(HOST) Writer, storyteller and commentator Willem Lange regrets that the best teachers he ever had – are now all gone.
(LANGE) In the winter of 1958 I was in the Adirondacks, cutting and burning brush on the side of Porter Mountain. It was lonely work, but warm, in spite of the cold, brief days, and I was making $1.35 an hour. You could live on that then.
One afternoon the boss showed up in his big Olds 88. He took a look at my operation, shook his head, and asked, "You ever burned brush before?"
Uh, no, I hadn’t. "Well, c’mere," he said. "Let me show you something." He pulled out smoking bits of brush and saplings, and laid them back onto the fire side by side. In a few minutes he had the pile blazing.
"You had ’em all tossed in every which way, and all you were gettin’ was smoke. You lay ’em in side by side, they share the heat, you’ve got a fire. You pay attention, someday you’ll be worth about half what I’m payin’ you."
I thought of him today when it rained and I burned a brush pile. After fifty years of doing it his way, it was instinctive, without thinking – except of the old-timer who taught me.
There are a dozen old guys in the pantheon of my heroes. Each of them did some thing – or several things – beautifully, and was happy to pass it on.
Bill Broe was the most conscientious carpenter. His specialty was log buildings: everything just right; no compromises. He sharpened his pencil only twice a day, and by the end of the afternoon, handing me a board to saw, would say, "Take two-thirds of the mark."
Jim Brown used a pencil so sharp it was hard to see the mark, and referred to Bill’s as "that blankety-blank crayon!" They debated the right way to do everything. Raised by evangelicals, I’d assumed there was only one way, and every other was wrong. But their arguments over the swing of a bathroom door, for example, revealed there were at least four, and opened a whole new world of philosophical possibilities.
Jim gave me his recipes for pancakes, trout and hushpuppies, and corn bread. Bill made pancakes in the morning; soup, sandwiches, and peaches at noon; pot roast in the evening, rice pudding for dessert. Deer came to the porch for scraps. Jim was an animal whisperer; he could feed them from his hands.
Ross McKenney, an old logger from Maine, taught me the difference between splitting softwood and hardwood, and talked often about the fear that threatens us when we’re lost in the woods or committed to a rapid that appears likely to end unhappily. It was comforting to know he’d felt it, too, and was nevertheless still with us.
All those old guys were great storytellers. Once they sensed this green kid wanted to please them, they shared their skills and, in between the lessons, told of of their childhood, their friends, their loves, and the long reflections that make of some lives works of art.
This is Willem Lange in East Montpelier, and I gotta get back to work.