Arriving through rejection
Loss & lust on the way to Another Place
This post is part 2 of the story of how I ended up here in Benzie County. I recommend you read part 1 first <3 The rest of this will make more sense once you do.
I’m creating a living document of the process of buying land in Northern Michigan and living out visions I’ve had for years of a home, a refuge, a residency, and regenerated landscape. This isn’t something I’ve done before and I don’t know the best ways to do it; many people have done this before and have endless opinions, and I learn from them. So far, I’m so happy with how this space has led to connection with old friends and new readers, and I’d love for that to continue.
This newsletter is about capturing my story, however it ends up.
Buying property is a lot like courtship. You begin searching because of some normative path telling you that you should, or, you search out of actual desire for connection, or you search for the basic need of shelter1. You search with a list of what you’re looking for, what you can afford, and what you’ve learned over time that you don’t want. You make yourself attractive to someone, hoping they see in you what you see in them. When you’re ready enough, you make your “best offer,” which means what you can afford to lose without breaking yourself completely. To make an offer is to put yourself up for rejection. And when you’re rejected, it’s devastating, but each time a little less so, the buffer of protection a little thicker, the understanding that this life is all a bargain a little louder in your head. And still, you hope for another chance, and you hope for some rest.
The first time I made an offer on a property and it was rejected was December 2021. I’d been actively searching for a year or so on my own, and more recently with a real estate agent who had set up a passive search that would scan the housing database each morning and send me properties that matched my list. Most of the properties were not at all what I was interested in, but it helped to see them. It opened up my eyes to the value of timber in the local economy, as I read listing after listing boasting the cash crop of timber on the property whenever the future owner was ready to cut. With my dad’s death in 2006 went much of the knowledge of the cabin (what they called “The Place”), its sale, and its location. The Place didn’t have an official address when my grandfather bought it, and according to my dad’s brother, he wasn’t aware it had an address when it was sold. I was somewhat familiar with open source (meaning free and available to the public) mapping and parcel data, so I began searching. Through one online map I found the proof of sale, and then the address. Once, when I was in the area with friends, I skipped off on my own and drove to the address, contemplating reaching into one of the mailboxes to get the current owners’ names …
At some point in early 2021, my mom revealed a box that had been sitting dormant in her basement since the sale of the cabin twenty years prior. In it was every possible receipt and item of paperwork involving the cabin dating back to the purchase of the property in 1963. I read every one, including the notes to the landscaping boy penned in my grandma’s immaculate longhand and the water bill from 1987. This discovery led me to Bart.
Bart is the son of one of the original four men (formerly known as the Betsie River Recreation & Conservation Corporation) who bought the surrounding property. According to the paperwork, Bart’s family owned the cabin closest to ours, and according to my uncle, Bart was still in the area. I messaged him on F*cebook and received a response within hours. He recognized my last name and graciously invited me to his cabin — which is half a mile down the road from my family’s old cabin. We made a date for me to visit a few weeks later in July.
When I called him the morning before setting out to his place, he invited me and “anyone else” along, ending the call in the charming Michigan-goodbye, “Ok now.”
It’d been exactly twenty years since I’d seen The Place and that bend in the Betsie, and two years since I’d started the discovery process of refamiliarizing myself with this land. I’d visualized the moment of my return to this place in cinematic light. I’d see, I imagined, an overlay of my childhood self running around, happy, the image grainy from the old camcorder my dad used. Melancholic piano (queue Dustin O’Halloran) would be playing. I imagined maybe I’d cry. Maybe I’d feel flooded with memories of my family in a different time, my first bee sting, Blue the snake, my brother’s voice. Over the past two years, my dream had taken a healthy divergence away from replication of my dad’s life to a separate, distinct life of my own. But place holds memory, and this place holds many.
I brought along four friends to meet Bart and visit The Place. I didn’t plan to bring so many friends, but when they offered, I felt grateful for the emotional padding of good friendship. Bart greeted us as if this occasion were expected, a sort of easy chore; he’s a tall guy, kind of limps along grumbling about a bad knee. He swooped his arm toward his own red cabin behind him, which I remembered only slightly from some distant dusty corner of my brain. The first thing we did was spend a few minutes standing around “the green pig” (what he called the propane tank) as he described recently upgrading it in order to accommodate multiple hot showers for big family reunions.
Within a few minutes we began walking through the woods and down the long road to The Place. Part of me wanted to yell ‘Wait,’ stand for a moment and let the weight of the moment settle around me, but it wasn’t like that. It wasn’t cinematic yet, and Bart was moving. The smells of the forest around us were deeply familiar but the road was a bit wider, more kempt, with new electric lines. Bart informed us that they’d recently cut down a bunch of the trees to make room for new electric lines and internet. We approached The Place, and there it was.
The small cabin looked different but the same. There was an addition on the back to make room for another bedroom and newer, tan permalog siding. It looked better, loved, cared for. The land around was mostly the same: very little landscaping, tall grass, a wild riverbank along the Betsie River. The current owners use it as a vacation property and weren’t there, so Bart showed us around for a while, and then gave me a bottle of maple syrup that they’d tapped from the trees around the cabin.
I didn’t cry, and like many theoretical Big Experiences in life that you try to inject meaning into in the moment, that experience didn’t bring the emotions I’d imagined more than it brought assurance that I was in the right place. I knew it because I was surrounded by people who cared to make this experience happen. Bart, with open arms and a “Track & Field = Diversity” t-shirt tucked into his jeans, my friend Dante who also lost her dad young, quietly walking beside me understanding the significance of it all, Izzy, Rowan, Conor asking Bart questions and listening so I could walk silently behind, feeling it all. I felt proud of myself for reaching out to Bart, for going to meet him and opening up to him, for receiving his care, for showing myself that I love myself and this vision enough to follow through on it. Being there in that moment reminded me how this place is for everyone, how I want to exist in a place that is welcoming, full, eternal.
I couldn’t afford to buy The Place back, which hurt for a minute. Property values on the river in the area have grown exponentially in the last few years. According to Zillow, the property value of The Place and its surrounding 25 acres hovers around one million dollars in 2023 (up $300k in value since 2021), and I am not rich.
The first offer
About six months later at the end of 2021, nearing Christmas Eve, I was home at my mom’s for the holidays and noticed a property alert in my email. This property was perfect on paper: in Benzie County, a tiny cabin already built with a loft and a sunny kitchen with rows of spices and a bathroom with a clawfoot tub, 14 acres with a greenhouse, a platform in the meadow to play music with friends, a garden with an existing irrigation system, off a dirt road, quiet, and in my price range. I was driving up north that week to visit friends with my then-partner, so I arranged to tour the property. It all connected and my hands got sweaty.
I believe urgency is a myth in most situations, probably because I’ve fallen into the trap of “if not now, then never!!!” many, many times. With real estate, I’m still not sure if it’s a myth, or if it’s a weather system entirely its own, like Mount Washington in New Hampshire with its own weather that you only begin to experience once you cross a certain altitude. But I do know that when many people all want the same property and you’re faced with the chance at a home or rejection, the urgency feels real. I felt the pressure building on this potential home immediately.
I visited the property as soon as I could, with the idea that I would “make an offer” (I still did not know what this really meant and generally felt like a marionette adult pretending to understand) if I liked it. My partner and I drove up a few days after Christmas to tour the property, knowing that if we liked it, I’d have to make an offer by the following day. We approached the cabin down a gravel road called “Eagle’s Nest.” As we drove up, I noticed an orange Subaru parked out front and a figure walking from the car into the house. It turned out that the owners were there packing up the last of their books, shelves of women’s studies critical theory, poetry, and bird taxonomies. This felt like sealed fate and I immediately went past the point of no return, believing that this place was destined to be mine, and for the first time in my search, sharing the vision to include the possibility of “ours.”
The lust of searching for property set in. For me, a big part of the process was the fantasy, like I wrote about in my last post. A fantasy, for me, allows me to move toward a life and world that I want to be in, imagining some detailed state of being that I can then tirelessly work toward. The pleasure of my particular fantasy that day is that in my head, I lived in that cabin. I made coffee and brought it out to my love as they repotted a plant in the greenhouse. I heard my friends playing three guitars out on the platform, and I spotted the thrush, finally, after hearing it from bed early in the morning. The fantasy that developed as I walked through the place overtook me and became the first devastation of this process.
I made an offer. It went like this:
I wrote a letter to the owners which read like a highly condensed version of the first part of this story. As my partner and I sat in our b&b and I called all the necessary people (the mortgage lender, my uncle, the real estate agent), the tension grew. Over the past few days, I’d gotten all the necessary pre-qualifications ready just in case I wanted to make an offer. I’d been recommended these people from other relationships I have up north, which helped.
I made the offer over the phone while standing outside in the back alley of a cafe in Traverse City as it began to snow. “Making an offer” felt smaller than I’d imagined: it consisted of literally just saying a price, stating any other contingencies (like you want to have the soil tested for chemicals before purchasing), sending over a comparatively small amount of money to show you mean it (called “earnest money”), and signing 10+ documents through docusign. There aren’t so many moments in life when you’re aware of the delicate balance of everything; these transformations are more obvious when quitting a job, saying vows, saying “I’m done.” This felt entirely anticlimactic and like I was sitting on the edge of my life, taking stock of what was currently true, knowing it could all be different in a few hours.
Later, when I made an offer on the property that I ultimately got and the one I’m writing this newsletter around, Another Place, the process was as easeful as it could have possibly been and done within twelve hours. That process was undoubtedly made easier because of the rejections and the clarified process, learned only through doing.
After making the offer, my partner and I went to dinner and toasted to a potential life. We looked at each other, imagining ourselves there, and imagining each other in our own ways. This had been my vision, one that I was admittedly very protective of and particular about. I was terrified of having it extracted, taken, of being told no. At the time, it felt safest to trust myself with handling the vision, holding a barrier impermeable to anyone else. I’ve since loosened my grip on that as I’ve felt the excitement of true shared vision (which can include a lot of independence and autonomy) and embraced the truth that we all need help. But in that moment, waiting, I felt the potential of bounty, and through that, generosity. I felt like the love I’d wanted and the home I’d wanted were converging, like maybe it was possible for a person to get everything they want.
I found out, first through no call at all, and then through the eventual call, that the place had received over 20 offers, and they ultimately chose the offer that was over $100k more than the asking price, which was not my offer. This was the situation of real estate in Winter, 2021. Within four days, I’d gone from finding a perfect place, experiencing the high of fantasy and possibility, and the devastation of an ending before it’d even begun. The rejection hurt. I felt insecure, like I’d never have enough money to compete, like I’d never have enough of something to get what I want, like I’d let my partner down, like that was our one shot at a life.
At the root, I’m talking about a home. A home is a place to rest, to invite into, to play, to experience love and pleasure, to feel safety, to create within. I’ve felt at home in someone’s arms, at home in a certain forest or on a certain hill, I’ve felt home in a moment. This search, for me, felt heavy because I was searching for both a home and an eventual shelter more intentionally than I ever had with the ferocity of someone who needs one.
I come from a home with a lot of challenges. I note this because for me, the feelings around buying property weren’t sequestered to the process itself; it remains a deeply emotional process that has brought out reactions I didn’t expect and emotions I couldn’t have predicted that crossed many areas of my life. The grief rolled in from all parts of my life. Grief from the loss of my dad, from past romantic relationships, from lost friendships all showed up. This was my first chance to make a place that was more than shelter — although shelter is one of our basic needs, and ironically, the property I ultimately bought has none. Once I learned it was possible for me, as an individual person without family wealth, to buy a place, I couldn’t stop.
That first disappointment of rejection taught me what I needed to know in order to do it again. I ended up making a couple more offers on places, but for a while, I paused on the search. I dismantled my life and relationships and moved back to Detroit from Chicago where I’d been living since mid-2021. I returned to the city I love, my home of seven years, this time living alone for the first time. I made a home in my apartment with all my little things and found a way to feel closer to home with myself. I experienced change and deep heartbreak, and when I was ready, or some other mysterious force was ready, revisited the search for a home, far from alone.
Finding Another Place
One day in October 2022, I received an email from my real estate agent about a 10-acre property in Bear Lake. I’d been away from the active search for much of 2022, but lately I’d felt renewed energy toward the idea, so I decided to drive up the next day. Bart offered me his cabin to stay, a testament to the relationships built in this process of reconnection with the place. The night before seeing the property, I slept alone in the loft, filling out the twin bed. The window was cranked open and a storm blew in, carrying with it the gossips and yelps of coyotes (two or twenty?) nearby. I felt aware of myself, aware of all that I’d learned, and aware of my body, singular and stronger than it's ever been. I felt calm, secure in the fact that no matter what happened, I would be okay. Rejection wouldn’t dissolve me.
The next day, my agent and I walked the property. It sat next to a timber processing facility which churned out the sound of screaming pines 8 hours a day and if we’re speaking about vibes, the vibes were off. We both felt uneasy about the place and I trusted that. I felt a bit dumb, driving four hours north to see this property that was ultimately not right, and I drove back toward Bart’s house to sink into that feeling. On the drive back, a mile from his cabin and The Place, I passed a few For Sale signs on a road I know well. I called my agent to ask about them and we walked that land the following day in the rain.
I knew immediately that this place was right. I’ve always felt strong intuition and over the past few years I’ve been trying to hear my body better; my body felt light there, a sense of direction and connection to the particular composition of the landscape. While walking through the maple woods, I felt it.
I made an offer that day, slightly below the asking price, made possible with vacant land financing through a local credit union. The offer was accepted within 12 hours, and then I sent away nearly every dollar I’d saved through the strange process of escrow. The due process of checking my finances, bank statements, of filling out endless paperwork, and of trying to prove I pay rent through Venmo took 21 days and it was true hell. I had one panic attack when I had to send over my bank statements, terrified that they’d judge me and ultimately say that I couldn’t have what I want. I was terrified of being denied, laughed at, shamed for buying that really nice face lotion when I really could have gotten something cheaper, and having what I wanted so badly taken away. The money trauma that was dredged up in this process was tough, but I didn’t dissolve. They did not reject me, and that is another post I’ll write soon; you don’t need to be perfect to be able to purchase shelter. Financial systems make it difficult, and the property process is broken, but with help and in community, it is possible for many people (although still extremely prohibitive for too many).
I closed on the property on October 212 At the end of that hour in the conference room, I got a copy of the deed (which at that point was actually just the closing guy taking a picture of the deed with his phone and texting it to me) and then I legally owned the property. If you’re buying a house, they hand you the hypothetical keys. In this case, my partner, Ellen, met me outside and handed me a giant 4ft long route-cut wooden key that she’d made, and we went to unlock the door.
A note on help…
I bought this property with my name on the deed but the earlier idea I held of “doing it on my own” is false. None of this has been done on my own. I had a financial gift from my dad’s brother that helped get me over the finish line of purchasing this place. The friendship and help of Rich and Sarah Anderson of Iron Fish Distillery nearby was crucial, and it was a gift to have Charlotte & Conor there for the first weekend on the property. I’m grateful for my ex-partner for encouragement throughout the hard years, my friends who are the best friends who could possibly exist I’m pretty sure, Dee the mortgage lender at Honor Bank, my real estate agent who texted me from her son’s Friday night football game to tell me my offer was accepted, my friends in Boyne City who have explicitly taught me or shown me through example what making a home in a rural community you’re new to can look like, what growing a home can look like, and my partner who consistently performs the magic of surrounding me in a forcefield of support and visions while also giving me my sentimental space to develop a personal relationship with Another Place. This ultimately is not only my place, but the place, another place.
Or whatever your reasons are
“Closing” means meeting with someone from the title agency — the place that owns the paperwork saying the property exists — to sign over 100 pieces of paper noting a variety of things, the strangest of which was a clause that asked me to promise that I’m not aware of having any illegal offshore accounts.
I recently moved to Benzie County because of similar connections to/love of this place and the Betsie, and this post really, really hit home... thank you for writing this.