So Long, Sailor (Cigar Smoke 8-18-11)

Well, I don’t have an exciting sea tale for you, mainly because I never actually got out to sea. I thought I was going out to sea. I even bought a Greek fisherman’s hat. And since I had the hat, I decided to buy a boat so I would have somewhere to wear it. However, all I did was go out to harbor. I was trying to go out to sea, dammit, but I backed my boat into another boat in the harbor and that’s as far as I got. Let’s just say it was not a Kon-Tiki kind of story.

I did have pretty high hopes at first. I had just bought a little hovel up in Brookings Harbor in Oregon. And I’d look out over my hovel deck and see all these boats and I asked a friend of mine if he thought I would make a good boat owner.

He said, “No.” I asked him if he could expand on that a little. He said, “Sure. Hell no.” So I said, “So you’re saying that you don’t think I would make a good boat owner. Is that what I am hearing you say?” (I learned that in a communication workshop.)

He then gave me a non-workshop finger gesture he had learned in the Navy, and said, “Laris, you are 70 frigging years old and you are as agile as a statue with arthritis. And your head contains the same material that the rest of the statue is made of.”

So I took that as an endorsement of my seagoing skills and bought a boat that was built in 1976. It was named the Bicentennial Baby and it cost me $2,800. And then it cost me $500 to actually have the motor run. And then because I am a what, I am a mature adult who wears Rockport shoes, I bought a backup outboard motor for $1,000 to ensure my safe return from the devil ocean if my main motor conked out. And then it cost me maybe $400 to buy sea crap for it like life vests and emergency flares. And it cost me $375 to license it. And it cost me $150 to license the trailer its little bicentennial butt sat on. And then it cost me $50 a month to store it. And it cost me $200 to insure it. And it cost me … it’s hard to keep typing while I’m crying.

And then I went for a test run with my so-called friend, and we got in the boat and unhooked the lines from the dock and the motor actually started and we drifted back a few yards, and then my SCF (so-called friend) said, “Hit it!” And I pulled the throttle back with all my 70-year-old might. And the motor roared to life. And we backed straight into another boat. And it made this really loud banging sound. But I was still able to hear my SCF say, “You push the throttle forward, Statue Head!”

Anyway, those 34 feet of harbor travel were as far as I got out to sea. (Thor Heyerdahl, eat your heart out.) So I decided to put the piece of crap, I mean, the boat, back into storage for a whole year. And then just last month, I made the decision to bring the boat back to LA and only use it on lakes, where I thought I would probably get three or four trips out of it before I keeled over. (Sailor talk.)

So I put new rims on the trailer and knocked most of the rust off the fenders, and Marge and Archie the Dog and I took off. The first day went great. We covered about 430 miles, and made it to Elk Grove, near Stockton, where we stayed at a Holiday Inn and ate pizza and life was good.

And then we got up and life was not quite as good. During the night some low-life scum pig had slashed open the boat cover and stolen everything in the boat that was worth anything. I was really glad I had bought the high-end boat crap to make the thief happy.

Then we got on the road, and we drove about an hour or so on Highway 5, and then this guy pulls up along side of us and honks like crazy and points to the boat and trailer. We look back and the right rear tire seemed to be engulfed in flames and smoke. Maybe lava was coming out. I stop, take a look, and I amazingly discovered the tire was actually still good but the trailer infrastructure was falling apart. Pieces were actually missing.

The boat was just barely hanging on. It was incredible that it didn’t fall off when we were going 55 in traffic. (I guess God’s a Greek fisherman.) We had just passed the metropolis of Westley, so we lucked out, and were only about three miles from Patterson. We decided to just limp along the freeway in the slow lane with our hazard lights on and Marge whimpering. Archie didn’t seem to give a shit.

I’ll cut to the chase. We drove straight to an RV camp where I asked the owners if we could store the boat and trailer. They said, “No.” So I said, “Well then, would you like to have a free boat?” They said, “A free boat?” I said, “Yes, a free boat. On one condition. You have to take the trailer, too.”

I drive a hard bargain. But cannot drive a car, a boat, or a car hauling a trailer.