BACK AT SHERAB’S, I KNEW WHAT MY ASSIGNMENT WAS BUT I WANTED to double-check just the same. Before I got started, I tracked Sherab down, found her wearing high black rubber boots, a long olive green barn coat, and a big smile. She’s maybe five foot four, maybe one hundred pounds, but she was in full-on Mussolini mode that morning, leading a group of WWOOFers off into muddy battle.
“Hey. Are you sure you want me to start in the girls’ dorm?” I asked. “I was thinking I could work on the bathroom or the gutters—”
“No,” Sherab said, having already decided. “I’ve wanted that door moved forever.” (She pronounced it fa-EH-va as is the Kiwi custom.) “Have at it, then,” she added before launching into the day.
With my marching orders clear enough, I gathered up some tools, grabbed Logan, and headed downstairs to get started. To get to the girls’ dorm, we passed through a large common room that was a disaster. The shades were still down. It was dark. Empty bottles and trash were everywhere. Someone was still asleep under a blanket on the couch. The room reeked of stale beer, cigarettes, pot, and mold. We didn’t linger.
Next, we entered a dark hallway, the back end of which was piled to the ceiling with boxes, chairs, picture frames, mops, insulation, junk. It looked like a barricade, certainly a fire hazard. Our escape was the second of three doors.
The girls’ dorm was nothing fancy: three bunks for six WWOOFers, an exit door to the outside on the left, a large window on the right. Though it was messy and cramped, it was also intact: Nothing leaked, nothing was broken … which was more than could be said for most of the house.
Upstairs, the bathroom was roughly framed out but unfinished; the shower stall was just bare wood studs with a yellow plastic sheet tacked up for a modicum of privacy. Outside, the fascia boards under the eaves were mostly rotten and the gutters were useless, no longer directing water, just directing your eyes to the eyesores they had become. With a few materials, Logan and I could have replaced those boards, painted them, reattached the gutters, and actually left Sherab’s home a little nicer than we’d found it. I wasn’t so sure the same could be said for the girls’ dorm project.
Sherab wanted the exit door on the left moved to the right and the large window on the right moved to the left. It was a feng shui decision, I think, but with so much more urgent work needing to be done, it felt a little like touching up your trim paint while your house was on fire.
Oh, well. If it made Sherab happy, we were happy, and so we got to work. We measured for the transfer, located studs, penciled on the cut lines, popped off trim. And as I watched Logan wielding a long level and scoring the drywall with a box cutter, I realized this was the first time he and I had ever worked on a construction project together.
When I was growing up, my father used to do a lot of work around the house. I watched him finish our basement, hang a suspended ceiling, fish a vacuum system through the walls, glue on laminate countertops, mess with plumbing and electrical wiring; but he almost never asked me to help him. Years later, when I got my own house and had to learn how to do all that stuff, I asked him why he never taught me.
“You only have one childhood,” he said. “I thought you’d rather be outside playing.”
Of course, he was right. At the time, I wasn’t the least bit interested in building anything, but as I watched Logan prying nails loose and wielding a Paslode nail gun and a demonic Sawzall for the first time like a natural-born burly man, I couldn’t help but feel I’d missed out on something with him, like I’d missed out on something with my own dad, too.
“Oh, crap,” Logan said. “Ants!”
He’d just pulled a square of drywall loose and thousands of black carpenter ants were swarming the room. It’s always that way with remodeling jobs: start to fix one problem and discover three more below the surface. In the girls’ dorm, in addition to the mother lode of ants, we found the insulation black with mold and the inner wall laced from floor to ceiling with some kind of dry climbing weed. The whole wall cavity needed to be cleared out and scrubbed down before it could be repaired. It was a big job that took us two full days, but I didn’t mind at all.
I’m not sure what it is about watching my kids work, but it’s my new favorite spectator sport. More than when I’m cheering for a big race or a big game, when I see them doing any physical work, I want to applaud. I don’t need them building the pyramids. They just have to work without checking a clock, without long distracted breaks, with any kind of enjoyment or passion or facial expression that is not a scowl. When they do this, and they did it a lot at Sherab’s, they transcend every entitled-teen stereotype I’ve ever projected on them and it’s all I can do not to break out into a sappy chorus of “These are the good old days.”
One of our last jobs at Sherab’s was to dig out the perimeter of her black lagoon of a pool. The idea was to make a level base all the way around, suitable for pouring concrete. It was hard work; the soil was wet clay, packed and heavy, and there were mountains of it to move. But the kids led the charge, digging, hauling, leveling. Even after the sun was gone and we could barely see, they goaded Traca and me to work harder, faster, really wanting to make a major dent in the project before calling it a day. It’s not changing the world, moving buckets of clay from here to there, but I saw it gradually changing our kids. With every door we framed up, window we installed, garden plot we weeded, or load of manure we shoveled, our children were getting a crash course in manual labor, in taking pride in their work, and when necessary, in just sucking it up and doing what needed to be done.
At the other end of the productivity scale, Logan and Jackson were also getting some world-class examples of sheer laziness from most of the twenty-year-old WWOOFers we lived with. Drunk by noon, high most of the time, these slackers did as little as possible, ate as much as they could, then sat around watching Dexter DVDs until three in the morning.
I heard two of the worst offenders talking about a job they’d been given; Sherab wanted dirt moved from one section of the yard to another. It was a straightforward assignment but a hard one, requiring a few hours of strenuous labor. For the task, the boys were given a wheelbarrow and a shovel. They were both strong, in their prime; but rather than just do the job, they stalled like a couple of arthritic mules.
“Why do we have to move it from way over there?” one of them moaned.
“This is bullshit,” the other bitched. “It’ll take forever.”
“Let’s just drag some from here and say we didn’t know.”
“Whatever’s faster, bro.”
And so they dug up a nearby flower bed that someone had filled just a few days before. When Sherab saw what they had done and ripped into them for being worthless, brainless freeloaders, they acted shocked and tried to appear contrite—or at least as contrite as their baked-drunk faces were capable of appearing.
By comparison, Logan and Jackson came off looking like tireless robot slaves, and I think they liked that. I also think, if they ever head off to do some WWOOFing on their own, they will have learned a few unwritten rules that do not appear on the International WWOOFing website.
The first is: If you’re going to WWOOF, WWOOF hard—especially if you’re young. Many WWOOFing hosts Traca and I spoke with said they were not crazy about accepting any WWOOFers under the age of twenty-five because they ate more than their share and did not pull their own weight. The conventional wisdom seemed to be that young people are lazy and spoiled, just looking for free food and a free bed.
Second: Don’t be a pig. Offer to clean up after meals. Be respectful and aware of others around you. For example: Don’t drag your drunk girlfriend into the girls’ dorm and start humping her when a fourteen-year-old girl (such as Jackson) is sleeping on the bunk above you.
Small courtesies like these will be appreciated.
So the work was good, but the time off from work was even better; Sherab asked for four hours of WWOOFing each day, and once that was done, we were free to explore the surrounding area. We checked out Bethells Beach, which was, and is, beyond spectacular. We launched ourselves off steep sand dunes that surrounded a pristine nearby lake. We took more bush walks and felt wonderfully insignificant in the shadow of massive fifteen-hundred-year-old kauri trees. But like so much of what we found on the road, our greatest discovery was not something we expected to find at all. In fact, our greatest discovery on this particular stop—at least for the kids—was an old man who lived in a bus just up the hill beside the Gypsy Dancer.
His name was Bob Paul, and in all visible ways he was just an ordinary chap. He was in his seventies, with a thin, pinched face, a large nose, and a quiet demeanor. His body was long and lean, strong for his age, but his presence was not what you’d call commanding. He didn’t open his mouth very wide when he talked, rarely looked at you when speaking, and trembled slightly, an affliction most visible in his hands. From the outside looking in, he was just another face in the background, a lonely divorced dude living in a plain blue bus. But that’s not what the kids saw at all.
Back in the day, Bob had been a world-class runner. He won a silver medal at the Kiwi Nationals, specializing in 5K and 10K distances. He ran marathons well into his fifties, nearly made the New Zealand Olympic team, and still ran the rural hillsides just for fun. When he was no longer competitive, Bob became a successful coach, training many of New Zealand’s top runners. Chat with Bob for more than five minutes and you’ll realize he’s an encyclopedia of running information, with story after story of races and records, injuries and crazy screwups on the track and in the field.
When Bob learned that Logan was one of Maine’s top running prospects for the upcoming cross-country season (and that Jackson had a passion for running as well), he offered to coach them both, and the kids jumped at the chance. From then on, when we were not working or traipsing about, the kids were with Bob. He adjusted their strides, worked on their mechanics, wrote up training regimens, basically poured his vast experience into their eager feet and seemed to soak up their attention with equal delight.
On our last night at Sherab’s, as dinner was about to start, the kids were nowhere to be found. They’d gone up to Bob’s bus hours before—many hours before—so that’s where I went to look for them. I climbed the dirt path to the bus parking lot as dusk settled across the property, dissolving shadows into the gloom. Outside Bob’s bus, I stopped. The place was a wreck. It was a long, plain touring bus without any of the Gypsy Dancer’s style. Weeds were growing up around the tires. The blue paint was peeling. No lights were visible inside. To my screenwriter’s mind, it looked more like a horror movie set than a place to hang out, and with that thought, uneasiness flared inside me. What did I really know about this guy? I knocked. No one answered. I knocked again. Nothing. I went in.
What I found was a party. Bob was sitting on a window seat, looking ten years younger, telling a story. His face was ruddy and animated and he appeared to be radiantly happy. Across from him, Logan and Jackson were enthralled, hanging on his every word. I said hello but didn’t interrupt beyond that. I just watched my kids’ faces as Bob’s story went on, watching for signs of boredom. There were none. They were into this and so was Bob. It wasn’t a horror film at all. It was a love story.
We left the next morning, hopped a quick flight to Christchurch in the South Island, spent the night in a hostel, then grabbed an early morning bus and headed north along the beyond-gorgeous coastline. The South Island of New Zealand is famous for some of the most beautiful scenery in the world and I knew we’d find that. But like the pleasure of a job well done or the value of an old man’s life, the beauty around us was really just the start of all that was waiting to be found.