Beaky's Blather

Back in America, without a fixed home other than the compressed space provided on board Wahine docked in a marina, Dad had for the first time, no challenging goal in life. Aged around sixty, he faced a blank-page future. No obstacle to a life of quiet contentment now confronted him. He had reached a hiatus in what had always been a driven existence, one while perhaps unspoken, that was designed to provide the very situation in which he now found himself. He was comfortably wealthy and sixty. He had achieved a state sought by many of us where quiet retirement and calm enjoyment of whatever one chose to do, was possible. A satisfying retirement.

Not however, for this ordinary man. Dad bought a large classical ‘southern mansion,’ of the type you see Bret standing before and not giving a damn in ‘Gone with The Wind,’ With it came around 100 acres of land just outside Aiken, South Carolina.  Briefly, he toyed with the Idea of pig farming. He had the land and could also spare some of it for a further business venture. Im unsure why he settled initially on pig farming.

He went so far along the pig-farming avenue as offering me a position (working with him), as manager of an operation set to become an intensive pig farming enterprise. I took it seriously enough as a potential new direction for me, I did some background reading, phoned a friend – a pig farmer – and resigned my post in Scotland as a teacher, packed up my bags, wife and young son Robbie, and flew to Atlanta Georgia, then drove to South Carolina. I anticipated his help with the ground-up establishment of a commercial pig farming operation based on his property outside Aiken, South Carolina, with the benefit of what I imagined would be his business acumen.

On his land, hidden a mile from the road, he discovered the owned an ancient, abandoned Negro School. Built 100 years earlier from Virgin Pine, (the centre core-hard wood that settlers first discovered and used up, from the slowly-grown-naturally heartwood of virgin trees). It was a very hard wood resistant to the devastation of a beetle infestation that destroys all softwood structures made from trees produced by modern growing techniques. But the building was in the wrong place. 

Not an obstacle. Dad picked up this – by US standards – historic building and transported it whole’ a mile or so across his land to a better-suited location beside the main road, adjacent to his new home. Oh, and he extended the negro schoolhouse by attaching to it a bought-from-a-catalogue, newbuild home, thus completing the re-location, planning and construction of a house ready for sale. So successful was this project; it was accomplished and ready for sale during the three months while I visited to investigate the pig farming option. Dad however by then had decided, largely on the back of this house move and build project, that, with half, (around fifty or so acres) of his unused land, he could enter the real estate business. Pig farming was forgotten, he had a new direction, and I returned to the UK and joined the RAF.

The purpose of my visit had been to review and decide whether I wanted the role of setting up a pig farming operation. After three months in South Carolina with him reviewing the potential of the pig meat market and what would be required to work closely with dad, I decided no. It wasn’t for me. I returned to the UK and my life followed an entirely different path. 

At some juncture, during their life outside Aitken, South Carolina, Dad and his wife became devotees of what sounds to me, to have been an evangelical, religious Sect. They were apparently born again, the scales had fallen from their eyes, and they now knew with utter certainty what it was they had been set on this earth to do. It was to – bring their particular evangelical brand of the Christian faith –  …. 

….to the people of Togo in West Africa – I was surprised to discover.

So, not a restful retirement then. Instead, they would go to Africa, preach evangelically, dig better wells for a cleaner supply of water, and establish (building and teaching staff) some basic schools. This they set about doing with characteristic focus and energy.

 The work in Togo, continued for years until dad was well into his seventies. Eventually, the assault from insects and poor food in cheap rural African hotels began to take its toll on his health so their mission changed. The people of South Carolina, they decided, also needed to receive their evangelical message, so they withdrew from their African endeavour and returned to Aiken, south Carolina, USA where they set up their own church. 

Called the International Ministry of Jesus, Dad established his church used the bulk of the savings remaining after his mission to Togo. The USA, he discovered was becoming too expensive, so he changed direction once more. He decided – now in his late seventies – that he would emigrate to Ecuador….and buy a farm, five thousand feet up in the mountains, in lung-challengingly thin air. 

This is the Retreat that my father built on his farm 5000 feet up in the hills, 65 Kilometres from Quito in Ecuador 

Here on his farm, he decided, he could generate an income to live on, albeit frugally, and use whatever extra the farm generated, plus whatever wealth he had remaining to build an Evangelical Christian Retreat that he would offer – to those who might wish to retreat from within the wider evangelical church movement in the USA. 

I was unaware that dad had any knowledge or experience in farm management. 

Communication with him in Ecuador became even more intermittent although, some did become available as on-line digital correspondence in rural Ecuador became possible. It was patchy and precariously unreliable, but I caught up on his life gradually as he shared parts of it.

 Once more I began to receive brief descriptions of the many challenges he confronted and that continued to assail what might otherwise have been his tranquil retirement years.

One episode I recall more vividly than others, was his description of a particularly taxing day. It went something like this – “Been a tough day today, just arrived back to the house, tired and a little bruised. The road down to the valley bottom from the farm avalanched last night, preventing our lorry from taking the day’s milk from the farm down for collection. I managed to arrange the hire of a suitable milk tanker from the valley bottom and some of the men and I drove down to the edge of the landslide and we carried the heavy churns around 600 feet across the section of road that had collapsed. Exhausting.” 

‘When I eventually returned to the farm, I learned from my farm foreman that a cow had fallen down a deep gorge and the poor beast was now wedged inaccessibly on a ledge, injured but alive and clearly in pain.  After some hours waiting, there was still no sign that the animal would die soon so I tried, unsuccessfully, to persuade one of the men to be lowered on a rope with my shot gun, and dispatch the poor creature. Clearly no one was willing, so eventually, to spare the poor beast, I decided that I would do it myself. 

I was lowered around 30 or 40 feet down into the chasm and, with considerable difficulty, tried to line my gun up with the cow. I discovered however that – as there was nowhere that I could reach and brace my feet to steady myself as I directed the gun hanging in mid-air – on firing the gun I was catapulted on the end of the rope around inside the confining gorge in wildly in gyrating circles and collided repeatedly with the rocky sides. I did eventually dispatch the stranded beast but, before I successfully landed a head shot, I hit it distressingly first in the body and then its rear leg.” 

Dad was over 85. 

He lived for a further 15 or so years and never retired. He continued to offer his Evangelical Church-Retreat (which survives still on his farm today, serving the Evangelical Church members from the USA that he originally set out to support. 

He did this until he just fell off the end of life… like any ordinary man.