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.

The March of Late Summer - Boat Malfunctions, Drought Driven Wellwater Pump Burnout and I Don't Like My Legit Job Either

 August and early September on Matinicus can be like March, just with super sweet weather instead of the sour cold kind. All the same, people might be grouchy or short, or burnt out, and by people, I mean me. When I was here in March of years gone by, I heard islanders say 'I don't know what's wrong with everyone, I'm fine. 

These days, I am not always so fine even with the nice weather. It's been a long slog of juggling two businesses, one of which is driven by weather, market and abundance or not of lobsters. The other is transactions, disputes, accountings and other fiddlesomeness. Then there's socialization, music events and just remembering to get back and forth for gas and groceries.

The last few weeks have been an epic L.A. Freeway in the fog sort of pile-up. First, I'm bad at saying no to legal work; almost as bad as I am at getting it done in a timely fashion. Then in the middle of what the National Weather Service says is 'extreme drought', the shower valve I've been procrastinating on fixing finally drips enough to make our water pump trip a circuit breaker while we're away for a few days. When plugged back in it shrieks with rage at the breaker for not tripping. It works, but clearly is destroying itself from within.

It takes me 7 trips to plumbing places to find the right replacement pump in the midst of closings, meetings, music performances and fetching mainland supplies. 

The boat has also taken to overheating ever so slightly at high rpms, and the cooling water discharge seems a  little slack. With home water supply problems and a long list of office delinquency, my happy space is supposed to be on the water hauling traps with Megan. 

Boat problems often seem to arrive in my world during the later part of my season which is the worst kind of timing because the catches are good, but the weather is likely to change on a dime very soon, at which time I'm having to take up gear for the year with a sick boat, or spend days diagnosing and waiting for parts and repairing something, all while not getting to the legal needs of clients, so it's what you'd call a confluence. Of shit. 

This boat development sets off a long seminar of youtube diesel-engine boat fixing videos, and some cramped hours in the space below deck in the murky water and with fiberglass spicules trying to find the problem. Just trying to get the cover off the water pump has me corkscrewed between curved hull, and unforgiving frame pieces in such a way that to have both hands on a part I'm trying to remove, one arm is too long and the other too short to work together in the space. There is some bleeding from elbows and knuckles and from my soul. The socket wrench escapes my grip and falls into the bilge. It is a very long 2 or 3 feet to reach into that forward part of the bilge due to the jungle of metal parts, hoses and belts in the way. 

All of this would be one thing if the nice weather lasted forever, but knowing there's always a day in the second week of September when the water and air are suddenly different, the imminent change together with office demands, dying domestic water pump and sick boat all go merrily around in circles immediately above my bed all night. 

I am lucky. A neighbor stepped in to lend a very professional hand to installing the new water pump. I very much enjoyed watching him work and being the set-and-fetch-it person. I am also lucky because an acquaintance helped me fine tune my overheating diagnostic process for the boat to the point where I took apart a heat exchanger, fished out bits of shredded gasket and made a temporary one out of a blue XL sized Atlas Vinylove glove previously used for hauling traps. F/V Compass Rose seems much better. 

I hit the wall, but my good people helped me through/under/over it.