When I first started coming on GFW, I was a drinker. I loved beer and Gin & Tonics. I was also fresh out of college and still thought beer cans, liquor bottles and other drinking accomplishments were the epitome of house decor.
I was also a new fledgling reader. The effort of bettering myself had begun and I had been sucked into the vortex of self help books. There are a lot of good ones out there, but there are also a lot of wastes of time. On this specific trip, I was reading the Magic of Thinking Big, and my big dumb brain thought I was going to have time to read it.
As our GFW has progressed, people’s tastes have changed, some have slowed their drinking down in exchange for waking up earlier to hit the water, and others have gotten sober. But fifteen years ago, the group still primarily drank Coors Light and were able to put quite a few back. We always packed in enough in case of the off chance we were snowed in in the middle of July with no access to another liquor store. We weren’t going to be running out.
With a four-day, three-night trip, you get plenty of time to move in and make the rental cabin your own. Upon arrival, I felt like a new home owner who was about to do some home decorating. And with my decorating aesthetic in tow, I started the construction of the largest beer can pyramid, or Beer-amid as we will affectionately call it, GFW has ever seen.
The base was set to be 10 cans across, which would make it 10 cans tall, and a total of 55 beers. A modest amount of our stash, but it felt achievable as many of the beers would be consumed and crushed for easy transport on the river, rather than at the cabin. Doing a little math, at a height of 5.2 inches per can, the beer-amid was scheduled to be 4.2 feet tall. I began to draw out my blueprints and ordering the heavy machinery.
I began collecting every can I could get my hands on. “Are you done with that? Don’t throw that away, I am doing something with them,” I would say to the other guys. Once I got the first row and a part of the second, the rest of the guys joined in to help build our 8th Wonder of the World.
The collection of cans extended out of the cabin as well. We started collecting our cans from our truck bed snack breaks. Sure, some of the aluminum soldiers were lost due to crushing, but we did a decent job of bringing many of the unadulterated cans back.
We built the Beer-amid up, and upon 2/3 of the structure being built, we began expanding the base, and I began adjusting my blueprints. By the end of it, we had expanded the base out to 12 cans wide, aiming to build it to 12 cans tall, or 5 foot 2 inches. 78 beers.
I was proud. The rest of the guys might not have cared, but I looked forward to taking pictures. Alongside my blueprints, my portfolio resume was bound to get multiple job offerings at engineering firms around the globe. We were getting close.
On Saturday night, the final night of our weekend trip, we were scheduled to complete construction on the structure. We had two cans left. The final piece of the “roof”, plus the crowning achievement of the Beer-amid spire, cell tower, needle or whatever that silly contraption is on the top or every sky scraper.
Our buddy Tom is a joker. He is constantly scaring people in the woods, throwing rocks by us in the river while we are fishing, or acting out a hilarious joke. There is always something. But I didn’t see this one coming.
As I was walking over to place that second to last beer can, out pops Tom from the neighboring bedroom where I had been bunking up. Over his head came a swinging arm, carrying nothing other than my book The Magic of Thinking Big, and he hurled it straight through floor 4 to floor 7.
The Beer-amid shattered into 76 pieces, with the echo of aluminum dancing through the room. Tom’s face lit up with glee. My face became distraught with surprise and then horror from realizing my engineering job prospects just vanished.
Then silence.
Suddenly, after gathering all the details of the carnage that just happened, the room erupted with laughter!
“Did you see that?!”
“The Magic of Thinking Big! Haha that is so ironic!”
“Look at Ed’s face!”
Let’s just say Ed’s face wasn’t happy. I had been assaulted, or my career had at least. I was devastated.
There is no record of the event, so each man present is left to tell their own version. Some would say I was angry. Some would say I pouted for a bit. Others would say I cried. No one would be wrong. Tom got me, and I was wounded.
The night carried on, and the laughs started back up again. The Beer-amid was destroyed, unlikely to ever be resurrected. And after cleaning up the cans, was soon forgotten about. The final night of Poker continued on, and guys will be guys. Kids will be kids.
I am sad to say that my career prospects didn’t get a boost from that weekend, but with time and space it has created one of my favorite memories from the trip. In some ways, had we actually completed that structure, the memory of its magnificence wouldn’t have been remembered. But the unfortunate demise will make it memorable until the end.
So with that we can raise a toast: “Long live the Beer-amid, and long live being a kid!”