BuckoLast summer I was in Alaska sitting on a river with an old guide. At least he seemed old. He was 65 and he'd been guiding in Alaska for years. I realized soon enough he was only a few years older than me, but his remarkably simple wisdom and experience made my admittedly full life pale a bit.
In the winter he was the caretaker for the lodge, and remained alone up there through the long and dark winter with his dog Sarah and a few hundred books. It took a while for him to loosen up with me, a man more comfortable with his own counsel, but soon the stories flowed. This was to be his last year. The season was winding down and he had one more winter alone. As soon as the ice broke this spring he was heading south, buying a camper and spending the rest of his life fishing the western rivers of the lower 48. I would assume now that he was somewhere on a river, a bit warmer, fishing for himself. His name was John Hickey.
I'm sure ol' John has no inkling of the seed he planted. The last day my companions retired to the lodge for drinks and poker. I sat alone on the dock, Alaska spread before me and I realized there were things I needed to do.
You're welcome to call it a mid-life crisis. Hell, I'm not proud. Like any good southerner, I wear my eccentricities on my sleeve. My oldest son just graduated from college, my daughter in the next year or so, but then there is Cooper, the seventh grader. When he graduates I will be close to seventy. There are no guarantees in life as proven by the ever-present e-mails from old teammates at Georgia about other old teammates stricken or passing on. If there are adventures to be had, they need to be now, while the body still cooperates. I need some adventure, some Jack London.
The fact is I've been working in an office for the past fifteen years (although a pretty nice one in the grand scheme of offices) and I'm running out of things to write about. The first two-thirds of life were full of farming, football, family and a host of other topics rife with fodder for a writer most of which I've written about in some form or another. Now, the well is dry. I'm running out of Bucko.
So in the interest of recharging the Bucko, I decided to do something Bucko-ish if you will, something a bit eccentric, yeah maybe even stupid when looked at from a purely practical standpoint. I decided in the prime of my earning potential, during the period of my greatest financial responsibility, during the worst economic period since the Great Depression, to take six months off.
I read the other day where if you retire at 65 and live to be 85, which is pretty normal these days, you're going to need a nest egg in excess of a million dollars. Based on the way things are going right now, if I were to retire at 65, I'd owe a million dollars, so we can forget that right now. The other fact I overheard from a former CEO of a fairly substantial company here in Vermont, is that statistics show that a fairly sizable percentage of people who retire are deceased within 18 months of retirement. Damn! What's the point?
So based on all these facts, I'm retiring now. The way I've got it figured, I'm still physically able to enjoy a few great adventures, financially I'm never going to be able to legitimately retire and most importantly, if I just retire for six months, then I'm a good 12 months shy of the dead at 18 months statistic.
What I've found a month into this is how deeply ingrained is the relentless pace at which we live. One would think that living in Vermont is anything but relentless, but the truth is we have the same pressures here present anywhere else in the country; we just deal with them in a more beautiful place. The problem is we often forget to look around and remember where we are. Even when not working, there are a thousand things that need doing. They've always been there, just pushed aside by the necessity of work. What I've discovered is, the beauty of not working is working. The weeds in my garden have had it pretty easy these past few years. They now tremble in fear. My garage could be photographed for Architectural Digest. I found myself Memorial Day weekend working as a bouncer at a bar on the Cape one night, ironically doing the job my son has done for the past four summers. He is a newly minted investment banker in New York, wearing an expensive suit and his dad is checking hot college girl ID's at a beach bar in flip-flops. Life is good.
Old John won't be at the lodge in Alaska this summer, but if all goes well, I will be. I took his job. It's only for a couple of months during the fishing season up there, but it's a good test and by the time you're reading this, hopefully I will be running a boat up the Agulowak in search of big fish. Most of the guides up there are young bucks in search of great adventure, but I refuse to believe that to be the proprietary domain of the young buck. Old John proved that.
There's a great country song that goes:
"I'm not as good as I once was, but I'm as good once, as I ever was."
Well, I guess we'll see.
We hope we'll be hearing from Paul Fersen during his mid-life crisis. He knows he always has a home here at Stratton Magazine.
