My Teachers (Part two)

The second installment of profiles about the teachers in my life.

Gary Kincade
(Builder, Artist, Woodsman)

As is the cliched reaction from every male child of a divorce when their mother finds another "dad," I was resistant to the idea of a lasting male role model. This isn't just the fear of replacement or the fear of a repeat situation whereby another ground-level male influence is introduced and then taken away--it happens as a sense of loyalty to one's own blood relationships makes itself known whether or not you understand it. I was just turning seven years old, and defiance, a reaction usually reserved for teenagers, reared its head sharply and quickly.

Though I've loved the outdoors all my life, this was still the age of Nintendo. Where Gary and I disagreed in our penchant for the outdoors was in structure...Hunting was boring to me. It required patience. Fishing was boring to me. It required patience. Whether or not I would find these activities interesting now is beyond me...it's been so long since I held a rod and reel that I would have to try it again to see where my tastes lie today. The point was, rather, that my time outside was MY TIME, whether that meant navigating a streambed, playing war games with myself against imaginary assailants, or just running around tying rope to things to swing off of.

But firewood...there's the lasting impression that will never cross my mind without making me chuckle. The splitting moll was one of my favorite tools as a kid, probably because of its close resemblance to a warrior's weapon. At seven or eight years old, though, I was useless with it. My extra height couldn't help me if my twiggy arms couldn't lift and swing a sharp arc into a log. So I was asked to do what I could do with the firewood--stack it.

It seems funny to me now how many excuses I made trying to get out of rounding up some quartered logs and tossing them against a barn in an orderly fashion. Mom and Gary tried everything from incentives for doing it, to punishments for not doing it, eventually trying to come down to my level by using logic to explain why I should do it.

None of them worked.

This, actually, seemed to be a theme of my cooperation with anything having to do with Gary.

Gary and my Mother dated for about 10 years, if I'm remembering correctly. In those 10 years, Mom and I lived in many places, but none of them matched our farmhouse in Melmore, Ohio--where most of my early memories of forest and field were forged. We lived on a mountain in Bristol, NY, on the lake with my grandfather in Canandaigua, in a farmhouse in Hopewell, but none of the locations had everything that I missed from my childhood.

Gary lived in a chicken coop in Stanley, NY--remodeled to become a one bedroom, one bathroom home. Complete with a wood-burning stove, forest, farm, and plenty of open space to romp--that property in Yates County became my new Melmore, though I didn't appreciate that at 8 years old.

Even given my resistance to male role models in that time of my life, I was taught to trailblaze. I was taught to clean fish and climb ravines. I was taught how to ride a snowmobile, how to shoot a gun, how to use a recurve bow, and how to get lost in the woods and enjoy it.

That I look back on those days so nostalgically means that despite my attitude in my early youth, it's where I wanted to be. It's where I needed to be. Most importantly, the lessons I've gotten from that time in my life stuck with me.

Now I've moved again, out of my apartment on Broad Street and away from the only traffic light in the Milford Borough. I'm renting a cabin on Log Tavern Road surrounded by stream and forest. The whole logs stacked next to a storage building were the first things that caught my eye when I went to look at the place. Old tumbling rock walls, a small ravine and a stream less than 1000 feet away, and 3 cords of unchopped wood. Heaven.

Now I wake up and watch the deer and turkey mingle in my backyard. I'm cleaning out the gardens and rebuilding the old rock walls. The funniest part about all of this is that I'm not sure I would see the same Elysium in front of me if I hadn't been lucky enough to have Gary as one of my teachers.

I came for home for lunch this afternoon, but I wasn't all that hungry, so I left the food preparation up to my roommate, Ben. I grabbed my gloves and headed to the woodpile in the front yard. I had about half a cord in a pile that I had split on Monday. I stacked what was there and started splitting again, before a funny power-surge style thought hit me...

10 years ago, no one could have paid me to do what I was doing of my own free will on my hour lunch break. No speech about the therapeutic benefits of chopping and stacking wood could have swayed me a decade ago as I approached my teenage years. So now, as I'm looking forward to completing the task of quartering this pine and cherry and moving on to raking out the small flowerbeds surrounding my house, I'm wondering how I would look at all of this if I hadn't ever spent time with Gary, one of the first and most memorable of my naturalist influences.