How a friendly family boating outing caused humiliation, pain, facial contortions, and tears. And that was just getting the thing in and out of the water. THE POCKET WATCH
By Jeff Dominguez
Speedboat Brings Out the Landlubber in this Garcia Bend Resident
My cousin Willie bought a boat last week. Or, more appropriately, he bought an immense jet engine, two vinyl seats, and a steering wheel, all bolted onto a hunk of fiberglass. That's how it seemed to me, anyway, when we took it out to Garcia Bend, right across the street from my house, and launched it for Willie's first spin as its new captain.
With only two of us, just getting the thing into the water was a bit of a trick in itself. I had to back Willie's huge manual-transmission work van—the only vehicle with a trailer hitch to which he has access—down the boat ramp to the point that the van's back tires were almost completely submerged, hold it there while Willie unbuckled this and untied that, and then drive the van back up the ramp, park it, and hustle back down to the water, where Willie was waiting. All of this proved to be far more easily said than done.
First of all, the van is so high, and the trailer so low, that I could not see a thing when backing up. To make matters worse, the windows on the van's back doors are two little squares no bigger than, say, a couple of record albums, so I had to get Willie to sit in the boat as I backed down so that I could use his bobbling head as a sort of reference point to indicate roughly where the trailer was.
Simply moving forward in a huge van with a trailer attached is no picnic either. With Willie and his vessel finally in the water, I lumbered back up the ramp, and over the levee with trailer in tow, one wheel or the other skipping up and over the curb at my every turn down to the parking lot. On a cloudy and brisk fall morning, I did not expect to encounter much traffic in the parking lot, but it was like a Grateful Dead concert out there. And I have never seen white parking-space lines painted closer together in my life. Maybe it was the length of the lines—to accommodate vehicle and trailer—that created illusion of narrowness (considering the well-known principle of how vertical lines make one appear more slender). For whatever reason, it was only after a great deal of awkward entry and reentry that I was able, finally, to wedge myself completely into the only space left in the lot.
As I came back down the ramp to get into the boat, I realized that someone had removed the little dock that was once there for passenger loading and unloading. Willie yelled to me that a little further downstream there was a series of small beaches where he could pull up, and I could hop in. So I began to hike along the rocky section of levee along the water's edge, thinking that a suitable beach area was no more than a hop and a skip away.
A quarter of a mile later—I swear I was in the shadow of the Freeport water tower—I came upon a little muddy beach no more than ten yards in length. Willie, who was following along midstream, began to pull in. After such a long hike (for me, anyway), my knee (scheduled for surgery this month) began to give me problems. After years of absorbing athletic abuse of one kind or another, the knee tends to lock up on me occasionally. My orthopedist claims that there are several bone chips floating around inside the joint, and, invariably, one will find its way into the works, creating an effect not at all unlike the proverbial monkey wrench being thrown into the cogs of an otherwise finely-tuned machine. Of course, just as Willie approached the shore, a chip that must have been the size of an actual monkey wrench found a home in a tender spot in my knee.
I danced a painful jig, writhing along the muddy shoreline as Willie's boat got closer and closer. Fortunately, I was able to compose myself just in time to absorb the shock of the boat hitting land. My task then quickly became to shove us off with the necessary force to get the boat far enough away from the shoreline, and to do so from the unsure footing that the black quicksand-like "beach" provided. My "heave-ho" reduced pretty much to a "ho" by my locked-up knee, I summoned what upper-body strength I could and, with the great shout of a Russian weightlifter, pushed the boat out into the current. As I surged outward to follow it, each of my feet made an audible popping sound, like a cork being plucked from a wine bottle, as they simultaneously emerged from their ankle-deep sockets in the quicksand. I swan-dove to safety on the bow of the boat and crawled across the porcelain bow like a foot soldier under barbed wire and plopped, my knee unable to bend either way, into the diamond-tuck seat.
As I situated myself, Willie, who had been turned toward the back as he reversed us away from shore, turned and shrieked in terror. "My boat, my boat, my beautiful boat...!" he screamed, nearly in tears. I rose to see what had shaken him so, only to discover that, like a snail, I had inadvertently left a trail of black sandy slime across the once pristine white surface of the bow during my crawl to safety. We quickly moistened two towels and, more or less, swabbed the deck and then dried—yes, dried—the surface meticulously. With the boat restored to seaworthy condition, the fun resumed.
This boat was no gutless wonder. If this boat was anything, it was quick. Lightning quick. It was the Mach 5 of boats. It could easily have been designed by Pops Racer for his son, Speed, to take out on the weekends. I know now how astronauts feel at the point of liftoff. I don't know how many G's we were pulling, or even what such a statement means, but we took off with such a force, such a deafening surge from the engine, that I became plastered to the back of my seat, and the wind caught the corners of my mouth and pulled my flapping cheeks behind my earline, stretching my lips--we've all seen the NASA training films—into a ghastly smile that extended from one sideburn to the other.
My eyes involuntarily flexed into a tight squint, and tears immediately began to stream out the outside corners. There is a scene from the movie The Right Stuff in which Sam Shepard as Chuck Yeager finally breaks the sound barrier in a special jet designed specifically for that purpose. In the movie, as Yeager breaks the barrier, the scenery gets kind of dreamy and cloudy, and everything takes on a sort of blurry rainbow tint, as though he is about to enter another dimension or perhaps a wormhole. I went through that same thing in Willie's boat that day, except with a Twilight Zone twist--I spotted a few eyeballs and a couple of E=MC2's floating around.
As the roar of the engine (or was that my flapping lips?) died down, and the boat slowed to a speed that could be calculated by something other than military radar, I began to gather my wits. The smell of gasoline filled the air. I looked around and realized that we were in Walnut Grove. Willie turned to me with a smile on his face that made me think of a heroin addict who'd just received a fix. "My cousin," I thought to myself, "is a speed junkie."
I drove all the way home at a much more reasonable speed, which took up the balance of the day. As we approached Garcia Bend Park, I realized that the adventure was far from over. I now had to go through everything I had been through launching the boat, only in reverse order. This time, there was a line of impatient drivers with empty trailers waiting their turn to back down the ramp, load up their boats, and take them home. They were backing down the narrow ramp two at a time, which, normally, would pose no problem to me, but this time I was without the services of Willie's bobbing little head to serve as my guide.
Foolish male pride restricts me from going into great detail in describing the developments that ensued in my backing the van and trailer down the hill. Let's just say that the group of impatient boaters waiting behind me decided to adopt my maneuvering as a sort of community project. Right neighborly of them, huh?
Once I was made it down to the bottom of the ramp, with the trailer in the water, Willie began to have some kind of difficulty securing the boat. As I sat at that 45-degree angle for 15 minutes, my tender knee holding down the stiffest clutch I’ve experienced since my tractor-driving days in Clarksburg, I began to feel all the blood rushing out of my foot, along with the prickly sticking that creeps in whenever a limb decides to go to sleep.
"Alright, take it up!" Willie yelled. I looked back and saw him standing on the side of the trailer. Mindful of the potential jerk that was looming under the present conditions—an injured knee and sleeping foot—I was extra careful to rev the engine and release the clutch slowly. However, despite my efforts, the rear wheels spun out in the silt at the bottom of the ramp and screeched as they finally caught hold of the grooves cut into the cement ramp.
Finally on level ground, I pulled over to let Willie drive home. He stepped around to the driver's side door, soaking wet, with spots of spewn silt dotting nearly every inch of his body. "Thanks a lot, Jeff," he said, looking far more dalmatian than human. "Oops" was all I could think of to say, as I handed him the dirty towel.
My father-in-law tells me that the two happiest days of a boat owner's life are the day he purchases his boat and the day he sells it. I’m not quite sure exactly how happy Willie was that day, but, as for myself, I was ecstatic, happy that it was Willie, and not I, who was the owner of that boat.
