The Boulder

Dad had almost finished building his house in the scenic Gatineau Hills. He had drawn plans for a workshop to be located a bit further back, to the right of the house. The site and orientation of the bungalow had been meticulously chosen. Of the three hundred acres he had bought (for a song because of the boondocks situation) there were only about twenty acres where it would not be too difficult to dig a foundation. The spot he had picked, beside a peaceful meadow, had a spectacular view to the west over the valley below. From the large picture window in his living-room, at night, he would be able to admire one sunset after another to his heart’s content. To the left, near the pine grove, he had already had the thrill of watching visiting deer at dusk.

That piece of land was my father’s dream come true. Before the age of fifty, he had managed to retire, not from the earnings from his hard work as a lumberman, but from a patent for the specialized wood-chipping machine he had invented. And even though his engineer-partners had left him with the short end of the stick, he had still managed to pull enough money from the patent before they had finished stuffing their pockets and declared bankruptcy. He had enough invested to live, not in luxury, but comfortably for the rest of his days.

Dad wasn’t the litigious type; as far as the engineers and their lawyer-friends were concerned, they could all just go to that place down below where he figured there would be plenty of lawyers and engineers, and where, as a young boy, he had been taught by the priest that it’s really hot all the time.

Dad had only attended school for a few years but he was smart enough to recognize that he didn’t have the sophistication to outwit those “professional” crooks. He wasn’t going to chase after them and hand over to another lawyer the share they had not managed to embezzle from him.

“I have enough to live on comfortably,” he had told my sister when she had brought up the subject, “and I don’t want to hear anymore about it. It’s in the past and leave it there.” That’s how Dad was about things he couldn’t change. On the other hand, when there was a situation he could tackle, he loved the challenge.

Ever since he had decided where the workshop should be built, there was one problem gnawing at Dad’s mind. Smack in the middle of the chosen site stood an imposing boulder that would have to be removed. It was an unwieldy, pale grey stone eight or nine feet in diameter and smooth as a pebble. It must have weighed several tons, and it stood there all by itself, as if defying him to move it. It was a mystery how it had ever materialized there in the first place.

Dad did not have the equipment to move the boulder himself, and he was loath to pay a large sum of money for what seemed to him just another logistical challenge. He, who had gone from being a miner and then a lumberjack, to owning several trucks and having four or five dozen employees, had, more than once, needed to solve unusual problems. He felt sure that he would find a way of moving this rock without having to break his back or the bank.