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By Gregory Clark, Illustrated by James Frise, April 18, 1942.

“Air,” said Jimmie Frise, “is about the only thing they can’t ration.”

“And water,” I suggested.

“Even water is rationed, indirectly,” asserted Jim, “through the rationing of the things you put in water, like sugar, tea, coffee, soap. But air is free. It is the one thing they can never control.”

“How about poisoning it with poison gas?” I inquired.

“Purely incidental, and purely temporary,” said Jim lightly. “They have rationed what we eat, what we drink, what we wear. They have controlled our roof and shelter. How we live, what we can buy, where we can go – all these things are under control. The only thing we can count upon in unlimited quantity is air.”

“Let us breathe deep,” I said devoutly.

“Sometimes,” mused Jimmie thoughtfully, “when I look upon the civilized world of Europe and America in their present condition, I have to smile even in the face of all the tragedy. For in this vast, storm-tossed scene, the only person who is free or happy is the person who has nothing.”

“Nothing?” I questioned.

“Those who are suffering the most, right now,” stated Jim, “are those who possess the most. The rich. The prosperous. It goes for countries as well as for individuals. Compare the freedom today of a hobo and a great industrialist.”

“Most great industrialists are in the war up to their necks,” I asserted. “It is only the would-be industrialists, the ones who couldn’t quite make the grade, who are yelping.”

“I am speaking,” said Jimmie, “of freedom and happiness. If the rich man is a good man, he is working as never before in his career; a prisoner of his great possessions, all of which must now bear fruit as never before. If he is a bad man, think how he must be agonized by the taxes, the restrictions, the controls.”

“A hobo is a happy man,” I agreed.

“The nations that are suffering the most,” went on Jim, “are those that have been accustomed to the most. And is true not only of possessions like money or property. It is true of men with sons. The man with the most sons today, whether they are in the war or not, is the unhappiest. And it is true of education and other spiritual possessions. The man with the most brains, the man with the greatest intelligence, is today the least happy and the least free. He is a prisoner of his thoughts, the way the wealthy man is prisoner of his possessions.”

“A hobo,” I agreed, “sitting on the side of the road, not even thinking, is the happiest man in the world today.”

“And the freest,” pointed out Jim.

Small Farm Best

“What makes you smile, then,” I inquired “when you look upon a world in such a mess?”

“Just the thought,” explained Jim, “that all over the western world of Europe and America we have been so desperate to gain the very things that would steal our freedom. The more you own and the more you know, the less free you are. And in the golden age of the past century, we have, like maniacs, been fighting to get into prison. We have invented and manufactured and amassed every conceivable thing. We have pursued knowledge and education like madmen. And having got it all, we now know that a small house, in the midst of a few acres of land, with a well and a rope to lower a bucket, and a plow and a horse and a haystack, are all that the human spirit can possess without going nuts.”

“Why, Jim,” I protested, “that’s worse than communism.”

“It’s the next thing after communism,” agreed Jimmie. “Communism is old stuff. It’s over and done with. It’s here. Now we’ve got to look beyond, to the next stage.”

“You’d have us all peasants,” I snorted.

“Several thousand years ago,” declared Jim, “the Chinese tried civilization, as we know it, and discarded it as silly. By painful experiment, they discovered that possessions are merely a burden. Only the fools submit to possessing things, beyond the merest essentials. A cup, plate, knife. That’s about all a man needs. And usually he can borrow them, from some fool who has two.”

“Have you gone Oriental?” I demanded.

“We’re all going Oriental,” said Jimmie. “We are all wishing we didn’t have half what we’ve got. Already, we are giving things away. And the first things we are giving away are our most cherished beliefs. The next thing will be our property. It’s too much trouble.”

“What started this?” I muttered unhappily.

“It started,” remembered Jimmie, “with me saying that the only thing they couldn’t control was air.”

“And a fine remark that was,” I submitted.

“What I had in mind,” said Jim, shifting his feet from the office window sill to his desk, “was a boat.”

“A boat?” I protested, since most of these casual ideas of Jim’s are tied up to a stump somewhere.

“A sail boat,” said Jim. “There’s nothing like a sail boat. A dinghy. Or a little sloop of some kind. With a sail boat and air, you are the nearest thing to being free there is in all the world.”

“Aha,” said I, seeing light.

“We thought when we invented engines for boats,” said Jim, “that we had made a great step forward towards freedom. But a boat sails the sea today at its peril. And you can’t get fuel to run even a little launch.”

“I can still paddle a canoe,” I asserted.

“If you are well and strong,” countered Jim. “But you can be as weak as a cat and still go places in a sail boat. The wind takes you. And they can’t control wind. Or ration it. That is why the Chinese still like sail boats. We call them junks. Were we ever wrong!”

“What could we do with a sail boat?” I inquired.

“We could go to work in a sail boat,” said Jim calmly. “We could keep it tied up to a wharf out at Sunnyside. And in the morning, we could come down the street, get in the boat and sail down to the foot of Yonge St. There, we could get permission to tie it up at one of the company piers. And at the end of the business day, we could walk down to the lakefront; get in the boat and sail home westward to Sunnyside again.”

“If the wind was right,” I interposed.

“We can always tack,” asserted Jim, the sailor.

“And take half the morning,” I scoffed.

“We could get up early,” retorted Jim. “And besides, business life isn’t going to be half as strenuous as it was. With gas rationing and crowded street cars and everything, business just isn’t going to be in a position to expect people to be at work on time. Anyway, it will be the bosses who will be latest.”

“I suppose we are going to take life a lot easier,” I admitted, “now that the means of speed are being taken from us.”

“Would you go shares in a sail boat with me?” demanded Jim.

“Are you serious?” I retorted.

“Perfectly serious,” declared Jim. “We can’t go touring in the country because of the gas rationing. So we will go sailing on the lake. We have no means of taking a load of anything from here to Hamilton. But if we have a sail boat, and a fair wind, we can get to Hamilton in five hours. A boat with sails is, in view of the circumstances in which we find ourselves, the most practical possession in the whole world.”

“We’d look ridiculous coming to work in a sail boat,” I scoffed. “In Toronto.””

“Let us hope we will never look more ridiculous,” said Jimmie. “In Toronto.”

So I said I would go halves on a small, cheap sail boat with him. Whereupon Jimmie picked up the telephone very business-like and called a man.

“Wait a minute, wait a minute,” I protested; because you don’t agree to a philosophical proposition like a sail boat as if it were an ordinary business deal.

But Jim had, it seems, already done quite a bit of snooping for a sail boat and had located just what we wanted from a man down near the foot of Cherry St., towards Ashbridge’s Bay.

A Home-Made Dinghy

“We’ll be out to get her,” said Jimmie over the phone, “at about 2 p.m. We’ll sail her to a boathouse I know up at Sunnyside.”

“Hah,” said Jim, hanging up.

“How much?” I inquired grimly.

“Fifteen bucks, each,¹” said Jim. “Sail and all,”

“It can’t be much of a boat at that price,” I submitted. “I’ll bet anything you like that boats are more in demand now than ever.”

“Thirty bucks,” said Jim. “Hull, sail, mast, boom, rudder and gear, all in first-class shape.”

“It doesn’t sound reasonable to me,” I muttered.

And when we arrived at the old tumble-down boathouse on Toronto Bay down beside the coal piles, and were led through a sort of Davy Jones’ junk shop of boats and the carcasses of old boats picked clean long ago, and were shown our dinghy, it was obvious I was right.

It was a home-made dinghy about 10 feet long. It was old. It was warped. Its mildewed sail, when we unrolled it, was patched and patched over the patches. The ropes looked rotten to me. But Jim was undismayed.

“What do you expect for $30?” he demanded haughtily when I attempted to point out some of the deficiencies.

“I’ll put a pail in,” said the tired old boy who closed the deal with us. “She’ll probably leak a little at first.”

“Naturally,” said Jim. “They always leak at first.”

The three of us hauled and lifted the dinghy out of the old boathouse and down to some decaying wooden piles in the water which used to be a dock in the great old days of sail. We lowered her, and the water spurted through all the seams.

“Let her fill up for a little while,” sighed the old boy wearily, “while we step the mast and rig the sail.”

The mast had a bend in it. Two of the rings that hold the sail to the mast had broken away from the sail, and the old man had to go and slowly find a cigar box with sail needle, thread and a sailor’s palm². And he sewed the rings back on.

Then we stepped the mast, and wedged it into place with some wooden chips. The rope broke twice while hoisting the sail, but the old boy went slowly away again, into the staggering boat house, and brought some marlin twine with which to splice the rope.

“You can bail now,” he gusted heavily. “See if she leaks faster than you can bail.”

I got down and bailed. It took 17 full pails and 20 short dips to reach the floor boards. An invisible slow trickle was still coming in which you could see if you sat and watched one special spot on the floor boards.

“Aye, ye, Sir!”

“Let her soak overnight, Jim,” I suggested, “and we’ll come down tomorrow and take her away.”

“When I buy a boat,” said Jimmie, “I’ve got a boat. I’ll sail and you bail. It’s a swell southwest wind. We’ll be at Sunnyside in less than one hour.”

I dipped a few more part pailfuls out. I glanced across the bay. Toronto Bay is not exactly a noble body of water. But it is an expansive, dirty and cold one from over the deck of a small, wet, leaky dinghy.

“Okay?” cried Jim.

“Aye, aye, sir,” I said with a feeble effort.

Jim in his young days, before the old war, used to be quite a sailor on Toronto Bay. Personally, I like prairies. Or, better, mountains.

The old man took hold of the mast and headed her into the breeze. Jim got set at the tiller and close hauled her. Then the old man gave us a shove and we were off.

“Bail,” said Jim, calmly; and the boat heeled slightly over in the breeze, causing the little water in her to slosh down to the low side, wetting my feet and legs clammily.

“Head straight for the Western Gap,” I warned, as Jim with a fixed grin only to be seen on the faces of amateur sailors, hauled hard and headed our craft for Hanlan’s Point.

“We’ll beat up, a little,” hailed Jimmie, “and then run down on the gap.”

I bailed. The dinghy’s heeling over had discovered new and larger cracks in the hull, and I suddenly found the water was coming in at least as fast as I could bail if I bailed all the time.

“Hey, Jim,” I warned. “Don’t waste any time. Don’t get too far from shore.”

“She’ll tighten up,” halloed Jim, “in no time.”

The mast creaked. The sail, which had more creases in it than any sail I had ever noticed, slatted; small things popped and rattled; something groaned; and the water slapping the hull seemed just outside. It seemed, I should say, almost in.

“Jim, steer closer to shore,” I commanded. “This water is getting ahead of me.”

“Bail,” ordered Jim cheerfully, hauling the sheet tighter.

Suddenly a hoarse whistle roared almost in my ear, I straightened to behold a tug bearing square down on us.

“Jim!” I roared.

“Sail has the right of way over steam,” said Jim, with a confident and dreamy smile on his face. And he never even shifted muscle.

The tug, with another fierce toot, swerved slightly and passed behind us so close that the captain could have spit aboard us if he had had a spit ready. But he heaved a few big, loose cusses aboard us instead.

Shipwrecked

The swell from the tug came rushing high and crested straight for our stern.

“Jim, look out,” I shouted.

But Jim just leaned farther out and took another haul on the sheet. The big wave lifted us the way a lady lifts a rug to shake it. It gave us a shake and a snap.

The mast cracked, right across, like a stick of macaroni. The sail, with a calm slow bulge, folded quietly down on the heaving water. The dinghy, with Jim crouched beside me, remained flat.

Slowly the tug made a large circle and came back to us at quarter speed.

“What’s the big idea,” said the master hoarsely, “sailing an old hencoop like that around at this time of year? Don’t you know the frost ain’t out of spars yet?”

“Can you tow us?” demanded Jim coldly, a man of sail to a man of steam.

“To Hanlan’s Point, and no further,” said the master. “I’m tyin’ up there for the night.”

“Very good,” said Jim.

So they took us aboard and we hand-reefed the sail back aboard the dinghy and laid it, mast and all, inboard and Jim lashed her down.

“If she fills,” warned the tug master, “I don’t stop.”

“Go ahead,” said Jimmie.

And the tug, which was full of rumble and roar and power, leaped to life and surged and plunged across the bay to Hanlan’s Point, dragging the dinghy close behind, nose uplifted, in the churn and wake.

At Hanlan’s we paid the skipper $2 for his consideration and then found a local man who said we could haul our dinghy up on his lawn until we could make arrangements to sail her on the next leg of her journey westward. Then we took the last ferry home.

But there was a high gale of wind last night.

And I have hopes that when we go back tomorrow, the dinghy will have washed away.

---

Editor’s Notes:

1. $30 in 1942 would be $572 in 2026. ↩︎
2. A sailmaker’s palm is a specialized leather tool worn over the hand, featuring a metal thimble plate with divots to safely push thick sewing needles through canvas, leather, or heavy fabrics. ↩︎

“If anything makes me sick,” declared Jimmie Frise, “it’s spring house-cleaning.”

“The law ought to be,” I agreed, “that spring house-cleaning had to be done on and not before May first. Then it would coincide with the opening of the trout season.”

“Perfect, perfect,” cried Jim. “Then the men could all go trout fishing for three or four days and leave the women to their frenzy.”

“Personally,” I submitted, “I can’t see the use of spring cleaning. It makes no difference. They’re always sweeping and dusting and using the vacuum anyway. They never rest. I think it is a kind of a spring disease in women, like trout fishing or gardening with men.”

“I wouldn’t doubt that at all,” said Jim. “They go kind of nuts, don’t they? They get all flushed and a wild look in their eyes?”

“It’s a form of spring fever,” I assured Jim. “Nature gives us all these deep instincts, like falling in love in June and feeling very industrious and saving in September, in order to keep us alive and going. This spring cleaning business probably dates away back to the cave man. I bet the caves were in a mess by the time spring came.”

“Old gnawed bones, and ashes and everything,” agreed Jim.

“So all the females of the cave man species,” I followed, “were suddenly filled with a furious fever of energy, and they got to work and held a kind of bone flinging and ash chucking orgy, to clean out the cave. It’s the same thing as in a wren, when she returns to the bird house in our gardens. She goes mad flinging out all the old sticks and debris of last year’s nests. If nature sends a lady wren nutty, there is no reason why it shouldn’t work with women.”

“Yet, the pity of it is,” said Jim, “that this fever isn’t necessary any more. Women keep homes clean all the year around, every day, sometimes twice a day. All this rumpus is sheer nuisance.”

“You can’t reason with them,” I warned.

“Naturally,” said Jim. “You can’t reason with a man in fever delirium. That’s what it is, spring delirium.”

“Do you think,” I asked, “we could talk it over with them and get them to put off until May first?”

“So we could go fishing until it’s over?” mused Jim.

“It’s a perfect arrangement,” I submitted.

“Yeah,” muttered Jim, “but there’s one little difficulty. My family has got me in a corner. They have it all arranged that I am to clean up the attic.”

“Do that in advance,” I cried. “Get it over with.”

“I might do that,” admitted Jim.

“It isn’t the work that upsets men,” I explained. “It’s the way the whole house is thrown into a wreck for nearly a week. That’s what gets a man’s goat. I don’t mind a little work.”

Antipathy To a Broom

“Would you help me with my attic?” inquired Jim.

“Why not?” I retorted. “What’s the trick about your attic?”

“Well, in a way,” said Jim, “the attic is mine, you see? All my stuff is up there. Guns, fishing tackle, decoys, work bench. I’ve got that old work bench up there. I’ve been tinkering at making decoys and things and there’s a lot of shavings and sawdust.”

“Aaaaah,” I said.

“That’s. why the women insist on me cleaning it up,” explained Jim. “I promised I’d clean it up last year. And the year before, I agreed to, and I did clean it up in a kind of a way. But they say it is my job and this year they’re kind of ganged up on me.”

“Of course, what you could do,” I offered, “is let it go to the bitter end and then one day you’ll come home and find they’ve done it in desperation.”

“They can’t,” said Jim. “I’ve got the key. I keep the attic locked ever since the days the kids were small. I didn’t want them going up and messing around my tackle and guns and stuff.”

“And you don’t want them messing around there now?” I added.

“Certainly not,” said Jim. “Even downstairs, where things are organized, I can never find anything I want after spring cleaning. It takes me about six weeks to get the house reorganized after spring cleaning. But if they ever got up into my attic, good heavens, I might never find anything again, ever,”

“I guess it’s up to you,” I sighed.

“I’m afraid it is,” said Jim. “The sawdust and shavings and things sometimes drift down through the cracks under the door. They are even saying that the sawdust is seeping through the ceilings. A man by rights ought to have a little cabin down at the foot of his yard, shouldn’t he?”

“After his kids start to grow up,” I agreed, “a man’s house is no longer his castle. It becomes only a sort of checker-board on which he plays a steadily losing game.”

“It was good of you offer to come and help me with the attic,” felt out Jim.

“Not at all,” I said, providing it’s not some night I can’t get away.”

“Oh, I’ll let you pick the night,” said Jim; which is a pretty low trick.

“I’m not particularly good at domestic work,” I submitted. “In fact, I have been told I am more a nuisance than a help.”

“Don’t you believe it,” cried Jim, heartily. “You’re a tidy little fellow. You can sweep while I shift the bigger stuff around.”

“Hm,” said I, neither positive nor negative; because there is some deep antipathy in my nature to a broom. Maybe some of my ancestors were stable boys.

To Clean Up the Attic

At any rate, Jim referred in a casual way to the cleaning of his attic from day to day, and finally, he tricked me.

“Did you hear about that short newsreel picture about bird dogs?” Jim inquired sweetly.

“No, where is it?” I asked.

“It’s at some theatre on Bloor St.,” said Jim. “I’ll look it up. It shows bird dogs pointing quail, and the gunners walking up to the point and flushing the birds and making lefts and rights. Boy, they say it is one of the most wonderful sport pictures ever produced.”

“Let’s go tonight,” I said promptly.

“Can you get off tonight?” asked Jim, pointedly.

“This is the first night I’ve got to myself in a week,” I assured him.

So Jim got up and pretended to hunt through the theatre ads for the picture and couldn’t find it. Then he telephoned one of the movie exchanges, and they said the picture wouldn’t be showing in the local theatres for another month.

“I must,” said Jim, innocently, “have seen the ad somewhere else. But say, look here, if you’re free tonight, how about coming over and giving me a hand with that attic of mine.”

“Er,” I said.

“Let’s get it over and done with. It’s only a month to the fishing season. You wouldn’t want me tied up with a lot of house-cleaning on May the first?” demanded Jim.

And since I couldn’t think of any graceful excuse, I was roped.

“It’s a perfect night for it,” continued Jim. “The family is all going to be out. We can have the house to ourselves. If we find any short cuts, we can use them, with nobody around.”

“Like chucking shavings, et cetera, out the attic window,” I instanced.

So waiting until around 8 o’clock to allow Jim’s family to leave the house and also to allow my supper to settle, I strolled around to Jim’s and he led me without delay upstairs and via the little stairway into the attic, which is just one big unfinished room, perfectly suited to a man’s needs.

It was a mess. No wonder Jim kept the attic door locked and the key in his pocket. One corner was full of decoy ducks, like coal heaped in a coal bin. Another corner had an enormous heap of what appeared to be old magazines, hunting coats, rubber boots and fish baskets. In the midst stood a small carpenter’s work bench, and a foot deep all around it lay a drift of shavings, sawdust, hunks of wood, and all the ingredients of a fine life devoted to making things of no particular value or success.

“Well, Jimmie,” I said, “quite an evening’s work.”

“Now,” said Jim, very energetic. “I’ve got it figured out. I’ll start shifting everything to a new place, like, and you follow me with the broom.”

“If your wife,” I said, “ever saw this place.”

“I’ve been scared stiff this last few months,” admitted Jim. “Haunted, by day and by night.”

I peeled off my coat and hung it on a nail. Jim handed me the broom.

“I’ll start here, with these decoys,” suggested Jim. “I’ll shift them all over to that corner, and you sweep. Then when you catch up to me, I’ll shift the decoys and what will be under them to another corner, and so on. We’ll keep going around and around, see, until it is all cleaned up.”

“That’s the way the women do,” I admitted. “Shift everything around.”

So Jim started picking up big armfuls of decoys and carting them to the next corner, and to fill in the time, I started batting with the broom at the dusty rough, unfinished planking and rafters of the attic wall and ceiling.

Suddenly, in the garish light of the naked electric light bulb, something fluttered out from the planks.

“A bat,” I shouted.

Jim dropped an armful of ducks and peered into the already dusty glare of light.

“Where?” he demanded.

We stood perfectly still, and heard a small scratching sound.

“Here,” I said, swinging the broom.

The bat leaped heavily into space and wobbled sleepily around, narrowly missing our heads.

“Swing it,” roared Jim, snatching up a long piece of scantling that lay in the debris on the floor.

I swung. The bat ducked. I ducked; the bat swung.

“Look out,” shouted Jim, charging for the narrow stairway. “It’ll get downstairs.”

But he was too late. The bat, attracted perhaps by the warm current of air coming up the attic stairway, followed down, and we were just in time to see it wobble on half-wakened wings, into the glow of light at the foot of the attic stairs.

“After it,” commanded Jimmie, fiercely. “The women would go crazy if they saw that bat in the house.”

Riot and Confusion

Down the stairs we thundered, and commenced a cautious search, in room after room, listening, holding our breath, waiting to hear the faint scratching of the bat hiding behind some picture or mirror.

“Prod around,” said Jim.

So we prodded around, shoving at pictures on the wall, shifting dressers and keeping a wary eye.

“Turn on the bright lights,” I commanded, “blind the beast.”

Suddenly, soundlessly, the little bat came staggering and wobbling along the hallway ceiling and darted into the room.

Jim swung. The chandelier crashed terribly and splintered glass flew in all directions. The bat darted out.

“After it!” shouted Jim, colliding his hunk of scantling along walls and doors.

I heard another violent crash. Jim had swung at the bat in the front bedroom and swiped all the ornaments off the top of a chest of drawers.

“Downstairs,” cried Jim, leading the chase.

“Be careful,” I begged. “Don’t wreck the house.”

“Better wreck the house than have that bat, in it when the folks get home,” gasped Jimmie, crouched and searching like a gangster in a movie.

We found the bat after we had disarranged all the pictures in the living room and shifted all the furniture and upset everything on the buffet. It was up in the chandelier.

“Poke with your broom,” whispered Jim. “Poke it out towards me.”

Jim poised like a baseball player, gripping the scantling mightily.

I poked with the broom at the poor little beastie. fluttered out towards Jim.

Jim swung. The chandelier swayed madly, tinkled into a thousand splinters of glass and then, slowly losing its wiry grip of the ceiling, came down with about a square foot of plaster.

“I missed,” moaned Jim.

“Like heck you did,” I said, from my shelter under the dining-room table.

The house was full of dust, riot and confusion.

“Where did it go?” I begged.

“I saw it go upstairs again,” said Jim wearily.

So we followed. After 10 minutes, we found under the bathtub. It eluded us again, and to our joy, it turned up the attic stairs again.

“Good,” said Jim. “Now we’ve got it on our own territory.”

So we went after it, and got into Jim’s private attic just in time to see the bewildered little creature alight flat against the rough beams of the ceiling and tuck itself cleverly and quickly in behind some great two-inch stringers of the roof.

“Aaaaah,” sighed Jim. “Leave him there. Leave him right there, still in his winter sleep, the little devil, and some nice spring evening, I’ll open the window and let him fly out.”

“It’s best to leave a bat alone,” I agreed. “Just let him fly away.”

“He sure has wasted the evening,” said Jim.

“We’d better quit this job,” I offered, “and go down and straighten things up the best way we can before the folks get back.”

So we turned the light off, carefully locked the door, went down and telephoned the drug store for a couple of dozen new light bulbs, and straightened all the pictures and dusted everything, and did the best we could with the fallen chandelier.

“There’ll be the dickens to pay,” I said, after we had worked for an hour and still everything looked disturbed, somehow.

“It’ll give them a taste,” said Jim, “of what we men have to suffer when they’re spring cleaning.”