This old Chalk Line has been used by us at Wilderness Innovation for the last several years. It seems to be of better quality than our new ones. The lines are straight and clean, not fuzzy like new ones. Of course that’s not the real reason for this article. It is more about remembering the past than anything.
All our ponchos get some lines chalked on them in production as guides for sewing, you might have even noticed some slight remnant on gear you have purchased, though we try to remove them, they are just a light dusting and wipe away quickly.
As we were cleaning up yesterday to prepare for Christmas I picked up that old chalk line, it was like some magical instrument as memories of dad flooded my mind. He’s been gone for a few years now. I collected his old beat up toolbox after his passing and found in it this chalk line.
When I was quite young my grandpa Peacock moved back to Utah from Oregon, my dad and his brother Rolland built grandma and grandpas new house out of their old house in Emery, Utah. I still recall as a little kid my job was using a hammer to pull out the nails from the boards as the old house was dismantled.
Later when dad needed a shop, he learned to be a brick mason and built our shop, and many of the neighbors. That shop soon served as a shipyard of sorts as dad embarked on a project to build a cabin cruiser boat. It was a fine boat that was used for many years by our family in lakes all over the western US. We camped in that boat for weeks on Lake Powell.
In the same shop I helped dad build snowmobile trailers, which we traded a dealer for our own snowmobiles.
When I was just entering my teens dad decided to follow his father and enter the beekeeping business. We built and repaired boxes and frames for the beehives in that shop as well as extract honey in the fall.
Soon dad moved us to the country and there I helped him build a new much larger shop and honey house. I recall stacks of bee boxes that we repaired, re-nailed, sanded and painted. Dad was always buying old bee boxes from people then we would fix them up and make them look practically new. Dad built his own flat bed on a one ton truck chassis, he built large trailers to pull behind the truck.
Dad helped Uncle Rolland build several houses for his kids as they married and needed places of their own.
Our house was built on sloping ground with the road being higher than the back of the property, so dad and I were talking and I said to him wouldn’t it be cool to build a double decker garage so the cars could park in the upper level and there could be storage and a place to park the boat on the bottom, well he built it just like that.
All these things and many more I watched and helped dad do, in his spare time, as his full time employment was with the FAA as an Air Traffic Controller.
That old chalk line brought back a lot of memories to me, I’m sure there are many more in my head as well. I guess for the many things dad was to our family, the chalk line reminds me of dad the builder. Chances are that if have bought a poncho from us at Wilderness Innovation the guide line for the front seam for the hammock cord was snapped with dad’s old chalk line.
I sure miss my dad, but many odd things like this old chalk line bring back many happy memories. What is there in your life that brings back memories?
Until next time, this is Perry Peacock for Wilderness Innovation, Simplifying Survival.