The boy sat, baking in the backseat of the blue and white DeSoto. While his mother and sister were shopping in Jamestown, he had wanted to go swimming in Bear Lake. His grandparents had agreed to take him, but first they had to go visit some guy named Willis. Sulking, he peeled his thigh off the plastic seat and considered joining Gracie and Bahpah as they walked slowly up the two-rut drive to what they had called "the site." He leaned out the window, searing the inside of his arm on the hot chrome door trim. Midsummer insects whirred loudly in the surrounding field, yet he heard the sound of an axe thunking into wood from up the hill. The rhythm of the axe reminded him that his grandparents had told him Willis was building a log cabin., Well, that was enough. The closest he had come to a log cabin was sitting on a rug in a suburban New Jersey home playing with Lincoln Logs. This guy Willis was out in the woods doing the real thing.

"Wait up. I'm coming"

He dropped his bathing towel and was out of the car, trotting up the hard packed rutted lane in a fluid motion. Muzzy Hill was steep as it rose up toward a stand of evergreens. He could see Gracie turn and shield her eyes to watch him approach. Bahpah had merely stopped walking. His shoulders slumped under the load of sunlight and lost thought. His brown Fedora looked worn and dusty. Gracie said, "We thought you might like to see this. Willis is an old friend."

He wasn't panting much and the sound of the axe was louder as the three of them approached the shade of the evergreens. Gracie turned to Bahpah with some special emphasis he did not understand. "Now, you mustn't get upset. They were best friends. We'll just tell Willis that when he's done he'll be welcome to come up and take what he needs."

"Okay, but let's not stay long. It'll just remind me."

The sound of the axe stopped as they passed through the trees and into the clearing. To their right, in the sun, was a large canvas tent with mosquito netting, a picnic table and a hanging lantern under an awning. To their left was a platform on a foundation with two or three courses of hewn logs linked to form a low wall. Just to the side of the platform stood a large man, in his late thirties. He glistened. One hand rested on the top of the axe handle leaning against his thigh. With the other he waved broadly. We wore khakis, boots and no shirt. His arms and chest were shiny with sweat. This was Willis.

As they approached the platform Willis must have gotten self conscious, for he slipped quickly into a red and black plaid shirt he'd draped over the low wall.

As the adults talked about the cabin-yet-to-be and things that happened long before, the boy became bored. He puttered around the edges of the log walls, but there wasn't to much to see. A work table, some jigs, a pile of logs, a pile of chips. It looked like too much work, to him. He figured that Willis would be living in the tent forever, judging by how slow things were going here. In 1953, this was more boring than Lincoln Logs.

The old man walked up to the old farmhouse knowing where the kitchen door was, because he'd been there before. The barn was gone and the fields were now woods, but he still knew the place when he pulled up. He had an article he'd written for the Historic Society rolled carefully in his big hand as he crossed the snowy yard. A gust of cold westerly wind flapped at his brown overcoat when he reached the corner of the house and turned towards the entrance. When he saw the old wooden screen door he remembered the days when he was a teenager and someone now gone would have answered his knock. "Oh, Willis. Hi! Bill's out back helping his father fence the garden."

But this was December 1993, not some August morning in the 1930's. The old place needed paint now. There were no gutters on the house and it looked like the roof was not insulated. Two and three foot icicles hung and sparkled from the eaves. He heard someone moving in the house after he knocked, and it sounded like a big fella by the footfalls. The melting drops spattering on icy fieldstone was the only other sound. When he came to unlatch the door Willis could see the man was in his late forties and close to two hundred pounds.

"I've come with the article for your newsletter" he said, as a way of introduction. He'd written a history about the Eddy family. They sat for a while in the kitchen and had coffee. They talked about people they both knew of. This man was Grace and William's grandson, so he thought he'd tell him about the connection.

"Yes, Mr. Wilson, your grandmother, Grace Anderson, and my mother, Ruth Eddy, were best friends. They grew up together here in Panama, you know. Their kids became friends too. Later, Grace and her husband were very kind to me. One summer your grandparents helped me furnish my place. Let me pick from a barnful of stuff. The table and chairs they gave me are still there today in that cabin."

Virginia awoke suddenly and remembered the pain. "Oik!" She was in Jamestown, not Liberty Corner, New Jersey. In her dream it was June, and her kids were still kids. The reality was December '93. She was seventy-two and her kids were in their forties. The familiar pattern of aches grasped her as she realized the phone was ringing. Whoever it was knew her, because they let it ring for a while. She avoided pushing the nearest sleeping cat off the bed as she put her feet to the floor and pulled her robe tighter. She brushed past what had been Gracie's bureau. In an open drawer another cat slept coiled amongst her clothes. "Old mother wouldn't have approved of that, I'm afraid". Virginia moved into the kitchen toward the ringing. "Oik!" She reached the phone and gathered herself before answering, "Hello?... Oh, hi! How are you?" It was her son.

He told her about meeting Willis and then remembering back forty years earlier, to 1953, when he saw Willis building his cabin. He asked her a few questions about that summer and she told him. Told him that was the year his uncle Bill had died, back when they all called him "Ickle Bick". After he hung up she thought of an earlier time, when she was nine or so. About her son's age in '53. Her brother was in his mid teens and her hero then. Bill had been good friends with Willis. If her memory served, it was Willis or posssibly his brother who had run away from Panama with Bill. It must have been 1930 and now, sixty-four years later, she couldn't remember who exactly ran away with her brother.

But she did remember her chores that morning and other details. After breakfast, she had been making the beds, and found it. Her mother, Grace, must have not seen the note when she got out of bed to make coffee. The note was from Bill and simply said;

"Mother; We have run away. Don't worry. We'll be OK. Love Bill...P.S. I'll write you soon."

Virginia was afraid to show the note to mother, but did when asked where Bill was. For days, nobody knew what had happened to the boys.

At dawn, the boys had walked from Panama toward Niobe, to the Erie Line, south of Muzzy Hill. They hitched a ride on a train coming out of Jamestown and in Erie switched to a boxcar on the New York Central Line heading into Ohio. Their plan was to be hobos and get to Denver or some place in the Rockies.

On Saturday the police in Toledo, Ohio wired the post office in Panama, New York. After confirming their stories and giving them a hard time and stern advice, they put the boys on a train for home. The police in Toledo put an end to their scheme to trade the Depression for adventures in the Rockies.

All Bill's schemes came to an end in June, 1953. He was driving a rented truck from Liberty Corner, New Jersey to Panama. In the truck was a household's worth of furniture and appliances accumulated in his parents' home. Grace and William had retired from teaching at the end of that school year, and were returning to Panama to spend the rest of their lives. They had plans, with Bill's help, to fix up the old farmhouse.

Driving the twisting state and county roads through the hill country of Pennsylvania and New York's Southern Tier was an adventure in the '53. There were no straight four-lane divided highways like modern Route 17. In those days big powerful V8's sped along narrow, undivided blacktops without the benefit of rack-and-pinion steering or four-wheel-disk brakes. In the 1950's it was not uncommon for a driver to drink while at the wheel, particularly on a Saturday night. Bill's truck avoided such a driver, in a black Packard, on a curve of the old Route 17 outside of Olean, New York. There was no passing lane or much shoulder and Bill hit a large elm in front of a darkened Victorian house and was crushed between the steering wheel and all that furniture in the back still moving toward him. An eyewitness in a car behind the truck said the Packard never even slowed down.

The phone call from Gracie notifying her about Bill's death came well after midnight. Virginia knew immediately what it was. The next day her doctor husband, their two kids and three nauseous cats drove to upstate New York in blistering heat. A ten hour drive. Cars didn't have air-conditioning then, even baby-blue Cadillacs, like the doctor's. By evening, they came across a series of flickering black kerosene lamps that marked detours and delays on the road. Everybody in the crowded car was depressed and grouchy by the time they met Gracie and Bahpah in Olean. After identifying what was left of Bill, they all drove on to Panama for the arrangements.

After the funeral, Gracie and Bahpah filled the barn in front of the farmhouse with the furniture that had been in the truck. Virginia and the kids stayed on with her parents that summer hoping her parents would recover quickly, but neither her mother or father was ever quite the same after the accident, especially her father.

The next spring Willis finished his cabin on Muzzy Hill. Gracie and Bahpah invited him over to select some furniture for the place, from their barn. After that the barn and its contents went pretty much unattended. Bahpah died in 1965. The roof on the barn failed and the dry rot started. Gracie died in 1972. Soon after, in a rainstorm, the barn collapsed, burying whatever history was inside. All that's left is what they gave away or what we remember.