My wife Marcie and I did not so much survive the 2008 financial crisis as get pulled under like a massive riptide.

We had a condo in Princeville, Kauai, and owned four fully entitled lots on Kauai—approved as residential building sites, with the necessary zoning, legal access, water, and wastewater clearances in place on the Wainiha stream just hundreds of feet from the beach on the north shore one mile from the Napali coast. These were not speculative jungle parcels with some vague dream attached to them.  We had done the hard part. We had turned raw possibility into something marketable.

Then, just as we put them on the market, the world financial system began to seize.

Conventional bank loans dried up almost overnight, including loans for buyers wanting to purchase lots with approved plans.  Our carrying costs on those four lots had reached $10,000 a month. Marcie had just lost her job with Waggener Edstrom in Seattle, Microsoft’s public relations firm. We had no deep reserve, no trust fund, no parent company, no bailout committee waiting in the wings. We tried desperately to hang on but couldn’t.

So the entitled lots with hundreds of thousands of our invested dollars went back to the lenders and a million dollars in equity disappeared overnight.

Then came the Princeville condo. Its value was falling by $100,000 a month. A few months earlier it had been worth around $600,000. Then it plummeted to a point below our mortgage balance. We could not unload it. We could not hold it. We watched it go back to the lender too.

We crawled back to our home on twenty acres in Willits, California, only to discover that even that refuge was no refuge at all. We had taken out a second mortgage on it for Kauai development expenses, and the lender would not extend the maturity date. The second mortgage holder foreclosed.

One by one, the places that had made up our life disappeared.

All we had left was our rental flat in North Beach.

So we put our belongings in storage and moved back to San Francisco, wounded but not yet beaten. There is a peculiar humiliation in reinventing yourself after professional life has already stamped you as established. We were not kids starting over. We were adults with advanced degrees, resumes, work histories, and a sudden need to find something—anything—that would keep us from circling further around the drain.

That was how we found the estate manager position in St. Helena—on Craigslist. By a remarkable coincidence, seven years earlier Marcie and I had been married at a seven-acre bed-and-breakfast just three miles from the estate. We were returning to the place where our marriage had begun, though under circumstances we never could have imagined on our wedding day.

The property was an eleven-acre luxurious estate a couple of miles from downtown St. Helena, overlooking Lake Hennessey. The main house was 6,400 square feet, with a slate roof, a pool, an elevator, and a large cobblestone courtyard with a massive fountain as the center piece  where guests could pull around to the front door. There was also a 2,300-square-foot guest house. Our quarters would be a two-bedroom apartment over the garage, which housed an Aston Martin, a Range Rover, and a Bentley.

The owners, Bob & Valerie Peebles, seemed pleasant enough when we interviewed. They liked the idea of having two business professionals with advanced degrees at their beck and call.  We were to be competent, invisible, available, grateful.

When the interview ended, Mr. Peebles said, “We are favorably inclined.”

Bob & Valerie Peebles

It sounded almost aristocratic. We had made the cut.

We got the job.

Our duties were sprawling. Laundry. House cleaning. Ground crew management. Drinking water system management. Plant and tree watering. Errands. Oversight. The vague category of “and so much more,” which in estate life means whatever needs doing and whatever the owners decide, on any given day.

Not long before, we had occupied professional offices with floor to ceiling windows and views of San Francisco bay. Now we were living in wine country, surrounded by beauty, housed above luxury cars, scrubbing, vacuuming, dusting and laundering our way through someone else’s dream.

And then there was Baxter.

Baxter was the dog in residence, a lovable Golden Retriever. But Baxter’s life on that estate was not, in my opinion, the life a Golden Retriever was meant to have.

For much of the time I saw him, he was confined to a crate in the Peebles’ living room that appeared barely large enough for his body. The crate measured 48 inches long, 22 inches wide and 28 inches high. I did not take issue with the 48-inch length, which is standard for a large-dog crate. The height was four or five inches lower than many comparable crates, but Baxter could still stand upright with a small amount of clearance above his head.

What troubled me most was the width. At only 22 inches, the crate was roughly eight inches narrower than a typical 48-inch crate which generally has a 30 inch width. Baxter had only a few inches of space on either side of his body and perhaps six inches to spare lengthwise. He did not appear to have enough room to turn around easily or stretch out comfortably on his side.

He looked cramped. I felt claustrophobic simply looking at him in there.

The photograph below is a stock photo showing what a comfortably proportioned crate can look like for a Golden Retriever. Baxter’s crate was not that.

It is clear in the pictures of Baxter below that he did not have enough room to turn around easily or stretch out comfortably on his side.

(above) Tape measure on top of crate reads 22 inches.

I do not know what the Peebles told themselves about that arrangement. Perhaps they thought it was discipline. Perhaps they thought it was convenience. Perhaps, in their minds, the crate was simply where Baxter belonged when he was not being summoned into use. But to me it felt inhumane. It was one of those quiet cruelties that polite houses can hide in plain sight.

The Peebles took an extended European vacation for two months, and during that time Baxter became my companion. I taught him to play Frisbee.

I was absurdly proud of this. I had never trained a dog to do anything in my life. But Baxter took to it with joy. The Frisbee became our ritual. When Marcie opened the home in the morning he would come trotting over to our apartment full of expectation, as if the day itself had been invented for our game.

For Baxter, I think, it was more than a game. It was release. It was movement. It was the simple animal pleasure of running across open grass with someone cheering him on instead of containing him.

When the Peebles returned from Europe, they informed me that they did not want Baxter playing Frisbee anymore. They were worried he might injure himself. Marcie thought that in truth it was Mr. Peebles not being able to handle a worker having a better relationship with his dog than him.

That broke Baxter’s heart and ours.

The next morning he came to our door, ready to play. I had to disappoint him. It was such a small thing, and yet it was not small at all. It was the first sign that joy itself could be overruled on this estate. Even the dog’s happiness required permission.

It was a harbinger of things to come.

 Above: a welcome home gesture to the Peebles on their return from Europe—fresh vegetables and flowers from their garden with a note.

Our main house cleaning day was Thursday. One Thursday, the Peebles informed us they were having guests and we needed to be finished by 5 p.m. The last stop was Mr. Peebles’s bathroom. I had grabbed a brand-new bucket from the garage, one the Peebles had purchased, to douse the shower. I filled it with water and set it on the carpet just outside the bathroom floor.

As I was about to use it, I noticed that a large area of the carpet was completely drenched.

The bucket had a tiny pinhole in the bottom.

It had been leaking silently the entire time.

There are disasters, and then there are household mishaps that rich people treat as disasters because they have been insulated from the real thing.

We immediately informed the Peebles. We gathered towels and soaked up as much water as we could. There would still be more to do, so we agreed to come back to it the next day. They were clearly upset, but appeared to take it in stride.

The next morning Marcie and I entered through the side door connected to the garage, passed through the mudroom and laundry room, and stepped into the great hallway.

The Peebles were coming toward us.

Marching might be the better word.

They did not appear to be coming to exchange pleasantries.

They lit into us immediately.

“How could you let this happen? What a mess!”

The tone suggested that I had taken a garden hose to a museum.

I explained that I had grabbed a newly purchased bucket from the garage, filled it with water, and unknowingly set it down with a pinhole in the bottom. Then I did something that turned out to be intolerable. I demonstrated the truth.

I picked up the bucket, with the Peebles and Marcie following me, took it to the mudroom sink, filled it, lifted it, and showed them the leaking bottom.

That was when Mr. Peebles revealed something about himself. He did not merely dislike being contradicted. He could not tolerate being shown.

He moved toward me and violently came down with his hands on my shoulders like talons.

I spun out of his grasp and got out the side door onto the lawn. He followed. We ended up toe to toe outside, the whole absurd drama having traveled from a wet carpet to a near physical confrontation on the grass of an eleven-acre wine country estate.

Then Valerie appeared.

“What in God’s name is happening here?”

That stopped the escalation.

Her next sentence was almost as revealing as his hands on my shoulders.

“You bring out the worst in my husband, and I can’t have you here anymore.”

I had not assaulted her husband. I had not threatened him. I had not damaged the property intentionally. I had not even purchased the defective bucket. I had merely demonstrated that the bucket leaked.

But that was enough.

I was fired.

Marcie managed to talk them into keeping her on, at least temporarily. I was given twenty-four hours to leave the property.

There is a special kind of humiliation in being expelled from a place where your wife remains employed. It is not just the loss of a job. It is exile. It is the message that the household can tolerate her but not you, that your presence has become inconvenient, that your side of the story is irrelevant because you are not the owner of the slate roof, the courtyard, the elevator, or the Bentley.

Robert P. Peebles
The Man, The Myth, The Legend-ary Tax Cheat

During my time there, I had also learned that Mr. Peebles had been fighting an existential battle with the federal government. As part of my duties, I cleaned his sprawling downstairs office space, which was chock full of  boxes labeled US v. Peebles. The matter, as I understood it, involved a 4 million dollar inheritance from his aunt Charlotte of Connecticut and the tax treatment of that inheritance. He had not reported that bequest, in the form of annuity he set up before his aunt died, to his accountant who prepared his Aunt Charlotte’s federal estate tax return thereby evading an estimated two million dollars in estate taxes owed to the IRS and the State of  Connecticut. He was indicted 2008 a little over two years before we arrived on the scene. .

Two decades earlier, with my masters degree in tax law put to work, I had worked as a programmer/analyst for a tax software firm and had designed and programmed a Form 706 product that CPAs and attorneys used to prepare estate tax returns—United States Estate (and Generation-Skipping Transfer) Tax Return for their clients. Now I was cleaning the office of a man entangled in a federal tax matter involving the kind of tax return I once designed and wrote software for.

And this man, fighting to avoid a possible transfer from an eleven-acre wine country estate to some version of Club Fed, had put his hands on me over water leaking from a bucket he had purchased.

The financial crisis had already stripped Marcie and me of Kauai, Willits, savings, standing, and nearly every illusion of security. But St. Helena taught me something else. It taught me how quickly the world can recategorize you. One year you are a professional. The next you are low skilled labor. One year your education means you are trusted with complex financial matters. The next you are being scolded for a wet carpet as if you are a naughty child.

It was not just the loss of money that changed us. It was the loss of position.

We had entered the estate thinking perhaps this was reinvention. We would live in wine country. We would work hard. We would stabilize. Maybe we would heal.

Instead, I learned that beauty can be a very effective disguise.

The slate roof, the pool, the elevator, the courtyard, the guest house, the cars beneath our apartment—all of it suggested grace, order, cultivation. But underneath was a rigid little kingdom where even Baxter’s joy could be cancelled and a leaky bucket could become a capital offense.

Marcie and I could not remain separated, with her in St. Helena and me cast out. So we got busy looking for the next position.

This time we landed a major job managing a 196-unit manufactured home/mobile home park in Citrus Heights, not far from Sacramento. It was owned by Jackson Square Management, which also held six other parks. Jackson Square Management was owned by Tom Coates of San Francisco, a man with an empire of residential rentals across the country numbering close to 150,000 units.

At the year-and-a-half mark in that job, Mr. Coates and I would square off in a battle of wills.

But that is another chapter.

This one belonged to Baxter, the Bentley, and the bucket with the pinhole.