Bucket ‘a Bolts
Posted on July 31, 2015 by bob in OffTheBeatenPath
It was by little coincidence that mere moments after I eased comfortably in my chair – weary from a full day of yard work and eager to catch the last few minutes of the ball game – that the toy stove in my daughter’s dollhouse, the one she’d been playing with all afternoon, broke. Pandemonium ensued, the drop-everything-all-parental-hands-on-deck-to-deal-with-this-catastrophe type situation where children are rendered inconsolable for reasons seemingly insignificant to the rest of us. This phenomenon is not known to exist outside of childhood, except when a man loses a very big fish or dumps a shot at a very nice deer. But I digress.
My daughter’s immediate need was for the toy stove placed in pieces at my feet to be put back together. As both her father and a sports fan settling into the last few minutes of a game, I wanted my little girl to stop crying. A quick analysis found this was neither a duct tape nor WD-40-type fix. Getting my daughter back to playtime and me back to game-time would take quick thinking. For the average man in my situation, a run to the closest hardware store would take 30 minutes round trip if the lines weren’t too long and they had more than one register open (unlikely – why do they have registers they never staff??). But the game would be over by then and my phone would erupt in text messages and alerts spoiling the ending.
I could clearly tell that with four very long and thin wood screws I could cobble back together the pile of pieces at my feet. And time was of the essence, for both of us.
In moments like these, I turn to a clear plastic tub with a white screw-on lid. In a previous life I believe it held 
pretzel sticks, but the label is too long gone to know for sure. It’s my bucket of bolts, a term some wield as an insult but one that’s always held a affinity for me given the origin of much of the bucket’s contents.
Both my grandfathers were handy – not in a tradesman sense, but in the way that men of a certain age are good at fixing things. And they should be. You live long enough, see enough things break, you learn to provide for yourself as much as you can. Things breaking are an annoyance, but that’s part of life. For them, turning to their buckets of bolts and finding an answer to the problem at hand was nothing out of the ordinary.
They were children of the Depression, and making due meant saving money and saving money was making money. That still holds true today, though fewer and fewer of us hold fast to that philosophy. So they kept stuff, odds and ends, pieces and parts. As they’d take things apart they’d save a bolt here and a couple of screws there, you know, just in case.
They could never predict when all four legs of a piano stool would blow out at the same time because their grandchildren were using it to play “king of the mountain,” and it would take eight, 4-inch bolts with matching washers and nuts to put it back in working order. Or, that your grandkids would want to build a zip-line in your backyard, down the hill and into the woods. They had the cable hung (salvaged from the garage of course) but the pulley they were going to use to carry them needed a certain size cotter pin and clip. Those situations are what buckets of bolts are for, and that’s where they shine. It might be years before they’d have call to use a specific salvaged item, but when they did, it was already on hand.
Everything has a lifespan, and things just tend to break at the most inopportune times. Like a child’s toy during the last few minutes of a ball game. Eventually, people wear out too. My grandfathers are long gone. but the lessons they taught and the self-reliant spirit they instilled in me will withstand the years and hopefully, the generations. Their buckets became the beginning of my own, and I’ve saved myself countless trips to the hardware store and untold amounts of cash simply by keeping a well-stocked bucket of bolts on hand.
Not long ago, a neighbor rang my doorbell one Saturday afternoon. He had a unique problem. He and his sons had been playing basketball, and as boys tend to do, a “dunking derby” had begun and a critical pin holding the two sections of the goalpost together had bent beyond repair. The derby was on hold until further notice; until a substitute bolt of unusual length and diameter, complete with washers and a lock nut, were found.
“Do you have any old hardware laying around?” he asked. I smiled.
“Come around back,” I said, imagining my grandfathers peering over my shoulder.“I think I have one or two that might fit.”
Niko Corley spends his free time on the water or in the woods, and earned his charter boat license in 2012. He can be contacted at cootfootoutfitters@gmail.com.
