Piermont
“That’s literally how I met him,” professional photographer and graphic designer Chris Mazzarella, who grew up in Corinth, recalled recently. “It was somewhere around Corinth, I think. I was 18 at the time, and he was playing with some juggle sticks around the fire like he often did. He was a few years older and told me stories about his travels to South Africa and Australia. We hit it off right away, partly because of our shared love of playing music.
“I can’t remember anyone else who was at that party but Freeman.”
Such memories have been rippling out from Freeman Robie’s wide and deep circle of friends and relatives since he died at age 43 at his family’s dairy farm along Route 10 in Piermont on July 6, after a months-long bout with cancer.
“We met at a Memorial Day party that featured a huge bonfire right next to I-91 in Norwich,” Carey Page, who grew up in East Thetford and now lives in Hawaii, wrote during an exchange of emails last week. “We talked for hours that night, and though I can’t recall many details of the conversation, I remember being impressed that he could discuss sociological theory and that he even knew who (French sociologist Emile) Durkheim was.
“He was totally captivating to talk to that night. I was the designated driver, and my friends had to literally drag me away.”
About five years earlier, budding singer-songwriter Hunter Paye had found himself riding shotgun to his bonfire buddy in an Econoline camper-van.
The ensuing cross-country trip ended in Santa Barbara, Calif., where they lived, some of the time on a boat, during one of Robie’s many retreats there over the years.
“I sort of idolized him during that phase of my life,” Paye, a 1994 graduate of Oxbow High School who lives in Portland, Ore., recalled recently. “He was so worldly and well-read and well-traveled. He could quote the Bible or any other book you could think of. He was so intellectually explosive compared to anyone I had ever met. He came from where we came from, yet he was unique. He had a way of creating adventure in otherwise seemingly ordinary situations. He could create adventure. That’s one of the biggest things I learned from him: How to say ‘yes’ when adventure is offered.”
From an early age, Neil Robie learned that resistance was futile. Take the tour of Europe that his big brother led between Neil’s college years in the 1990s.
“Freeman never put much value in money, but he always had the skills to survive,” Neil Robie said. “He was resourceful. We’d find jobs wherever you could find jobs — tending bar, picking melons in Portugal — and make enough money to move on to the next destination.”
Neil Robie figures that his older brother stopped answering to his given first name of Christopher in favor of his middle name — which by tradition the Robie line assigns to the eldest boy of every other generation — around the age of 14 or 15.
And, oh, did that shoe fit.
“That’s who he was,” Neil said. “He kind of did his own thing, followed the beat of his own drum.”
Playing point guard for Orford High in the late 1980s and early 1990s, he could induce basketball players to follow him. During a run deep into the 1991 New Hampshire Class S playoffs, Robie rebounded from a season of back problems to score 18 points in the quarterfinals and 16 in the semis, which Colebrook won by a point.
“He was just a joy to coach,” said Tim Dyke, of Orford, whose two stints in charge of the varsity boys included Freeman’s junior and senior years. “Every day in practice, he came in with a great attitude. He was someone everybody got along with. Under a lot of pressure in a big game, he could joke around and smile, even while taking it seriously. If we had lost a game the night before, he’d be, ‘OK, that’s behind us. Let’s go on to the next one.’
“That’s where that type of personality loosens up the tenseness.”
Between games and chores on the farm, and later while pursuing a degree in journalism from Messiah College in Pennsylvania, Freeman Robie read and wrote far beyond what his teachers assigned him.
“I’ve had the good fortune of going through a lot of Freeman’s manuscripts since he died,” said Neil Robie, who is now helping to run Robie Farm. “He attempted writing novels several times. There’s some good material. And songs, poems probably in the hundreds. … And I’ve been finding all these books — Aristotle, Plato, Melville — with lots of notations in the margins.”
Carey Page can vouch for much of what Freeman wrote and read during the 10 years they lived together before she moved to China in 2014.
“He could recite poetry and Shakespeare and quote other great authors,” Page recalled. “He had a real thirst for knowledge and was able to find meaning not just in print but in everyday experiences.”
During his retreats to Santa Barbara, while living among the boating crowd, Robie also paid homeless residents to share their experiences, which he then wrote in a blog.
“He didn’t see anyone in a hierarchy,” Hunter Paye said. “He would treat them all the same. He was embedded in both of those communities. He dealt with humans as being all on the same level, in a way that most people only talk about.”
Back on the farm in Piermont with parents Lee and Betty Sue Robie and brothers Mark, Neil and Tim, Neil recalls, Freeman would “do the farmers markets and crop work in the field, and cow work.”
In a 2013 article for the New Hampshire Farms Network web site, writer Helen Brody describes him coming in from chores on a frigid morning to set “two Robie farm-fresh eggs spattering in the fry pan.”
Along the way, he found inspiration in those everyday experiences.
“He was idealistic about farming and thought it to be one of the most honorable pursuits in life,” Page said. “My own interest in farming and gardening … really blossomed alongside his enthusiasm for it. Tasks like building fences and making hay became sources of pride for him, and this showed the most when his grandfather Freeman would compliment him on his work.”
And as he had throughout his life, Freeman Robie took and gave comfort in surrounding himself with friends, either at the camp he built in a remote corner of the farm out of mostly recycled materials, or in his pontoon boat on the Connecticut River.
“In 2014, Freeman took the role of throwing me a bachelor party,” Mazzarella said. “Instead of a traditional bachelor party he threw a mini outdoor festival with a bonfire and live music and called it ‘Mazzfest.’ ”
Mazzarella returned the favor last winter and early spring, organizing a campaign online to raise money toward Robie’s medical expenses. The online effort raised about $15,000.
“Every time a donation came in, my smartphone would go ‘Ding!’ ” Mazzarella said. “Sometimes it would go off, like, 20 times. Every time it went off, it lifted me up.”
The party that the Friends of Freeman Robie later held at Galusha Hill Farm Lodge in Corinth raised another $8,000 … and Robie’s spirits.
“That was very moving, to see Freeman enveloped by all that love,” Mazzarella said. “People were flying in from across the country.”
For the celebration of Freeman’s life that the Robie family held on the farm on July 16, Hunter Paye flew back from Oregon.
“I thought I was going to see him, because I was coming back soon to do a concert (at Alumni Hall in Haverhill on July 31),” Paye said. “Every time I’d go home, we’d meet up. He’d have a bonfire that would gather all the friends. When I went home for my birthday last year, me, him and a couple of friends just hung out and talked all night, slept outside, and went out on the pontoon boat the next day.
“I feel unfortunate not to have been there for the last phase, but fortunate to have endless memories.”
More than 33 of his Facebook friends remembered Freeman Robie on what would have been his 44th birthday last week.
“Missing you today as I draw some inspiration from your life well lived,” 1989 Orford High graduate Cynthia Thomson Robinson wrote on his timeline. “Knowing you are walking those streets of gold with your mischievous grin!!
“Thanks for the double rainbow I saw the other day.”
David Corriveau can be reached at dcorriveau@vnews.com and at 603-727-3304.