Monday, September 1—

11:17 a.m., anchored in Sonbeam’s Secret Channel-

No bugs. No air moving. Everything is fading, stagnant, waiting to die.

The river is dreadfully low, lethargic and passive like the sun on my neck. Nearly silent this morning, but for a light plane droning out of sight. The highway is Labor Day quiet. Cirrus cloud wisps—classically autumn for people inclined to be cheerful—are infinite irrelevant swirls not moving against a wan watery sky.

Caleb’s gone. Nothing will ever be the same.

The high-school band teacher, arrested in May after a rousing end-of-the-school-year concert, last week pled “no contest” to twelve of thirty sexual assault counts against minor boys and girls. Bail’s been revoked. He’s in jail awaiting an October sentencing. The ponderous log Chelsea and I dragged into shallow water last summer loosed itself two weeks ago and has been snailing downriver a few inches each day, following the sun south.

11:34- Sirens whooping out on the highway. First there were two sirens, now three, fading behind my left shoulder, though likely it’s just one civilian First Responder in the family van outfitted to arouse maximum dread at township expense.

Bald head is trampled wider than it was last month. Scat scattered, masses of black shell shards. Raccoons, I suppose, lolled on their backs after sex.

Single siren now moving opposite from the first fast through the trees.

I searched through scrapbooks for an Arnold Schwarzenegger lecture and weight-training workshop I photographed years ago. Leafing through I was overtaken by regret for leaving that career and I now want it back. It’s me, where I belong, though it’s taken two decades to realize it. Last Monday I emptied my savings and borrowed twenty bucks from John and joined the National Press Photographer’s Association to get at the online job listings.

“Photojournalist wanted - Duluth News Tribune.” My last position in the field, headed by the man who replaced me, admired my work, and got into the business because of it. Sometimes something seems so right, a serendipitous easy shoe-in. But I’ve learned since divorcing and closing up the 17-year business that obvious and natural “so-rights” are a fool’s errand to get caught-up in. At age fifty, with little financial chance of advancing in school and going broke at an $8.50-per-hour hardware manager job (I’m tired of trying to care about galvanized pipe tees and Gorilla Glue’s superior role in society, or whether the paint mixing machine needs new piston rings to fix a dinky leak) it’s what I will pursue to stick my lens back in through the door, whether in Duluth or a smaller venue if needed. I spent the rest of the week scanning yellowed newspaper pix and more recent color photos, burned them onto CD-ROM, and mailed the package Friday. There has to be, must finally be, a time when best effort and enthusiasm find root. I’ll let you know.

Yesterday—

2:30 p.m.-

Stars and Stripes.

Dignified iridescent wood glowing under deep layers of varnish. Chrome full of life, reflecting blink-bright dazzles. Impossibly too high—even on tippy-toe—to peek over the gunwale when it’s on a custom-made trailer on land.

Tom backed it into Lake Tomahawk. I helped, pretending to know all about what to should do, as though I too was a seasoned proficient crew member. A young woman on shore called her friends over. They took off their clothes and begged for a ride.

Gawkers stared, sunlight glared; a miniature American flag fluttered above the stern and a Chris Craft pennant flapped from a short pole poked into chrome on the point of the bow. New wood, new varnish, new chrome, new dark blue upholstery, and a floor of brand-new light-blue battleship linoleum. Tom submerged into the depths, distributed new cushions to the front and rear seats, sat down at the wheel, and turned the ignition key. A starter grunted lazily somewhere down under a cowling.

“Weak battery,” I thought for a half-second. Then the precisely rebuilt Chrysler six-cylinder burbled to life and made me cry.

A rushing reaction, visceral and spontaneous and without shame. Most appropriate. Admiration, awe, giddiness to be granted this occasion to share a stately creation of reddish-hued wood, finally complete after twelve basement years.

Nothing is pretend, it’s all real. Every square inch has been tended and reworked. Caulk stripes on the front deck are not plastic appliqués of old-fashioned authenticity. Each seam was manually laid in and sealed with Dutch marine varnish.

I stepped down the short ladder and stood stupid. Tom reached under the dash and pulled back a tall chrome lever. The engine growl deepened, steel bands moaned, tightening around mysterious mechanisms beneath my feet and filled my ears with a drone. The dock drifted away.

It’s a 1946 Chris Craft Utility, twenty-two feet long. Purchased from under a tarp in an overgrown backyard along with all original parts and extra parts in cardboard boxes, Tom started restoration in his cellar in 1990, finishing in time to win 2002’s Best of Show.

We backed around and headed out. Naked girls got dressed. Tom thumbed a small chrome lever in the center of the big white steering wheel. The power increased, the bow lifted. He nudged the lever counter-clockwise again. The bow flag flip-fluttered lively. He held us at 2,000 RPMs for a few minutes while we sat barefoot on the seat backs. Thick white nylon ropes softened across the front deck and over the windshield and into the cockpit.

“Still breaking it in,” he said. “The engine’s only got twelve hours so far. Needs twenty before the rings and bearings seat. Should pick up a couple-hundred more RPMs then.”

He slowed around a buoyed sandbar at Daniel’s Point, glided along shore, and pointed out boathouses where other woodies he’d once worked on rocked mahogany rear ends.

Idling up to a cottage, a white-haired man in a boat reared-up from a nap and hailed us over. We did, and rocked in passing boat wakes as Tom and his friend caught up on workplace gossip. Larry, too, had worked at the same automobile/boat restoration firm shortly before resigning from the proprietor’s psychotic paranoia.

We moved on, waving and throwing gay salutations and promising to write.

Out into the main lake, Tom nudged us to 2,500 RPMs. Flat-out speed is not the reason for a craft like that. Riding high in the sky with spray hissing at the sides and a long narrow wake flattening behind and carried by a man’s attention to perfection is the grandeurous whole point.

Last year late afternoon, after winning Best of Show, Tom went for a spin and discovered a small glitch in the mechanism. Throttling back after a fast ride, the motor choked on too much fuel. It stopped and wouldn’t start. Wind pushed him toward concrete bridge abutments, a bad spot for new varnish to scuff up against. Closer and closer it drifted, pushed by high circus wakes with no power on board but Tom and a newly restored paddle.

A boat show official showed up in an aluminum skiff and towed him to the boat landing, a smug snickering ramp beside a tavern where swank big-city folk drink and vaguely enjoy life guarding palatial Fiberglas sleeks parked up by the pilings snickering smugly at a local artiste having trouble without offering no help.

Tom loaded it onto the trailer alone, watching his varnish suffer a modicum of dings thanks to the drunk dis-debonair dinks.

He hunted out a new needle-and-seat (“the old one was cockeyed”) and today it ran fine.

He promised me a cold beer at Lakeside Cafe. We glided into a slip beside a Donzi (Italian white Fiberglas, “80-thousand,” Tom said) and berthed - blue bumpers hung down alongside and a tubular white bumper tied to the front to protect the sharp-pointed stainless steel bow cutter from scratches.

The lakeside cafe serves burgers and fresh frozen fish sticks and soft drinks and beer to a half-dozen picnic tables under umbrellas, adjacent to a gas pump configured to keep the fun humming for $3.45 per gallon. We wove through gypsies shouting and swearing good-naturedly and sat at a table behind a family of shuddering nice city folks drinking plastic glasses of root beer. (Both women showed me electronic panic buttons as we passed.) Tom, who is savvy with social gratuity, nodded or gestured or discharged some other circumspect, “C’mere Toots”-type act with his wallet. A young woman wearing an apron and short-shorts and freckles on her knees hurried right over. Tom ordered Miller High Life. His treat I did too, a premium brew compared to the cheap stuff I’ve become accustomed to.

“Babe magnet,” Tom said, inclining his head toward the boat. We discussed that, appalled. Then to emphasize the spectacle he lifted his shirt high and showed me his hairy chest, like Girls Gone Wild do on late-night television commercials. I switched on the video camera.

The waitress brought us beer cans in each hand and, in the cultivated nobody-else-has-drunk-from-it-yet style of cultural distinction, “psst’ed” the tab open, then left it sticking up. She, a pretty seditious young woman, hoisted her T-shirt and jiggled plastic breasts at Tom’s money. He waved her away.

We chatted about marriage and the church. (He’s disillusioned about it bringing in too many retards eat Jesus’s flesh but don’t respect what it means. I retired from there six years ago when the new pastor turned out to be a businessman in a preacher suit who on the sly consumed pornography and tearfully implored me to return Debbie Does Dallas.) He said his boat restoration business is beginning to flourish, and soon he’ll be leaving employment with Paranoid Floyd who double-bills clients and expects Tom to apply caulk to boat decks before moisture content is properly dry and Tom knows it’ll be back too soon for unsightly crack repair.

“Would you like another?” the waitress asked, setting her bare foot, tanned calf, and finely-shaved thigh high up on my bench.

“Yes. The same,” Tom said.

Hardly half-finished with the first and starting to stutter, I agreed to another higher power.

Two jetskis puttered up to the gas pump. Five girls, two under ten, none over twelve, wearing polymer hair and affluent faces with thin painted lips, nibbled multi-color fingernails. A tubby woman with roisterous voice, holding a beer bottle—everybody’s life of the party contained incompletely in a ponderously sagging-at-the-bosom swimsuit with tattoos everywhere—ran screaming to the edge of the gas apron and dove into the lake. The girls flinched and bobbed on their rides. One sobbed cruelly. Woman treading water shouted, “you want gas?! You don’t think I work here? HA-HA-HA.”

Stumbling up the ladder she belched, “I’m the ow’er’s sis’er-in-law, so it’ so-kay.” She unhinged the gas hose, filled the tanks, and went away with a fifty-dollar bill, returning with Hersheys and Snickers and blaze-orange cans of Livewire Alive!

We decided to go. Tom went to the rest room. I staggered to the boat.

“I had to wait,” Tom said. “Two Aussie guys jabbering gibberish were pissing in the sink.”

Into the channel linking Lake Tomahawk to Lake Minocqua. We followed a parade of slow-moving pontoons and puttering speedboats, one a Viagra-blue twenty-five-foot Fiberglas hydroplane pushed by a Chevrolet engine with phallic silver megaphone pipes jutting out the rear and steered by an old man holding a blinking Chihuahua with a party hat on its head. It’s difficult for a Chris Craft to go slow. Tom disengaged the transmission often as we crept up on other boats. “Hard on the torque bands,” he said.

We motored along Lake Minocqua’s shoreline. He pointed out boathouses hiding other vintage wooden boats he’s worked on, including a two-hundred-thousand Saint Craft woodie owned by George W’s Ambassador to Belgium, unused since he left the country two years. “Transom got all tore up in rough weather; wasn’t cinched down inside the boathouse, so it bucked against the door hinges and I had to fix the damage.”

Tuesday afternoon—

EZ is experienced in her station up front. I trusted her to respect the fiendish conditions out there and tip-toe guardedly remarking to herself, “my goodness, this wild water provoked by thirty-five-mph winds is uncommon to the conditions back there on the river, so I’ll be careful.”

It was sudden and unnatural for her to step out onto a 2-1/2-foot-high swell.

Lake Tomahawk changed harshly from this morning, when we serenely set off through calm wide open water. Exiting the “SLOW - NO WAKE” channel from Lake Minocqua we were blasted by high winds blowing straight at us, so we stayed in shore’s lee.

Then we put our heads down (I expected hers to too) and aimed slowly across building high scary waves. Anxiety grew. But I never thought of telling EZ to lay down and quit standing high on the front tip as we idled guardedly tossed high and low.

A wave bucked the boat and over she went, front legs reaching to calmly meet the surface that wouldn’t support her.

Crisis! I knocked the boat into reverse, then forward, then reverse again trying to find neutral. EZ paddled wild-eyed berserk, waves filling her flared nostrils, surfacing, waves pushing her under. I crawled to the bow calling, urging, “C’mere.” Then demanded “COME!”

She headed away, searching for shore where she’s accustomed to landing, confused and entirely helpless to defeat the overpowering absurdity in 60-foot deep water

“COME!”

She circled wide left into the lee of the boat, then paddled back toward my hand leaning over the side.

“COME!”

Body too vertical for competent strokes, paws splashing the waves to stay up out of the deep, EZ is old and out of shape and was losing the swim. A gust pushed the boat. It sank into a trough and in a swift, God-motivated move I caught a handful of the lady’s scruff and hauled her up panting and choking and trembling in drain-water pooling across the front deck.

“LAY DOWN!” She didn’t, but half-sat, half-laid, trying to catch her breath and make sense of it all. “LAY DOWN,” my voice said in a tone I’ve never heard. Boat bounced and bobbed. She laid down, reluctantly.

We rushed the final half-mile, me breathing deep rattled breaths, her shaking hard and soaking-wet terrified.