It happens infrequently while you travel slowly, the intersection between luck and serendipity, that yields the endearing moment you least expect. On remote highway WI-13,
meet Bill
Once a gravedigger, he stopped shaving and began woodcarving when Nixon waved goodbye from that stairway on the helicopter. Not content to dance to our drummer, his path of least resistance leads to a modest workshop/studio/shed and bed, breathing sawdust and sculpting life.
Path to the inner sanctum
No stranger to camping, he fashioned his own classB motorhome on the rusted chassis of a Chevy truck. “Don’t use it much once I passed 75…I’m too old and that’s too fast”
Where’s the circus ?
We tried to buy a beautiful fish, shaped and polished from burled walnut, but it was NFS, one of his favorites he could not part with. “Most of what I have in the studio (it was crammed with wooden art, every piece he had done himself) is only for display.
“However, if we express interest in a raven topped totem pole seen below in its infancy, he might be able to talk.
A stranger to personal hygiene, he is in remarkably good health and spirit, and recommended we stop down the road to look at his favorite truck, a 1927 Ford.
We don’t want your arms, we don’t want your legs, just give us your tows
Bill doesn’t have a cell phone, a TV, or a computer, only a Motorola portable radio that ‘needs new batteries’ and he’s never heard of a social networking site. I asked him if he remembered Elian Gonzalez and Janet Reno and the tug-o-war with Cuba in 2000.
“Vaguely”.
How about the oil spill ?
“Oh, yes, but I didn’t know where it was in Mexico or when it started. Is it fixed?”
There aren’t enough Bills in the world.
“It happens infrequently while you travel slowly, the intersection between luck and serendipity, that yields the endearing moment you least expect.”
Yes… the benefits of traveling slowly… or not at all… just being still for a moment… and opening our senses to what surrounds us.
Thank you for your well-written “Charles Kuralt moment” on former gravedigger, now woodcarver Bill in Wisconsin.
Here is another Charles Kuralt “On the Road” moment with another Bill, Steam Engineer Billy Byrd:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=i8g01-uCTpg