My dad’s workbench is at the
bottom of the basement stairs next to the furnace room.
It’s made of cast-off and
reclaimed lumber, waist high with pegboard above and shelves below. On the
opposite wall, below a foundation window is a 3’ x 5’ worktable topped with a
rock hard quarter-inch sheet of asbestos. Dad liked that you could work with
molten lead or set down a soldering iron without worry.
 |
| Uncle Guy's machinist tool box. |
The pegboard is hung with screwdrivers,
nail punches, nail sets and hammers -
framing, ballpeen, and mason’s. There’s a cardboard Velveeta cheese box filled
with rasps and rat-tail files and a miniature plastic file cabinet of assorted
nuts, bolts and washers.
As a kid, the adjoining
furnace room filled me with fear. That massive, rumbling, blowing beast of a
furnace, flames roiling within, seemed not of this world. The space around it melted
from dim light to empty black. Heading up the basement steps at age 8 or 9,
something put a tingle at the back of my neck and goosed me to jump steps two
at a time to get out of there.
My dad was a mechanical
engineer–a tinkerer at heart. Purdue grad. He rarely hired contractors - put
down his briefcase and took off his suit at the end of the day and did his own
plumbing and wiring, roofing, landscaping–you name it.
He hoarded repair necessities.
There’s a horribly over-painted Victorian-era dresser in his workroom with a
vice bolted on top and drawers filled with wood screws, washers, machine screws
and bolts sorted within the cut off lower halves of bleach bottles and cardboard boxes. The
overhead pipe running to the driveway hose bib is hung with electrical cables; ancient
braided cords from an earlier generation’s irons and toasters, extension cords
with frayed ends and speaker wire. Never know when you’ll need one to fix a
lamp. Beneath the workbench are boxes of plumbing fittings–elbows and Ts, and
others filled with wiring needs; sockets, wire nuts, black electrical tape,
switches, wire testers and tracers. There are sanders and skill saws and
drills, and an assortment of antique clamps that belonged to my grandfather.
There’s a green bean can somewhere in there filled with drill chucks.
Atop the workbench
is a beautiful oak machinist’s toolbox. It has small felt-lined drawers with
brass finger latches. It once belonged to my dad’s uncle Guy who took it with
him to Vancouver Island in the early 1920s. Guy was offered
the job of machinist for a logging crew. He and a foreman walked the railroad
tracks from town to the work site to see if it was acceptable to Guy. Crossing a
trestle over a river, Guy, an avid fisherman, saw steelhead trout boiling in
the stream below. He asked, “Are there always so many fish?”
“Pretty much,” the foreman
replied.
“I don’t need to see the work
site,” Guy said. He turned around right there and went back to town for the
tool chest.
It breaks my heart a little
that dad stored oil cans on top of that priceless work of machinist’s art. The
top is now saturated with decades of gear oil.
But that was my dad. He was
not a fussy tool guy, the kind who polished ‘em or hung them in pretty rows.
Tools are for work and specific purpose, not fetish items for indulgent
collecting and doting over.
It was down in that workroom,
upon the asbestos-topped table that we built my Cub Scout Pinewood derby cars.
He had scales and a crucible and a coffee can with scraps of lead. With the
butane torch he otherwise used to sweat copper pipes we melted the lead in the crucible
and poured it into a hole drilled in the back of my racecar. He said the weight
was best in the back. We measured carefully on the scales and painted carefully
with royal sparkle blue.
My dad was so smart and
crafty, it really wasn’t fair to the other kids. He helped this kid, a fuckup who’d
never won anything win trophy after trophy in the Pinewood Derby. I have a
devastatingly clear memory of searching for him in the crowd first time my car
won. He didn’t cheer or shout. It wasn’t his style to brag or gloat. He just
smiled at me and knodded, eager for my approval.
In my blue uniform and yellow
neckerchief, car in hand, I was startled to recognize my dad wanted my approval
as much as I wanted his. To this very day it haunts me that we both learned to
build things with such care, but so regularly and miserably failed to express the
love each of us wanted from the other.
Much against my will I helped
him break down a lawnmower engine and put it back together. I really would have
preferred watching TV, but he made me pay attention. From the machinist toolbox
he pulled tiny wire calipers so we could set the gap on the spark plug. Why
spend 75 cents on a spark plug when you can reset the gap yourself?
And it wasn’t about money
anyway. It was about showing an aimless kid how the world works.
When I was 18 and skipped
college, he bought a table saw knowing I imagined being a
cabinetmaker, and it was set up in the furnace room next to his workroom.
When I went to college a year
later he told me dismissively, “It’s a waste of money. You’ll fail and quit.” My lackluster grades in high school gave him reason to doubt, but that one stinging insult urged me to Alpha Lambda Delta the first semester,
just to prove him wrong. I used that table saw weekends and summers to build
furniture to help pay for tuition and books. He paid all the rest.
My father has been dead for a
couple years now and for some reason I’ve shed not a single tear. Visiting my
mom I sometimes walk down the basement stairs and into that dark furnace room. The scary giant furnace is gone, replaced with a
tiny purring high-efficiency unit. My fear of the space
evaporated long, long ago. I know the contours of the furnace room, and looking
into the little workroom on the left, past the workbench and my dad’s
collection of mechanical necessities, I fear only the dismantling of it all. Perhaps that's where the tears are waiting.
“Kurt Meyer’s The Salvage Man is a gentle Midwestern fantasy made up of one treasure after another. Part historical fiction, part love story, and part rumination on modern day life, this novel asks hard questions about the world we live in and the world we leave behind. I couldn’t put it down.”
Larry D. Sweazy, author of A Thousand Falling Crows
“Meyer turns the pages of history with gentle care and a warm heart, creating a story I’ll remember forever. Thank you Kurt Meyer for opening a door to my beloved town’s past and allowing me to travel the streets and meet the people of Noblesville 1893.”
Susan Crandall, Author of Whistling Past the Graveyard
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