the last time. Today Jennifer, Mike and Carmen will remove the last bit of furniture and cat hair from the Vermont St. House/Flinstone House complex. Before I get too choked-up saying goodbye to the Igloo and this period of my life, I'd like to make a final blessing: May the Great Spirit watch over the Igloo, and may the spirit of our great times there live on.

(photos taken by Jenn, oil pastel drawing by me)