As eruption threatened, the authorities told everyone living in the vicinity to clear out. But Truman wasn’t going anywhere. For more than two months, the volcano smoldered. Authorities extended the evacuation zone to ten miles around the mountain. Truman stubbornly remained. He didn’t believe the scientists, with their uncertain and sometimes conflicting reports. He worried his lodge would be looted and vandalized, as another lodge on Spirit Lake was. And regardless, this home was his life.
“If this place is gonna go, I want to go with it,” he said. “’Cause if I lost it, it would kill me in a week anyway.” He attracted reporters with his straight-talking, curmudgeonly way, holding forth with a green John Deere cap on his head and a tall glass of bourbon and Coke in his hand. The local police thought about arresting him for his own good but decided not to, given his age and the bad publicity they’d have to endure. They offered to bring him out every chance they got. He steadfastly refused. He told a friend, “If I die tomorrow, I’ve had a damn good life. I’ve done everything I could do, and I’ve done everything I ever wanted to do.”
The blast came at 8:40 a.m. on May 18, 1980, with the force of an atomic bomb. The entire lake disappeared under the massive lava flow, burying Truman and his cats and his home with it. In the aftermath, he became an icon—the old man who had stayed in his house, taken his chances, and lived life on his own terms in an era when that possibility seemed to have all but disappeared. The people of nearby Castlerock constructed a memorial to him at the town’s entrance that still stands, and there was a television movie starring Art Carney.
Alice wasn’t facing a volcano, but she might as well have been. Giving up her home on Greencastle Street meant giving up the life she had built for herself over decades. The things that made Longwood House so much safer and more manageable than the house were precisely what made it hard for her to endure. Her apartment might have been called “independent living,” but it involved the imposition of more structure and supervision than she’d ever had to deal with before. Aides watched her diet. Nurses monitored her health. They observed her growing unsteadiness and made her use a walker. This was reassuring for Alice’s children, but she didn’t like being nannied or controlled. And the regulation of her life only increased with time. When the staff became concerned that she was missing doses of her medications, they informed her that unless she kept her medications with the nurses and came down to their station twice a day to take them under direct supervision, she would have to move out of independent living to the nursing home wing. Jim and Nan hired a part-time aide named Mary to help Alice comply, to give her some company, and to stave off the day she would have to transfer. She liked Mary. But having her hanging around the apartment for hours on end, often with little to do, only made the situation more depressing.
For Alice, it must have felt as if she had crossed into an alien land that she would never be allowed to leave. The border guards were friendly and cheerful enough. They promised her a nice place to live where she’d be well taken care of. But she didn’t really want anyone to take care of her; she just wanted to live a life of her own. And those cheerful border guards had taken her keys and her passport. With her home went her control.
People saw Harry Truman as a hero. There was never going to be a Longwood House for Harry Truman of Spirit Lake, and Alice Hobson of Arlington, Virginia, didn’t want there to be one for her either.
*
HOW DID WE wind up in a world where the only choices for the very old seem to be either going down with the volcano or yielding all control over our lives? To understand what happened, you have to trace the story of how we replaced the poorhouse with the kinds of places we have today—and it turns out to be a medical story. Our old age homes didn’t develop out of a desire to give the frail elderly better lives than they’d had in those dismal places. We didn’t look around and say to ourselves, “You know, there’s this phase of people’s lives in which they can’t really cope on their own, and we ought to find a way to make it manageable.” No, instead we said, “This looks like a medical problem. Let’s put these people in the hospital. Maybe the doctors can figure something out.” The modern nursing home developed from there, more or less by accident.