Ed Riiska (Photo: Courtesy of the Riiska family.)

When my wife and I first visited Sandisfield almost 25 years ago, one of the very first people we got to know was the late Ed Riiska. This was by necessity.

Suzanne and I had just spent all our savings on a remote tract of woodland at the far end of Sears Road. This move had been a dream of ours for several years. Suzanne had grown up in Monterey, and she had wanted a retreat here to enjoy not only the natural beauty but also the distinctive pleasures of a rural Berkshire community.

I'd come from a proudly Yankee family on my father's side and western pioneers on my mother's side - she'd grown up in a tent on the Oregon prairie and a mining camp in the Rocky Mountains of Utah. When Suzanne and I were shown a little valley centering on a big beaver pond by local landowner Robert Liberman, we immediately fell in love.

There was just one problem, and that is how we came to know Ed Riiska.

The last mile of Sears Road to the entrance of where we hoped to make our home had not been maintained in many years. You could navigate it in a Jeep or ATV, but not in our family car or a contractor's pickup. My mother-in-law who was Monterey's Select Board chair advised us that we needed to consult the local road superintendent. That's how I met Ed.

As Sandisfield's old timers will recall, Ed was a taciturn but fair individual, one of those people who got things done. He reluctantly admitted that our stretch of Sears Road had never been de-listed from Town maps, which meant that it was still a public thoroughfare and as such was the Town's responsibility.

He asked me sternly if we really intended to build a home there; he'd had experience in the past with new arrivals who demanded upgrades to a road only to sell their enhanced property as soon as the work was done. I assured him that we were committed, and Ed decided we were in earnest.

Over time, as his budget permitted, Ed and his crew bulldozed boulders off the road and regraded it. The results were fairly primitive but passable, and Suzanne and I got a building permit.

My mother, bless her, offered to pay for the installation of a powerline, but when I went to Ed for his official approval to install the necessary poles, he initially refused. He was in a battle with Verizon, which had refused to move its poles when Ed had widened Town Hill Road.

The result of this impasse was that a quarter mile or more of the newly widened road had utility poles running down the middle of the southbound lane, and Ed told me I had to get those moved before he'd approve the installation of any more. When I pointed out to Ed that it was Eversource that was responsible for the poles on Sears Road, not Verizon, he grumbled but signed the necessary permit.

Home building is rarely simple, and Suzanne and I had to fire the first general contractor, a man from Dalton recommended by our architect. At the time, southern Berkshire County was in the midst of a building boom, and everyone local we contacted was busy working at huge mark-ups for plutocrats from New York City. Eventually we ended up hiring two friends of friends in Nebraska. Lee loved to travel and Troy wanted to experience the construction of a timber-framed house, and so they came to spend several months of camping out and building our home.

Lee and Troy weren't licensed in Massachusetts, so I had to assume the role of general contractor, even though I functioned mostly as a go-fer.

One day they had sent me into Great Barrington to get some supplies. When I returned, they were both laughing. I asked what the joke was, and Lee told me that "Your friend Ed Riiska stopped by."

I asked what he had wanted and Lee and Troy, both natives of small towns in Nebraska, laughed even harder.

"Ed said he'd gotten a small grant from the state of Massachusetts," Lee told me. "And he said, 'Tom's not too much of an *sshole, so I thought I might spend it on his road."

That, Lee and Troy assured me, was the best endorsement that an outsider like me would ever get in a small town.

"You can put that on your gravestone," Lee told me.

The next week, a teenaged boy from an excavation company in Monterey run by a childhood friend of Suzanne was busy pulling stumps, reaming out the roadside ditches, and spreading bank-run gravel in the low spots. Within weeks, Ed gave us a very functional road.

Then he went back to taking care of the rest of the community. And whenever I catch myself on the brink of doing something truly stupid, I think about Ed's judgment and try not to be too much of a you know what.

Invitation:

With Tom's and Suzanne's story of coming to Sandisfield, The Times begins an occasional series of how people discovered this hidden corner of the Berkshires, whether they arrived last year or are the third or fourth generation to make a home here. Write us a story about why you're out here in the woods with us, 400-700 words or so, and send it to editor@SandisfieldTimes.org or in the mail at PO Box 584, Sandisfield 01255.