Postcard of the Day

[fflo]

 

Comments

[peteralway.livejournal.com]

When I was a kid, in western Michigan suburbia, we had a little rowboat (my brother still has it), and we were surrounded by the kind of people who would have boats like this. We didn't live on a lake, but we got to lakes often enough, and people would keep this sort of boat in their miles-from-water yards.

I don't really miss that world, or regret that I'll never own a boat, but it sort of reminds me that I live in a very different universe than the one I grew up in, and just how privileged we, and the very mundane people around us, really were.

[fflo.livejournal.com]

Yeah, I hear ya. It's kinda cool to picture you and maybe a brother or two out there on the lake.

When we moved to Maryland from Kansas, my father traded his basement darkroom equipment for what we were told was called a jon boat. In Maryland we drove it to a very small lake nearby and fished. I remember doing that only a few times, tho. But back in Kansas we had been guests on a big ol' pontoon boat in Tuttle Creek Lake (the reservoir made by the local dam), and the family who owned that boat were athletic swimmer types. That seemed like somethin'.

[peteralway.livejournal.com]

We rowed it on uh, well, yeah, this is the name--Nichols Lake--up in the Huron National Forest somewhere vaguely between Grand Rapids and Ludington. Sometimes family outings--once fishing, but that freaked me out, once with my dad being amazed by the existence of cardinal flowers, sometimes under the inverted boat by the swimming beach playing submaring, and once I took it by myself in the middle of the night to see the Milky Way until the mosquitoes got too bad. When we were small enough, we set it out in the backyard and filled it with water from the garden hose to create a makeshift kiddie pool. Once my eldest brother mounted an aluminum pole on it as a mast, attached a sail (duck cloth, with grommets), and sailed it around closer-to-home lake.

The oars squeaked rhythmically in the oarlocks when you rowed it. Ten years ago I wrote some MIDI music based on that sound. I still have an MP3 somewhere. My brother Bob thought I was crazy thinking it made that noise, and that melody, until he got it out of our parents' garage and actually rowed it.

I guess I could rent a rowboat much like it at Gallup Park if I were so inclined.