They Never Dug the Gravel

When I was about twelve years old, my dad took me to the barber.

The man had his own little shop in Pinehurst, Idaho, and when nobody was in the chair, he didn’t just sit there. He’d pull out a small vise, clamp a bare hook in it, and tie fishing flies. I walked in one day and watched him take a feather, catch it by the tip, and wrap it around that hook — and as he turned it, the feather peeled out into a hackle, soft and even, all the way around. A bug made out of thread and a feather.

I stood there and thought, oh my God. Look at that. That is the coolest thing I have ever seen.

I had to be able to do that.

There was a fly-tying kit at Gary’s drugstore for twenty-six dollars. For a kid, that was a fortune. But I didn’t ask my dad for the money. I went out and gathered aluminum cans and pop bottles — a dime a bottle back then — and I crushed cans until I had a fifty-gallon drum packed full of them. Bagged it all up, hauled it to the recycle shop, and I came back with my own money and bought that kit.

Then I taught myself. I bought yarn for the bodies, and when I needed hackle, I went out to the chicken house at night and pulled feathers off the roosters while they were roosting. I took hair off a deer somebody had killed. I started tying my own flies out of whatever the land around me would give up.

That summer, we lived on the main river road along the North Fork of the Coeur d’Alene. I put up a sign at the end of our driveway and set up a stand. Fifty cents a fly. Fishermen were driving up and down that road all day, and they started stopping. Five dollars some days, ten on a good one. One weekend day I made thirty-two dollars.

And it was growing. I had repeat customers. One of them walked up with a real bug he wanted matched — an orange body, a little black head — and I went to my kit and tied him one that looked just like it, orange thread and a black feather. He was happy. I had just built a product to a customer’s order, and I was twelve.

So I went to my dad, because my dad believed in everything I did. And I said, Dad — look at this. I could build a little shed right here at the end of the driveway, in that big wide spot we don’t use for anything. Put a door on it. A real storefront. I could grow this into a bait shop — sell reels, sell poles, not just flies. This could be something.

Now, you have to understand where we were. My mom and dad had split when I was nine. My dad had remarried, and we’d moved onto my stepmother’s farm. So when I asked him, he said — son, we’ll have to ask your stepmother. It’s really her place.

And we asked her. And she said no. Absolutely not. We can’t put anything in front of that mountain, because someday we might need to dig gravel or dirt out of it.

That was the end of it.

In the fifty years since, they never once dug a single load of gravel out of that mountain. Not one.

The shop that a twelve-year-old had already built with his own two hands — earned the money, sourced the materials, found the customers, proved it worked — got killed to protect a maybe that never, in half a century, came to pass.

I’ve thought about that a lot over the years, because I’ve come to believe it’s one of the most common things that happens to people, and almost nobody notices it happening. A child aspires. A child sees something and thinks, I could do that, I could build that, I could be that. And some grown-up with the authority to say no looks at it and says — that’s not realistic. That’s a little crazy. Be sensible.

And the thing is, they’re usually not being cruel. They genuinely can’t see it. It’s a different way of being wired. I didn’t have the words for it as a kid, but I do now — it’s what Robert Kiyosaki calls the employee mindset. You go to work for somebody else your whole life. You don’t build. You don’t aspire. And if you can’t make ends meet, the answer is always to shrink yourself — want less, live smaller, cut back to fit the job you’ve got. It never once occurs to that mind to do the other thing. To grow the income to fit the life.

I know, because years later, when I was grown and broke — living out of my truck because I couldn’t afford an apartment, scraping together enough to eat — those same people told me I was living beyond my means. Beyond my means. I was living in a truck. I didn’t own anything. And the only tool they had to offer was: become smaller.

I never could think that way. Something in me, lit at that barber’s vise, just refused to.

I’m telling you all this because a couple of weeks ago a neighbor came over, and I asked him what he was passionate about. What he dreamed about. And he said — I don’t really know. Since I quit drinking, I don’t even know anymore. And I watched a grown man stand in an empty room where a dream used to be.

I showed him the magazine. I showed him the 3D printer, and he asked me, what good is it? What are you even trying to do? And I told him the truth — we’re proving a concept. We think a space habitat could be built a certain way, and we’re trying to find out if it’ll work. He looked at me like I was a little bit crazy. But he also, just for a second, looked interested. Like something stirred that hadn’t stirred in a long time.

Fifty years later, I’m still tying the fly. I’m just doing it with a 3D printer now, and the thing I’m building is a little bigger than a bait shop.

And that’s the whole reason this magazine exists. Not to sell you anything. Not to tell you how the world’s going wrong — you’ve got plenty of voices doing that already. Star Bound is here to do the one thing almost nobody in your life is doing: to tell you to aspire. To put something in front of you worth looking toward.

Because somewhere along the way, society quit teaching us to dream and started teaching us to cope — to keep our heads down, manage the chaos, and call that being realistic. I don’t accept that. I never did, not since I was twelve years old at a barber’s vise. There is more in you than getting through the week.

So here’s your shed. Here’s the big wide spot nobody’s using. We’re building something out here, and there’s room for you in it.

Come join us. Because we are Star Bound.

— John Lang, Editor