BETWEEN WORLDS

People have often asked me if I was having a difficult time through all this. I would reply that surviving is easy, co-existing in the civilized world is what’s hard. I believe we’d all be shocked at how many homeless people exist around us that do their absolute best not to appear that way. It’s hard work and worth it to many given the stigmas typically involved. I, for one, don’t care too much about appearances. Working in the operating room, I do care about cleanliness.

I’ve always had some form of beard or goatee, mostly because I despise shaving. When I started nursing school, Shayley asked me if I’d have to shave my beard to be a nurse. She cried, “If you do, you won’t be my daddy anymore!” I believe my mustache had only been shaved off three times before now. I say that appearances don’t matter, but after shaving to wear an N-95 mask at work , I saw myself in the mirror and a turtle face was looking back at me. Never one for selfies, this was not conducive to starting. I did look up one of the few pictures of my dad I had of when he was younger and compared us. He shaved every day except when he grew a mustache one year. It was just weird.

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I have to talk about Dad to put things in perspective as well. Roger Martin was born in 1935. He grew up on a dairy farm in western New York state. With eight kids in the family, Grandpa’s job as a bank teller and dairy farming gig just kept them afloat. Dad’s perspective on managing money was influenced by seeing Grandpa sitting over any scrap of paper he could find, crunching numbers, trying to figure out how to make ends meet. It probably didn’t help any when Dad contracted polio at 15. He never spoke of it much, but said he spent three months in the hospital and a year quarantined in the attic of their two-story, uninsulated, metal roofed farm house. This was in western New York with lake effect snows and winters. Sleeping under a homemade feather tick (old fashioned feather comforter of sorts), he often woke up with snow on the covers. Nothing soothed him more than the sound of rain on a metal roof. You could always see it in the contented smile on his face. Fortunately, he recovered with no apparent issues and continued working on the home farm as well as for others.

Dad got drafted for Korea, and on inspection of his record, the military doc told him due to the polio he would put him back on a train home if he wanted. Dad said if it was all the same he’d stay since there wasn’t much to go back to. He went on to graduate top in everything he did and ended up assigned to the new Air Force Academy in Colorado Springs teaching nuclear mechanics, training cadets on the machine gun range and competing on the Rocky Mountain Regional Rifle team. He stood 6’4″ with hands and forearms as big as me, could build the atomic bomb and was the best shot I’ve ever known. My dad was superman as far as I was concerned. He went on to college on the GI Bill, where he met my mother Sally and had my sister Jennifer.

One day Dad stopped by a job posting board at the college and saw a posting for a seasonal Park Service job. He went to apply and the lady said they allowed 100 applicants and he would be 101. He insisted until he got an application. He was the very last interview and they asked, “What kind of work are you wanting to do? Everyone else wanted to do research and specific things like that.” Dad replied,”I’ll do whatever you want me to do. I have a wife and daughter and need a job. Whatever needs doing, I’ll do it.” He got the job. After one month on the job he became a Ranger, which was the fastest anyone had ever been promoted to that position at the time.

All this is to say that you never told Dad you couldn’t. Quitting wasn’t an option unless it was a waste of time or better routes were available to reach a goal. Not to say Dad didn’t have his faults. He was a terrible procrastinator. When he did get started on something, then it got finished. We were always in on some sort of construction project or creating things we wanted or needed from scraps. Every object, good or bad, was viewed with an eye toward its future potential. We used tools that were old when he got them and made others if we could.

Another legacy that had a huge impact on me were two of Dad’s books: his college anthropology book and a big thick book on camping written in the very early 1900’s. The first had extensive information about indigenous peoples and cultures around the world and how they lived. This gave me an insatiable appetite for everything primitive and ancient. Sources were kind of slim, but my brother Joel had devoured some of the same material and he had a six-year jump on me. He was more into the what and how than the who, like I was. His bedroom looked like a mad scientist’s lab just hit by a tornado. It was the most fascinating place in the world, and I envied all the cool junk he had and the stuff he did. He was always better with mechanical, electrical and conceptual things and was very meticulous executing it all. He’s a hoarder like me, and all that stuff is like a savings account for the future. What I didn’t know or find elsewhere, he filled in the gaps. We later worked together doing a handyman business, and we complemented each other pretty well. We each knew how the other thought, and two brains and sets of eyes caught more mistakes and came up with better ideas.

The camping book set my mind to imagining long self-supported treks into the wilderness. I regret not doing more to attempt that kind of thing when I was younger. Not to say I couldn’t do it now. With the wear and tear on my body now, I’d probably be more careful and less likely to die. The one dream I had was to set off with a backpack into the western backcountry for a month or more to survive and hunt elk or some other big game. I would do the same now, but I would just hunt small game to eat along the way and shoot the big stuff with a camera. Pictures would be far easier to pack out than multiple loads of meat, hide and antlers.

My favorite reading through the years besides how-to books on survival and the outdoors were Louis L’Amour westerns, wilderness survival stories, all types of history, various military stuff, anything about guns old and new, and anything with the use and construction of primitive weapons. Dad had a subscription to Mother Earth News and really started the ball rolling when he handed me one with an article on making a sling. Not a medical sling, but the kind David slew Goliath with. Some parachute cord and a pouch made from scrap blue jeans. I was chucking rocks and destroying anything within 360 degrees of my position because I was far from mastering it. He momentarily regretted it when my cousin Kevin and I were across the road from his house slinging stones down through the woods, getting a kick out of hearing them bounce off the trees. Dad and Uncle Lester were leaned up against Lester’s pickup truck in deep conversation. Kevin had a fist-sized rock, wound up with an underhanded throw and released it going straight up. The silence was long and eerie as we looked at each other and started glancing up and around to spot it. Suddenly it came slamming down dead center in the bed of the pickup sixty yards away! Dad and Lester practically jumped out of their skins and simultaneously screamed our names reflexively. We concluded it wasn’t a good idea to tarry there and took off down through the woods as hard as we could run. I can’t remember if Kevin or I got whipped for that one. The sound of that rock hitting and our hearts dropping to our stomachs was punishment enough.

All this is to say I wasn’t fond of having to shave, but I was tickled to be able to use my life skills to create a living situation that cost next to nothing. $40 for two weed sprayers and some hardware for showering and washing, a five gallon water cooler and a couple of new five gallon buckets. I tacked a couple of contractor bags to the top of the outhouse until I picked up some metal roofing a little later.

I would boil a quart of water, add it to three quarts of cold in my shower rig, and as long as I shook it up good, I could get through a shower in any weather without scalding myself or freezing to death. If I didn’t feel like it, I would use the shower at work. Being able to wear the scrubs provided in the OR along with surgical caps and masks meant that I needed to be clean but not stylish. Maintaining cleanliness is paramount for the sake of our patients, and it also helps coworkers tolerate your presence. I kept a couple sets of clean, appropriate clothes to go back and forth to work. Any other time I looked like a hunter or construction worker.

I would reside for a month in the tent that I initially thought would be my permanent abode. Trying to find a routine was simple. Go to work, then go home and start looking for potential problems to fix or improvements to be made. Feed the critters, haul water, shave, heat water and take a shower, eat supper when it was ready and hang out on the porch with family as long as weather permitted, dig out and arrange anything needed for the next morning, and then sit around and read until bedtime. Early in the morning I’d jump into stiff, cold clothes, brew up some coffee and feed the critters before jumping in the truck to go do it over again.

I tend to settle into most things and get in a rut until something forces a change. I started settling into this new setting with a sense of adventure and challenge. The wind was still roaring through, and the tent walls started to sound as if they were tearing and looked as if they would kite away at any moment. Nylon and similar materials are okay for short term camping, but have a limited life span. That prompted me to consider something a little more solid and permanent. I started taking a better inventory of my stuff and considering different options. My restrictions were sensible use of time, money and resources while still coming up with a realistic solution. That last one could be a problem considering the behemoth piece of junk I’d just created. Challenge accepted.