Windsock
12-08-2004, 11:45
I first met Keith Shaw at the tail end of my first section on the AT in the summer of 2002. I was immediately impressed by the warmness of his home and of his family. This year, coming through at the very beginning of my southbound thru-hike, there was no doubt in my mind where I was going to stay in Monson. Beyond my feeling that the Shaws do a better job making a hiker feel truly at home than most hostels on the Trail, I have come increasingly to recognize Keith Shaw as a museum-worthy artifact of a Robert Frost New England that is harder and harder to discover these days. When I stayed with the Shaws this year, Keith often said he didn't have enough wind to eat, but he would sit at the dinner table with me (I was fortunate enough to have Shaws to myself), Pat, and Keith Jr at the dinner table and show enough wind to tell long stories, expend long drafts of laughter, and show me through his slipshod Shaw's advertisement campaign as if not yet fully aware that he had a die hard Shaw's hanger-on. The whole monologue was strung together with endearingly nonsensical witticisms that only a Mainer could compose or fully comprehend and then prolonged downcast smiles.
At one point on my hike I found myself thinking back to the Shaw's legacy. I found myself focusing on the great lifespan of the service Keith and Pat and Keith provided to our community. As hostels come and go like the seasons, Shaw's had a rare constancy to it. I can still vividly recall, and I'm sure I'm not alone, the stout sheet iron signs that Keith Sr. bolted into trees at the southern Monson trailhead that stand in sublime defiance of the 'no on trail advertising' clause of unwritten ATC policy. Today these sheet iron sings, bearing the simple message, "SHAW," are so grown over my the closing wooden lips of the trees that maintainers could not remove them without killing the host tree.
I could write on and on about Keith. He was a great treasure to the AT community, Monson, and they state of Maine. All of my love to the Shaw household.
Windsock ME-GA 04
This Month's Yankee
Welcome at Shaw's
WHITE BLAZES ON the bark of tree trunks mark a footpath that begins in Georgia and ends in Maine. Each year, three to four million people come from across the world just to walk all or some of its 2,167 miles.
It's called the Appalachian Trail (AT). It weaves and meanders up the Appalachian Mountain Range, connecting towns and terrain, land and lives. In Maine, in a 700-person town called Monson, the trailintersects Pleasant Street where a white two-story boarding home stands with a wooden cut-out of a hiker in the front yard, and a sign above it that reads "Welcome at Shaw's."
On the front step in the waning of a November afternoon, Mr. Shaw sits quietly as a surprisingly warm sun retires into the horizon. His arms rest on his knees as he stares out across the beaten pavement to Lake Hebron where pines and spruces line the needle-covered shore.
I've been looking for him to say goodbye, thank you, take care. All the things you say to someone you've come to know and are sure to leave. I walk across the yard and join him on the step. We say farewell, and hug. He smells of breakfast and warm skin, and I hate to pull away. Then I am leaving, rounding the corner of the house toward my car.
He calls after me in an old voice that carries resonance through gruffness, "You're always welcome here, you know that." He waves a hand through the air. "Our door's always open!"
It is something the Shaws say often. In their home, you learn what it means to always have an open door, what it takes and what it gives. And that's how this story begins. With an open door. Welcome at Shaw's.
Inside, the kitchen is warm with steam. Steam from potatoes boiling in large stainless-steel pots and steaks frying on the open flattop. The clear panes of the kitchen windows have beaded up with condensation, caught between a cold night and a hot dinner. Pat Shaw works over her ten-range stovetop, lifting lids, stirring, smelling, tasting. She stands barely taller than the pots she watches from behind round glasses. A mess of a bun on her head has let loose wisps of long gray hair that drift softly upon her shoulders. She is soft. Soft in the way she speaks to you with a delicate voice, and smiles slowly revealing deep dimples in the yielding flesh of her cheeks.
She smiles at her husband, Keith Shaw, as he seats himself at the long rectangular wooden table, set with two of everything. Two salts, two peppers, two ketchups, two sugars, and too many napkins. He's wearing his usual blue Dickeys and a plaid shirt under black suspenders. At 72, his long face is worn with creases, but his eyes are a crisp color of turquoise. He mumbles through his speech comfortably as he greets his son, Keith Jr., who enters the kitchen leading a trail of hunters behind him.
Keith Jr. is 22, 50 years younger than his father. He has short wavy blonde hair and a dimmer version of Mr. Shaw's eyes. He's in the process of taking over the boarding home in preparation for when his father no longer can, a point in time he is unsure of, but one that hangs close. He is polite and easygoing as he tells the hunters and hikers to sit where they'd like.
With hands blackened from earth, the three hunters remove their caps before sitting down. They breathe in the rich aroma of meat sizzling and the bitter waft of coffee brewing, and comment on an ever-growing hunger in their stomachs. This sentiment is echoed by the hikers, two girls in their twenties, as they set flower-painted plates before us and fill our water glasses. Dressed in clean clothes and showered, with wet hair pulled back from their faces, they are restless with the promise of steak. Of steak and potatoes, homemade gravy, fresh green beans, cooked carrots, buttered bread, and an apple pie Mrs. Shaw baked today.
With dinner laid out before us like a feast, Mr. Shaw speaks up abruptly, "Well, yep, let's eat." For the first five minutes there are only the sounds of forks scraping against plates, serving bowls clanging against dishes, heavy breathing in between bites, and food being chewed, savored, and ravaged all at once in the mouths of nine strangers, who, by the time there is room for pie, will no longer be strangers.
For 30 years, this has been the Shaws' business, providing a home and family to those who are away from their own. "Don't make a difference who it is," Mr. Shaw says, "I'm willing to share my home with anybody."
Shaw's is a boarding home for Appalachian Trail hikers during the spring, summer, and fall months. During the winter season they welcome hunters, snowmobilers, ice fisherman, cross-country skiers, anyone who needs a place to stay or a meal to eat. And it began accidentally in June of 1977 when Mr. Shaw happened to run into a hiker who needed a place to sleep.
Shortly after, word of mouth traveled on the trail that "Shaw's is the place to stay." Within one month, they were accommodating up to 20 hikers a night. And by 1988 their home had become so popular they appeared in National Geographic as the featured stop along the AT. They've housed over 34,000 hikers, and you can read in Bill Bryson's book, A Walk in the Woods, that "Shaw's is the most famous guest house on the AT ... because it's very friendly and a good deal."
"We treat them like one of the family," Mr. Shaw says about his guests.
Mr. Shaw retired in his fifties after years of working for other people on farms and in manufacturing plants. "We don't do this for our living," Mr. Shaw says. "We do it because we enjoy meetin' people."
Since the business has grown, the Shaws have expanded their property by adding onto the main house, purchasing a new one across the street, and beginning construction of a tenting site.
The Shaws' only private space is through an archway off the side of the kitchen into a small sitting room, which adjoins their bedrooms. At night, when the wood-burning stove in the kitchen dies down to embers, they disappear through this archway. Only then do you realize that they are rarely alone.
I asked Mr. Shaw about this once: if they ever had the house to themselves. He looked into the black of his coffee and ran his hand over the baldness of his head. "Not too often," he said. Then he looked over at Mrs. Shaw, "Do we, Pat?"
Mrs. Shaw was bent over the sink cleaning dishes. She turned to him, her gray eyebrows arched, and nodded in agreement.
A long time ago though, he told me, a group of hikers set up a tent in the backyard. This was three months after they were married. Each had been married before. Now they were in their forties and had just begun to open up their home and their lives. While everyone was clearing the table, Mr. and Mrs. Shaw snuck outside and climbed into the tent to "get away from all the commotion." Pretty soon, he said, everyone came outside yelling, "'Hey, where's Keith?' 'Where did Pat go?'" He mimicked their calls from a memory easily reached, and began to laugh hard and sudden.
Mrs. Shaw stopped and leaned up against the side of the counter, laughing also, waiting to find out what she already knew happened next.
"Well," he continued, pausing for a moment to add suspense, "We were in there just laughin' our butts off!" Then his laughter grew so that he had to lean over the table to let it all out, and she continued giggling gently. They stared at each other from across the kitchen, and I felt that I shouldn't be there then. That somehow I had found myself inside that tent.
Then all his expression gave way to a coarse cough that rose up and stole the laughter. It grew worse until he reached into his shirt pocket and sucked deeply from a plastic inhaler. Three assisted breaths, and it quieted back into the depths of his chest.
Mrs. Shaw turned to the sink and as she picked back up the dish towel, I heard her faintly, quietly say, "Oh, dear." It was just a whisper.
The two hikers clear empty plates from the table as Mrs. Shaw sets pieces of pie in their places. The girls talk about how cold the mornings have become, and how hard it is to push themselves to get up and walk the trail.
"I've had people here that are gonna quit the trail," says Mr. Shaw, "then before the day is over, I've had them getting ready to go back out again.... Just a little friendship and a little respect and you let people know that, well, everybody's got hardships. So you can't quit life on one day of sadness."
That night we sleep in the "bunkroom" on wooden-framed beds next to small wooden tables with old National Geographic magazines fanned out on top.
I fall asleep quickly and I don't believe my body turned or tossed once in the night. It did not think of waking until the cow mooed to be fed as the sun burned above the horizon, and the smell of bacon frying slipped beneath the bunkroom door.
Last spring Mr. Shaw had a "sick spell." He was in the hospital for his second heart-bypass surgery, and the nurse told him he would not make it. "I told her I'd rather die at home and not at the hospital, and the doctor discharged me." That was over one year ago. It was the ninth operation he's had in his life.
"I don't have no fear. I'm gonna die with everyone. I'd rather stay around with my wife, with my son, for a few more years. In the meantime, if it's meant to be, I'll be here. If it's not, I won't be. That's the way of life."
Since his last stay in the hospital he's begun to turn over the majority of the work to his son. Keith Jr. does 90 percent of the driving, shuttling hikers to and from the house, and most of the manual labor.
"I attempt to try to do or fill in when and where I can," Keith Jr. says. "But it's not just next season that I'm aware of yet that he's going to say, 'Hey, here you go, see you later....' He's going to have his foot in the door somehow or another."
I imagine the surrendering of a business that is also a lifestyle will be difficult for Mr. Shaw. Though he has slowed down, it is hard to picture him not there. It seems as if he'll always be cracking eggs at sunrise.
"Good morning! What'll you have?" At 7:00 a.m., Mr. Shaw is flipping eggs in cast-iron skillets and cutting potato wedges for hash browns. Today he's dressed in a green button-up shirt and freshly shaven. He greets guests who rub their eyes as they make their way to the table. Having been awake since five o'clock to feed the cows, his energy exceeds his younger guests'.
Mr. Shaw's breakfast has a reputation along the trail. It's known in terms of measurement, as one might refer to lumber, called the "4x4," which refers to four of everything. Four eggs, four pancakes, four pieces of bacon, four pieces of sausage, four pieces of toast, and a pile of hash browns. Also sitting on the table will be doughnuts, coffee, milk, and orange juice. "Never leave the table hungry," Mr. Shaw says. After breakfast, he heads toward his workshop, but not before approaching Mrs. Shaw. "How about makin' me an apple pie today?"
"No, I don't have time." Mrs. Shaw says between bites of her toast.
"What if I peel the apples?" asks Mr. Shaw as he slides an arm into his coat.
"No, Keith, I've got too much to do today. Sorry."
Keith Jr. follows his father outside to the shop. Sawdust floats in the air in front of bright windows and tools hang from every hook. Mr. Shaw and Keith Jr. light cigarettes from the same pack, then begin clearing space to measure boards.
Though there are two generations between them, they look like old friends smoking in the cold. They both standwith legs slightly spread and shoulders back. They are similar in how they talk to you as if they've always known you, how they laugh hard and work hard, and how they have time for everything and nothing all at once.
"That boy was my shadow," Mr. Shaw likes to tell people. "Back when he was little, no matter where I went that kid was with me."
But with such an age gap between them, they are also different. Keith Jr. describes his father as doing things "the old-school way." He prefers mechanics to woodworking, and has his own ideas about running the business.
"Everything could be done if you set it up more like a schedule or itinerary, it would work better.... But as Dad always says, we try to accommodate the hikers to their schedule."
At noon when they've grown hungry again, they walk back into the house where Mrs. Shaw is in the kitchen peeling apples. "Oh, looky here," says Mr. Shaw peering over her shoulder. "Mother made me a pie, after all." He takes his finger and pokes her in the side under her ribs. She playfully slaps him away and continues on with her paring knife.
Mr. Shaw is sitting behind the wheel of his Pontiac slouched into the beige-seat interiors, driving us down Route 15. He has offered to let me help him run errands for the day. Out the window, we pass trees that hang on to yellow leaves. Mr. Shaw smokes a menthol cigarette, inhaling and exhaling with the one lung he has left. He's wearing his old black leather jacket unzipped, and a Baxter Park cap crooked on his head.
We are coming back from a hardware store, another hardware store, the bank, the auto-parts store, and the meat market, where we picked up 421 pounds of Black Angus beef. The deep-red and salmon-colored meat sits cut and packaged in plastic wrap and white butcher's paper in the backseat. It was once his cow. He raised her until she was two years old and ready for slaughtering, which he did last week.
He had to shoot her. "Right here," he says pointing between his eyes. Then a hiker helped him cut the hide off in one continuous stretch of flesh. Afterward, they took her to the market, where they packaged the meat for $116. Now she was riding home with us in 90 different cuts of steak, tenderloin, ribs, and ground beef.
Our trip out had been lively, with Mr. Shaw greeting every clerk in every store. To the women he would say, "Hello! You're looking as beautiful today as ever!" Then he would strut down the aisles, his hands in his pockets, chest out, searching for the items he needed. He asked me to read him the prices when the print was too small. Then he would make his purchase, say "Have a nice day," and we would be off to the next place.
In the car, though, it's silent between us as we head back into Monson, past the town's welcome sign. And then I hear him, the words being sung.
"If I could turn back the years, put the gold back in my hair."
The words are soft and mumbled. They rise and lower as he sings to a tune only he hears as it stretches and plays out in his memory.
"If I could turn back the years, erase the lines from my face, and put the gold back in my hair."
He stares down the road and at times turns to me, smiling with eyes so blue they appear young, fresh in contrast with the wrinkles in his chin, cheeks, forehead. "If I could turn back the years, oh yes, erase the lines from my face, and put the gold back in my hair."
He sings a little more and I hold onto it; clutch at it like the trees to their yellow leaves. I feel again like I'm inside that tent, glimpsing moments that are not mine. I don't dare breathe for fear I might exhale the moment away.
Then his voice wavers off, and the words are gone. But the last note hangs in the air between us. We drive on and I wonder if the tune is still there playing in his head. If maybe it is always still playing in his head.
Through the archway off the side of the kitchen is a quaint room with hanging plants and photographs on the walls. The room is dim, with only the flashing of a television set. Mrs. Shaw sits on a quilt-covered couch, and Mr. Shaw sits in a tan recliner, his feet curled beneath him. At times his eyes are open, watching the television; then his head tilts back against the headrest, and they are closed.
We spend this last time together looking at pictures of children and grandchildren, and of the only child that belongs to them both, Keith Jr. As we talk about family, Mr. Shaw turns to me. "There's one thing I didn't tell you."
But what he tells me, he has told me before. It's about a hope he has for his son to marry soon and have a child. "Then I can chat and enjoy myself with the baby."
He tells us goodnight, then shuffles into his bedroom.
"We all have our number," he says. "Some comes earlier than others. I'm ready to go anytime.... When I lay down at nighttime I can lay there and relax and think about what I'd like to do the next day, and enjoy life, and go to sleep at ease. And wake up in the morning: Here I am again!"
I rise one last time to eat a breakfast that fills me beyond filling. I change the sheets, wash the dishes, and then gather my things. Mrs. Shaw is standing by the woodstove, drying her long damp hair. I hold her close as we exchange farewells and take-cares. Then I walk out back to the driveway where Keith Jr. is buffing the dirt off his blue pickup truck. He holds a hand in the air to me, and I wave goodbye to him, to the young man who also holds in his hands the future of the "most popular guest house on the AT." Looking at him in his Florida State baseball cap and steel-toed boots, I wonder what Shaw's will become.
But for the time being, I return to what it is. I walk down the driveway to the front of the house to find Mr. Shaw. He's sitting quietly on his front step with his face to the sunlight, framed in the arch of an open door.
Link to original story: http://www.yankeemagazine.com/thisissue/newvoices/shaws.php
PhatNate
12-12-2004, 02:28
I rode my motorcycle from bloomington Indiana this august up to visit a SOBO friend of mine (The dude) and caught him at the Shaws. I had never been in a hiker hostel before, and I was completely taken back by Mr. Shaws kindness and humor. That night my friend and I got some beers and hung out on the dock, he told me how lucky I was to catch him, truly (I just headed up to Maine without knowing where he would be, I just figured Id follow his mail drops). I woke up in the morning for thier scrumptious breakfast (blueberry pancakes, bacon, eggs, sausage, and hot coffee mmm!), and afterwards Mr. Shaw pulled out a photoalbum and told me stories of all the wonderful hikers that have come to visit him over the years. That tough sonavabitch got pretty emotional on me, and you could tell he loved really loved his life, his family, and his hikers. He got up to use the restroom and my friend looked over to me and said, "now thats a true trail angel".I was so overwhelmed by the Shaws hospitality and warmth that something hit me hard, it was a wierd feeling, and I got kinda emotional too. I left the Shaws that morning and headed up into Canada. During my ride up to the border I told myself that if this is the meaning of a "trail angel", I m missing out on something truely special. I thought alot about it over next few weeks, and it occured to me what I needed to do. Since then I changed my entire lifestyle. I dropped almost a third of my weight and Im thru hiking SOBO in June. I can truly say it was all because of that wonderful man.:o Thankyou Mr. Shaw, Ill see you in June.
I have a wonderful picture of Mr. Shaw smiling about to give my friend a whoopin for giving him some smart lip, I ll try to post it tomarrow after I find someone to scan it for me. Peace