Clint has purchased some sort of double-wide metal boat to keep in the marsh by our dock. Though the point was to have a lightweight vessel he could take fishing on occasion, it's a bulky cumbersome thing that Brett and he have to wrestle with to get it where they want it to go. Clint spent several weekends down in the marsh clearing a space for the new floating dock he would need to purchase and assemble. He was out there in the mud with a chainsaw and an ever blazing burn pile in our fire pit. Finally, the space was clear. He spent another few weekends acquiring and assembling the floating dock pieces. In the meantime, Brett and I took the girls for a ride up the creek.
The houses get more and more thrilling the farther up you go. The best part is getting to see the old houses that aren't visible from the road, blocked off by thrilling, treelined driveways that drift off around a bend, leaving your imagination in the lurch. You can see 'em from the water and some of them are even better that you'd come up with on your own.
While I admired the expensive and well-landscaped homes on the swanky end of our street, the girls paced around the little boat, forcing Brett and I to act as the counterweighted ballast stones. "Just sit down!" he finally barked at one of them. It was chilly out and Pippa finally settled into my lap which normally thrills me, but in this case I had to keep my arms in an upright and locked position that became very difficult to maintain. Grace eventually laid down in the back of the boat. She'd seen enough.
This was the morning of Thanksgiving and on our way in we noticed a big, fuzzy raccoon in a trap in our neighbor's yard. I knocked on their door.
"Hi! You have a raccoon in your trap."
"Oh great!" he said.
"What are you going to do with it?"
"Oh we'll get get rid of it. It's been eating our cat food."
"Don't kill it!" I blurted.
"Well it's not really up to me. You'll have to talk to Pops."
Just as it was time to leave for Brett's families Thanksgiving lunch, we were able to barter for the coon's life, so we stuffed him in our tollbooth with a bit of dog kibble and left to go give thanks. We got home just before sundown, so still in our holiday outfits, we put the coon in the trunk, drove out to John Island, and set it free to start over in life. For some reason we did this under a bridge overpass and it seemed a bit seedy and suspicious. A cyclist passed us in the dark with our shovels, flashlights, and metal cage. Brett became worried about authorities. "Let's get out of here," he said, and we loaded up our murder equipment and headed home.
"We saved a life today," I noted.
A few weeks later, after Clint decided he needed to move the whole floating dock rig and boat situation to the other side of our fixed dock where the marsh had not been cleared out by much effort on his part, Brett and I decided to take the boat for a low tide cruise. Clint had accidentally taken the boat's kill-switch home with him, but Brett is an engineer, so he created a cable-tie based solution and had the motor purring in no time. We tossed the girls in and puttered out in a different direction.
The oyster beds across the way are reminiscent of the french landscape after World War I. Peaks and trenches, sudden drop-offs and watery areas. Seeing as we aren't yet familiar with the topography of our new marsh, we beached ourselves on an oyster bed within ten minutes of leaving our dock. Brett turned off the motor. We had no oars or large sticks to push off with, so we tried bucking wildly. The dogs did not like it. When we thought we'd made enough progress, Brett fumbled with his zip-tie key in an effort to get us moving again. The tide was pushing us farther onto the oyster bed.
I'll skip ahead and tell you that I had to step out of the boat and into the water with my winter clothes on. I rolled up my pant legs (wishful thinking) and plunged my sneakers into the frigid waters. I am Chris Union's daughter - I don't do cold water. And because I had just showered and applied lotion to my legs, a hundred tiny fishies arrived out of nowhere and pecked at my calves and shins. It tickled and was scary at the same time. I heaved all my weight against the boat and sent Brett and the girls out into the creek again, but my feet had sunken too far into the pluff mud. I had to stand there awhile, unearthing each foot over and over again. The fish followed my legs. Brett got the cable tie back in place and puttered over to me just long enough to let me flop myself back into the boat like tarpon. Despite my icy toes, I was ready to continue exploring. Brett was sensible enough to be spooked by the ordeal and took us back to the dock, heaved the girls back into the yard, and then threw a bunch ropes around a bunch of posts and used all of our strength to the get boat back on the float.
I giggled to myself about the difficulties that this "easy little boat" has already caused. Clint has spent countless, worthless hours on it so far and still hasn't come up with a way to get it out of the water. There was a week that Brett and he spent looking at, shopping for, installing and uninstalling a few different wench systems, and at the moment, it's all just tied to our dock with ropes and the boat has gone all caddywampus, sitting diagonally on the float.
I giggled at the endless misadventures of Grandpa Bob and Captain Chris and chuckled to myself knowing that the tradition will live on.
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