Perils of the big-boned

By T. W. Burger 

At a campsite on the coast of Nova Scotia:

So, today I’m working away at my genuine L.L. Bean roll-up camping table (I’ve used it as a traveling desk for at least 20 years,) while sitting on my genuine L.L. Bean folding “What-A-Chair.”

I leaned over to get my briefcase off the rocky ground.

Something went SNAP!

Suddenly, I was lying on my side, looking out at the sea in the gathering dark.

I waited a bit to see if anything would start hurting or even bleeding. Nothing did.

Apparently, the matte black steel tubing network that the Bean engineers created to make a sturdy comfortable folding chair did NOT mean for writers who weigh a bit more than 300 pounds to sit in it. OK, OK, so it’s a sizeable bit more than 300 in those days, but less than 350.

It was not the first chair I had killed.

Back in the late 60s, when I was a mere slip of a lad at maybe 220, I had just been having a conversation with my first wife about my diet. I said I wasn’t really THAT heavy, just big-boned.

At that moment, I turned in the kitchen chair, intending to get up. The seat of the chair turned with me, as did the top of the legs. The chair’s feet stayed put, and I dropped straight down, to the accompaniment of a lot of cracking, splintering noises and a big thud.

“Well, maybe I could stand to lose a FEW pounds,” said, in as dignified a manner as possible, under the circumstances.

In the summer of ’89, I was sitting in my un-air-conditioned apartment on Lincoln Square in Gettysburg. It was over 100 outside, God knows how warm where I worked at my computer desk, pounding away on a story while sitting in one of those ubiquitous white extruded plastic chairs.

Suddenly, it seemed that the keyboard and desk were rising into the air.

It turns out, the chair, softened by the extreme heat, was just collapsing, slowly, into something that resembled an arthritic crab. I couldn’t straighten it out, so it went into the trash.

Next, I bought this knee-stool thing. They were all the rage, for a while. You basically kneel on a pad while your butt rests on a little cushion. It was quite comfortable and kept my back nice and straight. It was made of two-inch ash wood dowels and seemed quite sturdy.

Note the operative word, “seemed.”

That one gave no warning at all, just a loud “bang” as both main dowels gave way with a loud crack and dropped the side-bar, with all too-many pounds of me on top of it, across the backs of my lower calves.

That stung.

I think people half a block down heard me cussing.

And now this Bean chair. I took it back, since I was only a little more than an hour from their HQ where I was vacationing. They guaranteed everything they made, back then. Even against the big-boned.

T. W. Burger was raised in town and graduated from Athens High School in 1967, then worked as a driver of everything from fork trucks to garbage trucks,

He is now a semi-retired journalist who resides on the banks of Marsh Creek, just outside of Gettysburg, Pa.