Steve Budihas

Okay, I suppose some of you are wondering why I've been strangely silent about The Morning Call's Vice President of Human Resources Steve Budihas bailing out for greener pastures a couple of weeks ago. I may have been silent here on my blog, but believe me, I have certainly been celebrating in private. Doesn't it always figure, though, that the evil ones can fall in a vat of feces and climb out smelling like a rose? He presided over the firing of nearly half the staff of the Call, then when the paper is going under in that same vat, he walks away into a better job somewhere else. Somehow the justice of that escapes me.

But alas! The nemesis of the Allentown newspaper industry is gone. Let us be thankful. Hallelujah!

Unfortunately, it's almost too late to be encouraged by this wonderful news. The Call as it once was is also gone. There is no longer a newspaper in the Lehigh Valley. Most of the people who gave a shit about the paper are on the unemployment lines. I guess that's why I've been silent. It just all seems sort of anticlimactic, doesn't it?

The day's bounty from the garden

This is the time of the summer when the toil of spring planting begins to pay off in dividends of bountiful fruits and flowers. Summer squash, onions and pole beans have been providing the dinner vegetable for the last week and I've even managed to pick a couple of handfuls of blackberries before the birds and squirrels got to them. Abundant basil has provided the first of many pesto preparations. Soon tomatoes, beets, cucumbers and peppers will add to the harvest.

There is nothing like going out to the garden and picking out what will become the evening's dinner or the next day's zucchini cake and blackberry pie. Everything is coming along well, despite my annoying habit of planting everything too close together. Unfortunately, I've just spotted the first of the Japanese beetles. These destructive pests will decimate my beans especially, and I foresee many hours of handpicking the beetles and plopping them into a jar of white vinegar. I don't use traps, as that tends to draw more of them from the area. Hopefully, I wil be able to keep up with the infestation and not lose all my bean harvest.

Christopher Johnson McCandless at the Magic Bus

I saw the film "Into the Wild" recently and was surprised at my reaction to it. For those who have not seen it, it is the story of Christopher McCandless, who, at the tender age of 22, shuns society and family, gives his life savings to charity and sets out on a two-year journey to find himself and, as he says, to "kill the false being within." His quest leads him to Alaska where he lives out his dream to be completely "alone in the wild" with fatal consequences. At first what struck me about the film was the absolute idealism of McCandless's dream. I felt I could identify with his spirit of adventure and the desire to leave the trappings of civilization behind. After all, who among us has not had such a Waldenesque dream in our youth, to chuck it all and go somewhere far away from all that's familiar to test what we are made of?

The view of Mt. Denali from my campsite in 1994

My own dream was to go backcountry camping in Alaska as well, but when the time came to live out my dream, I wound up only about a hundred yards from the edge of the last public campground in Denali National Park. Why? Because after watching a mandatory park film about the dangers of backcountry camping I realized that there are a lot of things to be afraid of in the Alaskan wilderness. Things like grizzly bears and rampaging moose and wolves and mosquitoes as big and hungry as wolves. I ended up cowering in my tent, barricaded from a swarm of hungry skeeters apparently crazed by the scent of my human pheromomes.  I spent the night listening to their dive bombings, sounds that reminded me of small aircraft looking to land nearby. There I was, in full view of majestic Mount Denali at about as close to sunset as it gets in Alaska in June, and I was trapped in my tent. Needless to say, one night was more than enough. Alaska, my friends, is a whole nuther world.

My campsite at a less remote location in Alaska

I applaud Chris for his courage and daring in attempting to live in and commune with nature alone, unsullied by human contact. But the thing is, Chris's odyssey hurt other people.  His family and friends had no word from him for two years. He just up and disappeared. The new friends he met along the road took him in and cared about him, but he always left before anything was asked of him emotionally. There's a fatal flaw in the kind of spiritual idealism that eats up your heart and causes you to become one of those mean people you're supposedly running away from. It wasn't until the end of his solitary journey that he realized that "happiness is only real when shared." Although "Into the Wild" is a heartwrenching story, there is still a lingering romanticism attached to Chris's fearless trek into the unknown in search of adventure that stirs the soul of the wanderer in me. 

Jeff Korba clowning in Costa Rica

At about the same time I saw this movie, my friend Bill Crumlic was making a video documentary called "On Point" about another dead kid, Jeff Korba, a free-spirited musician who died in 2007 in a car accident in Montana when he was 19. Jeff had heard the same "call of the wild" but headed south, instead, for Costa Rica where he immersed himself in the culture and learned how to rely on his wits far away from his comfort zone. Both Jeff and Chris were strong-willed and full of curiosity for new experiences that tested the limits of their endurance. But that's where the similarity between the two men ends. While Chris McCandless turned himself inward and never looked back, Jeff reached out and put himself into the hands of other people. He is described as "kharma incarnate," "full of good will" and a young man who knew the secret of living each day to its fullest. He craved human companionship as much as Chris shunned it. Jeff left behind a legacy of being good to other people, of knocking down walls and opening up barriers that separate us from one another, and selflessly giving back to the community he lived in.

Two different kids, from two different generations, leaving behind two very different legacies.

My dear friend Keith Butler is as industrious as he is generous with his time. So when he volunteered to help me rebuild my backyard pond, I hesitated, knowing what a gargantuous project it would turn out to be. "Are you SURE you want to do this?" I asked him over and over. He assured me that he was, so off we went to the home store for the liner, a kiddie pool to hold the old pond water and tools.

The old pond was an odd shape, rounded to look like a natural woodland pond, and it was notoriously hard to clean and care for. Nearly the width of the yard, there was little room to get around it and the unfinished river rock border was unsteady and begininning to fall apart from years of settling. We decided to turn it into a rectangle with a slate border, flat and level to the surrounding ground and with plenty of room to get to all four sides for cleaning.

Unfortunately, the ground was a rock-hard clay and the massive tree roots encroaching from the neighbors' yard made the job incredibly difficult. We had decided against buying a pickaxe (a bad move), so the digging went slowly. I'm afraid I was not much help, being unfit and out of shape from sitting at the computer most of the day, so the majority of the hard work fell on Keith's shoulders.

Since the new pond was deeper than the old one, we wound up with about three cubic yards of crappy clay soil piled four feet high on the patio and nowhere to go with it. Calls to local excavators proved to be an expensive venture, so I got the bright idea to hold a sidewalk sale to help pay for the expenses. The sale would mean more work for me, lifting and carrying furniture up from the basement, and also that I wouldn't be able to help Keith with the massive job of moving the humongous dirt pile to the alley behind the house to allow easy access for a front end loader. I stubbornly insisted that I could handle both jobs, so Saturday morning I filled the sidewalk with the sundry items and unfinished projects that have been taking up valuable space in my basement. Most of the furniture had been acquired through my skills as a trash-picker so whatever I made would be pure profit. 

Business was slow at first, it being the Fourth of July holiday, but things picked up in the afternoon. One gentleman asked if I had any old cabinets or tools and I invited him to shop the basement to see if there was anything he liked. As we passed the pond project, he asked what we were going to do with the pile of dirt on the patio. Turned out he was an excavator and he offered to come the next morning and remove the dirt for $40, about $140 less than the estimated we had gotten by phone. Not only did I sell the man an old cabinet for $25 but our dilemma with the dirt pile was solved as well. The Lord sure moves in mysterious ways.

By Sunday morning, the pond was finished and our only job was to load the dirt pile into the front end loader. The rest of the afternoon Keith and I lolled on the front porch reading the New York Times and nursing our sore muscles. The weekend had been exhausting for both of us and Keith was anxious to get back home to his apartment in New York City. Little by little the items on the sidewalk were paid for and taken off to their new homes. I had made enough money in the sale to pay for the pond expenses plus a bus ticket home for Keith, making it a successful weekend all around. Would I do it again? Well. . . let me get back to you on that.