New Zealand was our big escape plan from work. But here my wife and I were, stuck inside a modern teepee house about to break an expensive glass facade.
As I pulled the hammer back to smash the glass, I hesitated. “Just get it over with!” my wife said as she covered her ears.
But I couldn’t do it.
As an architect, I knew how long it’d take to measure and get new, custom-cut pieces of glass made. I put the hammer down to reassess our luxurious predicament.
“How long are we going to stay stuck in this Dwell magazine nightmare before someone finds us?” my wife asked.
A much-needed break
Ok, I’ll admit it. My wife and I are a bit intense and work way too much. But this trip was our brief window to spend quality time together.
My wife had a friend who hooked us up with this spectacular modern teepee vacation house on Waiheke Island in New Zealand.
Designed by a super-talented Kiwi architect, the home was an Instagrammer’s dream.
The architect met us at the house to give us a personal tour. The story about how he came up with the design idea and got the complex shapes to come together just right was riveting to hear.
As a welcoming gift, the architect brought us two bottles of champagne. He had one quick drink with us before he headed out of town to inspect a new project. He said he’d check in on us later in the week.
There was no food in the house. But we planned to go to the market early the next morning.
My wife and I stayed up late, playing favorite tunes from our iPhones. We danced around in our underwear with the big glass door wide open. No one could see or hear us as we were deep in a rainforest.
However, like our iPhone batteries, our jet-lagged bodies ran down to less than 10% energy. It was time to get some shut-eye. But as I tried to close the massive glass door, it wouldn’t lock.
I remembered the architect told us the door lock was a bit tricky to latch. “No need to lock the doors,” he said, “because you’re in a safe place.”
As quaint as that sounded, I’d seen enough horror flicks about unsuspecting tourists sleeping in remote cabins in the woods while someone — or something — crawls inside.
My wife and I had a lively debate about whether to lock the doors. But there was no way I could sleep in a strange place with unlocked doors. So I played with the mechanism until I got the door to lock up.
One way out
We woke up early, crazy hungry, and needing a caffeine fix. I got showered, dressed, and ready to head out for the day in under 10 minutes. But my wife needed an hour to get ready. Making a joke about the delay was my first fatal error.
I figured I’d sit on the front deck while she got ready. But that’s when I discovered our barrier.
No matter how much I tried, I couldn’t get the large glass door to unlock.
My wife forewarned me this might happen, and I couldn’t bear the thought of her being right. I fiddled with the lock for another 45 minutes until my fingertips bled.
But it was futile.
There had to be another way out of the house — a back door or escape hatch — but nothing. I couldn’t even find an operable window that was big enough for our bodies to fit through, never mind jumping forty feet into the woods.
Photo by Author
It all comes out
When my wife came down the spiral stairs with a hangry look in her eyes, I dreaded breaking the news to her.
“You won’t believe this,” I said. “But I can’t get the door unlocked.”
“Let me try,” she said, convinced she’d crack the lock.
My wife fiddled with the door lock for 20 minutes until she tore her new manicured nail off, which was my second fatal error. And then she berated me for not heeding the architect’s advice not to lock the door.
“But of course, you had to lock it!” she added.
And that’s when eight months of unresolved issues came bubbling forth. We’d both stockpiled a long list of grievances, and the key to unlocking them was a glass door.
A volley of words ensued, each going lower than the next.
But when my wife attacked my inability to fix things around the house — the ultimate blow to my male insecurities — I lobbed an underbelly shot about her relationship with her mother, which led to fatal mistake number three.
That’s when a verbal concussion bomb went off inside the teepee. And a firestorm of words ricocheted around the echo-y walls of this magnificent triangulated edifice.
But don’t worry, nobody could hear us in those woods.
The breakdown
We tried to call the architect, but both our cell phone batteries had drained. Of course, I didn’t purchase the international plug adapter my wife implored me to buy at the airport because I thought they overpriced it.
“We’ll find a cheaper one in the town,” I said. But I would’ve paid five hundred bucks for a plug adapter to get out of this solitary confinement.
We kept going back to the door lock at random intervals to see if a new attempt would do the trick. But nothing we tried worked.
Our entire vacation day went by as we sat stuck in a teepee with no food, caffeine, TV, music, cell phone, or internet. The Cold War of words was in the air, but there was nowhere to hide.
Photo by Author
As the night wore on, my wife got so hungry, hypoglycemic, and claustrophobic that she broke down in tears.
And that’s when my stubbornness melted away.
As I held my wife’s tired, famished body next to mine, I gave her a reassuring kiss on her head and then lips. I wiped the salty, malnourished tears from her cheeks with my thumbs and said, “I’m sorry about locking the door. I’ll break the glass tomorrow morning.”
That night, we made starving mad love with the salivating desire of wild dogs.
The release
The next morning, I had the hammer in hand when the architect suddenly emerged on the deck in fear. Yelling through the glass, I let him know we couldn’t open the door. He stuck his finger through a hole in the lock, shook the door, and flipped it right open.
So simple, like the Fonz did to the jukebox on Happy Days.
My wife and I ran into town like prisoners on furlough. We bought anything we could sink our lips into and brought them back to our hideout in the woods.
But we didn’t dare lock the door.
“Who cares about Sasquatch?” I said. “We need coffee!”
A welcomed surprise
Not long after we got back to the states, my wife discovered she was pregnant. And we backtracked the date to the teepee house.
It wasn’t long before we had a new little cellmate.
Our beautiful daughter is now two-years-old, and her favorite place to hang out is the canvas teepee we got for her.
Photo by Author
When I look at her, I realize that sometimes life doesn’t go how we expect it. And there are moments when we feel trapped in a place we don’t want to be.
But perhaps there’s some cosmic reason the universe keeps us from getting what we want — so we can receive something much more magical and glorious.
This lesson of not getting what I want when I want it, only to receive something better, has happened to me so many times in my life. Yet, I still struggle to learn it, much less trust it.
I met my wife in baggage claim after we both came out of difficult breakups. And we thank God every day we didn’t get what we thought we wanted because we got something much better than we ever imagined possible.
It’s the same with our baby and so many other things in life.
Life can be magical even when we don’t get what we want.
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This post was previously published on medium.com.
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Photo credit: Kevin Ervin Kelley (Author )
