Go BIG or Go F*CK Yourself

the Earnest Pursuit of Personal Growth

by Kevin N Ladd

Introduction

Hi! Before I get into details, background, and anecdotes, I just want to thank you for taking the time to read my story. I hope my musings and life lessons entertain you and, ultimately, you find them to be inspirational in some way.

I am not here to tell you to make your bed every day (I don’t) or list the top 9 things successful people do—not that that doesn’t have value for a lot of people, it’s just not what I am here to do.

To give you a general outline of the story you are about to read and why I decided to write it, you should know that most, if not all, of the things I have accomplished since I can remember were challenging. And more than a few of them were a direct result of someone telling me I couldn’t do them. My advice, if you happen to want it, is to not only not let those voices of dissent and doubt dissuade you; use them as
FUEL. Heck ‘em!

From a diminutive, swarthy cook at my first restaurant job to teachers, counselors, and professors doubting my ability to get an art showing or move to a city that’s nearly triple the population of the entire state I grew up in, I have virtually metabolized doubt to drive me to do many things over the last several decades. Sometimes that doubt was my own, to be honest.

Don’t get me wrong, I had some very important mentors along the way, too. They were incredibly helpful to me. But there will typically be more detractors than cheerleaders as you are figuring things out. That has been my experience, anyway.

I have continued to learn well beyond my formal education. Through travel and curiosity, I have learned FAR more since leaving college than I ever did in it. Welding classes turned into actual projects, and building a Mission-style birch bed from raw materials on the back deck of my apartment. Buying an old motorcycle to learn how it works and how to restore and repair it. And then actually repairing it on the side of a busy highway with just the tools under the seat.

And then selling that bike at a considerable profit. And then buying a second one several years later with the same plan. It all began with curiosity and that fuel.

I had wanted to ride motorcycles and SCUBA dive since I was a small boy growing up in a small town in Maine. I wanted to hang glide and skydive. I wanted to travel to tropical islands and see Europe. I have done all of those things and more, and I won’t stop until I die doing them. Or die of something else, obviously. Or am rendered physically unable to… well, you get the point.

August at Lobster Lake circa 1993

Large Space

CHAPTER ONE

Humble Beginnings and Reasonable Expectations

What’s that song about being “born on the river”? I was actually born and raised not far from a decent-sized river in Maine myself. The Kennebec River runs from Moosehead Lake in Northwest Piscataquis about 170 miles to the Atlantic Ocean at Popham Beach, one of Maine’s few real beaches. Mostly, Maine’s coastline is quite rocky, making the Atlantic in that part of the country largely inaccessible to civilians. The Kennebec also runs through Augusta, which is Maine’s capital and the city where I was born, and Waterville, the town where I was raised.

Colby College began its existence along the shores of the Kennebec River, like so many of the major buildings did at the time. Colby College was originally founded in 1813 as the Maine Literary and Theological Institution. Several years later, in 1821, it was renamed Waterville College. The college struggled a bit in the early 20th century until it received a bunch of money from the city of Waterville and a few organizations like the Rockefeller Foundation. With that money, they were able to move Colby College to a 700-acre piece of land on Mayflower Hill, where Colby built the bucolic campus by the forest I visit every time I am back in Waterville. I bring my motorcycle to Maine late in the summer each year, and one of the first rides I take is to and through that lovely campus. Back in the 1990s, I actually did some renovations to one of the dorms and a few other buildings when I was working for Sampson Construction.

I grew up two and a half miles from Colby’s campus. It was in the parking lot of that campus where I saw my first BMW automobile. I think maybe that was where my desire for the finer things really grew. Though I didn’t know it until I was in my teens, I was what a Colby College student would refer to as a “townie.” I honestly wasn’t familiar with the term until I was around 19 or so and working at the Last Unicorn restaurant, where all of the Colby students would eat. Most of the Colby students back then were born into families of wealthy lawyers, doctors, and politicians from Massachusetts, New York, and Connecticut. Forty odd years later, it is quite a bit more diverse, even as the cost of tuition and lodging continue to rise. It would seem Colby now has a substantial endowment that allows them to attract and enroll a significantly more diverse student body.

I’m focusing on Colby because I think it was more or less a portal into the rest of the world for me—and maybe for other young people who hadn’t ventured much beyond Waterville yet. Or at least the rest of New England and New York, which felt quite foreign to us Watervillians. These exotic folks would show up in early September in their luxury cars and nice clothes and return a month or so later to check in on their progeny, whom they’d left in the care of Colby’s administration and staff.

Back then, I just remember wondering where all of these wealthy students grew up and what their lives were like up to, and including, attending Colby College. Have you ever just been riding in a car and seen somebody outside their home walking toward the front door and just wondered what their life was like? Especially if it was a big house, a nice one. I used to wonder about all of those strangers as we drove past their houses on our way to my grandparents’ house out in the country, past Newport, Dexter, and Milo, near Brownville, Maine. As I grew up and each time I walked through the campus, that feeling grew stronger in me. I just wondered what it was like to live in Boston, New York, or even just Portland, Maine. What was it like to live anywhere with tall buildings and live music at bars? And what was it like to be able to afford to enjoy all of those things? The first time I visited an elderly friend of the family who lived in an apartment in a fairly large building, I didn’t understand the concept and was so puzzled by the experience. I was such a hayseed.

I was born in late spring in 1969, the day after Memorial Day. It was an important and celebrated event for my parents and very few others. No gender reveal cupcakes or lawn signs: just my folks bringing me back to their little apartment on Water Street, right across the street from the Hathaway Mill, where my dad worked. My folks had been married for less than two years, and we were a family of four who had already outgrown our two-bedroom dwelling.

The Moon landing and Woodstock were just a few months away and soldiers were still killing each other in Viet Nam. The Civil Rights Movement was ongoing, and I was just a baby, blissfully unaware of all of the fucked-up shit going on in the world into which I had just recently been born.

Until many, many years later, I didn’t know shit about shit, growing up without so much as a color TV or cable television until I was finishing up grade school.

In 1971, when I was still a toddler, we had a four-bedroom Cape Cod home built on a lot on the north side of town. It was technically a four-bedroom, one-bathroom house, but one of the bedrooms on the first floor—the one across from my parents’ room—was used as a “den,” which left two second-floor bedrooms for Karen, Derek, and me to share. Derek was born in March, less than two months after we moved into the house. By St. Patrick’s Day of 1971, we were a family of five, living in our own house, just four years after my parents tied the knot.

We moved into our newly built home that January because that was just the way things worked out. Nobody wants to move all of their belongings and tiny kids in January in Maine, I can assure you. My sister Karen occupied the room on the north side of the house, just across the little hall at the top of the stairs from Derek and me, who shared the south bedroom. That living arrangement continued all through high school.

I grew up in a family of five (initially anyway, Jason was born when I was in junior high), and Derek and I had sort of an alliance based on gender and proximity, I suppose. That, and simple immaturity. We often pestered our older sister, teasing her mercilessly at times, just out of boredom. Poor Karen. She’s one of the nicest people you could ever meet, but she had to put up with our bullshit for many, many years.

Karen was the “good one” and Derek and I were the troublemakers. I recall one time, in our early teens, when we had all watched a Stephen King movie, Christine. For absolutely no apparent reason—and an inspiration I can’t seem to recall all these years later—Derek and I repeatedly pretended to confuse the characters’ names while discussing the movie with Karen. Our intent was to confuse and frustrate her, perhaps out of sheer boredom. It’s not like we had iPads and smartphones to entertain us back in 1984.

If you still aren’t sure whether to buy my book, just contact me and let me know what you think of the story so far. Maybe I will send you a free copy. Thanks for reading.