I found out that my friend, Jake Foster, died early Friday morning, one day short of his 78th birthday.

Because Saturday was his birthday, I was thinking about him and I planned to send a note once I was done mowing part of the pasture (I was trying to beat the rain). When I got in I had a note from Robyn, his wife, that he had passed away due to complications from ulcerative colitis.

I immediately went to the anger stage of grief, mainly being angry at myself for not making the time to see Jake when I had the chance. They had moved back to North Carolina from Texas several years ago but due to my own busy life I wasn’t able to make the time, and now it is too late.

I’ve been thinking a lot recently about Dunbar’s Number. This number is a theory that limits how many people with whom a person can maintain a stable social relationship, and it is estimated to be around 150. For me I think the number is a bit higher, more like 250 or 300, but between having a pretty stressful job and trying to maintain a farm I rarely get to see my friends in person. With the farm it is difficult for us to get away for even a few hours, and for similar reasons it is not always possible for our friends to visit us. I often have to settle for e-mail.

But one upside of having a job that involves travel is that I do try to see people when I’m near them, and the above picture was taken in 2022 when I was in Austin, Texas. They drove over an hour to meet me for dinner.

This is Jake and Robyn during that same meal.

Andrea and I moved to Chatham County in 1999, and Jake and Robyn moved in across the street in 2002. The house they bought was not very nice. It had been unoccupied for some time, there was some water damage, and it was pretty small.

That didn’t deter Jake at all. He was incredibly talented at building and repairing things, and not only did he repair the house he created an addition that doubled it in size. It was amazing. Andrea and I used to joke that it put the interiors shown in the Pottery Barn catalog to shame.

Jake was the last of the rugged individualists and he did a lot of work on his own. He had a B-series Kubota tractor that he used to help him with his projects, and he had created all sorts of additions to make it even more useful, such as welding a set of “forks” that could fit on the front bucket. When I first met him he was in a C-collar due to having some of his vertebrae fused to alleviate pain from an old injury, but that didn’t slow him down much.

After he had finished working on his house he told me he was a little bit bored, so I asked him if he wanted to do some work for us. Over the years he made a large number of improvements to our property, including extending the barn to add a wash stall, building a bin where we could put shavings for the horses, turning a gravel floor pole barn into an amazing “man cave” and adding a large, three bay carport so we could park the truck and horse trailer out of the weather.

He was also very frugal, and I want to stress that he wasn’t cheap. When we were discussing projects he would often start out with “I don’t want to spend your money, but …” followed by a suggestion that would make things last longer or easier to maintain for just a small premium. I always took his advice.

He was also very funny. I can remember we were working on the carport and he asked me how I wanted to tackle a particular issue. I had no clue so I said, “you’re the boss, you make the decision” to which he replied “If I’m the boss, why am I sweating?”

I got to work with Jake on a lot of smaller projects. He was great at plumbing, which is one of my weaknesses, and he would always drop what he was doing to come over to help us. I learned a lot about working in a shop, such as you never used compressed air to clean up around metal work, only brushes, since the air could put shavings into places like motors. If he needed to get around me I was to stay where I was and not move out of the way because more times than not I would end up moving right into his path.

Jake didn’t volunteer a lot about his life but you could get him to tell stories. He grew up on a poultry farm New Jersey where they raised mainly eggs. He then started working in a machine shop and really got into cars. He spent some time doing restorations, including on Rolls-Royce automobiles, and he used to race Porsches.

The North Carolina Museum of Art had a Porsche exhibit and I took him to it. He could tell me stories about almost every car there. There were some pictures of Porsches on the racetrack, and one showed a car in a turn where one of the front wheels had come up off the pavement. He said you could tell when that happened because the steering would become incredibly responsive.

When he was older he didn’t race anymore but he did like to play with radio-controlled cars. He used his tractor to build a dirt track on his property and some times he would have friends come over for a weekend racing around it.

He liked blues music and would often have it playing if I visited him in his shop. He was just so talented. We had a 2002 Jetta TDI that had developed a “crayon smell” which turns out was a known problem with the sound deadening material under the car’s carpets. He was able to take everything apart and replace it, but he knew enough to call some friends of his which resulted in him learning that you had to do a special trick when removing the seats or the airbags would go off. Everything he fixed for us turned out better than it was to begin with.

He also taught me how to shoot a pistol. I am not a firearms enthusiast in any form, but I wanted to go through the process of obtaining a pistol just to see what it was like. When I did eventually get it, he showed me how to use it, drilling into my head the importance of “trigger discipline” (you never put your finger on the trigger until you are ready to shoot), and he showed me how to clean it afterward.

Jake and Robyn decided to move to Texas in 2014 to be closer to family. Jake would drive anywhere but he hated to fly, so this would allow him to visit more often. We ended up buying a lot of things from him as he wouldn’t need them in Texas (they were not planning on buying a place with a lot of land). We still have what we call “Jake’s Tractor” which is the Kubota I was using to mow the pasture on the day I found out he’d passed.

He also sold me a Texas Bragg trailer that we use quite a bit. Jake being Jake had built sides made of 4x8 sheets of plywood so you could carry quite a bit and keep it out of the wind. I can remember the day before they were to sell their house he called me needing help getting the last bits of stuff out of his shop. I was cooking and immediately turned off the stove to go over to help, as he was always willing to drop everything to help us. It took a couple of hours to load everything up but then we parked it under the carport he built for us until he could deal with it later.

Jake and I made an unlikely pair of friends. He had grown up working with his hands whereas I had gone to a lot of fancy schools and worked at a desk. I lean a lot more liberal than he did but we always found common ground in the idea that good honest work is worth doing and should be rewarded.

I believe that no one is really gone as long as there is one person alive who remembers them, and I’m certain Jake’s legacy is safe because of all the lives he touched. To this day Andrea and I often approach a problem with the phrase “what would Jake do?”. He made me a better person and I will miss him.