Peter the Defiant: Thoughts and Feelings on Losing Peter
2/08/02Today our stove gave up the ghost. I had talked with sukey last night about Peter’s death, and Mimi this morning and then Jason the stove-man came over to replace a few things and make our old stove like new. I was talking to people on the phone letting them know about peter while Jason went to work on the stove.
The first time I ever heated with wood was on Marsh Island or “Peter’s Island” as we called it then. We had a big cast iron stove in Camp poly - a structure made up of saplings, plywood and clear heavy duty plastic. It was January in Muscongus Bay, and we were on an island two miles off shore. The stove had an 8 foot run of pipe that went straight up and out of the tent.
Peter was not the kind of person I had ever met before. He was smart and respectful and argumentative and incredibly resourceful, and capable with the laws of physics as they applied to things. He took other people’s ideas into consideration even if they were much younger than him (say 30 years or so.) He was 53 then.
Peter’s Island was the setting for my first sustained encounter with the laws of Physics and Nature as they combined to make equations like:
Want to stay warm + woodstove= cut firewood every day; and its corollary
Want to heat with firewood + island = look on the beaches for driftwood + drag it up to camp after cutting/splitting it.
Peter ferried us back and forth to Round Pond on his boat the Sherpa, and in the depths of Summer would always treat us to ice cream at the Round pond general store, where we, sunburned by the dazzling June sun, which bounced off the bouncing blue waves of Muscongus Bay, would lick and slurp our way through that ice cream, and look at the huge hunks of Store cheese on the counter waiting there for us to buy it on our return.
Our Vermont Castings stove was a model called Defiant; but it hadn’t been able to withstand Jason’s assault as he began to find more and more things malfunctioning, warped with heat and heavy use. It was a stove made in Vermont, the state where Peter set his final anchor with Mimi. Jason turned to me and said, " You know I don’t want you throwing good money after bad, but this stove really has a lot of problems...."
These were all the kinds of problems Peter could have fixed well himself, though he probably would never have gotten a fancy stove like this in the first place - with a catalytic converter and all, with so much that could go wrong if it wasn’t well maintained. I don’t remember Peter’s stoves, but I’m sure they were plain and functional.
His little cabin above the wharf he and a group of Cambridge Massachusetts kids had built all 20 feet of it with Rock cribbing, sat tight and white above the water with a view that only executives in big banks can now afford.
In my memory the room we met and ate and talked and read in was almost all wood - wooden floors, wooden doors, with wooden hand carved handles, almost story book round but not cutesy - functional and fun. This room, designed in what we nowadays call “the open floor plan” was the kitchen, library, malt shoppe, weather center, and dining room with windows on a world soaked in sun, rain, mist, and wind, filled with the lapping of waves and the laughter of our return to our truest sensations, lungs full of ocean air, and ears full of ocean orations.
Our stove lay partially dismembered on Jason’s drop cloth in the center of our living room, as we discovered the connection between the stove and the chimney had rusted through. Indeed this was our lucky day, the wrong combination of events and I might have even predeceased peter as they say in insurance or will talk.
But Peter had so much will power. He could take ideas with his hands and create realities with them like the wonderful wharfs he built on Marsh and Louds Islands; like his grand circular stairway up to the wharf house on Louds; but Peter wasn’t all that much on maintenance.
His body had risen from the cancer ashes a few years before we met him, and he had left conventional existence to perch on islands and sail through them and teach wandering boys who had strayed from someone ’s idea of the straight and narrow. Peter wanted to teach us all for free - he wanted us all to learn and love the things he learned and loved, and he was ever disappointed in human beings as we are currently constructed: so limited in courage and expanse, so cornered in a day to day mediocrity, so tied to the conventional, to the work a day don’t think it through ethic.
Peter, I though originally wanted to die at Sea, but he died adrift, adrift in snow, crystallized white water, sailing out there alone in his driveway he left us to deal with all the unanswered questions:
Why do we choose to live the way we do? What is important about being alive? Where should we bestow the wild and vital energies that pass through us so quickly and unreflectingly? How do we learn to pay attention to what’s important before we burn our own houses down in an effort to keep them warm? What is a good way to die, and what is a good way to live? When should we be sure to maintain a connection we started so long ago?
Like our stove Peter was a warm presence in my life. He was rugged and dependable, and I drew strength and comfort from his disorthodoxy. He was a wonderful friend, and I regret my gradual loss of contact with him as he moved inland, and began his western years. Of course he would only grumble at a statement like that - “figure out what you’re going to do about your stove Emanuel” he would say, “plenty of cold left in this winter. Don’t waste your time talking regret, do something, write something, contribute” and so as I keenly feel the absence of his warmth and defiance, I reply - so here it is, you old man, my thoughts my memories my feelings - thanks, and take it easy on those back roads.
Love
E