Accidental Shaman
How Not to be a Hermit
Sixty years ago, mark today’s date, I decided I wanted to be a writer and after about a decade of messing with that and writing really stupid stories I decided I wanted to be a poet. I remember a friend's father saying that all poets want to write a novel. So, at one point in my life, I decided to write a novel, The Horse's Ass. or, the Horse's Half Brother, which I've never quite finished but early on my mother offered practical advice and said that if I was going to be a poet then I had to have some way of making a living. And since I like playing with rocks, I ended up going into stone masonry by sort of a serendipitous happenstance with a little bit of guidance and a whole lot of people misdirecting me into doing other things like possibly wanting to be a behavioral zoologist but eventually I stayed stoned with a little bit of guidance, help from my friends and mentorship. I followed my light. Education as enlightenment is following our light. Which we should not put under a basket. Particularly if we want it to have oxygen if it's going to burn.
When I was fourteen, I sat down to figure out what I wanted to be when I grew up. In contemplation, and a habit of making self-help improvement lists, I realized there were too many things that I wanted to be. It was clear I'd never manage all of them, or maybe even get truly good at anything. I was also always daily being told that I would never amount to anything. I decided I wanted to be a writer. Even if I could not live all those different lives directly, I could at least vicariously experience a whole lot of stuff.
Stone masonry eventually became my trade, at least that is what I tell some people, it keeps the topic of conversation simple, and it is a way to make a living. I’m a trickster, a coyote, a chameleon, my avatar is shaman – always shifting, adapting to whatever comes next. Writing lets me do that. It also means I make a complicated mess of most of anything.
The universe, however, messes with me. Possibly rightfully so. My birth name: Ken Follett.
I'm not that Welsh author famous for writing those tediously long books about building cathedrals or whatever it is his team manufactures. Intelligent people, usually when they are insensibly drunk, insist to tell me I have to read those books. I have never read about building cathedrals. I prefer reading books by Iceberg Slim. The only time I’ve ever touched one of Ken Follett’s books was when an airline stewardess got seriously riled up at me because of something my "Alter Ego" had apparently written in a novel called "The Third Twin."
Out of curiosity to know how bad a person that I was I read "The Third Twin" because of this fuss. I discovered there were two sentences where this other Ken Follett said something not particularly terrible about flight attendants. These were early internet days, ancient history, like hearing from Aristotle or Plato or Socrates’ ghost almost, and apparently at that time in universal mind-bending time to find the actual terribly offensive author was not in any manner shape or pathway possible. To note, when misidentified and asked by a high school student in Germany what I am working on what I am now writing I reply, Offensive Driving for Consenting Adults, with Illustrations. So, to return to the line of your injury, this one flight attendant, however, found this deviant version of me.
For months, she harassed this Ken Follett online, threatening that all the flight attendants in the world would universally give me a tall pile of shit every time I got on an airplane. Fortunately, I prefer to take a train when practical. My friends, wanting me to be able to survive the ordeal, wrote emails to her, trying to explain she had the wrong dufus. She persisted.
Finally, my sister, who worked in IT, was able to track down where this female person was sitting while launching her sweet missives in a consistent volley of passionate irritation. It turned out to be a computer in the back room of a pizza parlor in Eugene, Oregon. That was the end of that.
Not the end of my problem. Just to be clear, I am the REAL Ken Follett. I am also more handsome.
From stone masonry, my career evolved. At some point, one of my employers figured out I was capable of doing paperwork. This led to me becoming a supervisor, and from there, I eventually moved into managing and estimating and a career in historic preservation. I spent about 40 years working primarily in the New York City environment, where I learned to build a business. One of the reasons I was drawn to historic preservation was the opportunity it gave me to travel around and explore the urban environment. I spent many years just wandering around all the boroughs of New York City, as well as parts of New Jersey and Connecticut.
My interest in historic preservation came about because I wanted to be a hermit. Oddly, as much as I have tried to realize my overarching ambition to be a hermit, or a hobo, or a tramp, or a bum, or as I once proclaimed, to die in a ditch, which almost came true one time in Texas, I am not very good at it. Some other person always comes up in front of me to share their story with.
As a child, my parents had an interest in historic sites, and we traveled to many of them. It was cheap to get in the car and go look at an old revolting fort and it usually ended hours later at a Dairy Queen. At one historic recreation of a colonial village full of neat buildings with a bakery or a printing press or a fake drugstore I fixated on the hermit's hut. The book, My Side of the Mountain, in which a boy runs away to the Catskills to live in a hollow hemlock was at the time my favorite book. I love hemlocks and have spent many a day reading under the coolness of their wind rustled greenery shade. Though beware, nowadays my favorite book is The Philosophy of Madness.
My desire to be a writer is complemented by my being an avid reader. My son recently illustrated this perfectly when an architect friend asked him what kind of books I read. At that moment, I happened to be reading a book about extraterrestrial hybrid human-alien babies, supposedly written by Ernest Hemingway's niece—who, as I recall, had never actually met her famous uncle. My son summed it up by saying, "He reads whatever happens to interest him at the time."
Indeed, I have a lot of books and a lot of tools. My house used to be overflowing with books, though I've been trying to be a bit more restrained lately. As my wife observes, I acquire books, almost as if to appease a "book god"—my personal sacrifices at a vernacular alter of fieldstone piled up in a rumble. Now that I live in the Hudson Valley, I'm out exploring here. When I go to a job site for my historic preservation work, invariably I like to wander off, and if I'm lucky, I find a used bookstore, which can take away several hours of relaxation against the backdrop of the black abyss.
Growing up, we didn't have many books in the house, but my mother taught me to read, a gift I've cherished ever since. I believe the first word I ever read was "salt," printed on a white ceramic saltshaker with a red Dutch windmill and blue letters, that I still have to this day. Salt. I read it and said it aloud.
Financially, writing hasn't been a major source of income. I think the most I ever made was $200 for a poem I wrote on my phone while on a train, which somehow got picked up for an anthology for high school students. Despite this, I know people enjoy my writing, and I have an active audience. I very much enjoy it when my readers give me feedback, offer ideas, and participate in moving the story along.
One of my serial stories, which I'll probably work on here [on Substack], is about Gabriel and Etidorpha Orgrease, a brother and sister duo involved in collecting outhouses, which ties into historic preservation. Professionally, as I mentioned, I make my living as a contractor and consultant in historic preservation. I specifically provide services to architects, structural engineers, and conservators when they are investigating historic structures before undertaking any work. We often say, "We put holes in the walls." We are specialists at creating these openings—carefully, without looking inside—and then, of course, patching them up meticulously. We do this work in some rather exotic historic locations for excellent teams of people.
One of my personal challenges and joys is that I can always find someone who knows a lot more than I do. What truly motivates me is helping people realize their best selves, giving them the space to feel free to express themselves, grow, and become a positive force in the world. I want to bring this to life here.
Beyond writing and preservation, I also love to garden and enjoy animals. We live on a 100-acre farm in Dutchess County, New York, nestled in our own little isolated valley with a mountain right outside our house. We have chickens, a dog, various kinds of birds (both indoor and outdoor), and goats. Our local wildlife includes raccoons, groundhogs, coyotes (the animal kind, in this case), bobcats, a great blue heron, red-tailed hawks, and what I believe are great horned owls (they certainly prey on our chickens). I'm also pretty sure I've seen an eagle here, though they don't let us get too close. And, of course, living in the country means we have plenty of crows.
Interestingly, right next door to our farm is a former deer urine farm. It turns out that deer urine is used by hunters; they put it on an amulet around their chest to confuse deer and mask the human scent. Being about 80 miles north of New York City, people from the city come up to the suburban boonies and buy the deer urine by the gallon. The farm is abandoned of deer now, a few hundred goats can be seen on a good day, apparently no deer due to trouble with the EPA. It seems that concentrating deer urine and allowing it to flow into local waterways isn't advisable, much like pig sludge in industrial agriculture.
We love it here. It took us a long time to get to this point, and we plan on staying.
You'll find all kinds of different things on this here Substack.