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FIELD NOTES: In praise of the gofer

This past weekend, I was browsing through some posts on a Facebook page dedicated to Ohio’s Lake Erie Islands. I grew up on the nearby mainland and visited the islands frequently as a kid. While I find many aspects of “island life” fascinating, a particular post on Saturday drove home one specific challenge of that lifestyle that would be a non-starter for me. The poster asked whether anyone on Middle Bass Island had some polyurethane sealant they could sell to him. He was trying to finish a project and had run out. Sounds familiar. More often than I like to admit, I will begin a project, then discover midway through that I lack the nut, bolt, screw, wire, paint, or tool I need to finish the job. Fortunately, my local hardware store is just a few minutes away, so while I may grumble about having to get into the truck and drive all the way there and back, the whole trip is maybe a half-hour. I can’t imagine that trip being, as for the island resident, a half DAY. Or perhaps I can … 

Near the top of the list of complaints I compiled about my first attempt at rural homesteading in the mid-80s, the “Little House on the Highway,” was its, well, ruralness. Situated on U.S. Hwy. 25, about halfway between Perrysburg and Bowling Green, Ohio, the closest retail establishment was a Tractor Supply I only entered once (for reasons humorously recounted in this essay) seven miles away. Everything else was at least a 10-mile drive. Now, 10 miles doesn’t sound THAT far, but by the time you drive to the store, find what you need and drive back, it’s an hour out of the day.

It helped a little to have a wife who was accustomed to playing the role of “gofer.” Janet’s father was the “neighborhood mechanic” who often sent his daughter into town to retrieve a starter for a ’78 Buick or an alternator for a ’72 Dodge. But that was also the problem. While Janet’s dad could tell her precisely the part he needed, I often could not. You see, like my father and his father before him, I subscribe to the theory of “eyeball engineering”; I cannot describe exactly what I need, but I know it when I see it. That led to conversations like this: 

“Honey, I need you to run into town and get me something I can use to attach this piece of wood vertically to this other piece of wood.” 

“You mean like a bracket?”

“Yeah, maybe … something like that.”

Spoiler alert!!! That homestead was not a great success. 

These days, I run most of my errands myself, and on those occasions when I have Janet pick something up for me, she insists on a full description with the model number and preferably a picture. Mobile phones can be lifesavers! Which kind of gets me thinking; wouldn’t an app – think of it as GrubHub for hardware – be pretty useful? An internet search reveals that  gofer.com is “under construction,” so maybe …


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