One Week Till Launch

I’ve got one week until Katie and I set sail from Troy to Manhattan on my book tour. I need to finish the boat, connect with the media, and finalize the schedule with the businesses at which I’m stopping. I just started to remember, today, what the last week before a raft trip used to feel like. There are lots of problems, and I’m not totally sure that everything will work out. But it feels exhilarating.

I decided to ditch the gas motor. It always felt like cheating, since I’d never used a gas motor on the trips that my book is about. Or, it felt like I was getting old, because I never worried about a gas motor when I built boats before. And if you read the previous post, you know the motor was 60 years old, it was hard to start, and it had a gas tank that the boating blogs warn poses an EXTREME EXPLOSION HAZARD. I was spending too many hours fiddling with the thing every day, when I should have been focusing on something I already know how to do (more or less), which is to wire together a bank of deep cycle batteries and hook them up to the two windmills I had on Assembly Required, the boat that I sailed to Manhattan in 2010.

Assembly Required, 2010, the day we installed the windmills.

Next I decided to ditch the idea of taking the boat apart into pieces and shipping it in the back of a pickup truck whenever I wanted to drive it from place to place. It was a good idea back in February, but the pieces were heavy, and required two people spending an hour to put the boat together whenever I wanted to work on it, and then a half-hour to take it apart again. Instead, I decided I’d get a trailer, put the boat together on top of it, and then I could work on painting it, wiring it, and building a structure on top to protect from the weather, without wasting time whenever I had 3 hours to go to New Baltimore to work on the vessel before I had to drive back to Albany to go to work.

So I drove to New Baltimore and Katie, my dad and I put the boat together in the yard. This time we used bolts but I put a whole bunch of screws through it too, so that the boat is really one piece now. To attach the platform to the canoes I crawled under the boat and tied the platform’s joists to the cross-beams of the canoes. Katie and Dad were unsure this would be a sturdy enough connection, but I knew from building Mother of Inventions in 2009 that rope is a really great medium for connecting hulls to platforms. They can take a lot of stress without snapping.

The boat finally connected into one structure.

The bow of the platform floats between the two canoes, as does the back of the boat. I wanted to support the bow so I could stand on it. Also, I didn’t want the canoes to shift or pizza-slice like a person trying to slow down on skis–the canoes have to stay exactly parallel. So I tied a rope through the loops at the fronts and backs of either canoe, to a bolt with two eyelets on either side, which when screwed together, adds tension to a line.

Connecting the canoes at bow and stern to one another.

After screwing in a set of oar locks, the next step was to lift the boat onto a trailer. My friend Jake had dropped his trailer off early in the morning, but he’d to leave to help demolish a house. So it was up to me, Dad and Katie to get the boat, which now weighed about 500 pounds, onto the trailer before Jake came back, so we could take the boat to the river that night and test it out. Getting The Manhattan Project (2007) and Assiduity (2009) onto trailers required cranes and 20 people, respectively. But this boat is much smaller. My father and I were able to lift the front of the boat while Katie slid a 12-foot 2×4 underneath, so we could hold it better. We then rested the 2×4 on higher and higher piles of lumber until we could back the trailer underneath the bow. Then I put a series of pipes under the bow on top of the trailer, and Dad and I lifted from behind and rolled it forward. This was how we rolled the bridge off of Assiduity 16 feet in the air when we had to move that monstrosity to the river in 2009.

The boat partially loaded onto the trailer. The trailer is 10 feet long and the boat is 16, so it hung off the bat quite a bit.

By 2 p.m. we’d gotten the boat permanently put together and onto the trailer. Jake was not due back to tow the boat to the river until 7 p.m. It was at this point that I saw a big difference in my Dad, compared to years ago. Back when I was building rafts, as I describe in my book, Dad used to joke about how silly I was, how I was ruining his yard, messing up his driveway, and wasting my time. My dad read my book about those adventures, and told me he didn’t like the way I’d described him, like an adversarial figure. I didn’t really know how to respond to that, because I know he wasn’t trying to be adversarial, but that was how he seemed to me, then. Well, now Katie and I rested on the boat and Dad sat on the stone wall that’s waist high across the driveway by the hill below the house. We were trying to figure out what to do next. Suddenly, he stood and asked, “Do you want me to drive over to Glen’s [our mechanic in Hannacroix] and see if he has my trailer hitch?” Dad and Mom had bought a newer truck which did not have a hitch attached, and Dad was waiting for the mechanic to fix the flat tire on the wood-splitter, and he was going to install the trailer hitch, which would only take a second to install, while Dad happened to be out there to get the wood-splitter (whenever that happened). “I’ll go over. What the heck. We gotta try out the thing sooner or later, right?”

“If you want to go over to Glen’s and get the trailer hitch, and use it to take Jake’s trailer to the river sooner rather than later, I’m down for that! I just don’t want to inconvenience you or anything with the truck. I’d really like to get this thing to the river as soon as possible.”

“It’s nothing,” my dad said, and took off to get the trailer hitch so we could finally try out the boat that I’d been designing and building since April or something like that. I didn’t feel total relief, but I felt partial relief because the solution to one problem–how to tow the boat conveniently–was largely solved. I could borrow my Dad’s truck, or he could drive.

Once Dad came back with the truck hitch it was a simple matter to hook up the trailer, then Katie and I followed behind as he and Mom drove up to Coeymans Marina. Katie and I veered off in order to drop my car at Barren Island, then we met my parents by the docks in Coeymans. This was the easiest transport of one of my boats to the river yet. We simply backed the boat down the launch until the trailer’s wheels almost touched, and the overhanging canoes licked the water. Then I untied the boat, lifted the bow off the trailer, and she slid right in.

Well, we tied the boat up to the dock and loaded the oars, the marine battery, the trolling motor and our life jackets. In a tupperware “dry box” we kept our keys and cellphones. While Katie, Mom, Dad and I stood on the dock, I did a little dedication ceremony. I threw a pocketful of coins onto the deck, popped a bottle of champagne, poured the first three libations to Poseidon, poured a little over the deck, and I named her “TL” — short for That’s Life.

It was obvious that she wasn’t taking on any water and that the whole deck held together well. She only drew about 6-inches of water, just about what a canoe would normally draw. My dad was surprised because he thought the extra weight of the deck and battery would push the canoes under water. Katie was visibly relieved because she has been in a canoe only about four times, and of course a singular canoe threatens to tip whenever you shift your weight. But when we got aboard she saw that the two canoes cancelled each other’s tipping motion, and that it would be very difficult to capsize the boat (more difficult than it would be to capsize a V-hulled boat like a speedboat or a sailboat, whose ballast must be kept below water level). We only had about two hours of daylight left, and I wanted to test the boat out and tie her up in Colewell Cove, on Barren Island, where Jake had planted a dock and moored his sailboat. So Katie and I boarded and waved goodbye to my parents. I hooked the electric motor to the battery and turned her on. We started moving downstream on half-power at about 3 mph, which is just below the boat’s cruising speed of about 4 mph. I remarked to Katie that it had been seven years, but I was now I was the captain of a boat again!

There is a point on Bannerman Island that makes a peninsula and cuts off the view of Coeymans from downstream. On our first raft it took us nearly 45 minutes to pass this point. On our later boats with oars it took us about 12 minutes to pass this point. On this night, with the water like glass, and no wind, and the perfectly streamlined hulls and an electric motor, we reached the point in 5 minutes, before my parents had pulled away from Coeymans in their truck.

We finally get the boat on the water.

It was mid-August and this was the first time Katie and I had been out on a canoe the whole year. We had the bottle of champagne to pass back and forth. So we decided to motor south to the beach at the southern side of the bay formed where the Hannacroix Creek meets the Hudson, a mile downstream. Katie watched her first three barges pass in close proximity. I told her,

“You’d think we have to worry about the wakes from barges, but they’re not so bad. Their wakes come at you slow and rolly. All you’ve got to do is turn and face them, and they’re over in a couple of seconds.” We turned and rode the wake of a barge and it was no problem. “It’s the speedboats that you have to watch out for. When the go by at 40 miles an hour, their wake comes flying out, and they’re bigger and less predictable than the wakes of the barges.”

In Hannacroix Cove, with Barren Island to the north behind me.
Katie in Hannacroix Cove.

You can tell it’s low tide because the littoral grass and lily pads are protruding from the water almost out to the channel. After we made our stop, we motored back up to the north side of Barren Island. I brought us to shore and we carried a canoe down from a hill where Jake keeps it. We put this on the boat, then motored out to the dock where Jake has his sailboat. We tied up TL, then canoed back to the land, where there’s a path through the woods which led to where we’d dropped off my car. I took a final picture of the boat tied to the dock next to Jake’s 30-foot sailboat. It’s grainy because I had to zoom in with my camera. All the lights and cranes behind are the works they’ve built just north of Coeymans. None of that existed when I was taking rafts down the river. We stowed one of our rafts where the tanker is moored in the picture below, because the whole place was an abandoned brick plant with some falling-down sheds.

The next day was Monday and I had a book event up in Dana Park in Albany, the Monday Night Concert Series. It is the little park next to Lionheart in the triangle formed by the intersection of Lark Street and Delaware Ave on Madison Avenue. I spent three hours there, and made a profit of $5. But I feel like every movie you watch about some comedian or singer has a scene at the beginning, when they’re just starting out, and they are performing at some hole-in-the-wall place with about two customers, one of whom is heckling them. So I didn’t resent being there–in fact I was honored to be asked to attend. I was adding to my starving artist creds. While I was there, the publisher of Boating on the Hudson Magazine, John Vargo, emailed me a proof of the cover of the September issue. Boating on the Hudson is a free magazine; 6,000 copies are distributed each month between Lake Champlain and Manhattan, and he put a picture of me and my book on the cover with the caption “The Next Hemingway.” That sure felt good, especially since Hemingway was one of the main authors I emulate in my writing (the first chapter of my book, which uses driftwood as an epic simile, is a nod to the first chapter of A Farewell to Arms, which uses falling leaves as an epic simile).

I didn’t have a lot of time to go down to check on the boat over the next week (August 14-20), because I worked every night, and every day I had to email restaurants, breweries, bookstores and marinas about the book tour. Sometimes in the serving industry you have the option to leave early if business is slow, but for two weeks I couldn’t leave early because I needed the cash so badly to order copies of the books, which take a couple of weeks to be printed and mailed, for the book tour. 20 copies of Volumes I and II cost $290, and I wanted to have 100 on hand before I set sail. So I definitely had to work every night, and still transfer $600 from my line of credit to get the books. The worst thing I can picture would be to have people show up to buy my books at an event, and I am sold out. So eight days went by and I didn’t have a day to go down to New Baltimore to check on the boat, and then on Monday I started to get nervous. On a raft trip in 2007 I’d left my boat tied up in New Baltimore, and first the wind snapped its anchor line, then the tide washed it onto shore, then the police ticketed it, and then somebody cut its mooring lines as an intentional act of vandalism. So I made a point of getting up early and driving down to check on the boat on Monday morning.

If I’d gone down to check on the boat one day later, I wouldn’t have a boat to write about. I hadn’t thought to screw in cleats when we’d launched the boat, so I’d had to tie her to Jake’s dock by throwing climbing ropes around the bow and stern lines that connected the two canoes, and I tied one line to an oarlock and passed it through a cleat on Jake’s dock. When I drove to barren island and kayaked out to the dock, the boat was literally hanging by a threat. The line that had been tied through the oar lock had snapped the oarlock in half; the line tied around the bow had snapped; the one remaining line was chaffed and threatened to break at any moment. I retied the lines and ran home in order to get cleats to attach to the boat. This was the day of the solar eclipse, and as that was going on, I ran a long lead line behind my parent’s house, over the hill, stringing three 100-foot lines together, and carried up the electric drill. I used the drill to harvest the cleats and other hardware from the my old boat, Assembly Required, which I’d sailed from Albany to Manhattan in 2010, and which was now a pile of rotting wood and chipping fiberglass. I removed the hardware as the noise of the drill sent bees swarming and grasshoppers jumping all around me.

Neglect and sunlight does a lot of damage to a fiberglass boat over seven years.
A view inside the cabin of Assembly Required. She has plants growing up through her hull now. The plywood floor has completely rotted away.

I’d bought an inverter–a mechanism that you can hook up to a big battery like a car battery which converts the current from DC to AC so you can run appliances off of it. I brought this device, the drill and the cleats back to the river, kayaked out to the boat, brought the boat back to shore, and loaded them aboard. While I was doing this, several boats passed, and I saw why the ropes had snapped over the previous week. Jake’s dock is in shallow water, and when the wakes from the passing barges and powerboats hit the shallow water they grow in size. I watched as the wakes hit Jake’s dock and sent it and his sailboat bouncing violently. Meanwhile a couple of boats passed–I think one was Riverkeeper–and men stood with binoculars gazing at me. I managed to screw in one of the cleats, but the inverter kept beeping because the drill drew more power than the inverter could handle. So I got some of the cleats half-screwed in, then brought the boat back to the dock and tied new, stronger lines, directly around the boat’s frame. I decided I needed to come back to the boat on my next free morning (two days later, Wednesday the 23rd) with a cordless drill, to attach the cleats more securely.

Wednesday started, for me, at 6:30 a.m., because I had to go to traffic court in Delmar at 8 a.m., because I had a totally B.S. ticket for not counting to four at a stop sign coming off the Thruway in Selkirk, but I decided not to fight it if they gave me a plea, because it doesn’t matter if you’re guilty or innocent in a traffic violation, either you get found guilty or a lawyer finds some procedural error, and I didn’t feel like getting a lawyer. (As a side note–I can see how the process is very confusing to a person without experience in government–the Prosecutor appears to be a functionary of the court system, and when they call you into the room alone, it seems like a representative of the judge is speaking to you. I accepted the plea of parking on pavement, and then the prosecutor started lecturing me on the dangers of “blowing a stop sign.” I didn’t blow a stop sign, I stopped a stop sign behind a dump truck where I could see a quarter mile of highway in either direction, and I didn’t stop a second time, but drove onto Route 144 at 2 mph behind the dump truck. I must have had a look on my face because he stopped halfway through his sentence and said, “Well, I don’t need to lecture you,” and I felt like saying, “Yeah, you’re function here is to make sure that these BS tickets take the money out of my pocket and put them into the town coffers, let’s cut the pretend-moral-authority.”)

I drove back to my apartment and Katie and I drove down to New Baltimore. It was now eleven a.m. Katie worked with my mom toward making the signs which will be on either side of the boat reading “DALLASTROMBLEY.COM, Coming of Age on the Hudson.” I’d already cut and painted the boards on which the letters would be displayed, and my mom was using a high-end printer she got for Christmas to cut out the letters. Then we’d just have to tape them to the boards and they’d function as stencils.

IMG_0624 (A video of the printer at work)

As mom worked on the stencils, Katie and I drove to Barren Island with some one-inch boards, screws, and the cordless drill. The boat was still tied up fine when I kayaked out to the dock. We beached the boat on land and used the drill to put the five cleats in more tightly, so now we have the ability to tie up to docks quickly. Then we built the frame of a “cabin.” It’s basically a stick frame that we can unroll a canvas drop cloth on top of, and bungie it down, to make an 8-foot by 6-foot room which is 4-feet high. Larger than a tent, it will give us a place to ride out summer storms, and a place to hook lanterns and navigation lights.

By then it was past two p.m. so we had to pack it in. I retied the boat. We drove back to my parent’s house, where my mom was still working on the stencils. She offered to finish them, tape them to the boards, and give them the first coat of paint. I’ll check out the signs tomorrow. As of today she had a first coat.

Tomorrow (Friday morning, 6 days before launch) I’ll get up at 7:30 to go to Lowes for L-brackets, hinges, polyurethane, and 1-inch boards, then bring back two of my old marine batteries to NAPA and get three new ones (if you return a marine battery you don’t have to pay the NYS surcharge of $10), then go to Yanni’s to see about getting a boat slip for my book signing there are 9/1, then to the island to work on the boat for an hour, then to Uhaul to see about renting a trailer to bring the boat up to Troy before my trip, then clean up and head back to Albany for a 4:30-11:30 table waiting shift.

 

 

 

 

 

Don Weeks Radio Interview, 8/2007

My friend Paul, who used to administer the website for my raft projects, found this gem in his files. It’s a radio interview on the Don Weeks Show on WGY in 2007, after my third raft was stolen and wrecked by vandals by the Normanskill Creek on the border of Albany and Bethlehem. The audio file takes 7 seconds to start.

 

Five Weeks Till Launch – Katie Labors, Jake Helps, Johnson Runs

Time constricts. You turn your head for a moment, and bills pile up, deadlines approach, laundry and dishes clutter. It seems like just last week I was sending pictures of my popsicle stick boat model to Mike, and saying “I think it’ll take about a month to build.” That was March. Now it’s July and five weeks until I set sail on my book tour, which could either be my big break, or a huge flop.

In mid-June, Katie quit her job to see what else is out there. I encouraged her to do so. (I left a career at the New York State Assembly to write and travel, and although it’s been hard financially, I think the benefits of working for myself, setting my own schedule, working outside of an office, experiencing the sun in the middle of the day–far outweigh the costs.) With alacrity she offered to help me construct the boat, and I eagerly accepted her help. It came at an especially opportune time, because Sam, who ‘d been helping me on weekdays, is a recent father, and can’t come down to help as often.

So we went to New Baltimore to put a second coat of primer on the canoes. It was late June and about 95 degrees. Katie rolled up her sleeves as we mixed the paint and flipped the canoes upside down. With sweat beading on her forehead, she said, “This feels great. I’m out of the office. I feel like a real laborer!” It took about an hour to coat both canoes with white paint.

My dad, meanwhile, was cutting firewood from some recently-felled trees, as my mother burned brush and leaves. After a while, Dad passed us, under their carport, where there was a pile of about 50 forty-pound bags of mulch. My parents were having their driveway resealed the next day, and my dad had to get the bags of mulch off the driveway. I felt like a brat painting while my father, already sweating buckets, began to move the mulch bags onto the lawn. So I put my brush down and went over to help him. Katie followed, watched me throw a bag over my shoulder, and carry it onto the pile. She bent, tried to lift a bag, and couldn’t get it over her shoulder.

“How much do you think this bag weighs?” she asked. She spends about an hour a day working out, and I think she thought that would translate to manual strength. But there is a kind of strength that builds in your bones and sinews as much as in your connective muscles from years of doing things like raking and lifting mulch, which is different from the kinds of muscles you build doing pushups and leg lifts.

“I’d say it weighs about 40 pounds,” I said.

Undeterred, Katie bent and lifted a bag, which much effort, dragged it ten feet away, and put it on the ground by the pile of mulch. I lifted it onto the top of the pile. This went on as we helped Dad with twenty or so bags. Finally my mother came up from the bonfire, saw Katie lifting the heavy bags, and said,

“Katie! What are you doing!”

“I’m LABORING!” Katie said. I couldn’t help but laugh at how she brought the word full-circle, and enjoyed doing manual work.

Next, Katie and I carried the pieces of the deck out from the workshop onto the driveway as the canoes dried. I only needed Dad’s help for the middle, heaviest section, which is composed of a piece of plywood connected to six 2X4s. By then the canoes were dry, so Katie and I carried them to the driveway and measured the distance between them. We placed the sections of the deck on top.

I’d bought new bolts capable of passing through the multiple pieces of plywood and joists. The idea was that the deck would be built of multiple sections, each of which could be carried by Katie and I and stacked in the back of a pickup truck, and then bolted together at the river on the canoes. That, I figured, would allow Katie and I (or Mike or Sam or Dad and I) to use the boat whenever we wanted, without  a trailer. We lined up the deck and drilled the holes for the bolts to connect the two center pieces. But when we put the back section of the deck in place, we realized that we didn’t have bolts long enough to pass through all the decking and joists. We’d need bolts at least 7″ long. So we drove up to True Value in Ravena and bought the bolts. As soon as we got back, I held the bolts next to the two sections of deck, and saw that they would be long enough to pass through the two sections of deck and connect them. But then I tried to drill the holes for the bolts to pass through, and my drill bit was too short.

It was now almost four o’clock in the afternoon, and although we’d been working for five hours, we’d only painted the two canoes and drilled four holes. I didn’t want to stop again to drive back to the store and spend another $15 on a longer drill bit. So, while Katie held the two sections of deck in place (by sitting on them), I drilled holes through the back deck, and then we took that deck section off. There were dimples in the bottom deck where the drill bit had passed through and made its impression. I used the bit to drill the holes through the bottom deck where the dimples were. Then we put the back deck back in place. I was able to pass bolts through two of the holes, connecting the decks in those two places, but I couldn’t put a bolt through one of the holes, because the hole was situated right above the canoe, and it hit the canoe instead of passing through. And another hole in the top deck didn’t line up with the hole in the bottom deck, because I must not have drilled them straight, so I couldn’t get the bolt through there. The engine I’d just bought would be attached to the back deck, and it needed to be connected damn well to the rest of the boat, or else the 7.5 horsepower force of the engine would just break the back deck off from the front. Two little bolts would not do the trick. So I lost my patience and started to curse and throw tools around. But seeing Katie there, I thought I needed to be more manly and not get so frustrated as soon something didn’t turn out as planned. (Especially because Katie is going with me on this boat tour, and is kind of nervous because 6 of 7 of my previous rafts sank, and asks me, now and again, to explain to her why I believe that this new raft will be safe.)

So I was kind of throwing things around in frustration, and Katie was offering to help if I could give her some direction, which I couldn’t, because I was frustrated (a word that means you have run out of ideas). Luckily, just at that moment, my friend Jake pulled into the driveway. He’d offered to help to get the new outboard motor I’d bought running. He would’ve come earlier in the day, but he had to wait to pick up his two year old daughter, Rosalyn, from daycare.

Jake’s arrival relieved a lot of stress, because Katie basically looked to me for direction, because the raft construction was my plan based on my previous experiences, but I was out of ideas. Jake is a hands-on type, who owns an outboard motor and is fixing up an old sailboat, so we could look to him for fresh direction.

Katie hadn’t met Jake before. Indeed, except for a visit from Jake two weeks earlier, I hadn’t seen Jake in about ten years. But he is one of the nicest guys I’ve ever met. He messaged me one night while I was working at El Loco, because he is running for Town Council in New Baltimore, and I had run for Assembly in that district five years ago, and he was looking for advice.

I want to make an aside right here and just say that I think of Jake Cowell as a great friend and a spectacular candidate for office. He is a gym teacher, he has travelled all over the country, he has been dating the same woman as long as I’ve known him (who is also very sweet and smart), to whom he is married with a two-year old daughter. When he told me he was running for office, my first thought was not whether he would do a good job, but whether the process of running for office was good for him, as a person. Because when you run for office, you have to interact with a lot of people who you know you could help, but they will only vote for whatever party they are registered for, even if it is against their own interest, the interest of their community, the interest of their family, and the economic interest of the area. But I sat down with Jake two weeks earlier and after ten years I found that he was the same smart guy, who loves life, who grew up in the area and wants to help as best he can, who has ideas and energy, who is invested in the area as a property owner and the patriarch of a family, who is neither a strict liberal or strict conservative, but someone who wants to bring the community together to lower taxes, stimulate economic activity, and just make the area a place for people to be proud to say that they live in. Plus the damn guy is busy as heck between raising a family, his own hobbies, and running for office, but he wanted to come over and help me with my boat motor, after not seeing me for ten years.

So Jake came and introduced Katie and I to Roselyn, who was shy at first, but immediately took a liking to Katie. Katie picked her up and showed her around my parent’s yard, looking at trees and dandelions, as Jake and I carried the 1957 Johnson two-stroke engine out into the yard and hooked up a hose and tried to get it started for the first time.

The man who sold me the motor said it ran great. However, the rubber fuel lines, which run from the 1957 gas tank to the motor, were cracked, and the fuel in the tank was old. There are two dials on the motor which point to “lean” and “rich”, which I didn’t really understand. There are some other switches which I didn’t completely understand either. Anyhow, Jake showed me how to prime the motor by pushing a button on the gas tank which pressurizes the tank and sends the fuel up into the engine. We took off the engine’s cover and Jake marveled at how clean the parts were, since they are 60 years old. We put the engine in neutral gear, twisted the drive into the “Start” position, pulled out the choke, and pulled the starting cord. Nothing happened. Jake tried pulling about ten more times, and nothing happened. I tried pulling a few more times. We looked at the engine some more. Jake pointed to a little reservoir in a glass bulb which had fuel in it. He played with the choke. We tried to start it with no luck. We tried starting it with the clutch in drive instead of neutral, with the choke pushed in, with the drive set to “forward.” No luck. Jake got some tools from his car, and I got some electrical tape from my parents’ garage, and we mended the fuel lines. We played with the dials. Finally, with the top dial set to “rich” and the bottom dial set about half, we got the engine started. Jake, Katie and I clapped. Roselyn pointed to an airplane flying overhead, which was much more interesting, from her perspective. We tried to adjust the throttle and the engine stalled. We tried to restart it with no luck, again and again, until we primed it even though the fuel reservoir was full. Then the engine roared to life again, but Jake said it seemed to run too fast, and smoke wafted from the impeller, so we shut it off. By now it was almost six at night, Roselyn was getting antsy, Jake’s wife was home, and Katie and I had been working on boat things for seven hours, so I decided to pack it in. Jake was nice enough to help me take the boat apart and carry the heavier pieces back into the garage, and carry the motor back inside, so that Katie wouldn’t have to do it. Then he left, and Katie and I cleaned up the rest of the driveway.

Here is a picture of the workshop I’ve set up in my parents’ garage, in case you’re interested. The windmills which will supplement the propulsive power of the boat are on the wall.

On the way home, I said to Katie, kind of discouraged,

“We just spent eight hours putting a coat of paint on two canoes, drilling eight holes, only six of which will accept the bolts they’re designed for, and starting the engine which is supposed to get us to New York twice.”

Another week passed. Time moves quicker the older you get. I’d like to think that’s because the older you get, the shorter any period of time seems, relative to how long you’ve lived. But I think its also a function of having a life. I work at least five days a week,  to pay for things like rent and utilities. We celebrated Katie’s birthday. I’m trying to write a book on the Erie Canal, and that requires reading on the subject two to three hours a day. Anyhow, after a week or so I I hadn’t made any more progress on the boat. So I called the man from Athens who sold me the motor and asked if he’d come up to my parent’s house and try to start the motor with me. Nine days after the events I just described, Katie and I drove to New Baltimore on a rainy Wednesday morning, carried the motor on it’s stand, attached to it’s gas tank, into the driveway, and hooked up the garden hose to the impeller. Mike (the man who sold me the motor) showed up, and we tried to start it. I must have pulled the cord 100 times, because my hands blistered.

We cleaned the spark plugs, took the top off the engine and looked at it’s insides. We fiddled with the starting levers. Still we could barely get the motor started–only after priming aggressively–and then we couldn’t adjust any of the levers without it stalling out. So Mike left, Katie and I drove to Napa, bought new spark plugs, I changed them out, and it made almost no difference. Now we’d spent three hours working on the engine, to no effect, and I had to drive back to Albany to work that night.

I researched the motor on some boating forums. It seems that this engine works in an old fashioned way–it sends air pressure into the gas tank, which in turn sends fuel back up into the engine. Since the fuel lines were cracked, they might have been leaking air, and therefore not pressurizing the engine. My new hypothesis was that if I changed the fuel lines, they wouldn’t leak air, and therefore the engine would get oxygen and not choke out. But the boating forums also had CAPITALIZED WARNINGS THAT THIS KIND OF FUEL TANK CREATES AND EXTREME EXPLOSION RISK.

Nonetheless I only had this engine, so I figured I’d fix it rather than replace it. After all, I’d spent $375 dollars on it, I couldn’t afford to buy a new one or pay a mechanic to retrofit the engine to a new fuel tank, and I’d wanted to learn about motors as part of my list of things to learn in my 30s. 

I made that list on the eve of my 30th birthday.

So a week later, Katie and I drove to New Baltimore, determined to clean out the gas tank, change the fuel lines, put new fuel in the engine, and get it running. We wanted to try the boat out in the water with the motor that day. We got to New Baltimore at 10 am. The first thing we did was paint the two canoes yellow–the most striking color, I thought, so that I could attract attention while on the river trying to advertise my book.

Yellow was a good choice: my three-year-old niece was up visiting my parents, and she looked out the window and exclaimed to my mom, “Yellow boats!” That’s exactly the reaction I’m looking for.

Next, I guided Katie around as I cleaned the motor. I was particularly proud to know what I was doing on this task, because I used to make a living cleaning, torching, sandblasting and fixing gas tanks on the night shift at a place in the ghetto of Albany. First I got rid of the old gas the way my grandfather used to: I found a stump in the woods which was in the way, and poured the old fuel on top of it. It will help it disintegrate, so that my parents will be able to drive their truck in that place to get firewood without worrying about popping their tire. Next I used regular dish detergent and a garden hose to clean out the inside of the motor.

It was about ninety degrees and I figured the water would evaporate from the tank if I let it sit in the sun for a while. We touched the canoes, but they were still tacky from the paint. So we drove up to Coeymans Marina to talk to one of the mechanics in the repair shop, just to see how expensive it would be to replace the tank because it is an EXTREME EXPLOSION RISK. The shop was open but we couldn’t find a mechanic. And since Katie had never been to Yanni’s Too Restaurant, we went inside and got a couple of beers and calamari. At that point, Jake, my old college buddy who is running for Town Council, texted me. He was down at Barren Island, and he said we should come down to see the place and take a ride on his sail boat.

This I couldn’t resist. I’ve always been interested in Barren Island. My grandparents used to tell me about an amusement park that was there in the 1910s, with a ferris wheel and observation tower. My mother grew up in Coeymans, a mile upstream, and used to swim in the area and tell me about finding tokens from the amusement park on the beach. Barren Island is a peninsula now, having been connected to the land, like so many of the Hudson River islands, when the Army Corp of Engineers dredged the Hudson and shot the silt onto the shore. In middle school I had a friend named Andrea who lived in Coeymans and I used to walk two miles to her house, and then we would walk down to the island to explore it. I couldn’t believe that an amusement park used to be there, because it’s full of tall trees now, 20 times taller than a man. We’d walk through the woods and look at the abandoned old-timey cars there, and find holes in the ground which must’ve been parts of old foundations, which we were too scared to explore. I couldn’t believe that hundreds of people would take day-liner steamboats from Catskill or Albany to spend their leisure time in this overgrown place. But then I found a book by Edward Giddings called Coeymans and the Past which had pictures of the amusement park, in my grandparent’s lifetime. It really brought home how quickly nature retakes anything man creates and abandons, because there are no traces of any built structures now. When I was in high school, my first real girlfriend and I walked around Barren Island in October, sat on the cliffs overlooking the river, gazed at the fall foliage across the river, and that was probably the first time I really fell in love. After college I read a book by Adrian Van Der Donk, “A Description of New Neatherlands,” written in the early 1700s, which had descriptions of the island. Anyhow I always felt it was a real shame that the place was overgrown and underused, so when Jake told me that he’d fallen into being the caretaker of the island, because his wife was related to Mr. Briggs, the owner, I was almost ecstatic about coming to see what he was doing.

So Katie and I packed some beers in a cooler and drove down to Barren Island. There is a paved road which leads from the highway to the Coeymans Filtration Plant at the southern tip of the island. Right before the gate for the filtration plant there is now a dirt road which leads up through the woods to the north side of the island. When we were almost at the northern tip, Jake’s black lab came running out of the woods and almost jumped through the driver’s window into the car with us. Jake showed us where to park, and we got out, gave Jake a beer, and he gave us a tour. At the top of the biggest hill on the island, Jake had made a clearing where there was a nice lawn and a place for a bonfire. From this spot we could see all the way to Castleton to the north, and across the river to Schodack and Houghteling Islands. Jake had made walking paths, and dug out around the brick foundations of other structures so we could walk around and see what used to be there. This is a kind of preservation which doesn’t get enough credit, because, again, I’d walked around this island for years and never saw exposed foundations, etc, because it was all overgrown private land. He told us about how his wife’s great grandfather, so-and-so Briggs, had built the first electrical power generating plant in the Hudson Valley, after selling his shares in the ice business, because he knew refrigeration would kill that industry. Then he sold the power plant and built the amusement park. Jake had built a stand for his canoes, kayaks and sunfish. He showed us the stairs he had built–which took many man-hours–to descend down the cliffs to the bay at the north of the island, where he had build and floated docks, and where he had a sailboat which he is in the process of fixing up. He offered to take us out on his sailboat (the sails are all destroyed at present, but his sailboat had an outboard motor). So we carried a canoe down, and used a piece of driftwood and a small snow shovel from the trunk of my car to paddle 40 feet out to the docks, which of necessity were situated over deeper water. Then Jake took us out into the river, down around Mathews’s Point. This was not the first time Katie had seen my hometown from the river, for I’d taken her out canoeing, somewhat dangerously, on our fourth of fifth date, but it was the first time we’d been out together on a vessel that didn’t operate under human power, and we felt like a king and a queen in the lap of luxury in this sails-down, broken-deck sailboat with its mast laying across the deck and portions of the railing broken off. After about an hour we got back to Jake’s dock, and he said he had some brush he had to burn that night (a Monday) and we should come and join him for a bonfire. So Katie and I drove back to Albany to feed the cat, get long-sleeved clothes, some more beer, and drove back to Barren Island to meet Jake just before dark.

What a nice time we had that evening. It was twighlight when Jake lit the bonfire, which illuminated the surrounding field and reflected across the cliffs onto the dark river thirty feet below. Over our heads the stars sparkled. I asked Jake about the several poles supporting chains along the dirt road and in the field where we had the bonfire. He laughed and explained that they constituted an Ultimate Frisbee course, and then showed Katie and I all the different kinds of frisbees one uses for the game, as one would choose different clubs for golf. We talked about television shows, and then my book, and then the writing society Katie, my friend Sarah, and I, recently started, which Jake wanted to participate in, if only as an audience member. We cooked hot dogs and some stewed beef I’d brought, on sticks. Jake told us the story of the stick he’d carried for something like twenty years for fire-poking and fire-cooking. Eventually I said to Jake,

“It’s funny man, I feel like you and me have such similar lives or interests or something. You’re fixing up a boat–I’m fixing up a boat; you’re running for office in New Baltimore–I ran for office in New Baltimore; you’re the caretaker of an island in the Hudson River–I was once the caretaker of an island in the Hudson River. We’re doing all of these similar things, and yet we haven’t seen each other in, what, ten years? Until like a month ago. I feel like this is going to be a very productive friendship renewal.”

I cannot pretend to quote Jake (people have different speech patterns, only some of which I can replicate verbatim from memory, but not Jake’s kind) but he agreed whole heartedly.

Perhaps the quaintest part of the night was around 11:30. We strolled down the hill from the clearing, into the dark of the woods. We could see lights shining through the sparse black tree trunks between us and the harbor, across which, upstream approximately two miles, was the facility where they are building the new Tappan Zee Bridge. We emerged from the trees onto the landing above the harbor, and, carefully, descended Jake’s homemade stone and cement stairs to the beach. Earlier, when we’d taken the sailboat out, we had to canoe across the water to the sailboat from the bottom of the stairs. But the tide had receded, exposing ten more feet of beach before it dropped off and made a place for the sailboat, in the moonlight, to bob. We walked along this low-tide beach. There was a fallen-down tree with it’s roots exposed, like 300 fingers of wood dangling. Jake and I talked about me bringing my boat to the spot, so that I’d always have access to it, floating, without having to transport and assemble it. Jake needs to move building materials, like plywood, paint, two-by-fours and hardware to fix up the docks and sailboat. This material is difficult to move by canoe, especially alone. My boat is a platform run by electricity powered by windmills. It could generate the power for Jake’s island and allow him to use electric speakers, power tools, chargers and to jump his sailboat motor. He could stack his materials on my boat, and troll across the harbor. He could easily ferry three people and two coolers over to his sailboat–this would require two delicate trips in a canoe.

Around two am we poured water on the fire. Driving home, I remarked to Katie that we’d spent four hours just the three of us talking, and there was never an awkward moment. We’d washed out the motor’s gas tank, painted the canoes, and now we had a more convenient place to store the vessel. Plus I’d gotten to explore Barren Island, I’d renewed my friendship with Jake, Katie had seen Yanni’s, and we’d both taken a sailboat out on the river. Not bad for one day.

Sometimes I wonder if I made a mistake leaving the Assembly, and I’m fairly certain Katie must sometimes wonder if she made a mistake leaving her office job. But days like these recent ones make me remember why we left. Even if we didn’t accomplish all that we’d set out to do, still, we’d packed our day full of adventure in a way we couldn’t have done in a cubicle (or husbanding our strength for 8 hours in a cubicle the next day). If we can pack every day full of such novelty and adventure, then someday we will look back and think we had a LIFE full of such stuff. That is my real goal with all of this.