He’d watched Chicago improvise its way through the Depression. He joined the Navy and helped his country improvise its way through a war that left it at the top of the food chain for the rest of his life and mine. Once you do that, how hard can jacking up a stupid house be? We often hear boasts of the American Can-Do spirit. We’ve earned it, but I don’t think it’s entirely accurate. Can-do implies expertise, which is pretty evenly distributed across humanity. What Americans have is more of a Must-Do spirit. Dad could have left the sag in the floor. We wouldn’t have minded. At least we knew where to find our marbles. But dad couldn’t stand it anymore than his generation could stand the fact that the moon was just circling out there with nobody on it any more than a man, perhaps in Michigan, could stand the absence of a watermelon cannon in his life once he’d thought of it. “Man fires watermelon through Pontiac with homemade cannon...” I could watch news like that crawl by all day long. Tom Bodett is an author and broadcast personality heard regularly on NPR’s satirical weekend news quiz Wait, Wait…Don’t Tell Me. He has been the national brand spokesman for Motel 6 since 1986, which allows him to live in the middle of a hayfield in Windham County, Vermont, rather than near an actual job.
controlled substances from invasive brothers and sisters, it never occurred to me not to build it myself in the basement. By the time I got a car, I was 19 and in college, but that summer I lived at home making roadworthy a 1955 Pontiac Star Chief I bought with chickens still living in the trunk. I plugged rust holes (you could have safely fired a watermelon through that Pontiac), rebuilt the carburetor, rewired the lighting, and tore the dead radio apart. I went down to the hardware store with a handful of questionable tubes and came back with the solution. NASA landed the Viking 1 spacecraft on the surface of Mars in the summer of 1976 – the same summer I landed in Alaska, where I would spend the next 23 years. We didn’t even get a box of rocks out of Viking. I got everything I would ever be out of Alaska. Alaska in the ‘70s was still the wild west. The oil pipeline was hosing the state with cash and there weren’t enough people there to build all the houses, schools, and bridges to nowhere that needed building. I lied my way into every job I took – cannery forklift driver, high-iron construction monkey, logger, commercial fisherman, marine electronics technician, construction contractor. I had contracts to build three houses in 1979 without ever having actually built a house. But I figured it out. Like I’d watched my dad figure it out. The most important thing I learned from him was, “Anything that has been done is doable.” Where he learned it from, I can only imagine. My best guess is he got it as his American birthright.
Headshot of Tom courtesy of Beowulf Sheehan.
American Consequences
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