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river rat: D is for vengeance.
Twenty years ago this July, the greatest prank I have had to endure was played upon me out on the river and this past weekend my ten month old son helped me fulfill the oath of vengeance sworn against two of the perpetrators who so cruelly toyed with my mental and physical well being.
Two decades ago on the evening of our mother's funeral nothing seemed more appropriate to my brothers Garth and Curt than to make our way out to Skull Island for a night spent drinking. My roommate from college had the misfortune to have been traveling with me on the week when Mom died and it certainly seemed a drinking trip to the island was the smallest pleasure we could afford him for having endured the emotionally stormy funeral.
We set out with three cases of Old Milwaukee pounders and a few bottles of wine. None of us were prepared for a full-on river excursion. We were traveling light-flip flops and cargo shorts with tee-shirts and sweat shirts. None of us had suitable river sneakers or boots and thought nothing of it when we borrowed our eldest brother Dave's john boat and poled out to the cabin. We'd be there for twelve hours, drinking and eating, then we'd pole back in for breakfast at the diner.
Arriving somewhere late in the afternoon and already buzzing on beer and wine we started a rampaging fire in the firebox Dave built next to the cabin a few years earlier. Garth had the good sense to add four whole roasting chickens and a roll of paper towels to his beer shopping list and in no time we devoured the birds, standing by the fire pulling parts off as our clouded judgment deemed them cooked, lighting greasy paper towels and throwing them at each other for laughs.
It was a fine evening full of heat lightning and laughs. The river was low so we opted for morning use of the rope swing-a rare flash of good judgment on our parts-and instead sat quietly on driftwood benches watching sparks drift high into the water birch canopy as the fire died and the empties piled pyramid shaped in the coal sand. We all passed out under the stars amid the groan of hundreds of bullfrogs and our own outgassing.
Come morning our hangovers' mild insistence drummed us awake. We'd taken only a few gallons of drinking water and no food for breakfast, so our plan of action centered on a quick boat trip to shore for a grand dinner of scrapple, eggs and hash browns at Lowe's Diner.
I slid down the dark sand bank where the night before I'd moored Dave's boat to the thick exposed root of a birch whose life was slowly losing its battle with the river during high water. The bank was so steep and my eyes so bleary that keeping my sights on the loose footing and my slippered feet kept me from noticing that the boat was gone until my toes were already in the water where I thought I'd left it.
"Alright you guys." I laughed. "Which one of you smartasses moved the boat?"
No response. Garth had his little radio cranked up with a Bowie tune kicking out loud enough to drown my voice. While near the water I looked around for an obvious spot where one of them might have moved the aluminum hull away from where I'd chained it. Nothing. I couldn't see anything or any obvious location where it could have drifted other than away. I knew I'd chained the boat well, so someone had to move it, right? I climbed the bank and broke the news to the guys that unless one of them was ready to confess to moving the boat, it had been stolen.
That's when I figured out that a lost boat isn't anything like a runaway dog. You can't holler for it, "Here Boaty-Boaty-Boat!" and have it come lapping back up stream ready to please you by keeping your ass dry on the ride in to shore.
We decided to split up and wade downstream, looking in all eddies and snags that might have caught it. I agreed with the activity because it was the only thing we could do, other than walk directly in to shore. We men, we do stuff when there's a crisis, right? It doesn't have to be productive, just so long as the wheels are moving or spinning, or in this case, splashing.
Walking over moss-covered ridges in the river wearing flip flops is a little like trying to climb a greased pole at a country fair using only your buttocks muscles. A foot finds purchase on the top of a ridge only to skip off at an unpredictable angle, knocking one's shin hard on the peak, or worse, wracking gonads mercilessly against granite and lichens. A note about wracked nuts on granite river ridges: 1/64th of an inch of soft lichens does not a cushion make.
After an hour of cussing and bleeding down the river, having walked almost a mile through channels and eddies, I see off in the distance a recognizable shape emerging from the morning fog. Dave is poling his boat upstream towards us. I know its Dave poling and not another fisherman or townie because of how he maneuvers the boat without making it seem like work. Watching him navigate the river is a pleasure except right at that moment in time when bloody shins and cut feet spanked even the most rudimentary understanding of pleasure as a concept from my brain.
I turned around and slogged my way up towards Curt and Garth, yelling to our friend Joe to head back to Skull Island, embarrassed and ashamed that I must have not tied up Dave's boat very well, also knowing that I would never live it down that his boat escaped my drunken and amateurish scouting skills. There goes my shot at a knot-tying badge.
He passed me, poling quietly up to me and overtaking me. I kept my head down and looked up only as he was just next to me. His face spit pure anger onto my wet head. As the youngest in our family I grew to despise the look that said, "you stupid little shit" even when I knew I had been a stupid little shit.
When we all met back at the island and gathered our mess, Dave told us that someone called him in the middle of the night from the Ferry Boat Campsites way down river. Luckily for us, he said, the person who saw the empty boat drifting past them was able to go out in the night and retrieve it and, luckier still, happened to be one of Dave's duck hunting buddies.
"Do you know what it's like to get a call at 3:00 a.m. telling you that basically your little brothers don't give a shit about your two thousand dollar boat?" He scolded us all but was staring at me.
Dave poled us in to shore in silence and for four years we thought nothing of it, forgetting the incident for the most part and chalking up the experience to inexperience and inebriation. I did spend a great deal of time trying to figure out just how that boat came unchained from the root where I'd fastened it. I could've sworn I snapped the combination lock shut around the chain, even remembering testing it with a good tug. I can hear the click of that tug when I close my eyes. It turned out that I was right-that I did lock the boat to the root.
Four years into the mystery, visiting with my brother-in-law he spilled the beans about how on the evening of the day we planted our mother in a hole up on the hill overlooking the river, Dave came up with a terrific way to cheer up our father. He convinced Dad and our sister's husband John to go out with him on the river and steal the boat we'd borrowed and then fabricate a story to make us feel guilty about having been irresponsible drunks who nearly lost his valuable boat for good.
Our sister drove the truck that dropped the three men and Dave's other duck boat in the water a mile above the island. Dad later bragged about how Dave didn't hit a single rock or even brush loudly against a grass patch on their stealthy approach to make off with the boat. He said that when Dave saw the lock had been shut, he used his lighter to see the ring and dial in the combination before drifting back to town with our only dry means of transportation.
-- Cut to this past weekend in Northern Virginia where we celebrated the graduation of my sister Vicki and her husband John's eldest daughter:
We're all sitting on the porch on Saturday afternoon telling stories and Dad and John re-tell the story of the night of Mom's funeral when we "lost" the boat. Our oldest sister and her husband had never heard the story before and HA-HA-HA that was sure funny all over again. As with every time the story has been told my father laughed until tears welled up in his eyes and John slapped his knee 'til I thought it might bruise.
"John," I smiled and announced to everyone, "I'm getting you back right now, just like I always promised I would."
John and Vicki looked nervously around the porch and everyone laughed as I continued my "long gone postal" stare at John.
Sitting on my lap, bouncing and drooling away like a champion, was my son, Adam. During our visit Adam ate and drank with the family, some of whom he'd met for the first time. He ate and ate and ate, and well, when babies eat, they poop. And when Adam filled a diaper, I kept it in a plastic grocery bag, banking his excretions like gold, waiting for an opportunity and when the rest of the family went off to church early Sunday morning, I snuck down to John's woodworking shop and made some long overdue deposits.
Those little bundles of urine and crap were tucked neatly into a planer-jointer, a wooden toolbox full of chisels, a band saw, and a table saw. I mashed one into a master mechanic's set of ratchets and wrenches, having to lean my full weight on the latch to get it to spring shut. Whistling the theme from Deliverance, I blissfully managed to lay one of Adam's finest examples of the modern miracle of digestion "open faced" in the shroud of a drill press, where it is my most sincere hope that it will spin wildly atop the shaft unchecked the next time John needs to make a hole in something.
D is also for diaper.
