THE DOCK

 

 

As my wife always says, give a man some tools, nails and lumber, and you will have, in relatively short order, a new and uniquely efficient method of injuring oneself. I tend to agree.

 

Case in point: the dock.

 

It all began when my outlaws (that is my superficially affectionate name for my in-laws) had a great desire to have a wonderful house on a private lake. Limited only by their imagination and the fact that they had neither a wonderful house nor a private lake, they began planning in earnest.

 

I will always appreciate my outlaws and their lack of connection with reality. They also live a life, as we all do, of declining expectations. After attempting to overcome their first obstacle, namely that they live in a desert, they scaled back their plans in a gradual manner, until reality met with a backhoe.

 

Years later, their pond was finished (haha, joking there. It was much, much longer). The word “Pond” was a rather loose term for an irrigation fed sinkhole surrounded by enough weeds to effectively mimic the Amazon river during spring. Also the word “finished” was also a bit hazy, but the fact that they had a rather large hole in their property was indisputable. They were, nonetheless, quite proud of their pond and tended to its needs regularly. This typically consisted of sacrificing various items to it such as rakes, picnic tables, bridges and the like in an effort to reclaim the pond for lush vegetation. Of course, wading through four feet of water carrying a sharp machete in a futile effort to trim down cattails led them to several rather remarkable and noteworthy injuries as well as their acquisition of something resembling, in several ways, a boat.

 

As I was catching on now, “boat” was another loose term for something that had a bottom, sides and leaked like a spaghetti strainer. My mother in-law had traded an old, dilapidated car for it in a fit of dementia. Sitting in the boat with water lapping at my ankles, I imagined that that old car probably was a bit more buoyant than the “boat” and probably got the same gas mileage.

 

“Can hold eight strong men afloat, even when swamped!” she would exclaim whenever I’d complain that the water level inside the boat exceeded the water level outside.

 

“Find me eight idiots dumb enough to get into it” I retorted.

 

“You’re one” she said dryly as an oar floated away.

 

My mother in-law completely outfitted the “boat” for use on a small, muddy pond in the middle of a desert. Namely, she had purchased from a ocean going cruise ship an excess anchor weighing about 100 pounds.  Always interested in the scientific implications of things, I discovered that by standing in the boat and grabbing the anchor you could bring the hull down to the very bottom of the lake, then launch yourself at least ten feet in the air after throwing the anchor off the boat. Of course, it was nearly impossible to throw it more than three feet without dislocating several important portions of your male anatomy. Amazingly, it was tied to the boat with a rather short 100 foot piece of rope tied to a piece of twine which was in turn tied to the anchor. Amazed at my abilities, I managed once to physically throw myself out of the boat once accidentally wrapping the twine around my ankle.

 

After awhile, it was decided that nature was winning, so we mulled over the last few minor problems of the pond; namely that it leaked, it was full of muck, and the weeds were so thick that the water level was rising by at least a foot a week. After prioritizing our list carefully and thoughtfully then menfolk decided (and remember, this makes total sense to us men), decided to build a dock.

 

As we explained to our wives, “it will make it easier to get into the boat and go cut down the weeds!” What we did not explain is that we had no intention of actually getting into the boat ourselves. We had more important things to do, namely a game of cards.

 

George, my brother in-law, who had made a passion of the dubious job of keeping varmints out of the pond by shooting at the resident muskrat with his .22, was unlucky enough not to be looking busy when it came time to pick someone to actually do the work.

 

“Have some ambition” said Dale as he told him of his task that day. “We’re going to go find the cards.”

 

Ambition is to some people like air and water, an intricate part of their life. To George, this type of ambition was synonymous with cat vomit, something to be avoided at all costs. However, the muskrat had begun taunting him by painting a bulls-eye on his coat and leaving several pairs of glasses on the bank of the pond, so George decided that a change in task was in order.

 

That meant that he began the process of looking for the misplaced tools that he would use to build the dock with the misplaced lumber. As he was milling through the refrigerator, obviously looking for a saw or hammer, I asked him if he had a plan.

 

“Of course” he responded taking out the milk.

 

“I mean for the dock” I said.

 

“What Dock?” he replied.

 

Of course, we accused him later of “making it up as he went” and never having a plan, but he mumbles “faulty materials” and goes off on his way.

 

Anyhow, since it disarmed my brother in-law, nobody objected to he making the dock, except of course the muskrat who had started dying of boredom now that he did not have an entertaining maniac with a .22 pistol shooting at him.

 

WEEKS later, we had, what we called, basically out of fear of making fun of an armed man, a “dock”. That it resembled three steps made out of rotting two by fours did not matter. After all, he had a gun.

 

As I remind you of “loose terms”, I must say that soon it became apparent that the “dock”, had a few “shortcomings”. One extremely minor one is that it was not, and could not be, attached to land.

 

Dale and I dropped the steps down in to the pond and readied them for their first test.

 

With the top step firmly holding onto about one quarter inch of the bank of the pond, we noticed the second “shortcoming” of the “dock”, namely that the second step was under a few inches of water and the last had disappeared completely into the muck.

 

“Well at least there’s no more water on that step than is in the boat!” Dale exclaimed. Then, in a brilliant summation of both the situation and of his own son’s construction abilities, he motioned to me and said “You first!”

 

For those of you without first hand experience with a mud pond fed by spring irrigation water, note two very important items. First off, mud is very, very slick and second, irrigation water is very, very cold.

 

Until this very moment, I had never been water-skiing in my life. I can tell you that the first tenth of a second is quite exhilarating, at least until you realize that the motion you are feeling is the base of the “dock” pulling away from the bank and the bottom skidding across the muddy bottom of the “pond”.

 

My first reaction was one of pure delight, until I realized that, first, the dock was sinking and second, the water was cold and finally, someone had thoughtlessly left a leaky boat in my way.

 

I figured I went at could go least 20 feet or so before my forward momentum began to lessen and gravity would overcome my desire to stay dry. Dale figured it was more like four feet but he had calculated me impacting the boat. I hate it when he’s right.

 

Crawling out of the cold water, I could tell that Dale was deeply concerned with my plight. The loud guffawing he bellowed was obviously a means he was using to make me feel better.

 

After several years, my oldest daughter, having mastered the “hopping technique”, which allowed a person approximately one-half a second to hop from the doc to the boat before it slithered into the pond, told me that the dock had gotten even worse and needed to be replaced.

 

Embarrassed

 

 

“What’s wrong with it now?” I inquired.

 

“The boards fell off, there are nails protruding through the base besides..... it just sunk into the pond and disappeared. Grandma said you could use that wood over there” she said, pointing to a cluster of old weathered boards lying on the ground.

 

My daughter had begun learning of the facts of life with earnest, but apparently had not had the talk yet of “what happens when dad gets out tools”. Instead of running into the house and hiding, as she should of, she watched, with a rather amused expression, as I fabricated my “dock”.

This consisted of a 6 inch wide board about 12 feet long. On the end of the plank was nailed a large piece of tree trunk (This had the secondary benefit of saving me from the unenviable duty of splitting it into firewood with Dale’s axe. An axe that had been worn, in its last few hundred years of use, into basically a blob of iron with a handle). As I figured that the log would set on the bottom of the pond, I figured the board was long enough to actually have some amount of it lay steadily on the bank.

 

Glowing with pride at my cleverness, I eased it into the water.

 

My daughter had also apparently missed the talk on “never trying out one of dad’s inventions”.

 

As my daughter moved to the end of the board, I noticed the my dock too, had one particular “shortcoming”, namely an uncanny resemblance to behaving like fishing bobber in a storm, moving up and down with a motion that reminded me of hooking a good sized rainbow trout. And, of course, my daughter was trying to stand on it.

 

Needless to say, her sense of balance was woefully inadequate given the situation, but her ability to perform a spectacular series of aerial events was quite captivating and culminated in an Olympic caliber dive into the water.

 

We finally decided that a dock wasn’t quite the necessity that we had first thought. I had proposed doing it one more time, but my wife and daughter, for some odd reason, were violently opposed. We did figure a method of getting into the boat more easily, which is to say you basically wait a few minutes until it sinks a bit and then step off of the shore and into the boat.

 

If I had only thought of that then maybe my daughter wouldn’t give me that look anymore.