Three Boys In A Boat

 

Wrote this story before  I read Nancy's story that has similar elements. Speaks  to the  universality of the theme, I guess, especially for people who grew up  in small towns by the water. A.T.

 

The year was 1964, I was eleven and living in Orillia, Ontario. Our family resided in a nice bungalow on a very new street on the outskirts of town called Collins Drive. There were only six or seven houses on the entire street so not many kids. I did have one good friend though, Jim Tost. I had another friend named Danny, but he was a dink.

The great thing about this particular street was that it was cut off from the main part of the town by Highway 12, so not many cars ventured down it unless they lived there. At one end of the road was the access to town, at the other a huge forest. Or so it seemed to little me. Across the road was the shore of Lake Simcoe and a half a mile to the northeast was the Atherly Narrows, a waterway that connects Simcoe to the other big lake, Couchiching. At one point we had lived on Couchiching, in a large, subdivided building called The Hermitage. But once my dad moved up in the world, he bought the bungalow, I think for around sixteen thousand dollars if memory serves.

During the summer holidays, it was a pretty magical place to grow up as a young pre-pubescent boy. In the summer, bikes were the vehicles of choice and swimming and getting into trouble was the goal. Let me tell you of one such adventure.

Prior to the building of the super-highway bridge across the Atherly Narrows, there was only one small two-lane bridge for traffic and further towards Lake Couchiching, a rusting old train bridge. It was a swing bridge, and it was manned by an old fella that spent the day in his hot, dirty little shack on the bridge. The bridge was operated by a push bar that he would walk behind in a circle to engage the mechanism, and it would slowly but surely swing the bridge. Hot work for an old guy in the middle of summer. Of course, back in those days, there wasn’t much traffic of boats traversing the Trent Canal system, so he only had to swing the bridge on rare occasions. At any rate, my friends and I struck a bargain with him. We would swing the bridge for him when needed if he would allow us to jump from the bridge into the waters. It was only about a twenty foot drop but seemed like a mile to us and it took quite a while for the first of us to summon the courage. But once that hurdle was crossed, we must have jumped off that bridge a million times. But that isn’t’ the adventure, although if our parents knew what we were doing they would have had multiple heart attacks.

No, the adventure began when we spotted a tin boat of about eleven feet in length tied to a post on the wharf of a run-down, unsuccessful marina. Nobody was about the place most of the time and when we swam over to the boat, we could see that it was in pretty poor shape.

Now anybody that has grown up in a town by the water like that knew how to start an outboard by the time they were six, so it didn’t take long for us to come up with the idea of taking the little boat out for a joyride. I think there were four of us, but I could be wrong about that, three at least and we clambered aboard and were amazed when the motor fired up after only a few pulls on the starter cord. We looked around, and as there didn’t seem to be anybody running down the pier yelling at us, off we went. No life jackets of course. I don’t think they’d been invented yet. We headed down the narrows with Jim at the helm out onto the grey waters of Lake Couchiching. Fantastic!

We tooted around the bay for a bit and then Jim gave way, and I took the helm, and we ventured out a bit further. Now, if you know anything about Couchiching, it is a very shallow lake and wind, and weather can quickly churn it up. In our joy at freewheeling about in out luxury yacht, we hadn’t noticed the storm clouds accumulating behind us. It’s not as though we got up every day and checked the weather.

The weather hit us from east and within minutes there was a serious chop on the water and whitecaps surrounded us. The wind picked up and when I tried to motor against it to get back to the marina, I realized that we were losing ground. The motor was probably a thousand years old and was only a ten horsepower, so no wonder there. When the boat began to buck, I turned us about and we decided to head for the main town dock, in Memorial Park, across the lake, a distance of about two miles. We made good headway as the waves got bigger and threatened to at least come over the sides, if not capsize us completely. Everybody was silent and the only other sound beside the pounding of the waves on the aluminum hull and the roar of the wind was the sputtering of the old motor.

Jim looked back at me and asked if I wanted him to take over steering. I wouldn’t have minded that actually because my arm was getting tired, but the thought of getting up and changing places with him in the wildly bucking boat, was impossible. I shook my head no and we proceeded, the others clenching the gunwales with white-knuckled fingers.

Slowly we made our way across the lake and the large town pier started to grow larger as we approached. A crowd had gathered on the pier and watched in amazement as the little tin boat with the tiny nervous boys emerged from the rain that now pelted down on us. I managed to bring the boat up to the steps that rose from the lake up to the platform of the pier. When we reached the pier, the others clambered out and held the boat fast as I shut down the engine and made my way over to them. We tied the boat off, made our way through the murmuring crowd, staring at us, gobsmacked and ran back to the bridge to get our bikes. Then we rode home.

Then we played army men, I think.  I often wonder what ever happened to that little boat in the end.