Velociworld

The Plastic Sailboat

Prior to our move to the farm the Senator spent most weekends there. The tiny corrugated fiber bungalow was being morphed into a two-story house, albeit one that contained the gist, the soul, of the bungalow embedded in its heart. The center of the house remained the bungalow. To the north side was added two large bedrooms. To the south was added a great room and an upstairs master suite, so the Senator could retire to his own devices, forty or so yards from us whelps at the far side of the house. I mention this only to provide backdrop as to why the Senator, and all of us, were always at the farm before we moved there permanently in '66.

The Senator had a vision, as well. Across the private dirt driveway in front of the house he was building a lake. A pond, really. A sluice, actually. His vision was to cut a circular lake, with an island of several acres of hardwood and pine, at the center. He was going to build a bridge across this pond, this sluice, to the island.

The Senator hired a man named Briggs to dig this sluice, this trench, with his backhoe. And a mighty backhoe it was. The trench, the ditch, was about thirty or forty feet across. Just wide enough for a stiff breeze to conjure some waves. Briggs went to work hellbent for Naugahyde, and did well for a while. He encountered difficulties, however, on the "back forty". The far side of the land, while fecund in hardwood, was hardwood of the cyprus variety. The land degenerated into a quicksand bog that mired the backhoe's treads in a sucking purgatorium. The machine lay enswaddled in muck, hoe arm lifted impotently and vainly, like a La Brea beast trapped in tar boils.

Briggs, probably drunk at the time of the enmuckification, wandered off to get more drunker still. The Senator essayed the situation, stirred his Windsor Canadian, and shrugged. "It looks like a circle from this side," he rationalized. "I'm fine with it." He then drove off, ostensibly to look for Briggs, and locate a source of catfish fingerlings to stock the pond, the trench, for when it filled with rainwater.

We returned a few weekends later to assess the situation. The trench, the ditch, had two or three feet of water in it. Whether the Senator had pumped water in from the well I am at a loss to say, for I was only eight years old. But when a wind (a zephyr!) came up you could see the tiny waves snap and dance on the surface. A bona fide lake we had, verily.

Now the Senator, ever one for surprises, produced a small plastic sailboat. This sailboat was for my older brother to ply the ocean blue, as it were. My brother had brought a friend for the weekend: they would make the journey across the mighty trench together.

"You have to sail it to the far side," the Senator admonished. "That'll make you a saltwater tar," he added.

I have no idea if the Senator was serious when he made these statements, or was merely having sport. I presume the latter, and fear the former. "You'll have to climb aboard on the shore," he added, "then cast off." This would launch the sailboat.

For a sailboat it was, in lieu of any other definition. It had a hull, and a mast, and a sail. There was no rudder, the idea being I presume to steer the thing by the boom, which was a slender plastic piece similar to a broomstick. About the hull: it was approximately five feet long, and constructed of the same blue plastic that one finds in patio baby pools for ten dollars. Entirely bereft of balance, or ballast, it was a devilishly unstable piece of bouyant catastrophe. The mast was of similar cheap plastic, and the plastic sail was akin to kite material, which is to say a passionate fart would rend it to shreds.

I almost forgot to add: in an apparent nod to the inherent unseaworthiness of the craft the manufacturer had included an outrigger: a length of styrofoam attached to two strips that would presumably stabilize the craft should one actually venture to launch it. The outrigger also added some Polynesian flair to the entire sordid enterprise.

My brother, being a game little cock, clambered aboard with his friend. And after some jovial hectoring from the Senator about the proper way to set the fluttering sail, they were launched from shore by the vigorous thrust of a well-placed size 12 boot.

I am reminded at this point in the tale of my studies of calculus at university. For even as calculus is at some level the science of infinitesimals, and even as I recall there are locations on a number line that are not zero, but are zero distance from zero, so I would describe the linear path of the Good Ship Fiasco, which, although having made sail, was instantaneously capsized before journey could be measured.

Tossed upon the cruel sea, my brother and his first mate, although waist deep in miasmic waters, still managed to lift the mighty vessel upon their heads, decant it of Neptune's liquor, and scramble again aboard. Tiny jaws thrust forward, they yanked the boom to catch wind. Only to find themselves foundered again, soaked as millers in a fetid bilge.

Four times the craft sundered, four times the lads exhibited tenacity worthy of Sysiphus in seeing the thing through (for who would fail before him? What boy would capitulate?) before the Senator, either tired of the spectacle or devoid of refreshment or both, and having guffawed himself hoarse, cried "Enough!" and mercifully let them off the hook.

The blue plastic sailboat disappeared after that day, I know not where. I assume the Senator threw it in the bed of the yellow Ranchero and hauled it off the garbage dump, there to smash it into pieces for the crime of humbling his boy.

Because it was the boat's fault, of course. I would not be surprised to learn the Senator had sued the manufacturer, too, for emotional distress. Not my brother's, of course. His.