The woodstove almost killed him the next morning. Five hundred pounds of cast iron came hurtling off the back of my truck, turning the wooden ramp into splinters. If he had been a half a second slower, Randy would have been flattened like piecrust under a rolling pin.

“I told ya those boards wouldn’t be able to take it,” he said. “Good thing I still have the reflexes of a jungle cat.”

I had already torn the old woodstove, worthless piece of crap that it was, out of my second cabin and hauled it away to the dump. When I bought the new one, they wanted three hundred dollars to deliver and install it, so I told them just to put it in the back of my truck. It sat there for two weeks under a plastic tarp, waiting for me to figure out a way to move it. This was a great source of amusement for Jackie, and he never missed a chance to ask me if I was still hauling it everywhere I went. Jackie would have helped me himself, he said, for a flat fee of $350.

When Randy and I had finally muscled the thing into the cabin, he stood with his hands on his knees, catching his breath. “You see, Alex,” he said. “I knew coming here was a good idea. It’s already paying off.”