Congrats Rick Holcomb!

2021-10-25

Rocks from space hit Earth all the time, all over. But to find one, there are better places to look. In the Mojave Desert, a dark meteorite can land and sit around to be discovered, without vegetation to grow over it. Space rocks can accumulate for decades on Antarctic ice sheets that hardly ever see snow.

By the same token, while helium-filled party balloons should have a fairly random distribution pattern, some places are better for spotting one.

A Mylar balloon landing in a city street just looks like regular litter. You need a quiet, out-of-the-way place.

The other day a pillowy, shiny object appeared on the ground 100 feet from our house. Still partially inflated with helium, it brought us the message, “Congrats!” A Mylar balloon can stay inflated for two or more weeks. If it had been blown by the wind at only three miles-per-hour, it likely came from west of the Mississippi. 

Looking at the hundreds of acres of unbroken forest around us in Halifax, either I’m very lucky or this place is more littered than we realize.

Life doesn’t always deliver the recognition you want. I say it would be foolish to ignore such clearly written and addressed blessings from the sky. But it would be narcissistic to take such a random message personally.

Therefore, I looked for a suitable recipient for these greetings. And at just about the same 7 a.m. moment when I saw the balloon, I heard the whine of Rick “Hokey” Holcomb’s chainsaw down below my pasture.

Walk with me as I say “Good morning” to Rick.

To assure you that I’m sincere in conveying the well wishes of an airborne piece of trash to Rick, let me tell you a couple things about him.

Since I mentioned to Rick that I wanted to write about him in the Reformer, he’s been reminding me about key pieces of his life philosophy. “Make sure when you write about me that everybody knows that it's Green-Up Day at least one day a week,” he told me. “Bottles on the sides of the road don't magically disappear. Tell them Mr. Holcomb gets 300 to 600 of them every year. There's a coffee cup from the side of the road in the back of my truck right now.”

Rick’s also not one to leave anything to chance. He lets me know when the Powerball jackpot is getting big and how he’s going to play it based on numerology of current events like Hurricane Ike and the California wildfires.

I take neither Rick’s lotto pics nor his stories about astral travels at face value. But Rick is a good old man from Guilford who has a cosmic consciousness. I don’t care what he says. He shows through deeds that his heart is beating strong.

To ask “How are things going?” to most people I know is to be met with “Busy,” “Hectic,” and the like.

Rick is no different, but listen to how he describes why he’s busy.

“There's a lot of people that need help. So I've been fixing cars and helping people move. Two loads of firewood to the farm yesterday just from scrounging along the roads.” (That’s a neighbor’s dairy farm whose outdoor wood boiler Rick helps keep supplied, just because he likes helping the same farm he got milk from as a kid.)

That’s not all. Rick takes care of his mom and his extended family and touches on I-don’t-know-how-many friends in the community like myself. He’s been coming up and helping me with forestry work and odd jobs on my farm for four years since he emailed me via Craigslist.

Rick isn’t prosperous by popular measures. He pads his Social Security check with odd jobs, but he sets his own hours, chooses his projects, and finds time for charity and family. He often arrives for work before sunrise, waiting a bit for the morning light in order to start his chainsaw. But if I’m slow in making my coffee I might easily miss him before he leaves again. He works a tank of gas hard and then gives his body a break by moving on again, usually within an hour or two.

As for the work itself, we’ll pick an area of roadside or a field edge, and over the course of days and weeks he’ll cut his way through it and produce both tidy brush piles (work most men his age wouldn’t touch) and firewood.

But I’m equally likely to drive out later in the day and find that Rick spent his two hours mowing the side of the road, or cutting brush under powerlines or in the town right-of-way. While I’m selfishly wondering why I pay him for this, he’s thinking bigger. He sees it as doing his part to help overworked road crews. He says the linemen for Green Mountain Power notice when a landowner takes care of their right-of-way. They might in turn put a little more heart into their work. And who am I to disagree?

I don’t know if it’s because he puts in so many hours out there, or if his open heart attracts serendipity, or both. But I encounter Rick at perfect moments. Sure, he shows up when I call and ask him for help running my log splitter down to Joseph Brown’s in the village. But he also just happens to be there, chatting with Dave at Sonny’s Sunoco, when I pull in unannounced with a flat. I need to be in Putney in 10 minutes, can he help? He runs me up there and waits an hour through my PT appointment to give me the ride back to Sonny’s, having happily passed the time catching up with his friend who cooks at the chuck wagon.

Rick’s there again later that day, this time on the side of Tater Lane, when Dave’s fixed my flat and I can return Rick’s favor with a ride to pick up his Ford Ranger. I offer to help Rick more but he refuses most things other than a few bucks an hour for honest work.

Speaking of Tater Lane, Rick related to me a remark from a friend in town about how the beauty of driving through the woods of that road hasn’t changed a bit in 40 years. “That’s 40 years of me putting in an hour here, two hours there, cutting the low brush and branches so you get that ‘timeless’ view deep into the woods,” points out Rick.

Those who admire and study figures like Elon Musk might learn something closer to home from the likes of Rick Holcomb. His small acts are motivated by a larger mission of planetary stewardship.

As he put it to me the same day the balloon landed, “There's not too many things I'm addicted to but I do like having a fault like breathing, you know.” Rick’s getting saucier with age and he laced in some f-bombs as he told me, “If you screw up the air and you screw up the water, now you might as well not have a pulse because the rest of it ain’t lasting long.” He’s in tune to the ecological benefits of the tree-thinning he’s doing, and loves quantifying the work, telling me exactly how many hundred trees or cords of wood he’s cut that week.

Another trait that’s disappearing as quickly from this land as a balloon into blue sky is Rick’s independence of thought. While I question some beliefs like the lottery business, I can’t fault Rick for being the rare beast who thinks for himself. When I told him I wanted to dedicate my Reformer column to him, he ranted so hard against the corporate monopoly on mass media including “The Misinformer” that I almost scrapped the idea. Rick is as equally happy to poke at the media bubble enjoyed by liberals as he is against our hawkish Republican presidents. Rick’s a team-player, a former Boy Scout volunteer through-and-through, but he’s also dedicated to his values above all. He’s wary of lazy group-thinking. 

Rick is a steward of value. He graded lumber for 41 years, starting with Tony Cersosimo in 1975. “Tony was the 10th richest man in New England when I started and he was the 6th richest when I got done,” Rick told me.

Who else do you know who both lives check-to-check, and who also feels fairly treated by a far-wealthier boss? Rick takes pride in helping someone more prosperous succeed, knowing how much he has contributed.

He describes Tony talking to him as a 19-year-old lumber grader. By Rick’s telling (as is everything in this column), Tony told him how out of 275 people employed at the mill at that time, “You’re the only one that’s making me money. They all cost me money.” Rick notes, “Isn't that unique? He was a Pisces, so, very sharp pencil.”

Rick explained that the lumber industry at the time was the 3rd-largest in the world, with Cersosimo trading millions of dollars in goods across continents and oceans. “You’ve got a tree that took three or four generations to grow, and it’s up to me to evaluate the logs and figure out what each and every board is worth and to get it in the right market.” That billion-dollar trade relies on the good and honest work of someone like Rick on this end, and a buyer or grader on the other end who breaks the bundles open. “And there's only one or two people that have actually seen the board and know what it is.”

Rick’s a multi-generational thinker, and not in an anti-“flatlander” way. When telling a story he mixes family knowledge and place into descriptions like this: “On Jacksonville Stage, you go in the dip by the Cutting Farm, then up around the corner and under the flat, and then that’s Sprague’s there as you get almost to the very top of the hill before you go down in. And there's a house on your right.”

When Rick and I wrap up one project and look for the next we joke, but also serious, about being in Year Four of “The 200-Year Plan” for the land here.

His parting words to me for three years have often included, “We’ve almost got the zipline in.” I thought he was cracking a joke about our never-ending scope of work. It was funny to imagine we could accomplish enough basic forest maintenance that we could do something as whimsical as put in a zipline. And now, this summer, I started putting the zipline in over the pond that Rick helped me clear.

With Rick’s age I’ve become afraid that each summer with him will be the last. (I seldom see him in the winter, when he has a whole other set of tasks and doesn’t risk chainsaw work on snow.) Whether it’s May or October he’s equally likely to note how many days of work we have until snow flies. In keeping with that he’s mindful of his own ultimate destiny. If a tree’s down across Green River Road he’s not one of us “busy” folks who’ll make a three-point turn and find a new route. He’ll stop and cut it and drag it off to the side, whether or not there was anyone around at 5 a.m. to see him do the good deed. 

Sensibly for this kind of work, Rick puts an index card on his dash with his sister’s phone number on it, in case anything should happen. Sometimes I hope he would add my number to the card, though I haven’t yet asked him for that honor.

A lot of us are as busy as Rick with our lives and work, and spare hardly any time to appreciate the special neighbors in our midst, the shooting stars that come from the cosmos and land modestly among us in the back roads of Windham County, Vermont.

To repair this error, I’m giving everything I’ve got today, both a cosmic “Congrats!” and this column, to “Hokey.”

I may not have a roadside spring to dedicate, like that to Barna Clark on Ames Hill Road, but we can say the same about Hokey as it is chiseled in granite for Clark.

“A True Friend And A Good Man.”

Or as Rick told me, “There's an old guy out there that cares about drinking water and cuts trees.”

And by the way, consider old-fashioned ways of celebrating someone, like showering rice or flower petals on them. Mylar balloons never biodegrade, and they can kill dolphins, who surely as my name is Tristan Roberts, are surely close confidants of Rick Holcomb. 

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