Camp Meeker Beat by Tom Austin - June 2018
Are we having fun yet?Zippy the pinhead wants to know. This issue of the Gazette is focused on fun, as are we all. I have a vivid memory of Robbie Brown speaking up in Mr. Stormer’s English Lit class senior year. Mr. Stormer was hunched over the podium as was his wont, discoursing on one novel or another’s take on the meaning of life. Robbie, as was HIS wont, cut loose with a wiseacre quip. Stormer cut him short.
“What is the meaning of life, Brown?”
Robbie didn’t even pause. “To have fun.”
Stormer’s head sagged further into his shoulders, an “I weep for this generation” as performed by a card-carrying worshipper of Hemingway. The Youth of Today never failing to disappoint.
But was Robbie wrong? I think it all depends on your definition of “fun”. I happen to think that Martin Luther King was merely following a particularly refined and heroic version of “fun.” Or am I stretching this trope to the breaking point? Is my trope tripe?
That all being said, it’s summer in Camp Meeker and there’s plenty of fun to be had. Camp Meeker Beach has had a bit of a trim—it was getting a little shaggy—and there is some calm contemplation to be had. Contemplation—another one of those refined forms of fun.
Farther afield, down at the other end of Dutch Bill Creek, there is plenty of fun to be had this summer. June 10th brings the Vineman Triathlon to Monte Rio. Sound more like torture than fun to me, but to each his own. June 23 and 24 will see the Russian River Rodeo come to nearby Duncans Mills—all the ridin’ and ropin’ and whoopin’ and hollerin’ you could ever shake a stick at. Then there’s the Big Rocky Games on July first. Rock skipping, ice cream eating, and I don’t know what all.
I like to have fun too.I had fun digging up dirt on our man Boss Meeker last month. If you recall, our enterprising carpenter/lumberman/land baron came out to California at a curious time—in 1861, just as war fever was gripping his home state of New Jersey. The great majority of 20 year old men (as Melvin was at that time) joined up and fought, or at least served in some military capacity. Melvin, however, had pressing duties escorting his sister out to California, there to be wed to her swain. Once in California, Melvin decided to stay.
I suppose I should feel triumphant at this bit of muckraking, but I really don’t. What would I have done in his place? It’s easy to say I would have joined up…but talk is cheap. What we can say is that once Mel Meeker got to California, he got to work and made something of himself. At twenty a newly arrived immigrant (forget for a moment that California was already a state by then), by twenty-two a landowner, by 24 building a house for his family. After that house, newly built, burned down, he and his family lived in a barn for three and a half years while he built yet another house. By age thirty Melvin was a made man: a homeowner, a builder, a land baron, a sawmill owner actively turning redwoods into San Francisco houses. Yes, I cheerfully stipulate that that act is as morally ambiguous (at least under today’s eco-greenie standards) as skipping out on the Civil War. As stated before, who am I to judge? Melvin was a hard-working man: he figured out which equipment his sawmill needed, arranged delivery of same around Cape Horn in a sailing ship, and made it all work. Add brains to brawn: US patent number 281,100, filed April 1883, lists Melvin C. Meeker of Occidental, California as the inventor of a “head-block gear for sawmills.” That would be when he was in his prime at 38.
This is how it is with great and powerful men: to make lasting achievements, be they in carpentry, lumbering, land acquisition or any of the other trades and practices by which one can make the dollar and the dent in the history books, one must have a singular drive, an obsession. Obsessively driven men are not often saints, and there is no evidence Mel Meeker was such a man.
Who are we to judge?
