Say some words... Smash them.
Extend invitations... Carry out the ambush.
Ask a question... Burn me.
Make a choice... Assign blame.
Receive a gift... Lament and complain.
Take a hug... Slap my face.
Continuity does not exist... Wonder and wonder why.
One thing leads to another... Don't connect the dots.
Hear the words... Don't listen.
Be informed... Deny.
Sew... Tear.
Build... Break.
Form... Crush.
Hold... Push.
Ask... Don't answer.
The headlights cut through the dark of night as I drove through the November night. The culmination of all my efforts for the last quarter century was supported by who sat next to me, what was in my heart, and what was in my thoughts. To the west, the bridge. When I was just 11, I crossed the previous old iron bridge that stood here, for the first time. It was built in 1910.
Back in the 70s, it was nothing to cross bridges that were this old. That was just the way things were. Ten years later, I drove across that bridge the day before it was closed forever. The day before, on April 5th, 1987, the Schoharie Creek Bridge on the New York State Thruway (I-90) over the Schoharie Creek near Fort Hunter and the Mohawk River in New York State collapsed due to bridge scour at the foundations after a record rainfall. The collapse killed ten people.
We were enduring record rainfall at that time. My job at the time was pouring concrete for Bob Eilers in Newington Connecticut. That day, April 6th, he foolishly poured walls in hard rain and things got dangerous. I got mad and left. I kept driving until I got to that Connecticut River crossing that connects Westminister Vermont and Walpole New Hampshire. I did not know it at the time, but I was standing on the threshold of one of the major pivotal moments of my life. You can be sure I was thinking about the Schoharie Creek Bridge as I crossed the old 77-year-old narrow iron girder structure with the Connecticut angrily thrashing a couple of feet under this old girl. I stopped on the west side, then gear jammed the three on the tree shifter on my 72 Dodge pickup. Adrenaline pumping. Hey, if a whole interstate bridge can fall, anything is possible!
Where was I going? It was a progression really. I was going to my family's camp in East Alstead New Hampshire. My cousins Dave and Janet, my second set of parents really, had built this cabin, with some guest appearances by others, including my father, who currently in 1987 had been living in Port Aransas Texas for the last 7 years. I had nothing with me today. I went to work this morning, threw a tantrum, and drove all the way up here. This was what you can do when gas is 86 cents a gallon. The bottom fell out on oil prices the year before, and you could literally roll pennies and fill a gas tank.
When I got up to the cabin, it was still lightly raining. I always loved coming here. This was my place. I was so drawn to it. It was like there was a source of energy under the soil that pulled me like Superman to the fortress, well, except no superpowers, red boots, capes, tights, or flying. A great deal of my life would be launched from here. When I was 11 years old, coming up here was the most incredible thing that could have ever happened to me. Back in 1977, my absolute obsession with this place could later be a foreshadowing of the incredible change and milestones, good and disastrous that would culminate in the years and decades to come, all happening on this very mountain.
I loved this place back in the 70s, having first gone up there in the summer of 77 with Dave, my Father, and my cousin Steve. There were only 2 walls up at the time and no floor. Steve and I took the scraps and built a small cabin fort in the front yard for something to do that weekend. The following fall, I went up again with Dave and Steve. It was going well until one of the beagles did not come back Saturday night. Overnight, it rained very hard, I recall Dave getting up many times thinking that maybe she was outside the door, ready to come in.
Morning came and the rain did not ease up at all. Dave suited up in raingear and left with a rifle in case he found her injured and needed to ease her suffering. During that time, Steve and I sharpened sticks. Being alone, the first thing that came to mind in our young brains was that we might need to defend against unwanted visitors. We felt it was our responsibility to craft weapons. Hours passed during Dave's soaking-wet hike over the mountain.
I will always remember what happened next because it was a glimpse into what it was really like to be an adult with kids who have no clue. Dave returned, soaked to the bone and unsuccessful in finding Daisy. We quickly learned that the logical and most helpful thing we could have done here was to start packing, brush our teeth, and clean up the cabin. There was so much to do. Dave always took a load of wood back home with him and that had to be loaded. I recall that the bumper of the truck got caught on a stump and got pulled out straight. The memory of Dave swinging that sledgehammer to right the bumper and cursing will forever be there. I would live this moment myself many times in the future, even with this same truck that later became my truck in the late 1980s.
I am happy to report that on Monday, a person on the mountain called Dave's home number to let him and Janet know that their Daisy was safe with them. They went up the next day and retrieved her. After that Sunday morning, I tried a little harder to ask myself, what can I do to help the adult who is trying to carry this load right now.
Because I brought nothing with me that day in 1987, no food, no bedding, nothing, I lit a fire and lingered for about an hour, then I drove back to Connecticut. One Saturday night that passed winter two friends and I were having a couple of beers at a bar in Southington. It was lightly raining. We got bored, so at some point, one of us suggested a road trip to New Hampshire. We switched to coffee and by the time we got just north of Springfield Massachusetts, it began to snow very heavily. Eventually, we could only move at about 30 miles an hour, so it took the better part of the rest of the night to get up there. There was a dim daylight in the heavy snow by the time we got to Cobb Hill Road. I had snow tires on the back of my 2 two-wheel-drive truck and a full bed of planks from my concrete jobs that kept the old girl moving even in weather like this.
It seemed like in 1987, not a 14-day span went by without me driving up to the cabin. Sometimes with my friend Scott, sometimes with my then-girlfriend Stephanie. Sometimes we would drive up there and find Scott and his wife up there. I never understood the pull this place had on me, but it kept pulling me.
In the summer of 1987, I was working for Clock Company, a heat treatment plant in Manchester Connecticut. I had talked my way into a job operating their most elite vacuum furnaces. I always thought I would be marrying Stephanie, perhaps mostly because she just always talked about what the wedding was going to be like. Then without warning, she ended it because she "needed some time."
Suddenly, my tether broke. I had been living in a campground in my 1976 Chevy Van that had carried me up from Texas the previous autumn. I was running around like a madman, always running towards Stephanie on my opposite 3rd shift schedule. I was always late, always disappointing her or her family, always having to be somewhere. Suddenly, I had time and space.
Clock Company was owned by the same company that owned Mal Tool Aircraft in North Charlestown New Hampshire. We were having our annual company picnic weekend there. I decided to go since I had nothing better to do. The cabin was only 2 towns away.
I never got up to North Charlestown that weekend, but there was an awakening. I arrived at the cabin Saturday afternoon with a cooler of food, a 12-pack, and a notebook. I sat at the table after dinner Saturday night listening to Solid Gold Saturday Night on a station out of Rutland. Old songs from the two decades passed unheard for many years. I wrote. That was something I had not done in a long time. As I sat there I came to the conclusion that I was done with Stephanie. I did not want to live in Connecticut. I never intended to stay there when I left Texas, I was supposed to be moving to Maine. But here, tonight, a new seed was planted. Why not New Hampshire? Other than my job, which was a really good one, I was no longer attached to Connecticut. I left the cabin Sunday afternoon feeling like a new person. For the first time since leaving South Texas, there was some direction in my life.
The next time I went up, everything changed. My impulsiveness led to a complete shift in life. I was suddenly married and had a family. That land in East Alstead also meant a lot to them. Just like the months before, we frequently visited the cabin in any season. I was young, wreckless, tireless, and indestructible. Road trips were made on a whim all of the time.
The following summer, everything around me collapsed as far as a place to live and work. I took my stepdaughter Amy to Florida to spend the summer with her father and when I came back was told that I did not have a job anymore. I could have just found something else since there were jobs everywhere, but the toxic people who lived all around us in the campground were making even living there unpleasant. I decided that there was no better time than now to start over in New Hampshire since I had to start all over again in Connecticut anyway. The fact was, Connecticut for me was repulsive. It had completely changed from what it was when I was a kid and enough was enough.
The summer of 1988 was hot, so living in a one-room hunting cabin without electricity or running water was interesting. I don't think I will ever know how we ate or put gas in the truck. The gas gauge on the old truck had not worked in years. It was better this way. Don't ask, don't tell got us by. Putting a couple of dollars in change for gas at a time seemed to carry us back and forth between Connecticut and New Hampshire over the long hot summer and yet, I will never know how.
We left Connecticut in June with only $50 and a tank of gas, and by the 2nd week of August, I had a 2nd shift job in Claremont, New Hampshire for $5.50 per hour, an apartment on the 2nd floor of Spring St in Claremont for $115.00 a week. That wonderful place in East Alstead and my family who owned it had really helped us start life in New Hampshire. Things did get pretty dark at times, but they really started looking up.
Over the next few years, this spot on that mountain continued to be a foundational part of our lives. We were now only 40 minutes away and still enjoyed going there. Now it was also a way for us to visit with our cousins Dave and Janet when they came up.
During the mid-nineties, I continued to go there but my second wife never had the desire to go. For that reason I would go up on my own, or with friends, or my brother Bobby when I brought him up to NH. As the years went by, the freshness of this beautiful place changed. I know that it was always really a reflection of the miles that I had put on. For me, it was always beautiful.
In the late 90s, I was so busy in my life that I did not have time to visit, and a great deal of time passed. Dave had a serious incident happen in his life and I always felt that maybe he and Janet just might be holding onto it not only for them but maybe also for me. Maybe that was just in my head. I wanted to make sure they put their needs ahead of mine and told them that they should do whatever they wanted to do with the land. I can still hear Janet's voice on that call, during which she told me she would let Dave know how I felt.
The irony was that in the year 2002, they did sell the land in East Alstead that we enjoyed for 25 years. 2002 marked a year that I most likely would have used more than ever before in my life for the next 20-plus years at least. I did not know that at the time. When I think about it, I do wish I had made an offer to them the year before. I was in the position to do so at the time and it would have allowed me to let Dave and Janet continue to enjoy it just as they had for over 2 decades. I imagine we would have built a little camp somewhere else on those 50 acres so that they could use their cabin whenever they wished. Hindsight is 20/20 and is just the way that things are.
What I find so fascinating is the sprout of a seedling in 1977. A Friday afternoon Dave and my Dad picked me up from where I lived in Torrington Connecticut and brought my cousin Steve and me up to that land in East Alstead. It seems like a stand-alone, unconnected event on a summer weekend almost 50 years ago now. However, because of that one weekend, so many people were born and would never have existed without that trip. Wars could not have been fought, and marriages, rescues, and inspirations would never have happened. Amy and Jesse's children, nor their children would ever exist, neither would Liam and Noah. Those are only the direct effects.
I always talk about how many entire courses in my life hung on the thread of one single second in time, in which I could have gone one way or the other with the way I chose being so unlikely. But this journey to NH as an 11-year-old kid was the very DNA of many of those threads that built entire lives and in turn, touched thousands of lives. Even I have a hard time comprehending the far-reaching implications of this.
There is something else though. I am sad sometimes when I think about that land in East Alstead. It was so important to the wild ride that my life has been and so many changes within it. Like a fuel section of a Saturn 5 rocket, nothing could have happened the way it did without it, but later it feels discarded, and fallen to earth as refuse. I know this is not the case. There are memories in the hearts of Amy and Jesse, my stepchildren in those days who if not for what I did then, would never have these memories. That is something to be so thankful for. I would not trade it for anything.
As I sit here, I think about the influence that place in East Alstead had on me. I started playing my life out as if I had never visited there that day in 1977. I realized as I tried to project how the course would have been different, I could write an entire series of novels about that course. That is the refuse, isn't it? That is the path not taken which makes it worth nothing. There are many people alive who will never know that their entire existence and family hang on that one day. I lived every moment of where that path took me, and I still cannot believe it.
Channel surfing.
Reading pages 1 through 9 in every book on the shelf.
It is the CD player stuck in "intro".
It's Ray Davies Destroyer.
It takes your complete sentences.
It infiltrates your dreams and leaves you stranded thirty years ago with a recent memory lapse.
It is looking for emotional clues.
It is thought time to put it all back on the rails.
It is a shift in the center of gravity.
It is indifference.
It is getting stuck on snags that should be smooth.
It is an echo in reflection of this time no matter what the year may be.
It is wanting to be a writer, then a chef, then an artist, and an engineer.
It is the sound of cicadas 24 hours a day at a horrible decibel.
It is having those you love all around you.
It is being more inside than you are on the outside.
It is wondering if you look clear or fuzzy in the lens of others.
It is summer and winter on the same day.
It is progress with a new measure.
It is people who let go for reasons that will never be known.
It is being understanding even when you do not understand.
It is dreaming of your Cinnamon Girl but knowing that is not real.
It is knowing the path home but the channel keeps changing.
It is standing on soil that keeps disappearing causing the need to jump.
It is sedation, it is turbulence.
You know what this is, don't you?
It's November.
Spring fell upon us with more independence than ever before. It was all new and the people we lived with were all different. I am still trying to figure out how that happened. For the first time, I was called to the kitchen table where all of the world's problems found solutions and we consulted over the morning coffee. Somehow, my sitting on the door armrest had translated into acknowledgment and validation. I fought for that!
My quadraphonic programming carved my perception of what my course should look like. Although that is spun into the fabric of who I became, thank God it failed to deliver fully! I have seen what that looks like, and I will tell you, brother, it is not pretty.
It was amazing to see the many facets of their relationship. I saw them as best friends at the height of marriage, and also as best friends when they were alone. It was such a true friendship and one that showed how right it felt between them. It was all of the other things happening outside that wrecked everything worthwhile. It would not have been so bad, except deep cracks in the foundations allowed the storm that was sweeping across time and space to get in. Who could possibly endure?
The antagonists appeared to be forces from the outside while inside each one owned their own specific torment. In those days, we never dealt with things like that. I recall the arguments; they, like the relationship, were charged and powerful. It was an age in which we just did not know what we did not know...what we needed to know. If we did, they could have had a chance.
It was here that she finally did it. Someone had to do something. The times did not allow for things to just continue as they had in the generation before and the one before that. She broke all the dishes in the pantry, leaving nothing of what had seemed like a sweet rescue.
Now she was free of it, but free of what? She shared what had happened with the boy on the phone. Sitting at a telephone stand in the hall an hour away, he supported her for what she had done, and her bravery, not revealing how much it hurt him. He knew they both owned this, he did this too. He knew enough that he could have prevented it. Even though he knew what, he did not know how.
It was the year when couples could act with a great alliance, but upon closer inspection, only dissolve the things they had. It was accepted as a normal byproduct of the pain. He knew he had played a part in all of the mess and now it was just ashes as he smoked one cigarette after another, consoling her and commending her for moving on. Nothing felt right, but there was no other way.
No one knew how to fix it. The old standard cast the mold and the world was changing. It is in the hearts of my parents that the frontier was taken, leaving them in the wake of families floating on the surface of the ocean after the ship they were on went down. They paid a higher price than anyone else did, and for time unforeseen more would fall as soon as they stood.
As evening descended, they each stood looking out their windows, him east and her west. After all of the villages that burned, it was a return to innocence. There was still something so incredible like that which can only be felt in the first love. It was evident, no matter what happened on that day in 1976, here was something that the air of the times, laws both legal nor physical, time itself nor any outside influence could ever break their connection.
I was fortunate. While yes, I heard more sad things than I would have liked to, their love and friendship is what I remember the most. I was old enough to remember hours and hours. Sitting in the backseat of that 63 Plymouth, 68 Pontiac, their ease at being able to talk to each other was such a beautiful thing. If I could have a wish come true for the span of my life it would be that they could have seen it the way that I could. I know it took me so many years to understand it, but having done so I do know, some people never get to have the closeness that my parents had.
They got married in a time in which they were on the threshold of social storms, those that had never before been seen. They were swept away in it. I do however find peace in the fact that they knew in their hearts, that the love they had was real and it was without end.
There was a sound in the night. It was a cry as if she was here, but I could not find her. Throughout the years, she never cried. Even now when she does, it is silent.
Because I know her heart, I can feel it, the confusion, the devastation, the temporary reprieve. There is a dimensional barrier that I have to cross if I am to console her. My callous recovery from my own trials sometimes make this as easy as passing through a solid wall of concrete.
So many times, for so many people, I have wanted to be the reason they found to look at things more positively. I wanted them to see the good in who they are, just like I did.
It is in the broken glass on the floor that I stop and ponder. I know that there was a difficult trial in this very spot. I am not interested in those whose boring and predictable lives have allowed them to live the dream. It is those who sit in the corner, knees pressed to chest, head down. I see you.
At one time in my life, I will admit that there was something in this consideration for me that was selfish, that somehow this allowed me to not look at my own imperfection and made me feel somewhat more worth something when helping others. Let me assure all, I have taken the express elevator to the bottom, and I learned a thing or two while I was there.
Today I am listening. There is a heart that I care for so much hurting and confused. Somehow, I have to let her know that I am here. For listening in the sad days and rejoicing in the happy days. I have seen all that she is; magnificent in ways that she cannot yet comprehend. But I believe in her. I always will.
I need to create classic recipes. It is the avalanche in me that cannot be stopped. I love seafood. I make excellent mussels. Sweet vermouth, PEI mussels, cream, portabello mushrooms, shallots, garlic, cilantro, bacon. Maybe a Thai chili or two if I want to cook on the wild side. My oh my!
But now, I NEEEEEEEED to make a lobster thermidor, a favorite back in1960s-70s entertaining. The food from those old black-tie dinner party meals is rising into view once again. I know there can be wild spins on what we can do with a meal that Julia Child championed us out of our collective trepidation. 60 years later we are tampering with the maverick. But take your rest here for a moment to cook at the station of that wonderful woman who brought the housewives out of the dark ages, showing us all that family dinner had no limits. Even more so, Julia showed us that ambition and creativity were not owned by men alone. She like my grandmother, did so in a world that said otherwise. But wow! I digress!
There it is, the antagonist in this blog shows its ugly head at the beginning of paragraph four. Time and energy, are those elusive things that none of us seem to have. We don't have time and so we compromise. Even worse, we figuratively have these little people standing on our shoulders, whispering in our ears: "You can't do it." Time assaults us, commercial dictators assault us, and we feel drained. The hyper-sensory trip we undertake daily is a long, LONG way from the days back in 1977 when I was white-washing cement walls on a summer afternoon.
The fact is, we have to fight against what seems to be an invisible weight that was never there before. I would attribute it to getting older but I know for sure that is not the cause. It is something else. Young and old alike, we all seem to be suffering. This means we have to channel the great Outlaw Josey Wales: "Now remember, things look bad and it looks like you're not gonna make it, then you gotta get mean. I mean plumb, mad-dog mean. 'Cause if you lose your head and you give up then you neither live nor win. That's just the way it is."
This may not work for the average person, I don't know. What I can tell you is, I have lived by this law that it is only because of it that I am still alive today. Daily too. Exhaustion sets in and I get mad, I push and I succeed. It gets me through RA, through apathy, tiredness, anxiety and all those things that pin us down today.
I ran into a colleague who said she struggles with being an introvert. The pandemic has dealt us all a serious blow in this area. Personal interaction has an odd weight and unpleasantness these days, until you actually do it. Then we wonder what we were so worried about.
It may seem like I am jumping around a little, but it is all related. I have been doing Fight4Taste Friday since March of this year. It is where I make a simple or not so simple meal for approximately 22 people at work on Fridays. It is so simple to slip into neutral, and when I fight against that, I find my joy.
So yes... Lobster Thermidor, smoked oysters, bento boxes that take me to new places, more, more, more. It's all good. Just remember, before I get started, everything inside of me says NO. But that is when I need to get mad.
Say some words... Smash them. Extend invitations... Carry out the ambush. Ask a question... Burn me. Photo by Trym Nilsen on Unsplash Make...
