After the work on Lulu’s Crossing was done, my friend Jack Macmillan, on the left (he is also a neighbor and the former County Transportation Superintendent) and Vince Vecchione, who fixed our bog, on the right, settled in to talk, and I couldn’t wait to grab this photo. They are old friends. At the end of a long day, they both settled down on opposite ends of Vince’s truck and started to Grunt And Grumble and they both settled into it, like pitchers in a bullpen chawing on their pumpkin seeds.
It was Jack who recommended Vince to me after I called him about the pasture bog. Jack is careful about who he recommends to people, but he had no reservations about Vince.
There were several big men in trucks working around the farm yesterday, they are a community all of their own, they speak their own language, they work hard and when the work is done they gather around their trucks and they talk in a special idiom I have always called “Grunt And Grumble.” These men know how the world really works, they manipulate giant trucks and machines, they rearrange landscapes, take down trees, pave roads, alter the path of streams.There are many exclamations, “yups,” and “uh-huhs” and “you betchas,” punctuated by winks, nods, shakes of the head.
These men belong in the country. They love their machines, most of them are hunters, they are nice and honest men, but you don’t want to tick them off if you can help it. They are great friends to have, bad enemies to make. If you try to bull your way through with them, they will find out in a flash and stare you into dust.
I have always enjoyed the company of these men, I love their stories, even if I can’t understand many of them and can’t offer too many of my own. In so many ways, they have made my life in the country possible. I am learning to do more of my own things, but they do many things I could never hope to do. Things that farms need.
True Grunt and Grumble is an art, it usually happens standing up and leaning against trucks or tractors. My friend Ben Osterhaudt is a gifted Grunt And Grumbler, his sentences are rarely more than a few words long. For true Grunt And Grumblers, stories are circular, they ebb and flow, are accompanied by chuckles and grunts, knowing smiles, telling silences, pauses fraught with meaning. The Men In Trucks have seen a lot, are good story-tellers, they remember details and have pinpoint payoffs and endings.
They rarely speak in full sentences, because in their secret understanding of one another, they know how most sentences will turn out. Sentences don’t need to be finished. They talk of jobs that were hard, friends who are sick or in trouble. They talk of great tractors they have known. They know everyone, have heard everything. You can not scoop them on anything – gossip, the weather, who is building what and when, who got divorced, whose kids are off the reservation, and who is playing with fire.
They love their friends, are loyal to them, they value them in a way that is unusual for most of the men I know. They generally consider me helpless and it is important not to pretend to know more than you do. If you do that, they will vanish from your lives and confidence. They don’t use cell phones to communicate with one another, they met at coffee tables and convenience store parking lots and along the side of the road. I showed them Red working, and they are always much more impressed with a working dog like him than anything I might do, like writing a book. A working dog is useful.
As we were all standing by the truck, I realized that Vince and Jack were talking about taking an evergreen tree down that had grown up around the woodshed of the farmhouse. It had to go, said Vince, it was taking off the slate tiles on the roof. Yup, said Jack, too close to the house. It wanted to come down.
Vince said he would come back in a few days and take it down. I realized after a few minutes that nobody felt the need to mention this to me, as it was work that obviously had to be done, and there wasn’t much I could add to the decision, even though it was ostensibly my tree. Yes, thanks, I said, it does need to come down. I would pay for this, I said, looking up and seeing slate tiles coming un-moored by the tree. Don’t worry about it, said Vince. I could have looked up at the roof every day for the rest of my life and never seen this.
This was all true, what Vince and Jack said about the evergreen. It has to come down. That was the end of it. Then the conversation veered to jerks who hunt irresponsibly – this comes up a lot – and hunting stories, victories and defeats of their own. I have to be honest, I love these men, love the hard and good work they do, love the stories they tell of time and place and connection. You can trust them with your life as well as your money. They are my first responders, and many have become my friends. Real men do not cheat or steal, they value honor and integrity, they are proud of their reputations. I have never been a joiner, there are not many groups that would take me in, this is the way of my life and I’m good with it. But I have great respect for these men, they make the world work and they can turn a bog into a pasture in a country minute with a couple of big trucks and a good tractor.