28: When my father was a boy . . .
28: When my father was a boy . . .
Little Follies, “Do Clams Bite?” Chapter 6 begins
6
WHEN MY FATHER WAS A BOY, Grandfather had bought him a copy of The Boys’ Book of Boatbuilding. In that book were plans for a number of boats that any boy might build. My father greeted the gift with an enthusiasm that made Grandfather’s heart leap. He got to work on boat-building immediately, but his distaste for actually being on the water in a boat led him to interpret the scale drawings in the book as full-size plans, and he built a series of model boats that lined the shelves of his room.
Big Grandfather was annoyed. He had wanted to get the boy out on the water; instead he was up in his room all the time making toys. Grandfather went out and bought the lumber for the first of the boats in the book, a flat-bottomed punt of the sort that one might pole in shallow waters. Overcompensating preposterously for my father’s miniaturism, he misread the scale in the drawings, and constructed, in the side yard, with my father as a conscripted apprentice, a twenty-foot punt, which, although singularly graceless, was ideally suited for cruising the shallow clam flats, since it drew very little water. It was not at all suited for crossing the bay to reach the flats, however. It bucked and reared over the smallest wavelets. As time passed, Grandfather added to the punt, which he christened Rambunctious, bits and pieces of other boats in the book that caught his eye. There was a cabin from a trim little sloop, blown up in scale so that it almost seemed suitable. He added a large gaff-rigged sail from a catboat and a centerboard enlarged from the plans for a sailing dinghy. He began to feel a facility for improvisation, and so he undertook on his own the addition of a gasoline engine, an engine that had once powered a small tractor. The engine was never christened, but he was as surely male as Rambunctious was female. Rambunctious was always referred to as she, and the unnamed engine as he.
Starting him, with a crank, occupied a good portion of the time spent in any of Rambunctious’s excursions on the bay. Grandfather kept Rambunctious in a slip on the estuarial stretch of the Bolotomy River, about half a mile upstream from the bay, where many other boats were docked. Most of those on the side where Grandfather kept Rambunctious were working clamboats. On the other side of the river, broad lawns stretched out behind large, comfortable houses. Notched into each lawn was a slip, in some cases covered by a boathouse, that held a sloop or a mahogany runabout or both.
Grandfather was a man of great patience and even temper; nothing better illustrated these qualities than his attempts to start him. Grandfather had intended that he would make the trip downriver to the bay quicker and easier than it was under sail, but it was not unusual for us to begin an outing in the early morning and be munching our lunch by the time we chugged past the town dock and reached the bay at last.
While Grandfather patiently cranked and adjusted something and cranked again, I sat in the stern, dangling my legs overboard, playing a game with the undulating surface of the water. I tried to bring the soles of my bare feet as close to the surface as I could without touching it. It was a game that could not be won, a game that my father would have considered like my chasing kittens on the day that my mother tumbled from her lawn chair. I couldn’t win the game because I couldn’t know that I had reached the point I was after until I had passed it. To make matters worse, I included a forfeit in the game on this day: if I touched the surface ten times before Grandfather got him started, I would brave the clams. I would put some into the front of my bathing suit, just as Grandfather did, and take my chances on their biting.
I had already failed nine times, and he showed no signs of starting. Grandfather had a series of procedures that he would follow, each of which was more severe than the last. He followed these procedures as predictably and precisely as if they had been regulations issued by the tractor manufacturer, printed on a little card that Grandfather had put in a black frame and screwed to the cabin bulkhead between his clamming license and Rambunctious’s registration:
Let him rest for a while.
Curse at him.
Remove his air cleaner (that’s the piece of window screen that keeps any really large pebbles from falling into his carburetor) and try choking him with your hand.
Squirt some gas right into his carburetor. (It’s a good idea to keep an oil can with gas in it handy.)
Pull his spark-plug wire off and clean it with your shirt.
Repeat procedures 1 through 5 until you’re convinced that stronger measures are required.
Change his spark plug.
Smack him with the crank handle.
Grandfather had already changed his spark plug. If we were to get underway before the water kissed my feet again, he was going to have to get going fast.
“Hit him with the crank handle!” I shouted.
“Hey, take it easy,” said my father. “Hitting a machine never does any good. This isn’t something alive, you know, it’s a machine. You have to respect it. You shouldn’t ever take your anger out on a machine.”
Grandfather snorted and whacked him a couple of good ones with the crank handle, then stuck the handle onto his crankshaft and spun it once. He coughed into life immediately, and Grandfather snorted again.
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