In Memoriam: Jonathan Collins, 1984 - 2015

I met Jonathan in 1997. We were both early-teen boys, and quickly found friendship in the world that revolved around that small church in rural Western North Carolina attended by both our families. I was the newcomer, and he welcomed me into his influence.

Even at that young age, his life was filled with an imagination turned into reality. Most kids dream of wild creations and high-flying ideas and go no further, leaving their fantasies tucked safely between their ears. Jonathan was different.

He wanted to raise goats. By the time I arrived, this was already a reality, with three or four of his funny critters housed in a shed he had constructed with his own hands, high on the hill behind his parents house. One in particular, Pickles, was his favorite, a gentle and quirky monochrome ungulate. She would set into dance when Jonathan made his way up the hill, and follow him around when she was freed from her fenced confines. It might not occur to folks that goats can be playful, but that didn't stop Jonathan, whose favorite play was standing on his tip-toes to encourage his goats in play-butting, dropping their heads towards each other in a pretend crash of skulls.

He was a confidant. During sleepovers, we would whisper to each other of things we knew nothing of. Of love and girls and the future. My overtones were as roving as my life has been since leaving the Holler. His was as steady as he would prove himself to be. From the first time he laid eyes on Julianna, my younger sister, he knew his path and never strayed from it. Nearly ten years later, one night in the woods on property he had scrimped and schemed to purchase, he led her into the enclosure of a gazebo he had built with his own hands. There he told her what everyone already knew. It was storybook quality, this love of theirs. Within a few short years, they were married and keeping house in the home they built together. First a son, then a daughter warmed their home, their love multiplying in these adorable images of themselves.

He was confident. Jonathan exuded a surety about the rightness of his path. He seemed to me to always know the route he had chosen was the only one for him, and then to seek it with single-minded determination. As a boy, insecure and unsure, I at times perceived this as gravitas, arrogance. We used to tease him, his peers, "Hey, JC, how many cylinders is that airplane firing on, far above, can't you tell?" Ignoring our petty foibles, he would answer with disdain. As I came into my own, I knew he had reason for such confidence. I have known few men who knew where they were heading and set out in that direction as surely as Jonathan.

Jonathan loved nothing more than to dream up a machine, structure or implement and then create it. With skills inherited from his father and grandfather, both inventors and tinkerers, he made a wide variety of ever more outlandish and practical pieces of equipment. My favorite example was a crawler machine. Using a small Briggs & Stratton as the locomotion, he designed a lawn-mower size vehicle with wheels of angle-iron tread to crawl straight up slopes. His willingness to revise an idea and continually improve upon it was refreshing education for my crippling perfectionism. When the first model of his creation developed issues with the tread and had insufficient power to tackle an incline, he tore it apart, mocking up a series of belts to gear its power down; cutting the wheels apart with a blow-torch and re-welding them. This he did over and over again, regardless of the project, delighting in coming to perfection by degrees.

This machine was just one of many. He made a mini-dirt bike, scary as hell and fun to jet around on. His tinkering was not limited to machines he devised from scratch. He taught me to use a blow-torch and mig-welder when we took a brushguard from my parent's Suburban and modified it to fit my Nissan truck. He was always adjusting something on his Highboy tractor, Nissan truck, Porsche sports car, Yahama 2-stroke dirt bike, or whatever else it was he was zooming around in.

Two years older than him, I had a driver's license and truck first. I remember the day I received his call, ever the entrepreneur, offering a business deal to join in his lawn mowing enterprise. In this fashion, we spent several summers together, my truck and his gear, trimming and landscaping the yards of clients he had held for several years already.

We worked on job sites together, for Gary Banks, Lee Forbes, Matthew Klein. We made music together, using our voices and our violins. Together, we attended bible study, gave sermons, sang to the elderly, built objects and explored woods.

The last time I saw Jonathan, nearly two years ago, as usual we toured his property, taking him from point to point, inquiring about what this latest invention was, or what this new project might be. His most recent device was a log splitter, driven by portions of a tractor. His next dreamed of creation was a gasification propulsion setup for his Dodge Dakota. Julianna was pregnant with Lydia. My girlfriend and I stayed until late, talking on whatever our heart's desired to discuss. My girlfriend was so enamored with his handiwork that if Julianna had not already snapped him up, I am sure she would have been knocking on his door.

Jonathan, I miss you terribly. Ever since I heard we would never see you again, memories of you have flooded my mind as forcefully as the tears now washing my eyes. I thought age would find us all growing decrepit, reclining as we watched your children grow. I thought I had more time, so much more time to come home for weekends and continue knowing you through a day spent at your home, staying late at night to talk eagerly, breathlessly, about our interests and how we perceived the world. You were taken far too soon. We are all impoverished by your absence.