“Bill Thomas,” announced Jimmie Frise, “has got the sciatica.”
“It’s little wonder,” I reflected, “the life he leads. From the time the ice goes out in the spring until the ice comes again in the fall, he’s out in that boat of his…”
“It’s about the boat,” interrupted Jim, “that I want to speak to you. How’d you like to help me put it away for the winter?”
“You mean,” I protested, “pull it up?”
“It’s a very simple matter,” assured Jim. “All we do is skid it up on some rollers, on to the beach…”
“Nothing,” I declared emphatically, “doing!”
“It’s a small thing to do,” pleaded Jimmie, “for a guy like Bill. The poor chap laid up cold with the sciatica…”
“A small thing!” I cried. “To haul a great big motor boat up on to a beach? Why, it’s work for a gang of 10 men!”
“Not at all,” soothed Jim. “The two of us can handle it easily. Bill has got all the equipment organized for us, All we do is to lay some two-by-six timbers on the beach and down a little way into the water. Then, we hitch a rope from the axle of the car…”
“What car?” I demanded loudly.
“Well, your car,” explained Jim, patiently. “As you know, mine’s laid up.”
“I see,” I said bitterly. “Somebody’s car has got to have the rear end of it torn out hauling a great big power boat out of the water.”
“Listen,” pleaded Jimmie. “Greg, it isn’t a great big power boat. It’s just a little old runabout, a little gasoline launch. It’s only 20 feet long; and with rollers under it, laid on those two-by-six scantlings, a car can haul it up on the beach as easy as if it were a wheelbarrow.”
“I think boat owners,” I enunciated, “should attend to the job of putting their boats away themselves.”
“I’ve just told you,” riled Jimmie, “the poor guy has got the sciatica. His knees are all swollen up. He can hardly walk.”
“And how did he get the sciatica?” I persisted. “All through this same silly boat! He puts it in the water the minute the ice goes out. He rushes down to the waterfront every afternoon, the minute his office closes, and spends his time fiddling and pottering around that boat. Many a night he sleeps right on the boat instead of going home to bed like a Christian. Every week-end he goes on ridiculous cruises, a few miles east or a few miles west, bouncing and bumping over the waves.”
“You and I,” reminded Jim kindly, “have been on many a nice little cruise with Bill.”
“Not for six or seven years,” I countered. “I have no use for boats, except to sit in for fishing. I can’t see any sport in sitting in a boat, going no place, just for the pleasure of going!”
“Every man to his taste,” said Jim. “Lots of people have no use for fishing. Okay, you have no use for boating. But you must admit Bill gets a great deal of pleasure and joy out of his boat.”
“Also,” I pointed out, “the sciatica. Just at the time he has to go to the trouble of putting his boat away for the winter.”
“Well, maybe I can get somebody else,” sighed Jim wearily.
“Oh, I’ll do it,” I subsided. “But I think this is one of the occasions on which I am entitled to squawk a little bit.”
“You’ll probably enjoy yourself,” assured Jimmie. “Boats are a lot of fun.”
“Boats,” I retorted, “are clumsy, damp, cold, heavy, lifeless. They smell.”
“Boats,” corrected Jim, “have a longer association with mankind than any other vehicle or maybe any other tool. Ages before the first crude wheel was invented, men were travelling up and down the rivers of the world, and along the shores of the world, in boats. The first man who ever tried to escape from his tribe jumped on a floating log and travelled downstream to freedom and adventure. The waterways of the world were the first highways of the world. Thousands of years before, the first roads were built, commerce had been established by boats, even if they were only crude. dugouts, and rafts.”
“They served their purpose,” I admitted, “like the spinning wheel, until something better was devised.”
“I’m trying,” explained Jim, “to show you that boats are involved in the very nature of humanity. Since they were the only means of travel, exploration, adventure and commerce for countless centuries, they appealed to men of masculine and adventurous character. To this day, boats have a powerful fascination for manly men.”
“Oh, is that so?” I scoffed.
“Down through the ages,” pursued Jim, “has been handed this love of boats, from generation to generation. And Canadians, more than any other race on earth, should love boats. Because they have the Atlantic on one side of them, the Pacific on another, the Arctic ocean on the third side. And, for more than half the width of Canada, they have the Great Lakes as their fourth sea-girt boundary.”
“Well,” I said, “speaking for myself and the great majority of Canadians, I like to puddle around on a few rivers and some inside channels and plenty of small summer resort lakes. But as for the ocean or the wide open Great Lakes, they’re all very well to cool the air for me, and to supply a little commercial fish…”
“You’re right,” cut in Jim curiously. “There is something mighty funny about the attitude of the average Canadian toward the sea and the Great Lakes. By all odds we should be a maritime people, with love of the wide seas and boundless lakes very strong in our make up. But, except for a few small yacht clubs scattered along our waterfronts, and a couple of dowdy old excursion steamers plying a tenuous trade here and there, the Canadian attitude toward the great waters that surround us amounts almost to – fear!”
“That’s natural,” I submitted. “Big water is uncomfortable. And dangerous.”
“We come of a maritime race, the British,” reflected Jim.
“Maritime my eye!” I exclaimed. “There’s another of those myths! The British have been marooned on a small island for centuries. For centuries, the only way they could get off the island was in boats. For centuries they’ve been getting off the island as fast as boat could carry them. Generation by generation, the young Britons went to sea in order to escape from the sea. For one that remained at sea, hundreds escaped to far lands, deep lands, where you couldn’t even smell the sea: and there they stayed! The far-flung British empire was founded by Britishers escaping from the island and looking for dry land: the dryer the better – Canada, India, Australia, Africa – good inland land from which you can’t see the sea…”
“You are tampering,” interrupted Jim, “with a noble tradition.”
“The noblest service boats have rendered humanity,” I summed up, “is to have carried men to parts of the earth where boats aren’t necessary.”
“Poor old Bill Thomas,” smiled Jimmie. “I’m glad can’t hear these sentiments and him trusting you to haul his beloved boat out…”
My old car, as Jim pointed out, has new tires. And these, he explained, would bite into the sand and gravel when it came to the actual traction necessary to drag the boat up on to the beach.
We drove down to the waterfront area where Bill keeps his boat moored out to a mooring buoy. It is a 20 foot launch with a small plywood cabin over the forward part. It isn’t quite a cabin cruiser, though you can sleep in it.
Bill had left, at a small boathouse nearby, some 12 foot scantlings of two-by-six, and half a dozen large rollers, like oversize tent poles. These, with a length heavy rope, were to be used in very simply hauling the boat ashore.
“I don’t see Bill’s boat,” I exclaimed as we drove out on to the shingle of the beach.
“There she is, the black one,” pointed Jim.
“I thought she was white,” I apologized.
“Bill painted her black two years ago,” said Jim.
With a canvas tarpaulin buttoned over her after end the little boat swung, among a dozen other assorted sail and engined craft, at her mooring buoy.
We carried the two-by-six planks from the boathouse down to the beach. The heavy rope I carried to the car and made an end fast to my axle. From the boathouse, Jim carried eight heavy billets of wood which, he explained, were to prop the launch in an upright position on the sand when we got her beached.
“We leave her,” he explained, “resting on the rollers and planks. But securely propped on both sides, so as to prevent her becoming what they call ‘hogged.’ That sagging at the bow and stern.”
“I’ll do the hauling,” I replied. “You do the propping. I’ll leave all the nautical stuff to you.”
We laid tracks, as it were, of the two-by-six scantlings. On them, at handy intervals, we laid the rollers which Jimmie, as I hauled, would lay under the keel, as she rolled. Last of all, we laid a couple of the two-by-sixes down the sloping beach right into the water.
Jim borrowed a small skiff from the old boy who minded the boathouse, and rowed out and released the launch from the mooring buoy. He towed the launch in while I, with my boots and socks off and my pants rolled up, waited on shore to waggle the two submerged planks neatly under the prow of the incoming launch.
“Neatly done,” admitted Jim, as he shoved the launch’s nose my way. I waded into the chilly lake water and drew the nose of the craft in between the two planks.
Jim beached the skiff and, removing his boots and socks and rolling up his pants, came-with the first roller, which he shoved and wedged down under the launch’s nose, against the planks.
“Heave-ho, my hearty,” he commanded. “Now pass me the end of the line, and when I give you the signal – get your car in low gear and gently haul.”
I paid the line away from my axle down to Jim, and he made it fast to the bow of the launch, passing it rough the two little metal rope guides on each side of the bow.
“Okay, now,” he called. “Take it easy and steady. As you haul, I’ve got to nip along and tuck these rollers under her keel.”
I started the engine, let her into low and, watching at the rear-view mirror, eased up the clutch. My tires bit into the sand and shingle. I felt the strain take hold. I felt the car edge forward and in the mirror I saw the nose of the launch rise slightly as she started to crawl ashore on top of the rollers.
“Slow!” rang Jim’s voice.
And I could see him nimbly jumping and ducking, as he grabbed up the rollers and laid them, one after the other, under the nose of the boat, as it slowly progressed up the beach.
We got it up the four lengths of two-by-six. Then Jim decreed that we ought to pull it still farther up. As he went back and got the two-by-sixes we had passed and laid fresh track. And on these, with the rollers, we succeeded in dragging the launch a good 60 feet from shore, well above the winter storm and ice line, and safe and snug against tempest, gale and blizzard.
While I undid the rope, Jim set the heavy billets up, as props, all around the bow and stern of the launch, to hold her steady and to bear some of the weight of the upper structure that otherwise would fall in the bilges and keel.
When all was snug and shipshape, a man in a yachting cap and turtleneck sweater came striding from the direction of the old boathouse, and he roared:
“What is the name of blazes are you characters up to?”
Jim looked him up and down.
“We’re pulling out Bill Thomas’s boat,” he stated.
“That isn’t Bill Thomas’s boat,” roared the mariner.
“That’s MY boat! And I want it this afternoon. I want it NOW!”
“Well, uh, how,” inquired Jim, weakly, “how do you pull a boat BACK into the water?”
He showed us.
He went and got block and tackle. And he got another yachtsman to come and drop a heavy anchor well out in the water, to fasten one end of the tackle to.
And with my poor little car shaking and trembling and scraping on the other end of the block and tackle, we rolled the launch back down the two-by-sixes, with Jim very nimbly slipping the rollers under the stern.
By which time it was getting dusk.
So tomorrow, or maybe the day after, at any rate, the next nice day we have, we will come down again and haul Bill Thomas’s launch out.
It’s a WHITE one. He repainted it this year.
We’ll come, that is, providing I don’t get the sciatica. For I feel slight twinges of something at the moment.
Leave a Reply