Crash Boot

So we have this thing called plunja - long story, has nothing to do with toilets, was named by an Australian. It's actually a platform with a little dive tower and a waterslide. As things tend to do here it got blown away by the wind - despite its moorings to a cement block so heavy not even Einstein could lift it. It's been a small speck on the opposite side of the lake (the parking space usually reserved for our stray inflatable things, water trampoline, giant inflatable triangle, etc) for over a week. I took it upon myself yesterday morning to go get it. Hilarity ensued.

I got in the crashboat, a little aluminum job with 15 or less hp, and zipped over to inspect the problem. The lake was glass, the fall trees reflecting a palate of peas, corn and carrots, and the sky a blue dome. This was going to be a deceivingly perfect day. There was only one other occupant on the lake. A man, older than dirt, in a little paint-flaked red crashboat, with about 5 horsepower, and a fishing rod. He was a speck on the other side of the lake too. Like plunja, he grew as I drew nearer. I skipped across the lake, tied up the boat to plunja, and climbed aboard the platform to see if I could hoist up the anchor. The old man was a little less than half a kilometre away, but I could see him coming about, slow as ever. After a few minutes of failed attempts at pulling the block up off the lake floor I quickly climbed in my boat, for on this calm morning I could hear the little red tin tub puttering toward me from a distance, the sound carried so well. Why do cottagers feel the need to nose about in everyone else's business? Don't we all come to this lake for solitude? I pulled the motor to a start,

and with a roar that disrupted everyone's morning, drowned out his little engine and sped away without looking back. I needed some pulleys for this problem.

Since the old man's routine was to go back and forth, trolling for fish in a 1 kilometre line he'd drift to and fro along, by the time I got back with my rescue gear he was on his way back in the other direction, where he was before. About 15 minutes of trying various systems of mechanical advantage proved useless to me, only buying the old fisherman time to reach the apex of his linear orbit and slowly gravitate back toward my position. Time was of the essence. I took my pulley system apart and opted to drag the anchor instead, after all, the wind brought it here didn't it? (Didn't it?).

I rigged a line from plunja to the back of my crashboat, using a retired climbing rope and some carabiners, and attempted to take off. Pulling something square and heavy with a little powerboat like this causes a speed wobble so slow you may not know you're speed wobbling. It takes about 2 minutes to reach the apex of one curve before you pendulously swing back the other way. Sometimes you feel like you're going backwards or sideways (because you are) as the momentum of you pulling the load right finally kicks in as you want to go left, and you get pulled right just a while longer. This means that crossing a lake involves a hilarious, convoluted and haphazard path, much like you might see on level one million of the game nibbles, or what is now more popularly known as snake on some cell phones. Needless to say I wasn't going anywhere fast, and after several attempts to take off and getting swung sideways at the mercy of the stuck anchor, I finally ground to a start (that's right, you don't always have to grind to a halt).

The old man was closing on me. It was like two steam rollers on a collision course. Old as he was, it became clear after some time that he apparently didn't have the life experience (or he'd lost it somewhere) to know that I couldn't make rapid (or indeed any) adjustments to my course. For the time being, my boat was pointing left, imparting momentum (this takes minutes, as I mentioned) while I was asking it to turn right. The old man drew nearer. Puttering along, pulling his fishing line, sliding ever closer, his face began to resolve itself. And resolved it was. Resolved to cross paths with me, whether or not it killed him, the creases beside his nose deep, his eyes beady behind his fisherman's glasses, and his mouth fixed into a determined scowl. I was going to have to talk to him. Once he was just over a boat length away, it seemed that a collision was imminent. . . in about five minutes. I waved him across my bow and declared factually "You might want to go around."

The rest of his face stayed fixed, including his beady eyes, as only his mouth moved. Though I couldn't hear what he said over the growl of my little Mercury outboard, I could tell it was a disgruntled gruntle. His course stayed as fixed as his facial features. I focused again on my goal across the blue glassy lake - the camp was so far away, shimmering elusively. I waved at him again, gesturing an offer of possible directions. Really any 270 of a possible 360 degrees would have avoided a collision, but he had only one in mind. He spoke again, louder this time "You turn your boat."

"Sorry, I can't"

"Just turn your boat!" (the distance is shrinking between us, but his voice is getting louder)

"The rope is pulling on me, I don't have a lot of control here"

The man swings his boat about, his trolling line in tow, and in so doing reluctantly concedes that mechanics has, after all, got the last word here.

Just then mechanics rears its ugly head, and all the momentum I've been loading into the system trying to go right kicks in, and the load swings the other way, and now I am behind the old man, chasing him involuntarily, like a possessed tortoise chasing a confused snapping turtle. Because the system works just so, it is at this point in my sinuous journey back to camp that my velocity is at its peak, and I can actually catch the old man up as he turns away in an evasive maneouver that will take about thirty seconds. He's puttering away skeptically, glancing back, clearly worried about his fishing line which is now swinging dangerously close to my boat. My emotions are mixed. Part of me appreciates the delightful irony of what is happening here, and has a real appetite for the comedy of the characters involved. Part of me wants to get the hell back to camp. My racing mind is interrupted by a cry.

"My line's caught on your boat!"

"What?" I need to buy myself time to think about this. His back-woods accent grows thicker with the rising helplessness of his anger."

"M'line's caught'n'yer boot!"

Now I'm angry, I can't believe this. Two men, out on a lake, a big lake, and we have to have this argument.

"Are you serious right now!?" I yell over the motor. Grimacing in frustration, I look behind me to asses the situation. The black line disappears under water a few feet away from my vessel, and plunges into the dangerous depths of a whirring motor blade, and aluminum hull, and a tight line pulling what is at least a thousand pounds of moving load that will keep moving regardless of whether or not I stop. I look back at him. I look back down at the situation. Back at him.

"Welp, looks like you'll have to cut it." And this really sets him off.

"LIKE HELL!" He yells at me, but with that old man accent so it sounds more like "LIKE HAIL!" did everyone used to talk like this?

I spread my free arm out, the other clutching the throttle and offer "It's a huge lake, you could've gone anywhere!"

"Gruntle gruntle"

"I don't know what to tell you, I can't reach down there and fix it for you."

"Gruntle gruntle - YOU CUT YOUR FUCKIN' LINE!"

I laugh, shaking my head in disbelief and twist the throttle a little further from turtle and a little closer to rabbit, trying both to drown him out and to outrun him, but my load is going to swing back the other way any minute now. The old man is caught, neither of us knows where, but he has caught something he never bargained for. Now he reluctantly follows, and I can almost hear the seagulls laughing as they look down and see a guy in a boat towing a water slide towing a guy in a boat. He has to gun it to save his line, and I couldn't care less, I need to leave. I hear him yelling as the line pays out and he slips into the sonic oblivion of my motor, and at this point I'm giggling to myself. When I look back again I can't tell if the line's broken or not, but it looks an awful lot as though he'd somehow gotten his lure back. When I'm a safe distance away I switch the orientation of my crashboat so I'm pulling backwards now, eliminating the pendulum effect and so allowing me to virtually speed back to camp at a neck-breaking 5 knots or so. I also have to stop to cut the anchor free. It got caught and took me about 5 minutes to realize I wasn't moving because it was snagged (there aren't any reference points in the middle of a lake except the bubbles from your motor). And I didn't make the kind of exit from the situation that should be followed by an encore. I had to go. By the time I got to tying the behemoth of a floating wooden playground up to our docks, I was laughing to myself, and I started to realize that maybe there is an argument for god, because how do you explain that full tallboy of Creemore I found floating ice cold in the bottom of the crashboat when I got in it this morning?

Somebody knew I was going to need it.