A Simpler Time

There's sort of two stories in one on this post today. Today, a short story of mine called "So Many Nights Ago" was published over at Six Sentences. (You can read that here.)

If you're new here, welcome. Be sure to take a while to look around and read what there is to offer. Everything should be pretty easy to find with the navigation on the side.

And the only thing I'm going to say about this next piece is that kids should play outside more, like I did when I was a kid.

We spent two weeks gathering supplies to build our raft. After our parents would go to sleep, we would sneak into the garbage and withdraw empty milk-jugs and two-liter soda bottles and store them in our secret stash behind a bright blue tarp, our makeshift fort, strung up between fence poles into a sort of lean-to in the backyard. When a stiff wind would come in from the valley, it would blow up and down in the air and make thick, thunderous sounds that scared the neighbor’s children in the middle of the night, but we didn’t care, we were teenagers now.

Once we’d collected an entire garbage bag full of plastic bottles and jugs, we set out to the dollar store with our saved up pennies, nickels, dimes and quarters to purchase six-dollars worth of duct tape and various odds and ends, lengths of rope and the like. Then we raced back home on our bicycles and got to work.

The body of the raft would be an old, hollow door that my dad had put on the side-yard during our last remodeling effort and hadn’t yet had time to take to the city dump. It was deep chestnut in color with a wood grain printed on what seemed to be Formica or balsa-wood, though we couldn’t tell the difference, either way it was perfect for our vessel. We went to task taping all of the bottles shut, airtight, and arranged them on the bottom of the door, taping them in long, neat rows like corn in a field. Then we added another row of bottles and jugs beneath that, leaving us with a solid eight to twelve inches of flotation device below the wooden door.

“Do you really think this’ll float?” Jared asked me, as though somehow I was the ringleader, even though it was his idea all those many days ago.

“Of course it will. I mean, there’s air in the bottles. The bottles float. The door’s made of wood, right? And the duct tape is waterproof. How else are we supposed to make a raft?” Perhaps I adopted his plan with more zeal than he had proposed it with, and in retrospect, my rhetorical question was preposterous. We could have gone up the hill and lashed a dozen dead trees together and sailed along that way, though it would have been much more cumbersome to get to the water and it seemed a bit too old-fashioned. For a pair of modern teenagers, this seemed like the best plan.

We fancied ourselves as a contemporary Tom and Huck, with all the latest materials for a better sailing raft. It was too bad that our Mississippi River was nothing more than a drainage canal running from one end of our town to another through residential neighborhoods, fenced off from each yard so small children and animals wouldn’t drown. The water was as calm and still as a napping cat on a lazy Sunday afternoon and, at it’s deepest, was no more than four feet deep and eight feet wide. It was as brown like mud, so it was like the Mississippi in one way at least. But every time we passed it on our way home from school, we could hear it calling for us.

It doesn’t matter how small a creek or mighty a river (or dingy a canal), it calls to young boys like the sea calls sailors. It beckons them with thoughts of adventure and youth. And the more the season pressed into the heat of summer, the more alluring the siren’s call of the canal became.

It was two blocks to the canal from my house, three from Jared’s, and we decided that once our craft was done, we’d get up before dawn and carry it to the mouth of the waterway when no one would see or stop us. And so, the next morning we arose early and got prepared for our voyage. Hoping we might find fish, we prepared in the early morning for fishing, stealing items from my father’s tackle box: bobs and weights, tackle and bait, plenty of fishing line, etc. We couldn’t carry fishing poles so we decided that we’d make our own rods on the “river” out of sticks.

The morning was cool, which was an early respite from the mid-day blaze of summer. Jared woke me with a tap at my bedroom window that morning and after we’d stuffed our packs with supplies in provisions, we crept out the back door and tip-toed through the grass to our tarp fort which did its best to obscure our raft from the sight of the front yard or my parent’s window.

Jared hefted the front end of the raft and I carried the rear and we walked slowly, as silently as possible, to the edge of the backyard. Getting it through the gate was tricky, but we’d practiced opening the gate as quietly as possible in the last couple of days as we plotted our egress. It didn’t work out too well, so Jared brought a can of WD-40 over to my house the previous day and we worked it into the latch until the only sound that could be made was the sharp TING of the hasp clanging against the metal fence pole. To our great delight Jared was able to manage the gate superbly and, after some angling of our raft, we were able to break it free from the backyard and we were on our way.

The black night soon became gray morning and the birds began their early songs as we marched with singular purpose through the neighborhood, down one block and up another. The water in the canal reflected the dim light of the morrow over the surface of the lazily flowing current. Between the poor light and the clouds of dirt, the bottom was completely obscured except for patches of green that were most likely moss of some type.

We walked around the fence, replete with a “No Trespassing” sign, and we set the raft down on the grassy bank, pulled the packs from our backs and set about getting ready for our journey. Jared toiled through the brush, looking for sticks suitable for fishing with, “Do you really think there’re fish in there?”

“Most likely,” I said, knowing I had no information to base that statement on, one way or the other.

“Oh,” he replied, continuing his hunt.

I tied the length of rope around what was going to be the bow of the ship as though it were the reins of a horse, fully realizing that we had nothing to steer with. At least this way, I thought, we might be able to pull the raft one way or the other in a tight spot.

“Ah-ha,” Jared exclaimed as he found a suitable branch for a pair of fishing rods that he broke in half over his knee. He handed me the shorter half and we went to work fashioning our rods. We tied fishing line to the top of the stick, attached floats, hooks and bait. We then carefully wound the line around the stick and put the rods on the top of our raft.

“This is the moment of truth,” I said, trying to offer gravitas to the occasion.

“Mm-hmm,” Jared replied.

We both stood over the raft, neither wanting to make the first move, both terrified that this would still be a total disaster.

It felt like a standoff and I caved first. “Let’s just get it in there and see what happens,” I said as I grabbed the stern of the boat and pulled it to the edge of the canal. “Grab the line,” I told Jared.

Now that I was the one giving orders, it seemed as though I was the captain.

Slowly, we pushed the raft into the water, cringing. It did indeed float, though it didn’t displace much water at all.

As I stood, Jared and I high-fived for our first major victory in our voyage down the canal. I looked at it, floating in the water; the stern was trying it’s hardest to become the bow in the current and for the first time the sudden worry that it wouldn’t both hold our weight and float struck me.

“Okay, hold it steady,” I ordered Jared. I liked being the captain.

He dug his heels in the dirt and wound the rope around his palms a couple of more times, bracing himself as though he were belaying me down a cliff. With great trepidation, I took one step out onto the raft, paying careful attention to the distribution of my weight. Slowly, I shifted my weight from my foot on the shore to my foot on the raft, praying that it would bear my weight. I could feel it sink beneath my frame, displacing more water until it seemed to remain buoyant with all the weight I was bearing down on it. I could feel my cheeks pull tight from the preposterous grin on my face. “I think this is going to work…”

Confidently, I wobbled my way onto the raft with my other foot and immediately sat down, for fear of losing my balance or tipping the craft.

Sitting in place, I threw my weight around from side to side in an effort to face the raft forward to little avail. It was obvious that it would head in whichever direction it felt like. By now, with my added weight to the vessel, Jared was actually having quite the time keeping it in place.

“You’re going to have to hurry, I’m going to float away as soon as you let go.”

“Okay,” Jared said, “on the count of three…

“One…

“Two...”

Cringing, I closed my eyes, waiting the inevitable impact.

“Three!”

I felt the shockwave of Jared’s landing and opened my eyes as I felt water creep up around the edges of the door-raft. Water was seeping at the edges. With our combined weight on the raft, the top of the door was just about level with the water.

If the broad smile across Jared’s face was any reflection of my elation, then you can imagine how impressed we both were with each other.

So what if it we’d be soaking wet all day? We had the sun to our heads, nothing but time ahead and a long lazy Saturday on river to look forward to.

The current moved at a snails pace.

We could have easily walked the length of the canal in one-sixteenth the time it took us to float down, trying our luck at catching the fish we were pretty sure didn’t exist.

We passed all manner of discarded trash in the canal including an old-rusted tricycle, half out of the water and covered in algae. For some reason it made me sad, though after all these years, I don’t remember why.

I don’t recall ever reaching the end of the canal, nor do I recall catching a fish. What I do remember was enjoying that simple time on the water floating on a homemade raft with a good friend at my side, a homemade fishing rod in my hand and not a care in the world.