Believe me, I’ve tried, but I can’t hide an agenda to save my life. In fact, the only thing I do worse than hiding my own agenda is uncovering someone else’s. I take absolutely everything at face value, something my mother has been known to twit me about. “Concrete-bound,” she calls me.

Until about ten years ago, I used to say that I was the most straightforward person ever to walk the earth. And then I met Kevin, who makes me look like Henry James.

One of the reasons my husband and I live in peace and harmony is that we leave nothing interpersonal to chance. If he wants me to know something, he knows he has to tell me. In English. Body language and pointed hints will not get the job done. And this suits him just fine, as it is his first impulse, when he wants me to know something, to tell me. In English.

Kevin is a relentless and compulsive truth-teller, and tackles every situation head-on. Although he has a much more nuanced and sophisticated understanding of the workings of other people’s minds than I do, he calls ‘em as he sees ‘em. There isn’t much of a filter between what he thinks and what he says, which means you almost always know what he’s thinking – a wonderful thing for a woman who can’t uncover an agenda to save her life.

And you always know where he’s been. He’s fundamentally incapable of not telling me what he did while I was away.

And, while I’m away, he’s always up to something.

Last week I left him alone for an afternoon and evening, and came home to find him sprawled on the bed, with what looked like closing credits scrolling up the TV screen. “Hi honey,” he said. “I had a steak and watched a war movie.”

So you did.

“And you know what else?” he asked, a glint in his eye.

Alarm bells went off. Leaving Kevin home alone with power tools, not to mention a big hairy truck with 650 foot-pounds of torque, is not always wise.

He led me into the living room and picked up something that looked like a cross between a fishing pole and an electrical conduit. He could barely suppress his pride. “It’s a sabiki rod!”

A sabiki rod!

A sabiki hook

A sabiki rod, for those of you have never jigged for mackerel, is a rod specifically designed for a sabiki rig, which is one of the most diabolical of all fishing lures. It’s a length of line, five feet or so, with five or six teeny hooks spaced along it, each attached to the main line with a length of line about four inches long and decorated with a little feather.

To use the rig, you attach a weight to the end of it and drop it down to the sea floor. Then you reel it up to the depth you think the school of mackerel is. Then you jig it, jerking it up and letting it sink again, until you get a fish.

If your sabiki rig is in a school of mackerel, you will get a fish, or several fish, immediately. A mackerel cannot resist a sabiki rig, and it’s not unusual to pull the rig up with a fish on every hook.

But that is not why the sabiki rig is diabolical. The sabiki rig’s diabolical nature is evident only when it comes time to put it away. It is impossible to store a sabiki rig without tangling it hopelessly, and every fisherman has spent the better part of a full-length movie untangling sabiki rigs in preparation for the next day’s fishing expedition.

If there’s one job Kevin hates, it’s untangling a sabiki rig, so he set his mind to building a rod that would obviate the need for it. The internet has all kinds of suggestions, and he amalgamated a number of them into his own design.  As is his wont.

The Zebco set-up

It started with a Zebco 404 reel, which is the kind of reel kids use – you press a button to release the line and cast. It costs about $13., and comes spooled with 15-pound test. The Zebco then got attached with a hose clamp to a five-foot length of PVC, and Kevin drilled a hole through the PVC a few inches above the reel. The line gets threaded through the PVC pipe and attached to the sabiki rig. At the end of the rig is a weight with a hook that’s big enough to not fit through the PVC.

So, when you reel in the line, the sabiki rig gets housed in the length of the PVC, and the weight on the end keeps it taut by hooking over the end of the pipe. Then a little pipe insulation on the reel end for grip, and a cap on the end of the PVC so the edge doesn’t abrade the line, and Bob’s your uncle.

Total cost? “Seventeen dollars!” said Kevin, “So I made two!”

Kevin's sabiki rod

Yes, while I was out my enterprising husband made two sabiki rods. I should go out more often, I figured. So, yesterday, I went up to Boston to interview a source for an article and have dinner with my friend Dianne. I came home quite late, but Kevin was still up. I put down my bag and was about to take my coat off when he stopped me.

“You wanna come see what I did?” he asked, flashlight in hand.

The same alarm bells went off. No matter how many constructive things Kevin gets done while I’m out, the alarm bells will always go off.

He led me outside, around to the side of the house that faces the pond. He shone the light on a hole in the ground. And then a second hole. And a third. All the holes were where stumps used to be.

“You pulled the stumps!” I said.

“It was awesome!”

Now, stump-pulling, under ordinary circumstances is hard, frustrating, sweaty work. It is most definitely not awesome. Which led me to believe we were not dealing with ordinary circumstances here.

“I’m afraid to ask how you did it …” I said.

“Well,” he began, “I backed the truck up by the side of the house.”

That would be the big hairy truck with the 650 foot-pounds of torque. I knew that truck was trouble. But I didn’t think he’d try to use a truck on the side of the house to pull a stump in the back of the house. I groaned.

He told me how it went down. He tied a rope around the stump, and then ran it around a tree down by the water, and up to the truck. Just because it’s worth picturing, I have worked up a crude graphical representation.

The house is our house. The red rectangle represents the big hairy truck (the other two vehicles are actual, less hairy, vehicles). The red X is the stump, and the white line is the rope.

He put the truck in its lowest four-wheel drive gear, and started to creep forward. The rope stretched. He crept some more, it stretched some more. And then, as he crept, the rope released and made that boing-oing-oing noise you hear in cartoons.

At first he thought the rope had snapped, but then he realized it had pulled the stump out with such force that it flew all the way out into the pond. He had to go down and haul it in.

It was so much fun that he pulled two others. The only reason he stopped was that he ran out of stumps.

“It was awesome!”

I am glad to be married to the kind of man who uses his time alone creatively and constructively. And if, some day, that means he burns down the house or totals the truck or severs a limb, I take comfort in the fact that I’ll be the first to know.

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We’re not there yet, and Kevin’s been unsatisfied with the pace of our progress. So he dispensed with the whole leapfrog thing and went ahead and bought a boat and a truck.

The boat is a Steigercraft 23 Chesapeake, with an enclosed pilothouse and a cuddy cabin. At least I think that’s what it has – I’m still a little iffy on the terminology. Better I show you a picture.

The hull is from 1990, and has a recently re-fiberglassed deck and a new gas tank. The engine is a 2008 225-horse Evinrude E-tec. It’s s super-low-emissions two-stroke, the big brother to the 50-horse version we have on our oyster boat.

The best part is that it’s totally tricked out. It’s got super-groovy Raymarine radar and GPS, and outriggers on the roof that are controlled from inside the pilothouse. It’s got enough rod holders for a small village and – get this – autopilot.

I was a little worried about the autopilot when Kevin explained what it could do for us. “We can go out to Horseshoe Shoal and set it to go in circles over our favorite spot.” I immediately had visions of us, lazing in the sun, as our boat went on autocrash with another boat with the same favorite spot.

“Don’t worry,” Kevin said. “We also have collision avoidance.”

A 23-foot boat with a pilothouse and cabin is a lot more boat than our current 19-foot center console. It’s the biggest boat Kevin was comfortable trailering regularly, and he’s only comfortable trailering it with a big hairy truck. So he flew to Chicago, made a deal on a 2008 Ford F250 Super Duty diesel, and drove it home.

While he was gone, our friend Bob stopped by. Bob knew all about the boat; he went to see it with us to because we wanted it to get the Bob Seal of Approval. I told him Kevin was away, driving home in the big hairy truck we bought to pull it.

Bob scratched his head and took a pointed look around our property, densely populated with boats and trucks. “I see a lot of addition,” he said, “but not very much subtraction.”

That hit the nail on the head. When Kevin got home, we had a come-to-Jesus on the issue of subtraction. At first, Kevin contended that I was overreacting to addition. “Hey, at least it’s not multiplication,” were, I believe, his exact words. I told him that if he didn’t focus on some subtraction, we might be headed for a long division.

So we officially have for sale one 19-foot Eastern center console with a 70-horse Johnson, a 14-foot Carolina Skiff with a 25-horse Honda four-stroke, and a 1970 Series IIA Land Rover. No reasonable offer refused, since we’ll never have room for the Queen Mary at this rate.

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We had friends over, and we decided to go to the Four Seas for ice cream after dinner. The Rover, a 1970 model, is our usual ice-cream vehicle, both because we can fit six people in it and because it just seems right to go for ice cream in a decrepit old rattletrap.

The ice cream mobile

We hadn’t even gotten all the way up the driveway before ominous creaking noises started coming from the rear end. We turned around, got out, and looked underneath. There was a huge crack in the frame, just where the leaf springs attach.

That was the beginning of Spring Break.

The next to go was the Eastern, our big boat. Kevin was out with his brother Marty pulling lobster pots, and the motor made a terrible noise when he tried to put it in reverse. It still ran, but it shook and rattled and shimmied. He limped in to the dock, and when he put it in reverse again the propeller shaft snapped clean off.

Then there was the door to the truck, which got banged into the dock as Kevin was backing a boat down a ramp. Yes, we brought that one on ourselves, but still.

How a frame shoudln't look

Then came the woodsplitter. Our friend Ed had several cords of wood that needed splitting, and he made a deal with us: we loan him the woodsplitter and help with the job, and get half the wood in return. That was a great deal for us, and we brought the splitter over to his place and got started. After several afternoons of non-stop splitting, it started to struggle. Then the hydraulic pump just gave up.

After the woodsplitter was the freezer. The freezer filled with thirty pounds of striped bass, six ducks, two turkeys, other miscellaneous meat, and various vegetables and stocks. Its defroster failed and, in a bit of appliance irony, the resulting ice build-up prevented it from freezing.

I caught it before everything defrosted, and although we lost about ten pounds of fish, the rest of it was salvaged. When the repair guy came, he told me that I could keep the freezer running in the week it would take to get the required part by plugging it in during the day and unplugging it at night to defrost.

I switched the food to the bait freezer, put the bait (fish frames, primarily) in the broken freezer, and tried his method. The first hint that it didn’t work was when we started to notice the smell of rotten fish suffusing the house. Taking that load to the dump and cleaning up the mess was about as disgusting a job as I’ve done since we moved here.

Last to go, the final insult, the straw that broke the camel’s back, was the coffeemaker. It was less than a year old, and it broke only because it felt it had to show solidarity with its electrical and mechanical brethren.

Now, two months from the beginning of Spring Break, we’ve gotten everything but the woodsplitter repaired, replaced, or resuscitated. The Rover frame is patched and the lower unit on the Eastern’s motor is replaced. The door of the truck is pounded roughly back to its original shape, and freezer is freezing once more. We have a new coffeemaker, which makes lousy, insipid coffee, and which I hate with a passion reserved for single-function appliances that perform their single goddamn function badly. I’m hoping this one breaks as quickly as the last one.

The woodsplitter, we put on hold, since it’s a little hot to be splitting wood anyway.

As we were dealing with everything broken – calling repair people, locating parts, writing uncomfortably large checks – my inner Eva Gabor was getting louder and more insistent. “Times Skvare,” she said, with her charming Hungarian lilt, and I thought longingly of the times when we owned no truck, no boat, no woodsplitter, and no freezer. Yeah, we had a coffeemaker, but it worked with us, not against us, and made decent coffee to boot.

It’s when the going gets tough that I’m tempted to hightail it back to New York, and trade my boats and trucks, freezers and woodsplitters, for a 250-square-foot apartment and a Metrocard. Kevin, though, is made of sterner stuff and, since I’m not going anywhere without him, I stayed and helped get everything fixed.

We got the boat back from our mechanic, Billy at Anchor Outboard, just this week, and Kevin took his son Eamon and Eamon’s friend Emanuel out to check our lobster pots. With the boat out of commission, we hadn’t been able to get out there for a good six weeks.

Why we lobster

Kevin called me after they’d pulled the first four, to report that there were already four keeper lobsters in the livewell, and the chicken I was planning for dinner would have to wait for another day.

A couple hours later, they rolled in with our all-time record lobster haul. Ten lobsters, one of them three and a half pounds. Sixteen pounds total.

We called friends. Doug and Dianne came. Les and Val came. I picked up some local corn, made a cole slaw, and melted some butter. Kevin boiled the lobsters in a giant pot on the burner outside. Les brought some littlenecks. We opened the wine, and sat down to one of the best dinners we’ve had in our three years here.

The truck, the boat, the freezer, that’s what it’s all in service to. We’re bumbling our way through all this for the days when we can put an abundance of lobster on the table and watch as our family and friends drip butter on the tablecloth in their enthusiasm. I don’t expect to stop missing New York, but there are things you just can’t do with a Metrocard.

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One of the members had brought a brochure for a workshop entitled “Voluntary Simplicity,” about, presumably, living simply without being coerced. Kevin leafed through it, and stumbled across a cartoon of a guy who was showing another guy the bumper of his car, where he’d just affixed an “I Love the Simple Life” bumpersticker. “I love that bumpersticker so much,” the proud owner was saying, “that I put in on all three of my cars and both my boats.”

Needless to say, I did not think this was funny.

The paraphernalia required to live in a shack and grow your own food never ceases to amaze me. Our garage is an environmentalist’s nightmare, what with the toxic chemicals, heavy-duty plastics, and gasoline engines. And then there’s the three cars and the two boats. And don’t forget the three trailers! We’ll need bumperstickers for those, too.

It’s when something breaks that I really question the need for all this stuff. This week, it was the truck.

Our pickup truck is a 1999 Mazda (a Ford Ranger by another name), and it started acting funny a couple weeks ago. The overdrive light on the dashboard would start blinking after you drove it a couple of miles, and then the shifting (it’s an automatic) would get heavy and rough. We gave it a few days to make sure the problem wouldn’t just go away, but no such luck.

Old Faithful

While we were waiting, though, the dashboard of our 2004 Saab lit up like a Christmas tree. This could be because the car knew it had recently come off warranty, or it could be because Kevin drove it on the beach and got its entire underbelly coated with sea grass. (And a flat tire in the bargain.) Either way, it needed attention.

That makes our 1970 Land Rover our most reliable vehicle.

We took the truck and the car to Gus, our mechanic, and asked him which repair was more urgent. The truck, he said, and recommended a transmission shop he knew and trusted.

Yup. It needed a rebuilt transmission, a job that cost fully half of what the truck is worth.

I will admit to balking. It crossed my mind that we could live in Manhattan without any car at all, let alone a car, a truck, another truck, two boats, and three trailers.

But then it crossed my mind that one of the best days I’ve had in the two years we’ve been doing this was this past August, when Kevin and I took the boat out to Horseshoe Shoal, in Nantucket Sound. It was a beautiful day, and we caught bluefish after bluefish as we circled the shallows. I’d been working extraordinarily hard, and to be out on the water, untethered from the Internet, alone with my husband, was glorious.

A day like that requires a boat. A boat requires a truck. A truck requires a transmission.

I’m not giving up days like that

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No problem ...

It was just a couple weeks ago that I was writing an if-the-shoe-fits post about becoming a pick-up truck driver. I decided I was okay with it.

Now I’m more okay with it. We’re on Long Island, because Kevin’s family’s annual Christmas party was conveniently scheduled to coincide with the biggest blizzard Long Island has seen in some sixty years. There are some 200 miles between us and home, and every one of them is covered in two feet of snow.

As the last of the storm blows through, we’re watching the mayhem out our hotel window. Cars slip, skid, and slide into snowbanks, ditches, and other cars. They try and get out, but only dig themselves in deeper. Eventually, they get help from kindly passers-by. Passers-by in appropriate vehicles. Four-wheel drive vehicles. Like the kind we have, and had the foresight to use to get us here.

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I inherited neither the familial affinity for poetry nor the savant-like memory. I can give you a few lines from “The Raven” or “Kubla Khan,” the prologue to The Canterbury Tales, or the ever-popular “Ozymandias,” and that about exhausts my repertoire. Unless you count this little Dorothy Parker ditty:

Oh life is a glorious cycle of song,
A medley of extemporania;
And love is a thing that can never go wrong;
And I am Marie of Romania.

I probably memorized it when I was twelve. That’s about the age when you’d think this was clever enough that you’d want to be able to quote it for the rest of your life. Had I had the option to forget it, I would have. But things you learn when you’re twelve have a way of enduring.

I must admit, though, that it has popped into my mind with surprising frequency over the years. Maybe not so surprising – the list of things we’d like to be true is very, very long. Men love women for their minds. Your cat cares about you. Your next book will be the bestseller. And I am Marie of Romania

Then there’s the idea, propounded by me for my entire driving life, that a car is simply a machine to get you from point A to point B. All that matters is that it does it safely and reliably.

You know the rest.

Our red Rover

When we signed the papers to buy this house, some two years ago, we had one vehicle, and nothing says “high-minded urban sophisticate” like a sober Saab sedan. By the time we actually moved in, we’d added a truck. It’s not just any truck, though, it’s a 1970 Land Rover Series IIA. It says “high-minded urban sophisticate dabbling in rural living.”

Don’t get me wrong; the Rover is a working truck. We’ve hauled out stumps and carted stones and navigated treacherous landscapes with it, and it was always game. But, because it’s small and cute and red and old, it seemed incongruous to be doing heavy, dirty jobs with it. When we were backed up to the pile of whatever we were buying – compost, mulch, stone – and the guy in the Ford F250 pulled up next to us, it seemed like something out of Dr. Seuss had wandered onto the set of ”This Old House.”

But that’s what made it okay. Sure, we were hauling mulch, but weren’t hauling mulch for real. We were high-minded urban sophisticates, playing gardener.

And then we got a boat, and we put the Rover to work towing it. I didn’t know it at the time, but it seems our rig got a bit of a reputation. “I saw you driving down to Prince Cove,” a friend told me. She’d never seen the truck, and when I asked her how she knew it was us she looked at me incredulously. “You’re pretty recognizable, you know.” Then, when we lost our trailer wheel and stopped traffic on Route 6A, our friend Florence told us afterward that both of her kids called her, independently, to tell report that her friends were in a spot of trouble. We hadn’t even met her kids. How could they have known? I guess word gets out that there are a couple of high-minded urban sophisticates playing fisherman.

The boat is a 19-foot fiberglass center-console, and it weighs about 1500 pounds (2000 when the lobster pots are loaded onto it). The Rover weighs about 3000 pounds, and has manual steering and brakes. Because it has very low gears, it has no trouble towing the boat, but stopping it is another question. As long as you begin braking a good quarter-mile before you actually have to stop, you’re fine, but you don’t always have that luxury.

Then, when the emergency brake on the Rover started to go, and loading the boat at the ramp became a race to get the thing out of the water before the weight of the boat dragged the truck into it, we decided we had to take a radical step. As tethered as I am to the idea that my car says something – something interesting, something substantive – about me, I’m not willing to risk my life for it.

We bought a pick-up truck.

My new identity

It’s a relatively small truck – a 1999 Mazda B4000 (a Ford Ranger by another name), with a six-cylinder engine and four-wheel drive. It’s equipped with a Reese class-III hitch and excellent tires, courtesy of John, the good-natured Englishman we bought it from.

We now own three vehicles, and I’ll still drive the Saab most of the time. In the summer, though, we’ll lend it to my parents, who usually rent a car for the summer, and I will drive the pick-up. In order to do this, one of two things has to happen. Either I’ll have to divorce my self-image from my vehicle, or I’ll have to come to terms with being the kind of girl who drives a pick-up.

That’s a no-brainer, I thought: I choose A. A car really is just a machine to get you from here to there, and I’m not Marie of Romania after all – I’m a high-minded urban sophisticate who happens to drive a Mazda B4000 4×4 pick-up.

Then a funny thing happened. We took the truck to Cape Feed and Supply to buy two bales of straw and a bushel of rye seed. Kevin opened the back, and I threw in the seed. Then we backed up to the loading dock and tossed in the straw, and I realized there was just no getting around it. A car is more than just a machine to get you from here to there, and I am Marie of Romania. And Marie of Romania is the kind of girl who drives a pick-up.

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