A wonderful adventure, Three Without Fear was published in 1947 but is just as engaging today. It's like Gary Paulsen's Hatch...
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Between a charcoal grill and a keg on ice before a half dozen friends who tried to dress nice, Brother William pronounces: "Husband and wife." Couples by the hundred he's bonded for life — or some brief stretch of it — in back yards, grassy parks, open space under birches. Never in churches. These are joyous affairs with a simple touch. "For people," he says, "who can't afford much." He does it for free. He says: For love.
Note: The man who I call "Brother William" is the man who introduced me to the Plattsburgh Hillbillies. He's a noble man (in the untitled sense), as you might expect since he's the son of Ken Laundry. He's also the only man I've ever met who has been turned into a bobblehead doll. If you would like to buy a genuine William D. Laundry bobblehead for $20, the proceeds go to an endowment at SUNY Plattsburgh. Call 800-964-1889.
A warm breeze rises over black water. A meteorite — so silent! Your little finger seeks my hand. This, our cabaret. Entranced we linger among fireflies sporting in the nightlife. Above hulking mountains float stars, the Milky Way like city lights of heaven.
Among Mountains
Returning as an old man maybe now I understand: The terrible weather of the Adirondacks makes you treasure the good. You find the right woman and stop. You ride out storms. You stir the glowing coals. You learn to crave the taste of wild blueberry plucked fresh, staining lips, sweetness so intense you will climb peaks, gorge yourself, filling pockets for deep winter.
Two men in T-shirts are sun-roughened, muscular in that non-bodybuilder way. They know physical work.
On the window glass with a smudgy finger the older man sketches a map from memory. They speak of willow trees, a trickling spring. A rocky field. Twin graves on a hill.
The younger man says, "That land was like home to me. Every time I set foot on it, I felt like I was being hugged." Embarrassed, perhaps, they each look away through the glass. On the runway, jets are rolling. Newark. Chicago. Some goddamn city. Now boarding.
The sun has set, the dusk is deep. You wipe your fingers of hamburger grease while the counter girl cleans up, humming, closing. Stepping out, you catch a taxi for the five minute ride to the Ho Hum Motel. The driver, Amanda, looks college age. She says her father owns the cab. Chatty, she says she's lived here her whole life. It's a safe town: "I mean, look at me, I'm driving a taxi at night." A pleasant trip. You overtip.
Morning, you head for the lake where sailboats flutter like delicate moths. Your cabbie, Albert, blares the horn: "This is what I hate about this town. People don't get out of the way. People walkin'! Y'know what I'm sayin'?" Albert's a whiner, a short guy. "I can't wait to go back south in a couple months when my service ends." Oh, service. Meaning: Albert's on parole, a work-release. What crime? Probably no danger, but strange. You count your change.
Something, I forget what, reveals I'm from San Fran, so the bread stocker, a big white guy, tells me he lived in California for six months, college in Long Beach, had a "brown-skin girlfriend," but he had to leave because he's "earthquake sensitive." He woke up one morning with the certain knowledge that there would be a killer quake within three days. He warned everybody. "Was there a quake?" I ask. "Yes. In Mexico City." "So you were off by a few thousand miles." "No. The way I see it, I prevented it from happening locally by calling it. Then I got the hell out." "The girlfriend?" "No." So now he's married with kids and drives a bread truck in Burlington, Vermont. He smiles. "It's a good town." I agree.
Note: I usually come to the Adirondacks by flying into Burlington, Vermont, followed by a ferry ride across Lake Champlain.
After Labor Day, speedboats gone, the weather turns gorgeous. Teacher Jim, age eighty-two, and nurse Edith, a mere seventy-eight, at the dock nonchalantly strip. In the cold water they soap themselves, bare butts etched like driftwood. The air is warm, breeze gentle. World, carry on.
Midseason
Free like an otter I swim without suit nor jock, then spy a mom and (uh oh) young girl at the neighboring dock. They wave, (whew), smiles on their lips. There's something so wholesome about a skinny dip.
The man climbs foolishly alone into clouds. Breaking spider webs, he's first to follow this abandoned path in a long while. A final, steep scramble up rocks and he's atop Moose Mountain. Clouds lift. Brilliant view, shared: Perched on a near spar, an alert falcon.
Tired, descending a different faint trail, he hasn't seen another human all day. Crossing a creek, he hops to a slick rock and falls so fast there is no time to raise his arms. His jaw slams against a boulder. Is the bone fractured?
He's in the cold creek, getting soaked, seeing stars, mad as hell. He was always good at bearing pain but this is amazing. He gets up swearing, screaming at nobody, the gods, everything. Where's the hat? Shit! He stumbles down the creek searching and slips again. Fuck!
He's too tired, too wet, too banged up and crazy. Farewell, beloved Tilley hat. Socks squishing, he continues along a trail so little used the duff bounces under his boots. Moss, fungus, throb. Birch, pine, stab. Squirrel, jay, pang.
Two weeks later — two weeks in which it was impossible to swing a hammer — a doctor purses her lips and says, "You're crazy, hiking solo where nobody would find you. You almost broke your jaw. And didn't it occur to you," she asks shaking her head, "you dislocated your shoulder?" She pops it into place.
The first time my father took me to the Forks — the town, Ausable Forks — those fifteen miles took all day by wagon. On Blueberry Hill you had to stop and chock the wheels so the team could rest. Later I'd ride our old mare and later still — this would be, oh, 1929 — me and some boys shared a Ford Model A. A mounted patrol stopped us. Our driver was fourteen, no license of course. The trooper consulted his gelding, I swear, turned his back to us and muttered, adjusted the saddle for five minutes while we stewed, scared. Well, the man let us go 'cuz we needed a way to get to school. That's how things was done. It was horse sense.
Evenings
after a glass of scotch, Ken would tell a story with a straight face so
you never knew exactly when the truth was left behind, if ever. I
heard this one several times. Here's another: '32 Ford, '80 Calendar, '64 Story
How often will a weary cashier see long after midnight, shopping in a Plattsburgh Price Chopper grocery cheerful mature men, all three giddy as kids going to summer camp? Which we are.
Arriving near dawn, directly to the lake we're drawn. No need for flashlights on this trail learned by heart a lifetime ago.
We strip and dive — WAHOO! — startling the loons. Purple water split by the moon so calm, ice-cold on flesh like balm.
First
as campers, later as counselors, now as owners (and I,
friend-of-owners), we gather in late June for a long weekend to open the
cabins. There's water to turn on, pipes to repair, docks to install,
weeds to hack. In 1999 we met in the Montreal airport baggage area,
each from separate flights, near midnight and drove across the border. Customarily we
buy groceries in Plattsburgh, then drive along the Saranac River
through sleeping villages until at last we arrive at Silver Lake.
Door-to-door for me it's a 15 hour journey.
Hairy brown spiders cling trembling to the underside of boards, then drop to dark water as we dismantle a dock.
My brawny son, goofy-haired, so tall, is distressed, refusing to rip nails until he observes: these spiders can swim!
Good boy.
Note:
I don't normally feel a need to fact-check a poem, but in this case I
did and here's what I learned: They're called Dock Spiders, genus
Dolomedes. They are nocturnal. They walk on water. They eat insects
and even small fish. They can go underwater, breathing air captured as
bubbles on their hairy bodies. Cool critters. Here's a photo from Wikipedia:
You must learn the appetite of insects, the temper of trees, the sex life of local fungus. Or they will destroy. Know the weight of snow, the force of frost, the humor of stone, the habits of soil, even the chemistry of the local air. Or they will destroy. Talk to people. Customs are the accumulated wisdom of a place. Respect the very soul of these folk, this land. Or they will destroy you as they should.
I learned this lesson in the Adirondacks, but it's true everywhere. Construction is local.
"Need a hand?" "Nope." "Can I help anyway?" "Doubt it." (Which means yes.)
Old Ken couldn't lift this dock alone, but he would manage with the wile of eighty-odd years to winch, drag, set it in place. His movements, stiff. His knees, weathered. His grip, when we shake hands, like the clamp of death.
Job done, he climbs aboard his skeletal tractor, a relic, 'Fifty-One Ford, for the uphill journey home. Maintained where it counts, the naked motor purrs.
Two rock-jawed old men: “You don’t want a gallon of that.” “Why not?” “Bad for you.” “Bad?” “Yes. It causes work.”
Most
summers, I return to the Adirondacks. I go as a working guest. For
pay, for play, I have a hard time telling the difference. You don't get
to choose what you love. Somehow, the Adirondacks chose me. Over the years, I've jotted sketches. I'll publish a few of them here over the next few days…
Molly
and Mike bought an acre of mountaintop. A forty-niner had settled the
place just after the gold rush, building a stagecoach stop halfway
between the San Francisco Bay and the Pacific Ocean. There was a small
barn for the horses. The stage stop became a hunting lodge. Now Molly
and Mike wanted to turn it into a house for themselves and their
eight-year-old daughter. They had a giant stone fireplace, virgin
redwoods, bad water.
"I need country air," Molly said. "I'm part Cherokee."
"Which part?" I asked.
She
gave me a curious look. "My lungs, at least." Molly was a nurse who
worked at the same hospital as my wife. They'd become friends. As with
many of my wife's healthcare colleagues, I sometimes felt like the
oddball dropout who they tolerated in order to have the pleasure of her
company.
Besides the friendship of our wives, Mike hired me not
for my experience (I had none) but because I was one of the few
tradesmen willing to go so far up into the mountains and actually find
the place where you look for the dirt road after the split pine tree,
turn at the second gate (be sure to close it behind you), go slow when
you ford the creek, then watch for a blue mailbox.
At the time
(August 1976), my wife was pregnant with our first. I'd just quit my
reliable, high pay, full time job as a computer operator. My goal was
to become a low pay, part time carpenter/handyman and then get rich
writing novels. Career planning was never my strong suit.
My
first task for Molly and Mike was installing the metal chimney for a
wood-burning stove. In the process, I somehow lost my old cheapo
Stanley hammer. When Mike paid me, he added five dollars. "For the
hammer," he said.
Nice guy. Generous. Or was it charity?
My
next job was to modernize the wiring. I crawled under the house
through stagecoach dust, running Romex. I insulated. I drywalled.
Mike kept overpaying me. A hardwood floor. I learned skills and
applied them.
My baby son became a child. My wife gave birth
to a daughter. We left the flatlands and built a house among massive
redwood trees in La Honda, not far from Mike and Molly. Their daughter
was growing, too.
In 1982 we had our third child. Molly and Mike
had just the one, who was now a teenager spending all day in her
bedroom watching soaps and playing the same rock record over and over
while giggling and screaming on the phone. Our paths were diverging.
Mike, who was an expert in biotech, had taken a big-bucks job advising a
venture capital fund. I was not so flush.
Mike hired me to build a deck. I presented them with several choices of how to design the railing.
"Which is better?" Molly asked.
"They're about equal," I said. "It's a matter of taste."
"Right," Molly said. "Some folks have it, and some folks don't."
Their
taste was for clean wood, simply crafted. I built the stairs for the
deck on a day when I was too tired. The next day, Molly was waiting for
me. Frowning, she said, "I wonder what my father would have said if he
saw those steps. He was a carpenter for fifty-one years back home in
Oklahoma."
I'd used knotty wood, and the nails weren't in a
line. "He'd kick me down the stairs," I said. "Then he'd tell me to
tear it out."
"He never kicked people," Molly said.
Actually,
I felt as if Molly had just mentally kicked me down the stairs in her
no-nonsense nursely way. I replaced the steps with clear lumber, nailed
straight in a line. At my expense. I owed it to the old man. And to
Molly.
Often, the house on that wind-swept ridge would be gloomy
and cold, but you could see a beautiful, sunny day in the air just a
hundred feet above if only the fog would clear. Which it wouldn't, not
for weeks at a time. Then one day the sun would come out, the view
would clear to the ocean, and it would be a lovely spot to work.
Heaven.
Mike and Molly came home later and later.
Molly asked me to fix up the old barn. They wanted to use it as a garage. Half the cedar roof shingles were missing — eaten by a goat, they'd been told — and the walls leaned badly. In fact, the entire barn would have collapsed except that its tilt had been stopped by a youthful redwood tree, which easily buttressed several tons of lumber. The goat had been chained to the tree. You could still see chain burn around the young trunk —
young, that is, in redwood years, which are counted in centuries. Repairing
that barn was a fun job. In late October after nailing the final
shingle, I sat on the roof facing the ocean as a cold drippy fog blew
into my face, and in dampness I jotted something like this:
The gold miner settled this hilltop a century ago, built this barn next to this tree and watched the stagecoach pass twice a day. Hand-hewn timbers now sag. Doors hang off hinges. Glass windows — added later — now are shattered. Square nails, rusted. Old roof covered with moss except where the goat ate the shingles. Walls lean downhill until stopped braced against the redwood tree which will be there to hold them without effort for another, oh say, millennium or so.
I
was going to add lines about my repairs and a wish that the new
construction might endure for some small fraction of the lifetime of
that goat-tree. My new lumber in that unheated structure, washed by
ocean fog, host to insects, fungus, owls and cats, would go the way of
dead wood. Before I could write any more, Molly came home with the
Volvo trunk full of apples and pumpkins. The mood passed.
After
I'd cleaned up, Molly gave me apple pudding, and she told me they were
putting the house on the market. Their daughter needed a better high
school. "It'll happen to you, too," she said.
At that time, my kids were six, four, and one year old.
On an impulse, I gave Molly the soggy unfinished poem.
"How
cute," she said. "I'll show it to Neil. Maybe he'll turn that old
barn into a song." Neil Young lived nearby on his Broken Arrow Ranch.
Molly
and Mike bought an upscale house in Portola Valley, an upscale town.
Over the next four years they hired me to install track lights, to
convert a closet, to rebuild a pool house. It was in August, 1986 that I
came into their daughter's bedroom one day and surprised Molly, who was
bawling on the bed. "I'm all right," she said. "Empty nest."
A
couple weeks later I stopped by to touch up some details and met Scott
and his young wife Sara, who was obviously pregnant. "We're
housesitting," Sara explained. "Molly and Mike are in Switzerland."
Scott
was building shelves in the dining room. They were young, just
starting out. They were me and my wife, a flashback. Our decade was
over. Molly would nurture them. Mike would overpay them.
"They're the nicest people," Sara said.
"Yes," I said. "You'll enjoy working for them."
Since
then, another quarter century has passed. I haven't worked for Mike
and Molly again. The stagecoach stop has passed through several
owners. I've stayed in La Honda where sixteen giant redwoods grow on my
little plot of land. Does one, indeed, "own" a redwood? I think they
own me. My kids attended high school, then college without the benefit
of a better zip code.
I never completed that poem. I don't know
if Molly showed her fragment to Neil, but I'm pretty sure he never wrote
a song about it. He's an old fart now, cranky and delightful. The
goat-tree remains youthful in redwood years. The barn is sagging in
places, aging once again in barn years. The fog keeps coming, cold and
damp, unchanging. Fog years are the longest of all.
I built a mandap for my daughter's blended Indian/Christian/Jewish/American wedding in 2002. I tell that story here: The Mandap (Part One) and here: The Mandap (Part Two).
After
the wedding, I was told that according to Indian family tradition, the
mandap wood should be re-used to build something that would be
meaningful and appropriate to the newly bonded families. I saved the
wood but did nothing for a while. A few years later, when the wedded
couple were expecting their first child, they suggested that I use the
wood to build a cradle. What could be more appropriate and meaningful
than that? So I gave it a lot of thought. The wood amounted to four
redwood 2x2s and eight redwood 1x3s, each about eight feet long.
I
never built it. Redwood is notoriously soft, weak lumber. The
expectant parents were extremely safety-conscious (which I applaud) and
would require a totally fail-safe cradle. I couldn't come up with a
safe, good-looking, functional design.
Their son is now five
years old. Actually, as he would immediately correct me, he is five and
six/twelfths old. Perhaps I should say five and
twenty-seven/fifty-seconds. He likes to be accurate.
I've made
picture frames out of the mandap wood. In consultation with the
parents, we decided to keep the lumber looking pretty much as it was:
old whitewashed redwood that had flowers and ivy stapled to it and then
was stored in my damp garage for ten years with spiders and banana slugs
crawling over it. In other words, looking like used lumber.
When
I pulled out the lumber, a few dry ivy stems were still stapled to it.
Ivy is like the cockroach: it will survive nuclear Armageddon.
I
removed staples and gave the wood a light sanding to clean it up. Then
I built simple frames. I re-applied the original white stain and
filled a few screw holes. The staple holes remain.
I
hope the frames look appropriate: mandap wood with a special history,
now displaying family photos and the artwork of that amazing bundle of
life, fruit of that special wedding.
