Hope & Redemption In The Midwest: The Salvage Man

It was 1994. I was restoring a Victorian era home in a growing community. Our family of five was pinching pennies on my meager teacher’s salary so I took to dumpster diving at old house construction sites and salvaging historic architectural elements at homes slated for demolition, reselling them to antique dealers. And leaving for school each morning I passed striking Firestone workers at the edge of my neighborhood.

That confluence of experiences laid the foundation for my novel; The Salvage Man. It’s the story of Dan Reynolds, a man who’s become invisible in a place where he thought he’d matter. In a startling moment of terror and wonder, he meets another soul as invisible as he is. Together, they seek redemption.

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Though a long time ago, I recall the events that shaped this story.

In the early morning dark, driving to work, I found myself behind a slow moving truck pulling a magnet that hung an inch above the street, gathering nails dumped by union workers to harass scabs. My town’s biggest employer, Firestone, was trying to break the union. The union-busting, picket-line crossing, slow-motion destruction of those jobs happened a few blocks from my home. The plight of those workers weighed on my mind. Their jobs were being sent abroad. The world was passing them by.

When I moved to this town in the late ‘80s, the population was 18,000 and growing. Many of those Firestone workers were raised here. I met blue-collar folks my age who grew up in a town they thought would be 10-15,000 people, where they’d have jobs of a certain kind and fit in socially in the life of the town. But even in the late ‘80s it was changing rapidly, and by the mid ‘90s, that world was evaporating. Today, our population is 55,000.

That growth and those new suburban residents created an economic vitality that overshadowed the fading blue-collar colors of the town. For the writer in me, that became Dan Reynolds’ background.

During the same period my little family lived in an 1890s house I was restoring. I took to dumpster diving for old house parts at demolition sites and stripping old houses prior to demolition. It helped me restore my home and provided extra cash as I sold truckloads to antique salvage yards.

Once, my neighbor Russ and I salvage cut stone steps from a neglected farmstead west of town. It was being demolished to make way for a new subdivision. The 1870s Italianate home was partially collapsed, leaning like a Dr. Seuss cartoon house. Russ had been inside already looking for salvage. Digging out the four-foot long stones that hot sunny day, I asked if there was anything inside worth taking. Russ is not prone to mysticism, but he gravely said, “Something bad happened in there. You can feel it. Don’t go in.” The cold insistence in his eyes convinced me. We muscled the stone steps into my pickup and left.

The setting for The Salvage Man

And The Salvage Man story percolated and evolved in my mind.

A few years later I salvaged again at a picturesque farmstead at the north end of town, across from the last covered bridge in the county. In my new position as a Realtor and the president of the local preservation group, I’d convinced the developer to save the pre-Civil War home. But the barn, grain bin, milk house and carriage house were all being demolished to make way for yet another new subdivision. I felt a deep sadness as I gathered doors, porch posts and shutters that had been discarded in the barn loft. The next week when I went back for more salvage, I found a staggering mountain of dirt had been moved, making a twenty foot deep dry mote around the barn, which was now perched on an island. It was a bizarre scene. Eventually the barn would be demolished and the ground beneath it also moved to make the subdivision’s retention pond.

It was there on that farmstead that I set the story of the Salvage Man, there that I imagined Dan Reynolds doing the same work I was doing, but he did it to financially survive after the strike. And like the old farmhouse Russ had entered, this one gave off an ominous feeling inside; dense, stale air, and dark rooms that put a tingle at the back of your neck and filled your chest with an adrenaline-spiked urge to get the hell out.

It is there inside that house, in that barn, and on that land that Dan Reynold’s life changes.

I imagined Dan not only challenged by the end of his factory job, but divorced at age 50, his kids grown and gone. All the things that once defined this silent, emotionless man–job, marriage, parenthood–are all gone. And his hometown is increasingly unrecognizable. To make him feel even shittier, the lone way he finds to survive is to “undress,” as Dan puts it, the town’s historic identity, to be sold off at antique stores before the rest is sent to a landfill.

But there in that house, in that barn, and on that land, Dan Reynolds finds redemption.

Ebook editions of The Salvage Man are just .99¢ for a limited time

 “A broken man, an abandoned house, and a lonely woman—all the makings for a beautiful, haunting tale of loss, forgiveness, and redemption. The Salvage Man is a lovely, bitter sweet story you won’t soon forget. I loved it!”

Sherri Wood Emmons, author of The Seventh Mother

Buy Kurt's first novel, Noblesville

“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

I Used To Read Magazines: Intellectual Atrophy In The Era of Social Media

Magazine pile in the den. Funny Times: The best bathroom magazine ever. 

Mojo: Perhaps the best music magazine ever. Perhaps.

I used to read magazines. A lot.

But that was before my iPhone–before it put blooper videos, friends’ vacation photos, snarky memes and angry political rants in my pocket. Before clients could text me at 10:00 at night or 7:00 in the morning, before NPR and ABC pushed news headlines onto my screen, before I could watch an approaching storm in near real time as I lay on my back in bed, the tiny screen and the morphing multi-colored weather system glowing before me.

Yeah, I used to sit on the porch and watch the storms, too.

I used to read long-form pieces on land planning, history, government policy, Hollywood trends and musician interviews. The magazines were stacked on the coffee table, kitchen table and toilet tank. I’m still drawn to the same material, but sound bites work better on that little backlit screen. And when I try to read New York Times article on my phone there are pop-ups screaming at me to click or buy or sign up for a monthly service.

It was so easy with magazines. The come-ons were printed on 3" x 5” inserts you just tore out and tossed aside.

In previous decades there were newspapers in the house, too. They laid open on Sunday mornings with jottings on the crossword puzzle, coffee cup rings across the masthead, torn-out coupons for $1 off State Fair admission, and jelly smeared across the president’s face, sometimes on purpose.

Yeah, I used to read newspapers.

The magazines were once thick – Rolling Stone, Time, Newsweek, Old House Journal. Like modern newspapers, they’re half or a third the thickness they once were. Nowadays only National Geographic offers as much content as before. That trustworthy bulwark is as good as ever. Old issues gathered in a willow branch magazine rack with dog-eared pages of recipes, gardening advice, and titles like 50 Ways To Occupy A Child On Summer Afternoons.

 

Magazine pile in the kitchen.

And there were novels stacked by the bed, on living room end tables, and laid open face down on lawn chairs. I used to travel to exotic, historic, and comic places with Earnest Hemingway, William Shirer and Tom Robbins. But the books are mostly lined up now, moldering away on shelves. These days I click on images of exotic places with headings like, “Wouldn’t You Love To Spend The Night Here?” or “The World’s 10 Most Breathtaking Vacation Destinations.” I do still read books, but fewer. I’ve even read some on my phone while riding an exercise bike at the gym: Things Fall Apart by Chinua Achebe and the last two in the Girl With The Dragon Tattoo series. But reading a book on that little screen is miserable.

Yeah, I used to read lots of real books back then. It seems like a long time ago. Magazine, newspapers, novels and people were all deeper back then.

This summer I’ve taken to buying Rolling Stone and Time magazine and the New Yorker again, putting them in the same kind of places where I read them before. And I’ve made a conscious effort to waste less time on Facebook, Instagram and Twitter, that aimless staring and scrolling that gobbles up 3, 5, 10 minutes at a time until I’ve pissed away an hour each and every day (that adds up to over nine 40-hour work weeks in a year).

This summer, I’ve pulled out the magazines and read. But that muscle called “the brain” is out of shape. I’m halfway through a 2,000 word essay on racial strife in America and find myself wishing the author would just get to the quick, satisfying takeaway I can claim as knowledge.

When you’ve been consuming so much brain candy, brain nutrition is a little hard to chew.

The bathroom magazine rack in the Meyer house.

I used to buy magazines I thought would spark my kid’s imaginations. I’d leave them within easy reach. When I found one folded open on the floor beside their bed– an article about deforestation or Led Zeppelin, I figured, “score one for Dad.” Funny, I forcibly raised them without televisions or computers in their bedrooms, trying to keep the brain candy from rotting their gray matter, but it’s me who spends his entire workday staring into a computer screen with a cell phone at the ready.

And the kids seem to have it all better balanced. I don’t think my 20-something, adult kids spend as much time on social media as I do. They get on, take a look, and get off. One of them even turns off his Facebook account from time to time, just to get more in tune with the real world around him. Yet, when I’ve been with them recently on the streets of Denver or Tokyo and we need travel, weather or restaurant information, they pop out their phones and find it way faster than I can.

So here’s to seeking balance. Wish me luck. Think I’ll order a magazine subscription for each of my kids, and myself, too.

Buy Kurt's latest novel, The Salvage Man

“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 See Also Murder

Buy Kurt's first novel, Noblesville

“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

My Father's Workbench

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.

Buy Kurt's latest novel, The Salvage Man

“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

Buy Kurt's first novel, Noblesville

“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

The Trials and Tribulations of a Bald Man

The indignities of being bald arrive early and stay late.  

One afternoon in college, in the early ‘80s, I ran into Randy, a clueless preppy jackass who studied in my department. We chatted a minute on the sidewalk, clad in our backpacks and down vests. Just as the conversation ended and we were about to each head our own way, Randy stared at my forehead, puzzled, and suddenly spat, “Oh my God, Dude, you’re going bald.”

Thanks Randy. Did I mention he was a jackass?

As the next decade wore on, I proceeded to truly go bald. It was all for the best I guess. When I had a full head of hair it wouldn’t do what I wanted it to do anyway. The feathered bangs of the late 1970s wouldn't quite feather. I spent so much time in front of a mirror with a circular brush and a blow dryer trying to make those bangs obey, when it started falling out, I suspected it was leaving to escape the abuse.

The unruly bangs, circa 1976: How is it fair that I 

have a unibrow AND and receding hairline?

There were some positive signs early on, signs that maybe hair was over-rated. On a flight to Phoenix with my sister, Cindy in those early receding hairline days, a cute young flight attendant gave me way more than normal attention, frequently stopping and chatting. When the young gal wondered off to fill someone’s coffee, Cindy leaned across the aisle and gave me her dry, familiar, dismissive smirk, gesturing toward her forehead, “Must be a father-figure thing.”

“What do ya mean?”

“The receding hairline,” she said, shrugging her shoulders. “You must remind her of her father.”

Thanks, Sis. 

When I was a high school teacher, boys tried to put me on the defensive with cracks about being bald. In front of the entire class, one would raise his hand and ask, “ Does being bald ever get you down?” Other kids snickered

I’d respond with, “Yeah. Sometimes. But then I meet somebody with an embarrassing haircut like yours and I don’t feel so bad.”

Score one for the bald guy.

A bald high school teacher can riff on that theme all day. Another kid grabbed his thick, long hair by the roots and shook it for me. “You ever wish you had full head of hair like this?

“What? And look like you?”

Oddly, this kind of verbal sparing built warm and trust between me and my students. They somehow liked me more for giving it back to them.

The Hair Club for Men commercials of the 1990s didn’t improve bald man self-esteem as promised. Somewhere between the clips of formerly bald men running their fingers through new hair as thick as 1970s shag carpet was a clip of a busty blonde in a bikini chirping, “I don’t know why, I just like guys with hair.”

Thanks, Hair Club.

As I lost more and more hair, I tried to accept it by cutting what was left shorter and shorter. Embrace it, I thought.

When I was a teacher I had a principal who did just the opposite – he wore a toupee. But it was clear he was self conscious about it, as well he should have been. It was a damn ugly, ill-fitting hunk of hair. When we talked, he’d stare at my receding hairline. I’m sure he was trying to imagine how he would look without the rug. It helped me understand how women feel when men stare at their breasts in conversation. I wanted to draw a downward arrow on my forehead and write, “My eyes are down here.”

Once you get a toupee, I figure you’re kinda trapped, and he was. But cruel reality intervened for my old principal. He fought cancer and of course the chemo gave him little choice but to throw the toupee away. After surviving that terrible journey he never wore it again.

Fellow bald man, Dave Kimmel, a North Elementary 4th grade teacher gets the same kind abuse the rest of us bald men get. At a family reunion a curious, confused child squinted up at him, asking, "What's wrong with your skin?"

"What to you mean?” he asked. The little girl leaned closer and whispered gravely, “It’s all over your head.”

Out of the mouths of babes.

I myself joke about being bald as an act of self-deprecation. On humid or rainy days, I tell people, “I hate days like this. I spend all morning getting my hair just like I want it and then it rains.” But when I’m teased by somebody about being bald, I usually say something like, “I’ve as much control over this as a person in a wheel chair has over their handicap. Do you make fun of people in wheelchairs?”

I admit, that's a bit heavy handed, but it shuts them up. I’m just trying to turn the tables and perhaps don’t know my own strength. While it’s true both bald and handicap people can’t control their condition, handicap people have real obstacles to overcome while we bald men have only wounded vanity.

Some men overcome their wounded vanity with grace. I find myself envying men who look good in hats. Anytime I try to cover my bald head with a hat I look like I’m going to a costume party as . . . well, somebody who looks stupid in a hat.

How’s that for diminished expectations? I’ve quit envying men with hair and started envying men who look good in hats.

Buy Kurt's latest novel, The Salvage Man

“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

Buy Kurt's first novel, Noblesville

“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