Beloved Boats and a
Flood of Summer Memories
Sitting boatless in Maine, recalling hours and
many miles water-skiing on the Mississippi River.
By Catherine Petroski
in the Wall Street Journal
Arrowsic, Maine
When visitors come to
our summer place, with its 600 feet of shoreline along the Kennebec River near
Bath, they often wonder that it lacks two coastal Maine essentials, a floating
dock and some sort of watercraft. Recently my husband told someone we were boatless
because I "grew up with boats," and that I knew what an investment of
time they require. While true, that is only part of the story, because everyone
knows boats can be a lot of fun.
The plain fact is that
my husband is a workaholic, happy as a clam in his big upstairs study, where
his upriver view of the Kennebec—with the occasional bald eagle visitor—is his
nirvana. There are all those books to read and words to write. To that may be
added his discomfort around water generally: His childhood summers on Jones
Beach on New York's Long Island did not result in his becoming a confident
swimmer. A boat ride to him is a white-knuckle experience.
But I did grow up with
boats—and now and then, when I see a real beauty hydroplaning on a still, hot
summer afternoon, there is that tug. My father, an only child whose collecting
of toys developed into a lifelong occupation, always had some kind of boat that
he took on the rivers and lakes of Illinois and Missouri. Even now, three
iconic boats of his stand out in my mind.
The first, a 16-foot
lapstrake (where the hull's planks overlap like clapboards) Thompson, emerges
from the mists of my earliest memories. Because he used it for duck hunting in
the fall and winter, my father had painted it a matte grayish-brownish-green,
the better to blend with bottomland marshes and duck blinds. A dreadful color,
I thought. Nevertheless, on summer days, there the Thompson sat, dull and sober
amid the gay pink hollyhocks bordering my grandfather's rhubarb patch, resting
from the hunt but ready for the clarion call of a run on some nearby river,
perhaps even the Mississippi, which had once nearly claimed both boat and
father.
That episode evolved
into a cautionary family fable, the story of a sudden violent storm that had
trapped my father and the Thompson out in his blind, while people watched from
shore and gave them up for goners. Only the mighty Thompson could have saved
them that day, he always swore, though the boat's duck-blind rescue was not its
only lifesaving work.
Our town was bisected
by a tributary of a tributary of the Mississippi that flooded on a ruinous,
near-annual basis until the Army Corps of Engineers intervened with a
flood-control dam. During floods, the Thompson and my father ferried the
stranded from upper floors and rooftops to dry land. With its huge
25-horsepower motor in our basement, the motorless Thompson sat out the summer
on its trailer among the hollyhocks, and my friends and I scrambled aboard and
played out a rich fantasy of waterborne explorations to exotic destinations
cadged from our reading.
The second boat, the
Arrowhead, a much lighter plywood craft, was at least a nicer color, a deep,
natural, varnished mahogany. Lacking the foredeck that had made the Thompson so
amenable to make-believe, the Arrowhead was completely open to the gunwales all
the way around. It was much narrower in the beam than the Thompson, but with
three usable seats instead of two, it was more of a family boat.
Many summer Sundays we
would haul the boat to the launch at a nearby state park and spend the day
putting about on the horseshoe-shaped lake, lazing on a sandy
"beach," floating around in inner-tubes, eating quantities of chicken
that my mother had fried early that morning, and drinking Dr Pepper. This was
our form of air-conditioning.
Casting about in the
mid-1950s for something to occupy himself and possibly make some money, my
engineer father foresaw the possibilities for the Volkswagen Beetle in midcentury America. He signed on as
an early authorized dealer and over his last few decades made money enough to
afford nicer and nicer toys, including ever-larger single-engine airplanes that
he and my mother learned to pilot and, finally, the pièce de résistance of his
boating career, the Century Coronado.
With her throaty
inboard Gray Marine overhead-valve V-8, a gull-wing-style convertible hardtop,
white leather seats, teak decking, an aft ladder for swimmers and skiers, and
an eight-track tape deck with the complete Sinatra oeuvre, the Coronado was a
double-planked mahogany sexpot of a boat that, with Rat Pack cool, my father
named the So What. She was 21-feet long, broad in the beam, and much too big
and heavy to haul on a trailer routinely.
After the spring-flood
wood debris subsided in the Father of Waters, her launch was a major
production, and once safely afloat, she summered at Clifton Terrace, the marina
above Lock and Dam #26 at Alton, Ill. Capable of speeds up to 55 mph, she could
pop two skiers out of the water in nothing flat. So the So What plied the
mid-Mississippi, the confluence, and the lower Illinois every weekend as my
sister and I skied tandem for hours and miles at a time.
After I left for
college, the toy collector cast his gaze on a yet larger and more
electronically gifted airplane, and the So What vanished. I never knew her
destiny, but accounts of well-documented, treasured Coronados being
painstakingly restored make me wish I at least knew her hull number. Until this
past week I had yet to catch sight of anything resembling the So What passing
our house on the Kennebec. Here in New England, the equivalent vintage
wooden-hulled boat seems to be the more restrained Lyman runabout; schools of
them gather over in Boothbay Harbor and form mini-regatta-parades up and down
the river here a couple of times each summer.
For other passersby,
we have the occasional Aegis destroyer from Bath Iron Works, and on a less
monumental scale the silent kayaks and racing sculls and boats under sail, the
lazy pontoon boats, the raucous jet-skis, the jet-fan boats, inboards,
outboards, inboard-outboards, and the brassiest of the brassy, the look-at-me-and-by-all-means-listen-to-me
cigar boats.
Then on Thursday I
heard the siren call of a familiar voice out on the river and told my husband
to look at what was passing. It was not a Coronado, but it was definitely a
Century boat—the elegant soft curve of its hull was unmistakable as it rounded
the turn at Range Lights and arced into Fiddlers Reach. Then a more familiar
voice said, "Now that's pretty."
Ms. Petroski, a writer
and photographer, collaborated most recently with her husband, Henry Petroski,
on "The House With Sixteen Handmade Doors" (W.W. Norton, 2014).
The basic post in the Wall Street Journal with an images can be
found at: http://online.wsj.com/articles/catherine-petroski-beloved-boats-and-a-flood-of-summer-memories-1406931883
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