A Free Life

I was coming through Vermont once on a hot day in late august, coming down this winding road out of the mountains, with the hot sun and the humidity filtering through the dense web of leaves and tree limbs above. Then, there, right out in the open sun, was this river, maybe twenty or thirty yards wide. There was a little dirt road leading down to it and just next to the river there was an old truck parked and this old Volvo station wagon next to it. T-shirts and jeans had been tossed haphazardly across the hoods of the vehicles. As I came down closer on the motorcycle I heard the faint sound of laughter beneath this large roar of rushing water.  The river bent around a curve and there was this waterfall there, maybe fifteen feet high and beneath it, standing in its spray were five young guys all about twenty or twenty five and they were shirtless and just in their boxer shorts, drinking beers under the little waterfall on the hundred degree Wednesday afternoon. They were a group of traveling laborers and they had spent the morning into the early afternoon re-walling a two-story barn a few miles up the mountain somewhere. Now work was done and they were already living again. “This is what we do,” one of them was telling me, “we make what we need to just to keep going, then we can just live like we want to, do things like this all day.” They invited me to stay with them, which I did in an old cabin one of them was renting up the road, and to work with them, which I also did for two or three days before getting back on the road. I think about that waterfall still, and about those guys and about that life they had going there. I guess I wish things could always be so simple, that I could always be that free.