The Backyard Adventurer by Beau Miles

The Backyard Adventurer by Beau Miles

Author:Beau Miles
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Adventuring and personal development
Publisher: Brio Books
Published: 2021-05-04T23:00:00+00:00


Hands

Of any body part, I appreciate hands the most. Eyes lie, legs run away, and while breasts are wonderful and practical, they’re not really my thing. But hands, especially when they’re grasping tools, from the wineglass to the axe, make me appreciate how much humans are capable of as the only primate with an opposable thumb to each of the four fingers. Here I am typing away, drinking tea, gesturing to thin air as I look for the right word. I can’t imagine life without my hands. If I no longer had them, I’d have to completely redefine how I interact with the world.

I first properly noticed my hands when taking a photo of them. Actually, it was a photo of my right hand, taken with the left. Much of the photo shows my thumb, which is my favourite digit. I was working by the lake at camp in the U.S, alone, jacking up a mud-sunken timber boathouse. I was conversing with rotten floor joists and slippery boulders as they were my core company, and I hadn’t warmed to my borrowed tools, yet. With a fresh wound on my chest inflicted by the wayward use of a ramming bar, I remember saying something along the lines of, ‘Fuck me. Mate, have a break. Sit in the shade, drink.’ and likely a few more swear words to hammer home the point that a break was the best option. Leaning against a sloped birch whose entire canopy was over water, meaning its entire root system was beneath me, swigging from my water bottle, I must have noticed my attractive thumb, covered in mud, showing me how good it looked and how hard it had worked.

Let me go back a step, to contextualise that particular camp experience, and the intimacies of that specific geographic location; Burr Pond, central Vermont, six miles from Rutland. It’s an unfortunate name in a sense, Rutland, a place where people gather in a furrow, lower than other places. And true enough, it’s now the end of the line, where the train only comes and goes from one way. But you can love low, rainy, end-of-the-line places because, more often than not, such places have stigmas of association from those who don’t live there. Rutland is a grand town to me because camp was down the road, meaning it became my version of America, a zone where experiences unfolded from May to September for a decade.

This particular day by the lake was the first day of my fifth season working for Camp Sangamon for Boys, ‘The camp with the pioneer spirit’. Boys were in fact more grown up than ‘boy’ suggests, often coming from the boroughs of Boston and New York. Street-smart well beyond their years, the boys would stay anywhere from two to eight weeks, nearly always there on the recommendation of a friend, or a friend of a friend. I became an adult over the years at Sangamon, living and working in the same grooves I’d cut during my first addictive summer there.



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