A Builder’s Tale Chapter Fifty–Five

Finished but for the Epilogue Chapter. And it's significant.

A Builder’s Tale Chapter Fifty–Five 

 Still uncertain of his future, but trending West, Wilson decides that he will soak up the Lakes… Go sailing. Who knows, once in the mountains, he might never come back, not have such a chance again? In middle age, he is beginning to sense time’s… Life’s limits.  He phones Feely, telling him how to find him, then he does the same with Lawyer Smythe.  After that he is out the door and heading to the Ridgeland atop Camp Hope…  Brown’s high bluff, where campers will not play, but Founders will. For, as you must have figured out by now, Camp Hope is complicated, just like the government or the defense department.  After all, where affluent America meets good deed doing or government contracts, principles are almost always multifaceted…layered might be a better word.  It is worth remembering that the naissance of Camp Hope, its Raison d’être, was keeping Brown from jail. Atop Brown’s high bluff, no one wears dark hats, even if those hats, by intent and outlook, should be. 

      Because of this, demand has increased for the bargains of the bluff, bargains for a while yet, anyway, and Dick and Randy are working with Brown, forming a couple of phase-one foundations that may soon add Wilson’s phase-two and three, before the summers out, as Radley stakes a third already expanded in size to include all three.  Three new Founders’ cottages, and enough work for any of his crew that wishes, including Ron and Dean and Waltner, who are still engaged with Daphne’s small fixes and demands, her this’s and that’s.  Daphne has grown accustomed to having the men about, and she is reluctant, almost dreading their departure. 

     It is Wilson’s opinion that they have reached the point where she is making work for them, a way of not letting go.  Not only keeping men about, which she found satisfying… but also as a way of not ending the many chapters of her life with Tim. Despite his betrayals and all their conflicted chaos, she still misses him.  And… As long as work progresses on the house, she will not have closed the chapter on her life with him completely. 

     But their presence at her home won’t last much longer, as they are almost finished, even as Daphne keeps finding this and that… And then, for this vestige of ‘Team Wilson’, it will be off to work for Brown with Dick and Randy, everybody taken care of, everybody satisfied, at least those of the crew who have decided they can work for an Indian, with Brown as master… Because Wilson has said to Brown, “Put Dick in charge and with him Randy. Put an Indian on your team… a tiger in your tank… especially when that Indian is now an officer-Dick,  in charge of the former Longbottom estates.  It only makes sense now Brown, doesn’t it?”  (As I said… multifaceted…it’s America) and Brown agreed. 

       However; there has been a schism.  The racists of Team Abernathy have rejected Brown and followed Potts, who has used his ‘I was Abernathy’s foreman’ credentials to find a project… something Wilson could have nixed with a phone call.  But had not…  Bad-energy… who needed that?  His initial outrage congealing into a benign ‘Who gives a fuck… I’m soon out a here’.    Still, Wilson has noted those who have joined with Potts… And should he someday engage in another ‘Maison de Beauville’?  All who have followed Potts will now be persona non grata… He can’t trust them.  

     Of course, times can change and moods may soften. But when he thinks about it… should his future firm, as he’s anticipating it will…  no matter, because in that future he will be done with the building game forever.  With the possible exception, that he cannot find a satisfying replacement, a new life and land and mental space to inhabit and feel creative.  And, if he cannot… Then his need to produce, or think, imagine, might send him back to architecture… And its supplicant slavery, send him back to Beauville… Because it is without doubt that in some way his creative beast will require feeding, be it lunch or a twelve-course dinner, if only to keep the demon off his back.

      However; for now, this is unnecessary… For the coming summer it will be books and sailing, and exploring music, listening to new composers, and to old pals like Mahler.  Because no matter how many times you listened to a Mahler symphony, there was always something more, a few bars he’d never noticed awaiting discovery.   He planned to find the ‘something mores’ in Mahler, Shostakovich, and Prokofiev, even in his favorite uncomplicated Opera-land Puccini, not to mention Bizet, and more unknowns, those of Brahms and Bach, Charpentier, and Lili Boulanger…or Ricard Wagner… the list was long, and a list to be accompanied by a lot of reading.

     It would be war and peace again, Napoleon… history’s trained monkey, and then he planned to read Proust, and munch some Madeleines…and if all that became too deep, he had his paperbacks of John D. MacDonald, Travis McGee solving crimes with slinky babes aboard ‘The Busted Flush’, McGee’s fictional houseboat… this alone could fill a summer…  Music, and bobbing on the water, freed of financial worry, cocooned in the Anomie’s teak cabin… with a case of Old Draper aboard to lubricate his leisure, and enough beer to fill the lazarette. 

     And if in fall, it is off to Colorado, and he thinks it will be… he can be damn-creative skiing, at least until next spring.

And should Kitty or Grace’s David decide to make offers, on his house. Smythe has a power of attorney and Feely knows the numbers… and they all know how to find him.  Also Indian Dick, who could track him without information, anyway…   Informing Dick, as they meet atop Brown’s bluff.  “You may bug me, but… In fact, I will miss our conversation… But only if it is important, or if you have a pressing question concerning your house or these cottages.  And you don’t need me! You’ve learned enough… Fortitude Dick!  These should be patty cake for you.”  He says nothing to Grace, aware that if anyone can find him, it will be her.   He informs others who might care or discover a need to find him, that he will be checking-in once a week on the ship to shore… “Or if I’m invisible… Ask Smythe… I will not have a mobile.”   

     Two days later… He closes up and locks his house, leaving keys stashed in hideaway locations… not needing to leave a key with Dick, who he’s asked to check the place, because Dick has had a personal key since his home’s construction.

     Then it is out the door and down the hill with Ivy following, first walking next to him before he grabs her and places her in the airline kitty-satchel sack, not wishing to delay departure while  searching for an errant cat.

Late June…out the door and gone and history. This year he will miss the parties, Daphne’s first annual, and Janet’s always, fourth of July fetes… Miss the chaos and the crowds, certain that nothing could match the previous fourth with Honey Darling’s plunge and Indian Dick’s heroics, recalling CNN’s arrival and Beauville’s fifteen minutes of fame and notoriety of summer last.  The only chaos he can imagine might be Brown, amok with drink… Drunk and backhoe wrecking something… Someone’s… for lack of payment.  And this seemed unlikely due to Brown’s two plus years past, show and sham, Jesus respectability.

     He spends the longest day on Beaver Island, never going to shore, reading aboard the anchored Anomie, bright sun atop small waves, in awning shadow, cushioned beneath its repaired deep blue tent space… As far away from building as he’s been since before that long ago phone call from Tim Stevens… Rereading War and Peace and contemplating Tolstoy’s suggestion that Napoleon was little more than one of ‘history’s trained monkeys’… that the ‘great man’ theory of history was a path to folly, and that he (Wilson) was not great but had only barely escaped the folly… His only decision necessary, where to sail tomorrow.

     The sun set, the season established, and by the 22^nd of June, as the temperatures climbed, the sun was already traveling south, back to fall and winter… this bit of sun and summer, an annual mystery.  For the rest of his sail, when gazing at the compass rose, when his heading faced the sunset. Even as summer temperatures increased, the numbers would be shifting south. Summer, and free, hurrah… as he contemplated adventure and traveling into North Lake Huron and then the Soo, and onward to Superior… Everything and anything seemed possible. 

     Then, deciding against cold Superior, he decides instead to putter safer, more securely about the places he knew, Mackinac, and the surrounding North, anchoring as he went, hanging for a day, a week or two, and then back south to Little Traverse Bay and Harbor Springs, then Leland and South Manitou, then returning north to Beauville… or maybe back round Cat Head point and south all the way to Traverse city, hanging there for a while before returning to Beauville as summer met the fall.

      There were many islands out there. Simple sailing, sun and water, a storm or two, a lightning flash, no doubt arriving with a batten the hatches red and green horizon, big waved and storm-tossed, now and again… sailing chaos…  relaxation while escaping… detaching from architecture and building, from creativity, construction, and the years of Chateau Daphne. Preparing and saying goodbye to Michigan and perhaps an occupation, before heading back to Colorado for bright sun, dry snow, deep powder, and skiing in outrageous beauty, nonstop for miles, something impossible in Michigan.

       Chateau Daphne’s completion, with its final payment, allowed him this ease, time to lounge and leisure, time to think and putter, for the entire summer and if he selected Colorado, there this would and could continue, for at least nine months and likely longer… an ease he knew few ever had.  Contemplating that he was fortunate. But considering this ease, a small payment for the previous two years.  Few had the chance or misfortune to experience that either… Almost no one! 

     If only he were not alone, but that now seemed   it was meant to be… easier for him to accept in middle age than it would have been when younger, with a young man’s hormones surging… He accepted a single’s life as destiny, alone but for life’s small pleasures, because small pleasures can be grand. Winter snow and mountain nature...  You could never have it all.

     And so, he traveled on the waves… Up early in the mornings and departing with the sun, or lounging reading, examining the past and pondering his future… More and more deciding that it was time for something else, time to find new adventure in a different occupation… he would have the winter to figure that out, but what?

     And skiing; that would be a certainty unless he blew out another knee.  Rising, plunging, breathing at the top of his turns, skiing in Colorado’s wonderful light deep powder, like water, flowing down a mountain’s side. His knees too old, with too many repairs for moguls, but still capable of speed.  There was plenty to fill the void for now, to keep him occupied…   perhaps he would and should just watch and wait, satisfied with mountain joy and exercise, until some new occupation, some new need discovered him… Alert, Alert… Cancel all anxiety and searching.

    These thoughts filled his mind, as he imagined tunes and hummed them, and typed in his laptop journal, took pictures of the air and lakes and land, listened to music and read, and read, and read… his mind expanding, freed from dreams of spaces, the whir of motors, the smells of sawdust, and the need to manage anyone other than himself, and managing his self… as little as possible, his senses captured by the Anomie, all life, what are your plans anxiety, replaced by a summer on the water. 

    The only thing that haunted was Grace’s determination to set him up with dollars, and to get him out of town and out of the state… occasionally, he wondered why? 

From this island or that port… On his weekly ship to shore’s with Smythe, when he inquired had there been offers on his house, he learned nothing had happened, as Smythe advised “they’re all busy playing right now.”… Learning that Feely had taken his first vacation in years, he and Kitty off to somewhere, and Grace and her fellow… Gone and nada, nothing. Smythe had heard rumors that “They’d skipped town.”… “Nothing is going to happen until August, and the realtors are still predicting, despite last summer’s crash, the time that people purchase will remain as past years,  late September or October.” With an unnecessary aside that…  “By the way, Dick and Randy seem to be doing fine with Brown… without you!” 

   Sailing summoned introspection: Years of chaos, the death of Stevens, Daphne morphing, changing, crashing, resurrecting… it had been bizarre, a strange bewildering, troubling, howling, weird and merry dance… And now all gone and vanished but for memory… Friction, worry, building, the lust for creativity, all gone, as if he and it and he and Stevens had never entwined… the only evidence that they had, the dollars in his bank account, and Chateau Daphne standing stately grand upon the land, making this present reality now, all possible.

     He had two years before he had to concern himself.  And after that, enough to worry for another year before he had to worry about that… And should an offer arrive on his home then he would be, could be, little rich, limited lifestyle, intelligently invested… until the end, forever… Perhaps?                                                                                                                                        

By late August he was back in Beauville, enjoying his house, packing, getting ready to depart. Shrink wrapping the Anomie and placing her in dry dock.  There had been no offers, as he organized, cleaned the office, filed the papers, collated the floppy discs, and stored the plotter pens, thinking first, that he should take his design operation with him, and then deciding against it… It would only trap him. 

     So, he filed and finalized and placed his Michigan life in boxes stored in the garage.  He packed some clothes in suitcases and satchels, leaving those remaining folded on the shelves…  Preparing the house so that if his house should sell, Dick and Randy could place his life in storage.  Leaving the CDs and LPs and stereo behind, packing only his Sennheiser headphones, amp, tape deck and tapes. 

    Left behind, so his stuff could be moved, furniture sold as is.  Boxes filed… his books, the LP’s and CDs, the music?  He would leave these all behind, for now but take his tapes and the Nak 505, the Sennheiser headphones and their amp, for music… Alone in that small studio, his sound system would be unnecessary and bothersome to neighbors below, and to his landlord Jeffrey, especially when the whiskey buzz was on him.  Plus, the music system with its amp and CDs might motivate a final sale, a bidding war still between Kitty and the Runt, or his house’s purchase by someone yet unknown.

     Sadness and a sense of loss, bittersweet foreboding, combined with a surging sense of freedom, transitioning into something he surmised was happiness. 

     Yes, it was possible that he might never be as creative again, never live within his artist’s picture.  These thoughts combined and spinning-spun as he planned for departure.  Such strange and odd and weird emotions, and new too…  He had never occupied such a mental space before, a place of freedom, loss, and possibility, all mixed as one.  He was sad with joy and somewhat frightened... and also conflicted.  But none of this altered his inertia, as momentum carried him forward into simple thoughts of when to leave and which path to take across the nation… Practicality.        

     Michigan was beautiful in fall. He could wait until November.  But Colorado was golden blue with white topped peaks early in October.  He’d been missing that for two years now, the snow dusting on the mountain tops and the golden aspens.   If he wanted to view their peak, then he needed to travel soon, before three weeks were out… Departing his special spaces for tight quarters, because he wished to ski again… ruined knees and all.                                                                               

     He was no longer the young man with that Austin Heeley…  these thoughts spun him slowly, a mobile tapped to spin and spin again, then more rapidly, a top, his thoughts spinning a future of hope and change and skiing.  

     Possibly, it might be never again… Never again would he live in such a space, perhaps never again would he inhabit his own creativity, be able to touch it, smell it, stroke it.  His house, living in it, was a constant affirmation of his value, not money, not things, but of the essence that makes one human, our ideas and thought.  In his architecture, these were manifest. 

     Value, his skill so obvious before him every time his hand slid up and down the banister… Every time he gazed at the lights in evening… Contemplating he had thought this up… Living in his art.  Except for his waning skiing ability, he would have no ‘art’ in Colorado.  In those moments of despairing introspection, he would only have his inner self…   Did he need more than this… probably, and there was the rub… He was not sure, but he suspected that the house would somehow sell, and there was a degree of horror in this finality. 

     Certainly, there was beauty in Colorado, but here his beauty was all about him, inside and out. In Colorado, he would have magnificent beauty outside, hiking, skiing, riding his bike up passes, but inside, he would be living in a tiny studio with windows that viewed a broken deck and courtyard… These thoughts slowed him down, and they confused him, and made him sad… and then he would ask Ivy, what do you think?  And she would meow, and he knew she would miss the house too, with all its windows, all its cat TV.  Her favorite places to watch the birds and deer and animals… 

     But he had no choice. The dye was cast, and in a way, he was like the unborn babe, secure in the womb, comfortably satisfied without the choice to remain there.  But the baby must pop out to live.  And the need to live made it necessary that he depart… Otherwise the future would be only… rewind… repeat… rewind… repeat, repeat… repeat, repeat… There was no growth in repetition, only redundancy and slight improvement, that or utter boredom. 

     He wondered, might he decide to turn back, even before he reached Indiana.  Sense this loss, and become so overwhelmed that he might turn around, racing back to Beauville, fearful of the loss, fearful of the future.  He doubted it. This had never been his nature.  But it was a reason to depart without fanfare, in case he changed his mind?

      Saturday, the third week of September. He departed on the weekend. Heading East to catch I-75, down through Michigan until… there he was… Negotiating the stink of Gary Indiana, a place unwise to pass through on a weekday… something you never even wanted to think of on a Monday… never finished, always chaos… and dangerous if all you had done for two years was to negotiate the rural roads surrounding Beauville… The greatest chaos in Beauville, the confusion at the bridge. In Gary, it could easily show up as reality and a smash up, and this almost happened. 

    He met Gary in a thunderstorm surrounded by detours and cones and cans and chaos. Starts and stops and terrible… Ivy whining, then hiding under his seat, never to emerge till nightfall.  He almost crashed twice, but he survived, and then he was through it all with the interstate before him.

   In college the route had been I 80, now it was I 76 and onward, onward, onward… Onward, across the great plains as the settlers had first traveled East to West, the first travelers, the Mountain Men unaware there would be mountains, the many generations that had followed them aware of their existence, but with no understanding of their grandeur… The Adirondacks, the Green Mountains, the Smokies… all of east of the Mississippi Appalachia anemic by comparison.

      Once again traversing the nation, retracing his path of years before, this time reversed, until he met more Indian names, Chicago, Illinois, Iowa, Nebraska, until he entered the Colorado plains, and tumble weeds, in the distance the snow-capped mountains rising like clouds at the base of the horizon. Retracing the same route he had taken two years before, with the mountains before him and not behind.

     The first time he had ever seen these mountains was decades back.  He was twelve years old, riding in a spiffy red and white Impala, headed west to ski in springtime to that never seen magic-land he had heard of with Michigan skier reverence… the land called Colorado, with stories of moguls and miles of snow, and mountains, mountains, mountains… and soon you will see them he’d been told, like clouds first faint then growing, white and white and whiter.  

     It had been different in 1962, with twelve-year-old eyes and wooden skis and lace-up boots and less pollution, the mountains visible for a hundred miles or more, and growing.  In this new Millenium they were more obscure, hidden by decades of pollution, but he was aware that they were out there, sensing their presence even though the smog hazed air hid them. How bright they must have been when the Indians walked, then later rode the land. 

    He waited and watched across the early plains of Colorado until suddenly, in the distance, as if by magic, there they were, as the air grew drier, as the tumble weeds rolled across the highway, behind him now, the smell of water gone, and with Denver there was a crispness rising in his olfactories, a tang of pines, but different from the conifers of Michigan…  like leaving Hobbit land for the grandeur of the Misty Mountains, but these mountains were clear and bright and gold with light and rising-real, the tallest 14,000 feet.

First the foothills then a steep climb up from Denver, not pausing for a moment in the mile-high city, anxious now to reach Glenwood Canyon, the Roaring Fork, and Carbondale, and then Basalt and Aspen… Up the foothills, higher, climbing, then through the Eisenhower tunnel, no need, for decades now, to travel over Loveland pass as he had done in 1962… Then descending, then up once more, and Vail pass, which though high, was almost flat and soft and cuddly by comparison to twisting high topped Loveland, Vail requiring no tunnel.

    Then plunging down again and the ski resort Vail or Vile as the Texans phrased it.  He had skied Vail, only one year open, and Breckenridge too, that first trip west, Arapahoe and Loveland Basin, but none of them had equaled Aspen.  Then still quiet but for skiing… Perfect, spread out, not a stop light, Aspen…Long before John Denver rolled in to ruin it with advertising song. 

Aspen, once his favorite place on the planet, through grade school and junior high and high school and then college, visiting it and skiing year after year, always longing to live there… aware that if he did not have these memories, it was likely he would dislike the place except for skiing.  Because it had changed so much.  However, his purpose was skiing, and because of this, he could ignore the relative hustlers and scammers who now saturated the place, fitting the new millennia more than he did.  It would be swell, as long as he did not engage.  Because, the denizens of new millennia- Aspen, made even the most mendacious Beauvillians small fry by comparison. Beneath their tans and recreation bodies, there was tough financial steel from New York and LA, in modern Aspen… Such world class hustlers, they had driven out the Texans.  

      These thoughts, present and past filled his mind from Denver on, but he did not care because he would see his friends again, and he still had many more of these in Aspen, than he had every had in Beauville… and unless they had changed, his friends still held the values of the seventies.  They too, out of place, even if they did not realize it.  And that was a good thing.  It made them better people… And all of them were skiers.

And beginning the climb up the Roaring Fork Valley, he remembered the recent past… And so may you. 

Think—Prologue.

‘And so, if you were traveling on the interstate in Early April, you might have seen Wilson Abernathy.  A man of almost middle age, who had pulled up his real and metaphorical stakes yet once again.  Rolling… trailer in tow, across the Great Plains of America...Listening to talk radio and imagining the Prairie’s past, its waving grasslands replaced by corn, its Buffalo extinct except as designer beef.  It’s Native Americans departed, leaving only their names.’

If he had only known what lay before him then, would he have turned around, would he have stayed in Aspen, would he still be here now? Who knows?  He’d seen Ram Das once in the early seventies at the high school, when the airport parking lot was dirt and this thought filled his head as he moved up the valley and past the private jets… his buddy Robert C’s ranch flattened, vanished, obliterated to serve private jet mendacity. Contemplating as he gazed at the concrete runway where the Ranch had been, that if not for skiing, he would be turning away from Aspen too.

On a boat, the saying goes Red-Right-Returning, which means when you are returning from the sea, the light that would be on your port (left) departing is now to your starboard (right) since you are returning. 

As dusk turned to night, the runway lights to his right became bright white… A conundrum that…    He’d need to think about it.  Perhaps it was an omen. Like reading the entrails of a goat. 

And he remembered that it was the year 2000.  

There’s one more chapter coming… chapter fifty-six…The Epilogue. This is finished, but I have left it off as I am searching for a publisher. Today, they like little books, and if you have read this far, you know this is not little, even if divided into books One and Two. Message me if you want to read the Epilogue… the end of things for now… and I will send you a private link. to your email or facebook messages.

Who knows in some future tale, Digger Brown may become a senator?