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Readers > Tad Hutton
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As with most people, writers in particular, I've experienced enough knocks and dents to fill a few books. My fellow bartenders, ditch-diggers, surveyors, and hard-scrabble folk have all learned early that the little guy is a valuable resource—maybe not as often as he is a bag of wind, but still.
In other words, grand plans are no better than the ordinary people who make them happen. As a fellow digger told me in the bottom of a swamp ditch on a hot summer day in Adel, Georgia, "The big boys get the credit when everything goes right. It's always the little guy who catches hell when things go wrong." And that's pretty much what I write about, that interplay between the big schemers and the folk who end up working the edges.
Oh sure, I have a formal side. I earned a couple of degrees at the University of Notre Dame, and I spent some years on the West Coast doing fund-raising for the university's foundation. I also taught in colleges and universities around the country. I wouldn't trade those years for more digging or bartending, no sir, just as I wouldn't replace other, more unorthodox experiences of life with the mundane stuff. I mean, what makes one feel more alive than being a night watchman in a Glacier National Park resort, facing up to wandering grizzlies on nightly rounds? Or living alone as a summer caretaker in the Notre Dame stadium and sensing honest-to-God ghosts moving just outside the locker room? (Actually, in the stadium my best memory was going out to the fifty-yard line on a summer Sunday, spreading a blanket, and reading for a test. You would not believe the feeling as Touchdown Jesus, the huge mosaic on the university library, gazed down on me through the white goal posts.)
I haven't been alone on the smooth and rutted roads of life. My wife Jeanne and I spent a two-and-a-half-year honeymoon as Peace Corps volunteers in Colombia, just before the drug wars drove the Corps from the country. Jeanne taught nurses on the Caribbean coast, and later ran a clinic out near the Amazon Basin while I taught some English, ran a small experimental farm, and designed sustainable construction projects. I lost my honeybees to predators and my quail to the heat, but the rabbits and tomatoes came up huge and won national awards. Then there were the people we met: the Guayibo Indians, the pobres of the slums, the laid-back costenos, the professionals who were trying to forge a better nation, and the volunteers from other countries. One day we'd despair over endless work or dashed expectations. The next day we'd be racing an Irish medical team in outrigger canoes to an island in the Caribbean sun.
When we returned to the U.S., I worked for Thomas & Hutton Engineering Company, specializing in wastewater transport and treatment for municipalities and resorts along the East Coast. Then I went to the City of Savannah and drifted among the streets, stormwater, development services, and inspections departments. I also made trips to Indonesia for Savannah, working with Indonesian city officials under a USAID-sponsored program to further understanding between different cultures.
Jeanne is presently building her career as an important player in the natural health and wellness field. An area manager with the firm Arbonne International, she intends to spread the word of Arbonne's healthy, anti-aging products across two or three continents. My son Matt travels the Pacific Rim countries with photographer Barbara Feijo in pursuit of their dream to establish a surfing and resort camp on the Brazilian island of Florinopolis. My daughter Honor sandwiches her career as an engineer, home renovation expert and Arbonne International consultant between travels with her husband, Honza, whom she met in New Zealand, to ecologically sound venues, and to Honza's home in Prague, Czech Republic.
I have written for most of my life. Newspaper columns, feature stories, and technical reports and articles have appeared in state and local media. I've also published two novellas for young people centered around life on an Atlantic Ocean barrier island. In addition to the sequel for Rio Savannah, I'm presently merging the young adult novellas into a full-length historical fiction-fantasy book.
The opportunity to travel and research what I write about is a great pleasure. It's amazing, what parts of a trip or a session stick with me or find their way into a journal page. The big things like monuments, tourist sites, and violent confrontations are almost automatic. But minimal things—seeing a stolen kiss on a beach, a figurine in a shop window, or a gun shell on a sidewalk—as forgettable as they seem, each one usually finds a place in a story.
Tybee Island, Georgia
February 16, 2007
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