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When the flood subsided, Noah abandoned the Ark–probably
one of prehistory’s wisest moves. The Ark
was a single purpose life raft. When it had completed
that role, it was of no further value, except as
salvage lumber and firewood..
I had always visualized the Ark as an enormous
boat surrounded by ladders. Both our cat and dog
could climb ladders, so it made sense that other
animals might also. I conjured images of elephant-sized,
horse-sized, and ant-sized ladders all leaning up
against the Ark. I also imagined that my father,
had he been in Noah’s place after the flood,
would have cleaned up the Ark and converted it into
a party boat.
Our family dentist asked my father, who is a carpenter,
to build him a garage in exchange for a boat. The
boat was the locally famous “African Queen.”
My father jumped at the opportunity. In retrospect,
I have come to believe our dentist never really
needed a garage. He needed to free himself from
the African Queen.
I first saw her on dry land, looking like a scale
model of Noah's Ark, up on blocking in a grassy
field. An old wooden ladder was leaning against
the hull. Bunnies, living under the keel, dashed
away through the tall grass when we approached.
I remember wondering as I climbed the ladder if
the two rabbits might have climbed this ladder as
well. I was twelve years old.
She was named after the leaky old bucket in the
1951 Bogart and Hepburn movie, “The African
Queen”. In the film, a drunken Bogie putt,
putt, putted around Lake Victoria, doing battle
with the Kaiser's army in far off sub Equatorial
Africa. I hadn't seen the picture, so her name meant
nothing to me. Shouldn't she be called the Michigan
Queen or Canadian Queen? We lived on Lake Huron,
after all.
She was built between the two World Wars, old already
when I climbed aboard; constructed entirely of wood
and slathered with white paint over multiple layers
of crackled white, over flaking white, and over
chipping white. In her belly lay an antique, big,
oil drooling, cast iron engine.
How she smelled and what interesting textures!
Dad spent weeks painting, caulking, oiling, attending
to her needs, making her pretty and sea worthy,
before he nudged her into the river with an old
bulldozer.
Boats, or at least the African Queen, were not
only female, but had feline genes. Pet owners sometimes
say that the difference between dogs and cats is
simple: dogs have owners, while cats have staff.
Dad thought he owned the African Queen. She, in
fact, owned him. My father was her chief of staff,
attending to her needs with every free moment. We
kids were her secondary staff. Dad gave each of
us a white sailor hat and orange life vest. He taught
us how to swab the deck and bail water with coffee
cans. He also instructed us how to spit overboard
without having the spit fly back in our faces. As
a reward for keeping the boat clean, he served us
sailor food: hardtack, herring, and sardines. While
we enjoyed the kippered herring, we failed to acquire
a taste for sardines in mustard sauce. The part
about sucking on limes isn’t worth mentioning.
The African Queen was like a cat in ill health.
A smart, healthy cat knows when to rub up against
a leg and purr. The Queen could purr and take you
on a wonderful voyage, but all too often she'd hack
up a gigantic hairball, or attempt to lure you toward
death. Her tired old engine would break down and
her bilge pump quit running, always at the most
precarious times. The first time dad made a warning
sound: “Ahugga! Ahugga! Ahugga!” we
kids didn’t know what he meant. We looked
puzzled till dad yelled, “God damn it! Start
bailing!!! We’re taking on water!”
Highly motivated by the twenty feet deep water
around us, we got the coffee cans and scooped water
out of the boat and dumped it overboard, back into
the lake. Little kids with their adrenaline flowing
can bail quite fast. The bailing experience did
not make us want to go out again in deep water any
time soon. It was bad enough that she often settled
to the bottom while moored in her slip. There, at
least, the water was shallow and she never disappeared.
But to have no power and no pumps in the middle
of the busy shipping lanes was dangerous. Being
rescued by the U.S. Coast Guard embarrassed my father
to no end. He was a "Navy Man." For him,
it was an insult to his seamanship.
Unfortunately, events of this type became increasingly
more ominous and frequent. Dad couldn’t trust
her any longer in deep water. The African Queen
was like the cat who has forgotten the rules of
the game. She suddenly wore out her welcome and
it dawned on my father that all his efforts at kindness
represented a love unrequited. All those hours of
fixing, patching, rebuilding, caulking, sanding,
painting, polishing, tinkering, and caring. She
met the same fate an ungrateful cat would have.
If dad could have, he would have tricked the African
Queen into the back seat of the car with a can of
tuna and then dropped her off on the outskirts of
town.
Maybe Noah had been correct to just walk away from
the Ark. The African Queen was pawned off on another
unsuspecting victim, with “party boat”
visions. I don’t know who dad stuck with the
Queen, but he, like Doctor Treadgold before him,
freed himself and moved on. She passed from one
hand to another.
I never anticipated seeing her again, but ten years
later her photo was smack dab on the front page
of the Port Huron Times Herald: a large black and
white image of the African Queen creating more trouble.
She had broken free of her winter berth and set
off, on her own, with no captain or crew, moving
with the ice flow of a late March thaw on Black
River. The photo captures her passing through town.
She had always been prone to sinking, so I could
only imagine that when the ice filling the cracks
in her belly below the waterline eventually melted
she'd fill and plunge to the bottom of Black River,
or be sucked under in the wider, faster, current
of the St. Clair River. Unfortunately, no article
accompanied the photograph; so I didn’t learn
the outcome of the run away boat. My guesses about
her fate were wrong. The African Queen led a charmed
life.
I spied her several years later, again on dry land,
just as on the first day I met her. This time she
wasn’t in a field, but leaning against a wood
house of similar vintage. At first I thought I was
looking at a bizarre home renovation, like an extra
bedroom tacked onto an odd house.
I drove around the block again to take a second
look. When I was certain it was the Queen, I pulled
into the driveway and paid a visit to her.
Her new owner emerged from his unpainted, two-story
clapboard dwelling wearing a see through, stained
sleeveless t-shirt–the style referred to as
a “wife beater,” and swinging a bottle
of Stroh's from the crotch of his orange thumb and
orange index finger. Speckling his facial stubble
were flecks of Cheetos snacks. With a flip of the
beer bottle, he called off his two dogs, who were
fiercely wagging their tails at me. Another minute
more and they might have licked me to death. The
man set his beer on a cinder block, bent forward
and lifted a four-foot square scrap of disintegrating
plywood from the dirt. Face down had been a hand
painted sign: BOAT 4 SALE.
Up close, I recognized the old tub was in greater
need of painting than even her new “owner’s”
house. She was a shadow, a ghost, a glimmer.
Those chips of paint still clinging to her shell
lightened her appearance from a distance, and contributed
to an illusion of well-being. It struck me that
the house, the boat, and this man all seemed to
be wearing versions of the same see-through, sleeveless
t-shirt. They were each in desperate need of a fresh
coat, or at least a shirt. Her new owner told me
how the African Queen had come into his possession.
He had been sitting in the back of one of the riverside
bars, putting his paycheck to use. His blood alcohol
level hadn’t quite reached his quota for the
day, when something caught the corner of his eye
out the back window. Just drunk enough to realize
that he'd seen the unmanned African Queen amid the
ice flow, a brilliant thought popped into his brain.
“My ship has finally come in! I’m going
to be wealthy!”
He figured he could claim salvage rights, if he
could board her: FINDERS KEEPERS. And he was drunk
enough not to realize it was a bad idea to scramble
over the ice flow to make his claim good. He managed
to get a line to shore and rescued the old boat,
pulling her out to the bank and paying to have her
plucked from the river and trucked to his yard.
There, he cradled her with stacks of scrap lumber,
nailing the boards together so she wouldn't fall.
There wasn’t enough lumber, so he held her
up against the house with what he had. “Hey,
ya work with what ya got, am I right?” He
asked me to make an offer and the boat would be
mine.
Most people in town who hadn't heard of the boat
with a mind of its own and a propensity for running
away, sinking, and trying to kill its owners certainly
knew after the ice flow photograph in the paper.
I fantasized how the African Queen might finally
come to an end. I envisioned an escape down the
Great Lakes. I imagined the African Queen making
the cover of the New York Times as she plunged to
smithereens over Niagara Falls. On the other hand,
I was confident she'd never be freed from her dry
dock in the salvager's yard. So, I imagined a tornado,
common enough in Michigan, whisking her off for
a farewell tour of the town before dunking her into
the depths of Lake Huron. Then I thought again.
She'd be more likely the victim of an accident,
maybe trapped as she was next to the droopy, unpainted
house, if it ever caught fire, she'd burn, too.
Or maybe she’d be struck by lightning, start
burning , and take the house with her! Yes, that
sounds like the curse of the Queen! But no, no exciting
end came for the African Queen.
She never sailed again. She never sold. The salvager
gave up buying paint for her. She turned from gray
to brown and might have eventually melted into the
ground, except for a very cold winter and a chainsaw.
She vanished board by board in a matter of months.
Some might say it was expensive firewood. Her cast
iron engine still sits in the guy's backyard. Perhaps
he's hoping to sell it for scrap. Maybe he’s
waiting for it to escape on its own.
Noah had it easy: when his voyage ended, he ditched
the boat. Maybe he opened a lumber yard, or just
never had to look far for kindling..
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