Some folks think a monument is a big stone with a name on it but I have a monument which is made entirely out of wood and has no name on it at all except the name I whisper under my breath: Mr. Bugbee.
I don’t recall knowing Mr. Bugbee’s first name. He was 78 when as a new homeowner I hired him 1992 to fix the bottom step on my deck stairs.
It had cracked under my feet and since I weigh over 200 lbs. I thought it was only a matter of time before it broke off entirely, especially since I use those 7 stairs every day to go in and out of my house.
Mr. Bugbee was a retired carpenter. He was recommended to me by one of the agents who had just sold me my house, John Clerkin.
As a newcomer to White River Junction, I told John I needed the name of a reliable carpenter who did small jobs and he assured me he knew an old Vermonter who lived right in town near the Connecticut River: Mr. Bugbee.
He had a well-known name in town. The street I drove on every day to get to my job as a teacher was named Bugbee Street. And the senior center in town founded in 1976 is the Bugbee Senior Center.
So I called Mr. Bugbee up.
Yes, he was retired but he did occasional small jobs and would be willing to give me an estimate.
When he came over I told him the problem might be bigger than just one broken stair.
The stairs weren’t open on the side, so sweeping dirt or shoveling the snow off them was a clumsy nuisance.
They were built like a slanted ladder with the steps nailed into the side bars. You had to use a broom or a shovel more like a knife scooping a piece of pie out of a pan instead of being able to just sweep the snow or dirt off an open edge.
In fact that was the issue: there was no open edge on one side of the stairs.
Mr. Bugbee could see the solution instantly with his carpenter’s eye.
His suggestion? Rebuild the entire stairs with zigzag supports so that the treads were on top of the zigzag instead of nailed below into a 2“×8” side bar which traps snow or dirt.
But building an entirely new staircase would cost a lot more than replacing just one cracked stair, about $300 in 1992, or maybe $900 in 2022 terms.
I clutched my wallet and gulped an “OK” to the estimate.
I had one big question. Could Mr. Bugbee for the same price use the best wood available so it would never crack again?
“It has to outlast me. I weigh a lot and I want these stairs to work for the rest of my life,” I said.
I was 47 at the time.
Mr. Bugbee answered with a tightlipped Vermont warranty: “Ayup.”
That was it.
Decades later I still hear that “Ayup” from time to time when I walk down those stairs.
And I’ve gone up and down Mr. Bugbee’s 7 step monument at least twice a day now for 30 years : that’s 365 x 2 x 30 or 21, 900 tromps up and down x 7 stairs or 153,300 bends of my ankles. Whew.
I believe I saw in the obituaries that Mr. Bugbee went to his glory about ten years after building my thick and sturdy stairs.
By then, I’d easily gone up and down those treads 7,000 times.
They have outlasted 30 Vermont summers and winters and made my sweeping and shoveling a lot easier.
This year I will turn the same age Mr. Bugbee was when he built my stairs.
I no longer bound up them two at a time or skip down them like a basketball player as I did 30 years ago.
Now, when I feel their sturdy thickness under my clopping Timberland boots, I whisper, “Thank you, Mr. Bugbee, thank you.”
I was raised in the 1950s to respect my elders by using the title Mr. or Miss or Mrs., so I never called Mr. Bugbee by his first name if I even knew it.
“Mr.” may sound a bit stuffy to a Vermonter, but I didn’t mean it to be.
I addressed him that way because he had the talent to do something I couldn’t do — use his carpenter’s hands and his engineer’s brain to make a set of stairs from scratch.
I said Mr. Bugbee had long ago gone to his glory but he left some behind for the living to enjoy.
Mr. Bugbee’s set of deck stairs are seven steps of glory that I ascend every single day of my life.
They’ve kept me on my toes well over 20,000 times.
Even in work boots. Ayup.