Travels with Gary

‘Excuse me, Gary!” “No, EX-CUSE me, Geoff!” That sarcastically polite exchange captures a key aspect of my relationship with Gary Hufner, my co-driver at The Lakeville Journal Company. En route to our deliveries, our conversations are typically punctuated by friendly jibes, jousting and…peals of laughter.

If you’ve seen a solidly-built middle-aged man with a toothy grin and two days of grayish stubble wearing a short-sleeved shirt and a Tractor Supply baseball cap, you may have seen Gary. If you’ve seen someone matching this description bounding along outside of La Bonne’s with a bundle of newspapers, you’ve definitely seen him.

When I first met Gary about a year and a half ago, we seemed to have little in common. I’m a fan of podcasts; Gary hates them. I like lively roundtable conversations about politics and philosophy; he rolls his eyes at the mere mention. My go-to is singer-songwriter music and jazz; he gets restless if he’s not listening to bluegrass, country or Americana. Hmmm. Tricky.

Yet surprisingly, this odd-couple dynamic has worked amazingly well. Despite (or possibly because of) our feisty exchanges, we enjoy each other’s company and have become good friends. We’ve certainly learned a ton from one another: Because of me, Gary is more aware of the importance of the Strait of Hormuz, what Mulligatawny Soup is, and who Wendell Barry is. Because of him, I’ve learned much more about the history, backroads and personalities of this wonderful area we live in.

One day, driving south on Route 41 from The Hotchkiss School to Sharon, Gary pointed west to two trees in the middle of a large field, Mudge Pond shimmering in the far distance. “Know about Twin Oaks?” he asked. “No, what’s to know?” I responded. He then recounted the story of two iconic oak trees, integral to one of the most cherished vistas in Litchfield County, Connecticut, that had been around since before the American Revolution. The two original trees, he explained, were felled in storms and replaced with much younger ones by the Sharon Land Trust in 2013.

Another day, driving south on Route 7 towards Kent, a mile and a half south of Cornwall Bridge, Gary alerted me to a colossal moss-covered boulder that juts out onto the left side of the road. “As a prank, local teenagers put a little stick between the chin of the boulder and the ground to scare drivers into thinking that a megaton weight could easily come crashing down on them!”

I’ve driven both these roads for years and, until recently, was never aware of these little details, little details that can make a big difference into one’s understanding of a place.

Gary gets into some funny situations.

For instance, there is an older woman at a cafe on our route who goes gaga every time she sees Gary. With a very pronounced New York City accent, she holds court like the local mayor and goes out of her way to make sure that everyone within earshot has been introduced. Given their mutual affection, she once joked that maybe she and Gary should date. But Gary, playing along, said he’d need to see her financials first.

As we make our way along our delivery routes every Wednesday and Thursday, Gary and I come into contact with scores of people and we do our best to learn and remember their names. But there will always be that awkward and embarrassing moment when we come upon someone whose name we desperately want to remember but can’t. Gary’s gambit for not getting tied up in this knot is sleight of hand. “Oh, hi,” he’ll say, “good to see you! I always forget how to spell your last name.” This approach has backfired, of course, as when the answer he once got was “S-M-I-T-H!”

Parked in front of the Sharon Package Store, one of the more than fifty retail accounts we deliver newspapers to, Gary showed me a video of a farm engine he’d picked up the previous weekend. When not working for the Journal, Gary is buying, selling, repairing and collecting antique machinery and gadgetry, mainly but not exclusively farm related. This would include tractors, hit-and-miss engines, corn grinders, ice tongs, egg scales, mangles, etc. There’s a water motor from the 1890s sitting outside the front entrance of the Lakeville Journal Company’s office in Falls Village that once powered our printing press. He’d like to try to get it going again.

I often ask Gary to be my teacher, especially when it comes to farming and machinery. One day my question to him was pretty basic: “So, how does a 4-stroke engine work?” “All you really need to know is this,” he answered, “intake-compression-power-exhaust.” I couldn’t be sure whether he was describing a 4-stroke engine or the nature of our topsy-turvy relationship!

Geoffrey Olans delivers The Lakeville Journal and The Millerton to retail outlets on Wednesday, Thursday, and the occasional Friday. He lives in Millerton.