Laddie, losses, and maybe a few random Tuesday thoughts

Laddie and friends have arrived at Joel’s Gulch. Nothing but the bare notice so far, since it was late when they got there.

But all who made it happen can be proud of themselves.

I’m sure we’ll be hearing fun updates soon.

—–

Good news is most welcome in a summer that’s had too much of the other kind.

The week MamaLiberty died, I learned a local acquaintance had also departed the world. S was in his early 60s when he died of cancer.

I never knew S well, but I’d known him for decades and done business with him. He was an independent logger and as kind and decent a man as you could ever know — the classic “give you the shirt off his back” guy.

Even before the big timber companies began closing their woods to We the Peasants, S’s lands were my favorite place to walk. Our forests are strictly utilitarian. They’re commercial farms. Nobody grooms them to be pretty. But S did. He thinned his trees with an eye to appearance, as well as better growth. The edges of the roads running though his property were mown grass. He loved his woods. If you knew where to look you could find ponds and picnic tables and campfire circles.

Although he hated when teenagers used and abused his land, he long ago gave me permission to walk my dogs where I would, even on his private side roads.

He dreamed of someday building a house out there, private and way off grid. About two years before he died, he began.

I never saw what he built (the building permit posted at the road said just a pole building, but I believe his son lives out there at least part time), because as construction commenced, a keep out sign went up, and I never so much as stepped past that signpost, even though some of the very best of his beautiful land was down that side road.

—–

(Funny — and grand — how in a decent world a mere two words, “No trespassing,” are holy writ.)

—–

This weekend I stopped at the lumberyard to buy sand for the block patio and the “wrong” people were there.

Well, the people were right, as usual, but there at the wrong time.

Yes, I have schedules of the main lumberyard guys memorized, because they’re founts of construction knowledge and each has his own specialties. This guy knows plumbing, another knows concrete or electrical or garden tech. If I need to talk to that guy I know when he’ll be there. Or not.

If I have a tough finishing question, I don’t go in on weekends because the #1 paint guy doesn’t work then. But there he was, upsetting the balance of the lumberyard universe.

“What are you doing here?”

He drew me down a side aisle and told me that W had just been fired and that he was sharing bits of W’s schedule with four other men.

Now, in plenty of businesses, employees come and go. Not this business. Oh sure, the outside yard guys or the young women in the back room are sometimes kids holding jobs between high school and college. Or occasionally the lumberyard hires some construction guy who’s sold his business or gone bust and doesn’t know what to do next. Then he moves on.

But W had been around forever. Heck, the paint guy’s been there forever, and W’s the person who hired him. W was one of the store managers. He was the window guy, the know-everything-about-metal guy, the know-every-supplier-in-the-county guy, and probably the most knowledgeable and best problem-solving guy in general.

He was also they guy whose great-granddad-the-bootlegging-fugitive built my house.

“W fired? Why???”

I’m almost sorry I asked. As I was shocked but not completely surprised to learn, great-granddad’s genes ran strong in this one. It turned out they’d been loyally tolerating and helping him through years of random absences, fruitless rehab, and all the things caring friends and employers go through for alcoholics before giving up.

I’d noticed I’d hardly seen W at all this summer but I thought it was just me. Or that because it’s a slow year for them, they’d given him time off. Turns out he’d been descending into the worst of the worst — blackouts, trips to the emergency room, DT’s, and making every lame, dysfunctional excuse in the book to stay home drinking or going home to drink during the day. So after patient decades, they fired him.

Having W gone was akin to having a face erased from Mt. Rushmore.

And I now look back at all my joking references to him about great-granddad Jim Beam and his friend Jack Daniel nipping at their product while building Ye Olde Wreck. And I cringe just a little.

W isn’t dead, though it seems likely he won’t “make old bones,” as they used to say in the olden days. But his absence almost feels like a death, and it throws our little small-town universe out of kilter.