The AAA TripTik said it is 2,737 miles from Flagstaff to my house in Maine, which is close to true in my truck even with getting lost outside Indianapolis. Now here I am, and today I’m building a box to dampen the noise of the sump pump in the basement. I don’t like launching off the bed when the pump kicks in at odd moments: mid good dream at 3 a.m., for example, when it sounds like a 747 landing beneath the floorboards! If I can build a successful box to hold insulation around the pump I might sleep better and maybe a light bulb could be added to help the pump meet freezing.
I feel like a handy gal, but that’s only because over the years I’ve watched people around me being so handy. My father used a drill with majestic grace. I admired the shelves Meg built for her dispensary; I noted details with amazement while Art built first a kayak, then a sailboat, then an airplane. And Susan built just about all the furniture in her house once upon a time. I’ve had an impressive education in watching can-do.
I start to build my box by straightening used nails because I know that is the most important part of the job. My father told me so. He parked his two little girls under the carport in Phoenix, and while he shingled the roof he provided bent nails for us to straighten all day long. I’m pretty sure that’s why he could afford to take his family to see grandmother in Maine every other summer, because we saved him all that money on new nails.
With plucky confidence I take a fold-up measuring stick down the stairs into the dim underworld. Nothing is creepier than a New England damp basement with old rock walls and dangly cobwebby things hanging from beams and abandoned wiring from previous eras hissing, “Watch out!” My grandfather bought the place in 1917 so who knows how long That Thing has been mildewing in the corner. Ick.
Upstairs I make a cup of tea to think about it. Then I take the rest of the day off to run over to the library where artist Catinka Knoth is giving a workshop on how to draw and paint farmhouses. “Think shapes,” she says to seven of us around a table. “You don’t always want to start with lines.”
Line is how I draw mostly; line thinking is what I bring to most projects, too, which means I imagine ad infinitum how to break things down into so many steps I often don’t get to step number one actually. But after doing a not-bad drawing in a new way, I arrive back at the farmhouse and look at the shapes buried in the rotting back porch that is next headed to a life in the dump.
There is a kind of box hiding in the shapes of the built in benches. If I cut here, I think. Nail there. I whack and pry with hammer and crow bar. I find a piece of dusty board in the barn and saw a piece to fill a gap. My box sure looks ugly!
Last summer when Bruce Larsen, the fire lookout on Kendrick, wanted to get to his days off, he radioed the dispatcher to say he was going to try to get down the trail between thunderstorms. From my lookout I watched lightning pound his mountain for an hour and then called his cell phone to find out if he’d made it. He did, but he had plenty to say about dodging thunderbolts.
“That’s the stupidest thing I’ve ever done,” he said, “And I’ve got a whole lot of stupid behind my name.” I liked that expression so much I use it about once a week now, varying it as needed.
“That was the longest day of driving ever,” I moaned at a KOA in Somewhere, America, “and I’ve got a whole lot of long days behind my name.”
“That was the best bowl of fish chowder I’ve ever slurped,” I say to the oyster crackers at the Rockland Café, “and I’ve got a whole lot of good eating behind my name.”
And today, exhausted on a bed that no longer shakes when the sump pump kicks in, I’m proud to say, “That’s the ugliest box that’s ever been built, and I’ve got a whole lot of carefree ugly behind my name.”
