In August 1981, I'd gotten my degree from U.M and took off with my lover to Burgaw to learn how to be a carpenter. I was 21.
North Carolina was a revelation. Every morning we dressed in old jeans, t-shirts and steel-toe boots and took ourselves to the Burgaw Diner for breakfast in a light blue ’59 Chevy truck. We smoked up on the way and ordered a working man’s meal, then it was time to get to work. Serious work.
I learned to build a house from the foundation up by doing it. We dug a footer by hand, filled it with concrete we mixed ourselves, and started framing up the walls. While I was hammering 8 penny nails into those, Jeanne was building the trusses and jousts for the roof. We hired a cement company to pour the floor foundation, then waded out in the middle with floats to smooth out the wet mud. I learned to use a buzz saw, run a chalk line, survey a site and more. Day by day I watched the project take shape, and at night we showered, ate dinner, tackled the aches and pains with sex therapy and slept like Rip Van Winkle.
My hands roughened up, my skin got browned by the sun, I laughed a lot and worked harder than I ever have. There were no hard hats small enough for my bean sized head so we had to get one from a toy store, but I wore it with as much pride as any Brooklyn construction mook.
As for the boss, Captain Jack, we hardly saw him but when he made a rare appearance, it tended to start out grand and end up shitty. This was on account of the fact that Jack was, in many ways, a douche.
Once he invited us to join his crew on for a fishing tournament. We got on his fishing yacht and thirty minutes in, I turned green and got sea sick for the next nine hours. Jeanne did better, and won a one thousand dollar prize for catching the smallest king mackerel! But Jack took the cash, of course.
Another time he took us to Cape Hatteras to go hang gliding. Turns out we were only invited so we could fetch the thousand pound hang-gliders at the bottom and wrestle them back up the hill for the next round.
But Jack was seldom around, and on the weekends, we rested. There was nothing to do in town, and the closest movie theater was 40 minutes away in Wilmington so going was a major deal. There was no McDonalds, no TV except for grainy Andy Griffin re-runs, and no other dykes anywhere to be found. If we wanted fun, we had to make it ourselves.
I fell into the incredible power and beauty of the outdoors. We had a Zodiac inflatable boat and a Johnson 9.5 engine and we’d take to the Cape Fear River for hours.
I read the entire works of Faulkner while floating down the river, page by confusing page, and once I locked eyes with a wild panther swimming near the banks. He never took his eyes off me as he grabbed a low branch with his front claws and hoisted his whole body up onto a low tree limb. After he slinked away, I realized I’d been holding my breath; he was magnificent and seeing him was a gift.
It's my nephew Ben's third birthday and he's wild about barney the purple dinosaur and huge construction trucks. I got him a dump truck and what's more, we rented a Barney costume for the big party at his house later that afternoon.
