52: If you are determined . . .
Little Follies, “Life on the Bolotomy,” Chapter 9
9
If you are determined to make a trip on the Bolotomy, summer is the best time for it, but be sure to avoid the weekend of the Babbington Clam Fest, the town’s annual salute to the bivalve on which its economy depends. For the sophisticated traveler, this molluscan hoopla is likely to be simply an embarrassment.
Boating on the Bolotomy
THE DAY WAS FINE and clear. I dressed and left the house before my mother and father were stirring. I packed my old red wagon with the food and equipment for the trip and tied it behind my bicycle. I set off for Raskol’s, weaving and struggling along the street, with the wagon wandering this way and that, independent of my steering, like a curious child holding his mother’s hand. The part of Babbington where I lived, outside the center of things, was still quiet, and I didn’t see another person until I was downtown, riding on Main Street. There excitement was in the air. At street corners, high-spirited auxiliary policemen stood eating doughnuts, drinking coffee from paper cups, and poking at one another’s bellies. I saluted these fellows as I rode past.
“Nice morning!” I sang out to some. “Great day for traveling!” I called to others. I pedaled past them, and behind me I could hear some references to me that I couldn’t quite make out, perhaps praise for my pluck, perhaps expressions of envy, of nostalgia for lost youth, for its discoveries and adventures, who can say? The Babbington High School Marching Band had begun to assemble at the corner of Bolotomy and Main. These boys and girls, so much older than I that they seemed to me already to have become men and women, shuffled around in disarray, kicking at pebbles on the pavement, tuning their instruments, and making one another giggle with remarks that I could not begin to imagine. I stopped for a moment at the edge of the river, near Leech’s Son’s Boatyard, to look at the clamboats gathered there, covered with flowers, waiting for the grand procession. The clammies were standing on the decks, dressed in Sunday suits, shouting friendly insults to one another, drinking coffee from paper cups or beer from brown bottles, spitting into the river, and hoisting their pants up from time to time. I thought for a moment of going over to them to try walking from clamboat to clamboat, which looked like fun, but I pushed on instead, because Raskol and I had decided that if we weren’t in the water early enough, people were likely to see us wobbling under the weight of the boat when we carried it to the water, and the photographer from the paper was sure to consider that a cute shot, take it, and use it on the front page, making both of us look like idiots. We had decided that we, and the boat, would look much better in the water than on our way to it, so we planned to paddle out into the bay a little way, just around the Municipal Dock, then reverse course when we saw that the crowds had gathered on the dock and paddle past them with style and grace.
[to be continued on Monday, July 26, 2021]
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