Cam, Tim, the Band and Frye's Leap

 Today I heard the news. Cam had passed. 

Frye's Leap for most of us is just a really good beer. For one moment captured in a photograph, it was Cam and his brother Tim in a perfect swan dive together, arms wide, backs arched, legs back, floating for an instant before the arc turned vertical. They did something I'd never have the moxie to do in a million years. I expect they both got laid afterwards.

For a magically loud and bombastic few years, I was the guitar and second vocal dweeb in a band with Cam, Tim, Mike, Todd and Chris. It was during a time when I could play a club in Connecticut at night and be in court in Bath or Wiscasset at 8:30 the next morning. 

We partied very hard, wrote songs, argued, traveled, and, at the center of the stage, the warmth and center of gravity was the force of nature that was Cam. Physically, he was a bit of a brute, but he also had a delicate and finely tuned sense of musicality that came just from inside, not from endless lessons after school, or in a music program in college. 

Cam and Tim were big into skiing, which had us installed at Sunday River clubs for many nights, and skiing the following mornings. I'd be doing my best to carve my way down the mountain, and there would be Cam, a blue spandex fighter jet whistling by me, not schussing left, schussing right, but tracing the contours of the mountain, only turning when it did. 

The skiing gigs took us to ski country in Austria where we all camped into a big lodge and played in bars with people clonking around in ski boots. We played on mountain tops where our gear went up by cable car, and yet it was somehow 70° even though we were surrounded by glaciers on all sides, and beer soaked fans closer up. We loaded our gear into tiny utility trucks and hatchbacks and found our way through the Alps to this hamlet or that disco.

Then came weddings and kids and drifting apart. A few years back, I ran into Cam at Hannaford, at Andy's Old Port Pub and some other occasions. 

In the early 2020's I tried to convince everyone to regroup, because I could tell the music was still in all of us, but inertia, commitments, health issues and the tyrannical, remorseless flow of time did their thing, so it never happened. 

Freddy Mercury and Cam are on another plane and I miss them both. Take a break, Driver 8. Rest easy, big soul.