In 2023, Carteret Writers will be 40 years old (though we hardly look a day over 18). To begin celebrating our organization’s long and storied history of supporting, connecting, and inspiring local writers, we asked our members to think back to some of the best stories, poems, and essays of the year before the group was founded. Several members responded to our request for literary responses to 1982’s bestsellers. In this post, member Chris Hunter, a local essayist, shares the sense of kinship he felt with a character from James Michener’s 1982 novel Space. Thank you for contributing, Chris!
There was a line from a character in James Michener’s Space that thrummed my essence. After all these years, I don’t remember his name or for certain if he was real or fictional. I want to say it was the fictional Deiter Kolff. In the novel, he was an important assistant to Werner von Braun in the German’s rocket program even though he had no higher education. His gift was mechanical aptitude.
When the Nazis were defeated, the Americans were snatching up as many of their V1 and V2 scientists as they could for their own rocket development. The interrogators came to this guy and were puzzled by his lack of scientific credentials, so they asked what his qualifications were. His reply, in broken English was, “I fix things.” If I were to design a family crest for myself, that would be its motto. Sarcio Rerum.
When I was young, I would spend hours taking things apart to see how they worked. This dextro-mental absorption channeled me to my lifelong vocation. For thirty-six years, I worked with my hands fixing people’s broken down teeth, yet five long days a week did not fulfill the passion. Even a house and cabin where repair-needy items appeared on a regular basis left voids, so every trash pile I’d pass on long distance training runs would warrant a side eye going over. I’d find treasures. A perfectly good wicker rocking chair with only a broken rocker, a Hoover vacuum that needed a belt, an axe with a cracked handle.
I can only imagine what passing drivers thought of middle-aged me jogging homeward with my trash pile prizes.
Over the course of a reading lifetime, there have been hundreds and hundreds of characters I have fantasized about— their courage or determination or talents. Strength of soul or endurance or just plain physical strength, knowing full well I was indulging a wistful fantasy, one of the pleasures of reading, of escaping mundane reality.
Escaping the blows of every year that passes confronting me with an escalating feeling I was born out of time. Born too late. Born to a new age where things that needed fixing required microchips and coding skills. Born to a wasteful land. I needed to be born with the ability to accept that, in my lifetime, products would be made to fail without the option of repair.
I wasn’t. I find that abnormal. If not a rift in the very fabric of the universe, then at the very least immoral. It is ever so natural that I forge an identity and affinity with any character in a novel endowed with a knack for repairing things mechanical. There was Orr in Catch-22 well before Space, and Ove in A Man Called Ove, long after. Michener’s Kolff, though, was the one who so explicitly expressed my spirit and whose three simple words of dialog I’ve remembered these forty years.
