My good friend David Hval died on July 4 at the age of 70.  We first met when we were college freshmen in the fall of 1964.  We were assigned to different rooms on the same long corridor on the third floor of a dorm.

David soon became the leader of a crew of troublemakers known as the DV5.  (The Dave Clark Quintet was a British band that came to the U.S. after the Beatles.  They changed their name to the DC5 when they learned that no one knew what a quintet was.  Their name inspired the Hval gang.)

Their rivals on the floor were a group named Dirt, Incorporated.  As a taunt, the DV5 would sing “Stronger than Dirt,” which were the words to a jingle connected to Ajax cleaning products.  The two groups played practical jokes on each other to keep themselves and the rest of us entertained.

The two gangs would call a truce from time to time to carry out work that neither of them cared to do separately.  It was here that David could put his spectacular athletic talent to use.  David never participated in sports.  He wouldn’t have wanted to engage in an activity bounded by rules, coaching, or competition.  But his athletic freelancing outside of sports was impressive.

The third floor of a dorm presents challenges if you want to haul a lot of beer from ground level.  You can carry it, but you might get caught (and have to share).  Anyway, who wants to carry a lot of beer up two winding staircases?  People go to college so that they don’t have to do that kind of grunt work.

The far end of the dorm, the end away from where the RAs were housed, had a small elevator, a dumb waiter, for carrying cleaning supplies and the like.  Unfortunately, it could not be operated without a key.  David solved that problem.  With complete ease, he climbed a three-story high drain pipe, hoisted himself onto the roof, and figured out how to work the dumb waiter’s key override.  The two gangs’ beer could flow uphill without further trouble.

Sometimes a truce was more spontaneous.  Someone would crank up a record player and play “Wipeout” at full volume.  Someone else would yell “Surf’s Up!”  The two rival gangs would instantly join forces and flood the hallway with soapy water.  The individual rooms had doorsills so nothing more than a few towels at the end of the corridor was needed to keep the floor well lubed.  The game was on to see who could surf the farthest in bare feet without wiping out.  I understand that the college authorities tried to prohibit this activity.  Why would anyone object to soap and water?

We knew some people in common, found the same things funny, and became friends.  We stayed in touch after college.  I would occasionally visit him and his then-wife in the town of Brockton, Massachusetts.  They later moved to Mystic, Connecticut, where their daughter was born.  By that time, I was married myself.  Margy and I arranged to visit the new member of the Hval clan shortly after she was born.

When we got there, the house was empty.  There was no sign of them.  I knew the woman next door – she was known as Gramma Durphy – well enough to say hello.  I asked her where David and his family had gone.  Gramma Durphy was a woman whose mind entertained only a limited range of subjects.  She was a superb baker, but she baked only one thing – white bread.  David told me that he once asked her how to make rye bread.  She said she had no idea and invited him to try a slice of her white bread.

That same one-track mind was at work when we asked Gramma D what happened to Dave, wife, and child.  She told us that there had been a falling out with the landlady – Dave’s mother-in-law – and invited us in to have some bread.

I’m proud to say that we tracked them down.  This was 1972.  There were no cell phones, no internet, nothing.  The Dark Ages.  We figured that they had to be camping somewhere.  We used a pay phone – everyone carried change in those days in case you had to make a call – and got hold of a (maybe the) helpful person in the Connecticut State Parks system.  It was a slow time of year – October if I recall correctly – and Hval is an unusual name (outside of Norway), so he was able to locate them.  We bought some supplies for them and less than an hour later, we pulled into their campsite.

I can still see the look on David’s face.  He was on alert at first – who is pulling into my campsite?  Then he was relieved when he saw it was us.  Then he broke into a huge smile, something he didn’t often do.

We were friends for life, but with very little in common.  Different skills, different interests, diametrically opposed political views, differing goals in life.  None of that mattered.  Whenever we got together, we started a new and interesting conversation.  The frequency of those conversations diminished as time went by but not the quality.

At some point, he and his wife divorced and he connected with another woman (I don’t want to use the names of living individuals).  The same spirit of adventure that launched a college freshman to the roof of a three-story building was still alive.  They worked for Greenpeace for a while, whether as employees or volunteers I don’t know.  They sailed in a Greenpeace ship (forget the name) as true believers. After that, they spent some time coasting in Spain, earning money by doing odd jobs.  David never studied Spanish that I know of, but he was able to conduct business in Spanish with native speakers.

They had four children together, three boys who are fairly close in age and a daughter who is several years younger.  They returned to the U.S. and settled in Kerhonkson, New York, a small town in the Catskills, also known as the Jewish Alps.  (Just think about how many of the great comedians got their start only a few miles from David’s house.  Henny Youngman: The Doctor says, “You’ll live to be 60!”  “I AM 60!” “See, what did I tell you?”)

Our family was on an east coast trip and we stopped by to visit overnight shortly after they moved in.  They had indoor plumbing – I remember that very well – but no indoor facilities for cooking.  The stove was a circle of rocks in the back yard surrounding a wood fire with a metal grate on top.  At our next visit, the kitchen had been fitted out with an antique gas stove that must have come from a restaurant, or maybe a soup kitchen.  It was the size of a small room.

Dave had excellent cabinetmaking and wood-working skills.  At one point, we wrote to tell him that we had bought a house.  (This would be about 1977.)  He sent a package in reply.  The note inside congratulated us on buying a horse, but gently suggested that it was long past time for us to consider settling down and buying a house instead.  He included a hand-carved spatula with a beautiful serpentine handle as a way of encouraging us to take that bold step.

Dave ran a small business where he used his fine woodworking skills to help remodel houses.  His work exposed him to a lot of people in the area.  He developed a wide range of acquaintances notwithstanding his serious and taciturn demeanor. (Not to stereotype the people of Norway, but it’s not a huge surprise that a person named Hval would present these characteristics).

One of those acquaintances was Pete Seeger, the folk singer, composer and instrumentalist.  Seeger greatly admired David.  David – never one to brag about himself – proudly reported that Seeger had told him that it was a lucky day for their valley when David moved into it.  Dave enjoyed having the approval of such a well-known and widely admired person.

Seeger died in 2014 at the age of 94.  By then, David had been diagnosed with cancer.  His symptoms had baffled the local doctor.  David had worked on the house of someone who knew a prominent oncologist at Sloane Kettering in New York.  She bought him a couple of extra years through an aggressive course of treatment.  The disease seemed to be at bay.

Margy and I visited him shortly after he got back from “cancer camp” as he called it.  When we got there, we saw no one in front but heard activity in the back.  There was an old guy working with a younger guy to load some wood into a truck.  I couldn’t figure out who the old guy was until I saw that smile again and saw it was David.  Cancer and chemo had taken a horrific toll, but he was the same David.  Grizzled, run over by something powerful and bad-tempered, but the same guy, looking at life the same way.

His birthday is also our wedding anniversary.  I sent an email last December to congratulate him on reaching 70 and to mention that we were celebrating our 45^th anniversary.  He wrote back to say that Margy and I must be getting used to each other by now.

He would send some writing every now and again.  He mostly retold his adventures over the years, profiled interesting people he had met, that kind of thing.  I loved reading about his travels and asked for more.  I hope he got a lot more down on paper, but I have probably seen as much of the Collected Works of David Hval as I am going to.

By the fall of 2016, cancer had resumed its attack.  Our last few exchanges related to an incident where David had damaged some property and was looking for a way to make things up to the other person.  I had just come into a collection of pie recipes, a free add-on to the purchase of some oven mitts.  I suggested that the gift of a home-made pie would probably set things right.  Dave asked me to send a recipe.  This got tricky because the author of the collection warns that any transmission of her recipes is a violation of international copyright laws carrying a minimum fine – a minimum – of $150,000.

This put us both in a tight spot, but he got his recipe.  The pie dough is made using lard and David was able to get his hands on ten pounds of lard from a recently slaughtered pig just a few miles away.  They say that when you need the lard, you find the pig.  I hope the pie turned out well and that the gift of food solved the little problem that Dave had caused.

The last thing he wrote to me was that he was about to start an experimental treatment.  Apart from my wife, children, and grandchildren, there is no one on earth to whom I feel as close a bond.

David Hval. December 19, 1946 – July 4, 2017.