At the beginning of every summer, Williamstown undergoes a transformation: Roughly two thousand Williams students leave and are replaced by a smaller, but still sizable, number of vacationers and seasonal residents. Although the population drops overall, both year-round and summer residents rent from the same pool of non-college housing, and finding an apartment can be tricky.

That's in part why my roommate Nick and I found ourselves without a place to live on July 1. Our lease had came up, our Long Island landlords had returned to take back their place for the summer, and we hadn't found a new flat. We moved most of our possessions into storage here at Tripod and the rest into our cars. Thus unburdened, we began a month and a half of unrepentant mooching.

Days 1-2: futon in John's guestroom; Williamstown, MA

When I first walked into John's apartment, it seemed familiar, but it took me close to an hour to figure out why. I'd been to a party there the previous winter, as it turns out, but it was hardly recognizable as the same place: the previous tenant had kept a disco ball, Christmas lights, and his DJ equipment in the spare room, while John uses it for guests like me.

While I mooched off John, Nick roughed it at Tripod. We do have a shower and some reasonably comfortable couches here, but we also have a downstairs neighbor that operates heavy machinery at 6am.

Days 3-4: Tom and Bridget's guestroom; Newton, MA

Conveniently, I had planned a trip to visit friends in the Boston area for the July 4th weekend. On the other hand, I couldn't look for an apartment very effectively from three hours away, and my car was filled up to its windows with furniture and clothing I couldn't unload.

Days 5-9: guestroom of Trixie Tripawed; Williamstown

If you've seen our staff pages, you probably recognize Trixie. She's nominally Margaret's pet, but she's been around longer than most Tripod employees; she's got clout, and she's the true mistress of Margaret and David's apartment.

For this week, Nick and I shared the "duty" of cat-sitting Trixie while Margaret and David were out of town--not that you need two people to feed a cat. Their place, filled with antiques, is gi-normous. (It's so big I feel I have to use a made-up word to describe it.)

Day 10: Brian's place; North Adams, MA

Another example of an unfair trade: in exchange for feeding Brian's fish while he was driving Lori to LA, Nick and I got to stay at his place. Fortunately, we managed to avoid any aquatic casualties. ("Welcome back, Bri, thanks for letting us stay, and all your neon tetras died the icky death.")

Day 11: couch in Jon Butler's living room; Brookline, MA

Back to the Boston area again for the weekend. This time I stayed with Jon, who hired me at Tripod back in April '97. Talk about cronyism: Jon was my roommate our first year at Williams, and we've been great friends for eight years now.

Days 12-15: Brian's place redux

I returned to Brian's for the rest of the week. North Adams is just to the east of Williamstown, but I'd never really explored it before. A walk through the center of the city reminded me of how easy it is to ignore a place when you're driving through it. You don't notice all the empty store fronts or the boarded-up windows on the factories and mills. You also don't stumble across stores like 34 Skidoo, where a few weeks later I bought a vintage shirt with the most painful early-'70s geometric design.

Days 16-45: air mattresses in the Scott house; North Adams

By mid-July I was tired of this peripatetic lifestyle, and I was very tired of mooching, whether we called it by that name or used a euphemism. So when Hank and Jan Scott offered us the chance to stay in some empty rooms in their three-story Victorian, Nick and I accepted. At this point, we had verbally agreed to rent a nice apartment from them--Randy's place, in fact--but Randy was having all sorts of problems getting a visa, so he wasn't moving out.

So we went to the local K-Mart--they seem to be changing their name to "Big K," judging by the new signage--and bought air mattresses for $19.99 each, since neither of us owned a bed yet. And we stayed there for nearly a month. It really wasn't too bad, though we had to re-inflate our mattresses each night.

And then on the forty-fifth day of this mini-Odyssey, we were finally able to move into an apartment.

The next morning, my car wouldn't shift out of park. It's still sitting there.

Now I'm borrowing someone else's car.


Derek
Software Engineer (8/28/97)