Have Glove, Will Travel_ Adventures of a Baseball Vagabond - Bill Lee [85]
A day with them and the rest of the crew on the construction site wore on me much harder than any day on the mound. I have thrown over a thousand cut fastballs and sliders throughout my career without once experiencing a sore wrist, but I developed carpal tunnel syndrome laying down the white pine floors that wind through my home. Could not get on top of my sinker for nearly a year after that. It was worth it, though. I remember sitting in my kitchen the day after we finished and thinking how great the place looked. But I knew something was missing. Was it the warmth that only an old house can exude? No, it was the basement door. I had forgotten to install one. I walked outside to go downstairs through the bulkhead and discovered we had also neglected to build one of those.
Remember what I told you before? Half cocked.
It took three days of nonstop work before I could slice a rectangle through the kitchen wall’s eighteen inches of concrete. My daughter Katy wore a surgeon’s mask and dripped water on my diamond-blade saw to keep it cool. I spent another two days pounding out that slab with a sledgehammer and chisel. Lost twenty pounds, but now I can walk down to the wine cellar. I have found peace here. Those wild partying days in Montreal feel well behind me. People in this region take everything in stride, and I’ve learned to relax more being in their company.
My friend Durwood Starr comes to mind here. He has taught Bill the Great Confronter how a touch of dry wit can defuse potentially volatile situations. Durwood lives in North Troy, where people revere him as one of the best vetenarians in our entire state. His son Greg works as a customs investigator on the border between Vermont and Canada. One afternoon, the three of us were hunting deer on the Starrs’ property. After shooting a deer, you must hang it so the blood can drain from its carcass before lugging it home to be butchered. We had already slain three bucks and winched them up on tripods constructed from the trunks of freshly cut birch trees.
A fourth tripod stood in our camp, but it did not carry any prey. Only the week before, Durwood had shot at a deer from across the hood of his Ford truck. He used a new rifle that day and did not realize quite how low the gun’s barrel extended under his sights. He missed the deer but scored a perfect bull’s-eye through the side of his vehicle. To honor the kill, his children had hung a crumpled toy Ford truck from one of the birches.
I was checking the ropes securing the tripods, making sure they were tight, when we heard a man yelling from the top of a nearby hill. He ran into our camp carrying a bloodied hunting dog that had just lost a wrestling match with a porcupine. The pooch whimpered from under a face full of knitting needles, each of them at least three inches long. I counted over two hundred black-tipped quills stuck in his hide.
We brought the dog to the surgery Dr. Starr maintained on his farm, only a hundred yards away. After Durwood sedated his patient, Greg and I helped him to extract the needles by hand. Twenty minutes later, the dog sat bandaged on the operating table, licking our faces, still hurting but past any danger. Durwood stepped to his desk and wrote an invoice for $115. The dog owner, a bartender from New York, went ballistic soon as he saw it. “Jesus Christ,” he screamed, “this is so outrageous, it borders on usury. You only had my dog for twenty minutes. What the hell do you people do up here all winter that you have to charge such high rates?”
Now, the old me would have clamped my incisors around this ungrateful son of a bitch’s throat in a heartbeat. Durwood, though, did not misplace his composure for a moment. He just looked the man in the eye, smiled, and said, “What do we do all winter? Why, raise porcupines, what else?” That bartender laughed so hard he forgot his anger. Paid his bill with a smile.
David Reed is another Vermonter who