Real men not afraid to shed their image

BY GREGORY J. RUMMO

LIFE IN THE BOONIES

Up here in the Boonies there are lots of real men.

This begs the question, what is a real man? A real man is not someone who drives a 4X4 or who rides a Harley. It's not someone who wears leather or Levi's or who sports a tattoo on a bulging bicep or who displays a favorite football or baseball team's logo out on the front lawn. It's not someone who eats red meat or quiche. It has nothing to do with firearms or patriotism. We're all patriotic up here in the Boonies but not all patriots are real men.

What makes a man a real man is his shed out behind the house.

A shed is a man's secret lair; the place where he keeps all of his dangerous stuff like chain saws and weed whackers and rows of smelly liquids that could kill anything that crawls or flies. It's his personal armory, his stockpile of chemical weapons; it's where he arms himself to do battle with the flora and fauna that threaten to encroach on his existence, overrunning his house and his family like an army of invaders from outer space — or at least from those outer spaces on the fringes of his yard.

Show me a man without a shed and I'll show you a mere shell of a human being. The battle beckons but he is unarmed and thus helpless to respond — a dodger perhaps? Or worse yet, a coward? — or perhaps just stuck behind a desk and apathetic to the war all around him; a greater tragedy still.

It was mere days after we moved into our home in the Boonies over 18 years ago that I contacted a builder to come and erect a shed on our property. I had already ordered a lawn mower, a snow blower, a leaf blower and all of the other assorted smoke belching noise makers that would identify me as a man of the Boonies to my neighbors. But I wasn't yet a real man until I had my shed where I could store my arsenal.

But late last year, despite an initial two coats of outdoor paint, the enemy prevailed. My shed is rotting into the ground.

It's a sad site. It's actually leaning back on itself probably from the weight of all the stuff I have accumulated over the years. It's so cramped in there that I have to empty half of the stuff just to get at the lawn mower, a maneuver that usually results in bumping my head on the door frame at least once followed by the exercise of unbelievable self-control to avoid uttering a string of expletives. The bottoms of the doors are falling off in wet, finger-sized splinters. The latch is covered with a patina of iron oxide. There are oil stains on the floor in various places where the seals on power machines hanging from the ceiling gave out over the years and there's a lachrymatory stench from the toxic mixture of biological and chemical hazards that is overwhelming even for a real man like me.

Surprisingly none of this has been able to thwart the annual invasion of cave crickets that thrives in the foul environment. Every time I open the doors from June to September I am scared out of my wits by several dozen of the fat, brown and white speckled creatures that all spring off the doors at once, scampering under the space between the shed and the gravel to escape the daylight.

This past weekend, I decided I had had enough of the foul smell, the lumps on the back of my head, and the army of cave crickets overrunning the place. Heading north on Route 23, further into the Boonies, I found John Brady Sheds in West Milford and I say "found" because if you're not careful, you could drive right on by never having known the place is there.

His showroom is his front yard. His workshop is an addition and a garage attached to the house, set back several hundred yards from the highway at the end of a loose gravel driveway along which are piles of lumber neatly stacked.

I had arrived in real man land.

We chatted for 15 minutes during which time I got the tour. That's all it took. "I'm sold. Work out the numbers," I said, "and throw in a window, a window box planter, a shelf inside and a coat of stain."

I now have three weeks during which time I must empty what has been my fortress of solitude for the last 18 years, going through almost two decades of accumulated treasures, deciding what goes into the garbage and what stays, followed by the coup de grace when the shed itself is demolished to make room for the new.

That will be a sad day but I can take it. I am a real man.

Gregory J. Rummo is a syndicated columnist and the author of "The View from the Grass Roots." Contact him at GregRummo.com