1.) Jerry Solom: Particularly strong, sturdy, solid, substantial, robust, tough, strongly made, durable, hard-wearing; sometimes thick headed according to his wife.
2.) Guinness Extra Stout: A kind of strong, dark beer brewed with roasted malt or barley.
Almost everyone on the planet knew Jerry Solom was the guy who built his own boat and sailed to Norway and all that. There’s been dozens of stories about that feat for 26 years; I have many in my files here. Joe McDonnell wrote a remarkable epilogue about him in the almanac last week that went practically viral, so there’s no sense in me writing about it all again.
http://wannaskanalmanac.blogspot.com/2019/07/jerry.html
But it had been six days since Jerry died and, as a very close friend whom I had known for 36 years I still hadn’t been able to wrap my mind around it. I’d been awaiting inspiration, some spark that would ignite emotion and set me down the path to write about him, but I couldn’t get there even while my wife Jackie suffered with bouts of tearfulness periodically. I never quite fully turned the corner after receiving the phone call from Marion, that Jerry was gone, except to drown my sorrow with a six pack of Guinness Extra Stout in the hotel room we were staying far from home, an act of some numbing delusion of scribbled words on lined yellow ledger paper.
I took a drive that Sunday evening as the sun was setting. It had rained earlier and the car windows were wet. Using the windshield wipers, their arc on the glass disappointingly obscured my vision against the sun as I rounded the curve from our driveway onto the township road. I parked by the schoolhouse to wipe it clear.
There was really nowhere to drive. I could see Jerry’s shop, a mile away, south from where I stood by the Palmville one-room schoolhouse, and to the west the Tin Farm and County Road 8’s long sweeping southwesterly curve. To my north was County Road 33, a gravel road at its intersection with 8, and the turn two miles east, over the river and past Joe’s--then where? To what? What was I doing? Mosquitoes found me. I retreated to the car.
When I returned home, Jackie looked at me tentatively, but I shook my head, going on down the basement steps to my writing desk there seemingly devoid of anything I could definitely say sparked my imagination. Jerry was just as alive to me then as he was before.
Very early the next morning, I slowly became conscious to intermittent images from the movie, “Waking Ned Devine,” the scenes where the tension in the pub is building, then flashing to the allergy-plagued lottery man in his car, then the local priest in the church van, both fast approaching the unsuspecting person busily dialing the lottery office, from the telephone booth far above the sea shore. https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0166396/
I also began seeing alike ‘video shots’ of Jerry. For example, him wearing his black Guinness stocking cap in his shop, and us laughing about it. He said he thought of me when he bought it, because he knew it was my favorite beer. I jokingly told him to ‘will it’ to me, but he gave it to me on the spot. “You might want to wash it.”
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| He gave it to me on the spot. “You might want to wash it.” |
The Waking Ned Devine movie images kept appearing, when the thought came to me that I needed to get out of bed fast because, maybe, I was the one in the phone booth for as Joe had pointed out last week, Jerry used to say, “Life is burning up.” Who knows when any of our lives will go ‘poof’? I hurriedly left my bed.
Once people learned of Jerry’s passing, many asked about what they saw as his sudden demise, blind to the fact he had been slowly deteriorating since his diagnosis of leukemia in 2009, which subsequent photos revealed. He had tried valiantly to cloak his condition from the general public in flurries of work-related and family-related projects that until recent months, never clearly indicated his declining abilities, except to his wife, children, and those closest to him.
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| Jerry had been slowly deteriorating since his diagnosis of leukemia in 2009, which subsequent photos revealed. Me, Jerry and Marion. |
Jerry had recently set aside his cane for the most part, having just gotten to the point, after his hammertoe/foot surgery, where he could ‘dance’ again, and was looking forward, figuratively speaking, to his cataract surgery to correct his vision, so he could see to weld good again, and happily return to the now stagnant stack of books he had to stop reading. His breathing difficulties had long been a problem, and although seeming at least not to worsen, until toward his end, he kept working in his shop doing the best he could.
Then there was that matter of his kidney function that had long concerned his doctors, that he was just getting by with, if but poorly; a matter he had expressed as, “It is, what it is.” Ever since his acquaintance with leukemia, he took a welding truck-full of medications each day, and had scheduled visits to Rochester every month to six weeks, outliving many of his friends who he and Marion had met at Hope Lodge, during his days of hospitalization in Rochester. He was truly, a cancer survivor, someone with a well-known story that doctors never got tired of hearing; but know, Jerry never tooted his own horn. Few knew his fearlessness in the face of adversity, but all knew of his great love of life, devotion to family and appreciation of friends
Back home, he was still fulfilling past obligations he had made to customers, but limiting his work to small projects at his shop as he could, right up to the day before he and Marion were to leave for Rochester, again, to see about scheduling his leaky heart valve surgery.
Attempting to keep us up to date about his tests, he called me one evening, with a smile in his voice, sounding much relived after learning there was no heart blockage. He had said they would determine what to do about kidney dialysis the next week as the tests he’d undergo were going to be hard on his already frail organs. He talked about how the human body was this intricate machine and how wondrously everything worked together--or what happened when it didn’t.
He and Marion had returned home for a few days, but one night he began experiencing breathing difficulties that worsened. He told Marion to call for an ambulance to Roseau. Discovering fluid build-up in and around his lungs, he was transferred to Grand Forks via helicopter, and after several days in ICU on IVs and a ventilator, he was flown by special plane to Mayo, where, although happy he was in the very best of hands by an indication of ‘thumbs up’, he suffered further exhaustive tests, ‘pokes and prods.’ Early in the afternoon of Tuesday, July 23, he made his hospice wishes known to family and his team of physicians, and died late the same night.
But not so his legacy. Unknown to many, Jerry had been concerned that people in the community would see him as ‘weak’, just a little, virtually skeletal, man with a curved spine and shoulders, unable to do his work, feel sorry for him. He had once remarked that he didn’t look at himself as handicapped; he did what he could as he could do it and seldom turned down a job.
His arched upper back and shoulders prevented him from standing straight, sitting, or riding too long. He had lost three inches of height from all the chemo treatments he endured, but what he lacked in height he made up for in stature, as all in the community held him in admiration for his strength of character alone.
As I learned on our 2000-mile road trip to Indiantown, Florida in January 2019, he preferred to drive because gripping the steering wheel gave him support. He had fashioned a backrest from an old wire-mesh car seat that, with a rolled-up jacket or pillow as lower back support, he was somewhat comfortable. In January and March of this year, he drove over four thousand miles total, there and back, with Marion as his navigator. I wrote about our journey, here in the Wannaskan Almanac, if any wish to read them. Look in the archives.
An avid reader, especially during the winter months, Jerry took inspiration from individuals, especially seafarers and expedition leaders like Ernest Shackleton and others who survived against all odds, and enjoyed reading history books like Bruce Catton’s Civil War, and Doris Goodwin’s Team of Rivals; and with the help of his wife Marion, and his eldest daughter Sara, wrote and published three of his own books about building and sailing Indian Summer. https://www.history.com/news/shackleton-endurance-survival https://www.amazon.com/Indian-Summer-Jerry-Marion-Solom/dp/150528869X
Jerry was always broadening his sailing education going as far as taking a navigational instrument class in Duluth the spring of 2019. When his eyesight further deteriorated, he had to stop reading like he had been doing. Welding work stopped in the shop, although he did what he could almost to the end of his time at home, completing a couple small projects he had on sawhorses just outside his big shop door.
Notably, these past few years, he had started talking in detail about how he made repairs on things, elaborating on how he thought about an approaching job--or the fact, in these later days, that if he had told his customers he would do the job, he was obligated to do it, despite his failing strength.
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| He did what he could almost to the end of his time at home, completing a couple small projects he had on sawhorses just outside his big shop door. |
He hired help when he needed it, but many more times ‘employed’ Marion to help him do things around his shop, just as she had from the very beginning of their life in Palmville aside from raising their four children, which even included helping Jerry build his first shop when he started his Palmville welding and fabrication business. Marion was his lifelong, right-hand woman and First Mate.
But sometimes, she couldn’t help him, for example when he took repair jobs that no other regional welding shops would take--like the eight-foot diameter cast iron rock crusher base, weighing several tons, owned by Schenkey Construction of Middle River, that had a 20-inch flange broken off of it. Adding to the fact that the rock crusher wasn’t made any more, so new or used units weren’t available, he had to figure out how to do it when nobody else could. And he did.
On one of the last jobs I went with him as a helper, he had to look at a dragline bucket in a gravel pit. On the top of the bucket was heavy-duty bracket, connected to a chain, and made from one-inch thick material. The weldment between the bracket and the bucket would too often break, despite repeated attempts by other weldors. The customer called Jerry hoping he could fix it once and for all.
Jerry said he couldn’t make that claim that it would never break again after he welded it, but said he’d take a look to see what he could do differently. Studying the broken weldments a couple minutes and determining they weren’t necessarily the problem, he walked to the truck and returned with a large magnet that was about the size of his hand.
Touching the bucket with the magnet adhered it there fast, but not so to the bracket. It wouldn’t stick. It wasn’t steel, it was magnesium and required a special welding rod to weld it to steel; as well as there being other tricks to it. He called the customer and told him what he had learned, offering to order the special welding rods, which would take some time--or he could fabricate a whole new steel bracket in his shop for the customer, which was the route the customer chose.
Jerry was always like that, forward thinking; detail oriented. What didn’t exist, he could often make in his machine shop, saving his customers money and time. He was a highly intelligent, humorous, honest, hard-working trades and business man, in addition to being a loving husband, devoted father, and doting grandfather, a seemingly rare breed these days; a standout in a crowd.
In November of 1983, in a hurry to get to Thief River Falls before the unemployment office closed for the weekend, I rolled my '72 Toyota Land Cruiser just west of Jerry’s shop, and was thrown from the vehicle in the process-- destroying my vehicle, but I miraculously survived, totally unscathed, to tell the tale. Lloyd Dunham, who was living in Palmville at the time, was first on the scene, his mechanic shop just fifty yards away; second was Jerry Solom, who, when he looked up from under his welding helmet recognized my truck and saw someone, he thought, covering a body with a blanket, and David Oslund, whose dairy farm was across the road, and who was summoned by Lloyd, arrived a short time later, on his tractor to pull the wreckage back to my farm, a mile and a little more away.
Thus I made acquaintance and a resulting thirty-six year friendship with Jerry and Marion, and in turn, Joe and Teresa McDonnell. In the ensuing days, Jerry offered to help me get an old pickup I had, back on the road, in exchange that I’d help him insulate the walls and ceiling of his shop. It was a telling project and the beginning of an epic friendship.
Although I know Jerry, has walked on, I’ll still envision him and hear his voice in the many videos, digital images, stories, and memories I have of him until the day I too, go ‘poof!’
See you later, brother.
Love you, man
Steve
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