adventure boat

at ten thirty am i am sitting on the upturned bottom of a fourteen foot johnboat on a grassy median in the parking lot at a large sporting goods store. to be fair, the lot belongs to a variety of large stores but this bit of grass is directly across from the door to the sporting goods store which is where this boat was resting quietly just a few minutes before. the weather is nice and i am all decked out in a blaze orange tank top and a denim skirt. my bag, a monstrosity of a straw my students insist belongs to abuelas in markets, leans against the bottom of the boat and a ball of green wool threads its way from the bag up to my knitting needles. i am waiting for the sweetie.

you see, we got up early this morning and drove the forty or so miles in to kingston with a brand new roof rack on our little subaru so we could get ourselves a boat. now, i know what you're thinking. it's ugly to live like that. we've already got a boat. but our beloved boat is tired. we carry its nine hundred pound carcass down to the reservoir every chance we get and i come away cut and bruised each time because the boat struggles so much against us. the amount of bailing we need to do suggests the decrepit thing is beginning to lose its will to float (which, at 900 pounds, was never that easy, anyway) and we would like to let it spend its twilight years at the reservoir, going out only on rare occasions. which means we need a boat.

now, it turns out the sweetie and i have, each of us, a birthday and then we each have our wedding anniversary all during the same week. this week. and we have taken to celebrating those things all rolled up together. so this morning not long past ten we stroll into the sporting goods store and stride right up to the boat we know will be able to take over for our own retiring boat. the men who work there seem a little confused at first about how to get the thing to the front of the store. one of them, a man younger than me (and an employee of a sporting goods store, no less), seems particularly overwhelmed by the task of moving the boat and has to stop and rest. now, you know i am a sympathetic person and you know i have struggled under the nine hundred pounds of boat the d.e.p. has registered in my name, but i have also lifted this new boat. by myself. with one hand. i consider asking the men if they want help but one thing i have learned is that although they might indeed want help, they will not ask me for it and will say no if i offer. so they wrestle a boat that weighs less than i do through aisles and around displays and up to the front counter. we pay and they take it out and across to the parking lot where they hoist it up onto our little subaru.

and here is where math begins to fall apart. a fourteen foot car may seem mathematically like it's capable of carrying a fourteen foot johnboat about forty miles at sixty miles per hour. but it isn't. the nose of the boat dips down in front of the windshield and may or may not be attempting to touch the hood of the car. the sides of the boat are within a half inch of sliding down over both sides of the roof rack and simply covering the car like a very dapper hat. the men from the sporting goods store suggest we rent a truck from the lumber store at the other end of the parking lot. twenty bucks, they say. not a bad deal. and so the sweetie hurries across the parking lot while i sit in a very dark car with an ominous stormcloud of a boat hovering over me, threatening to slide off into the grass at any minute.

he returns fairly quickly, truckless. the lumber store has one truck and it is out. they do not know when it will return. the sweetie, ever resourceful, finds a rental truck place that is open and asks about trucks. i remind him the boat is fourteen feet long and his mind does these magical calculations that include diagonals and imaginary numbers. we lift the boat up and put it on the median. it is light as a feather. light as air. i am in love and i sigh deeply to prove it. the sweetie hurries off to get what i know will not be a truck with fourteen feet of space in it. i sit happily on my beloved boat, working on my knitting and looking up from time to time to field questions from folks who have never seen whatever it is i am up to. when i explain to one woman why i am waiting there, she hollers back from in front of the sporting goods store, "i knew it would be a good story. i could tell."

and the sweetie returns. with a ten foot truck. we lift the boat up into the truck and the four back feet stick all the way out. the sweetie is sure, with some diagonal finesse, we can cram the whole boat right on in there. we can't. but we tie it down tight with ratcheted straps and we hop in the truck and head the fortysomething miles back toward home with four feet of boat hanging out the back of the truck like a bleached tongue. sporadically, we call the d.e.p. to see if they're open because you can't put a boat on the reservoir until it has been properly inspected, bathed and tagged by the good folks who keep an eye on the reservoir. the phone rings and rings but nobody ever answers. the sweetie finally gets someone at a different number who explains that they're not open saturdays. i know this sounds strange. that the place you get a fishing license and the place you register your boat, the place you get permission for recreation, is not open on weekends. i know. so we drive on back to the house and we unload the boat. then we drive back fortysomething miles to the truck rental place and then drive another fortysomething right on back to the house.

we put the boat in the grass. i sit in the rowing seat. the sweetie hands me my oars. the sweetie's birthday will come and go and we will not be allowed to put that boat in the water. our anniversary will fly past. on my own birthday i will have to sit in the boat on the grass and imagine rowing on the reservoir. but in a few weeks, we'll take a day off during the week. we'll drive up late the night before. we'll be the first folks waiting outside the gates at the d.e.p. (in yet another rental truck) for our boat bath and inspection. and after we put our new boat on the grassy bank right next to our old one, we'll drive the rental truck back (only twenty miles this time) and then make that same trip right back in our own car to where the boats are sitting in a cluster of other boats, still, listening to the water a few feet away. and we'll spend the day on the water, right in the middle of the week like that. extravagant and glorious. well, we are celebrating two birthdays and our marriage. and why would you marry someone if you didn't plan to have adventures together?