Anybody have a copy of Petester's "Down to the Sea" story?

Status
Not open for further replies.
Part Three
The Labor Pool
As many times as I had kept repeating it, Tuna still did not believe I was serious about the Mexico thing. In his own mind he still clung to the notion that the whole thing was just a lark and after floating the canal for just a few hours we would call it good. In those days, schools in Phoenix were not air conditioned and it was far too hot for students and teachers alike to endure the summer months in stuffy classrooms. As a result, school let out for the summer on the last Monday before Memorial Day in May, and did not begin again in the Fall until the first Monday after Labor Day in September. But it was already late in July when we hatched our Mexican exploration scheme and Tuna could not see how we could possibly get the raft built and journey all the way to Mexico before we had to go back to school in September.
“You know, Pete, I think it’s a big long way to Mexico,” he whined. “I bet its every bit at least fifty miles. More even. There’s no way we could do that between now and September. And besides that, my old man ain’t gonna let me go to Mexico and I bet yours won’t either. And another thing, let’s say we did go to Mexico. How are we gonna get back, huh? Tell me that. I mean floating down the river is one thing. But we can’t paddle a raft back, can we? So, you really don’t mean it when you say we are going to Mexico, right?”
I did my best to patiently explain the facts to him. “Look,” I said,, “first off, even if you TOLD your old man we were going to Mexico he wouldn’t believe you anyway. So don’t even bother to ask him if it’s okay. I looked your old man right in the eye and told him straight up what I had in mind. So what did he do? He laughed his butt off.”
“So what about getting’ back home?” Tuna pressed.
“As far as gettin’ back goes, that’s the easiest part of the whole deal,” I said. “When we get there all you have to do is call up your old man on the telephone and you say; ‘Hey, Dad, guess what? Me and Pete are in Mexico! Can you come and get us?’ Nothing to it. What do you think he’s gonna say? NO? Heck, when its all over I bet he’ll want to ride in the Packard with us.”
“What Packard?”
“Ah, geez, Tuna. You got a mind like a steel trap. The problem is that its always sprung shut.”
“So why MY old man? How come we can’t call YOUR old man?”
“Because my old man probably WOULD say no. And look, I measured on the map. Its only about ten inches to Mexico from here. On the map an inch is something like twenty miles. So that means it’s only about two hundred miles to get down there.”
“TWO HUNDRED MILES !“
“Yeah, two hundred miles. Don’t get excited. That’s no big deal. Keep it simple. If we just do twenty miles a day, what’s that come to? Ten days, right? So we got plenty of time to do this yet. We just need to get all the guys together and get started chopping down those trees.”
So we split up the recruiting chore. Tuna was supposed to go talk to the Lindauer boys, Stan Troxel, Richard Simis, Karl Lance, Sid Rosenthal and Toby Lefkowitz. I had to go get Herb Gottchauk lined up, along with Larry Woicek, the Walters brothers, Tony Delgado, Shorty Silva, and a couple of others I forget now.
As anticipated, Tuna got a lot of grief from the Lindauer boys before they agreed to sign on. The Lindauer boys were still pretty sore at me from last Halloween when I did the burning bag trick on their old man. I had a few problems with Tony, too. He had a Grandpa that lived down in Hermosilla, Mexico, and Tony wanted to be able to go along on the trip so he could see his Grandpa. He said the only way he would help would be if he got to go along. I figured I’d deal with that later. But the worst problem I had was with Herbie Gottchauk from next door. Actually, it wasn’t Herbie that was the problem so much as it was his sister, Bonnie.
Apparently Bonnie had a sort of ‘thing’ for me. There were two or three times when she said she hoped we could get married when we grew up. Well, she was a nice enough person. Very friendly. Maybe too friendly, always wanting to do that kissy-face business and all.
But there were a couple of problems with any future marriage plans. Three actually. First, me and Tuna had taken a blood vow to never mess with girls. It involved the pocketknife-point to the fingertips deal with mixing the blood and all that. Second, if I ever DID get married, it would be to Dixie Leonard, a girl in the eighth grade and a year older than me that I was head over heels in love with, but who didn’t even know I was alive. And finally, Bonnie Gottchauk looked just like her brother, Herbie, only with a dress instead of pants, and both she and Herbie looked like a loaf of rising bread dough with arms. And then there was the pumple thing. “Pumples” are really, really big, nasty pimples, and she always had a pretty good crop of those under cultivation. She let me mash one once and it squirted at least three feet. I guess you could call that a sign of true love. Think about it. How many girls would just let you squeeze one of their pumples ?
So Bonnie wanted to be involved. Not just in the construction project. But she too, like Tony Delgado, wanted to be able to come along on the trip. I had to tell her, no way. But I was able to do it without hurting her feelings too bad. I did that by using Tony. I told her we might have to take Tony along and if we included her for a total of four kids, the raft would have to be huge ! We wouldn’t be talking just raft anymore. We’d be talking ARK!
“But Peteee,” she protested, “why can’t you just take ME instead of Tony? I can do things. I could make sandwiches and stuff to take along.”
I shook my head. “No, Bonnie. I can’t. I already kinda promised Tony. He wants to see his Grandpa down in Mexico who’s a hundred and nine years old or something and is like gonna die any minute.”
But I added that she could make us sandwiches while we cut down the trees and that seemed to make her happy. Peanut butter and raspberry jam for me, and Tuna liked peanut butter and sliced banana. She could ask around about what the other guys liked.
For some odd reason I can’t remember or explain, the whole project took on an aura of secrecy. It must have been somebody else’s idea to keep it all a big secret, because it wasn’t my doings. I didn’t see the need. Because like I said, you could come right out and tell people what you were doing and they’d just laugh at you anyway. Nobody would ever take this stuff seriously. But for whatever reason, it was decided we would never work on the raft on weekends. We would only work on it during week days when all the Fathers were at work. That worked out well though, because the guys all had pretty free access to their Father’s tools and stuff.
On the very first day, getting one of those big Tammy-trees cut down proved to be a bit more than we might have reckoned. Everybody brought along some sort of a tool but none of them were worth a tinker’s ding. Teddy Lindauer had brought what must have been around a 24-pt cross-cut hand saw better suited to cabinet making than felling trees. Larry Woicek had something that looked like a toy tomahawk, and Karl Lance brought his Boy Scout hatchet.
The first tree we attacked was about as big around as the big part of a fat kid’s leg and Karl started banging away on it with his hatchet. He never hit the same place twice and all he was doing was making a stack of nicks in the bark that looked like corduroy. With a circle of us standing around him telling him what he was doing wrong, his frustration began to mount commensurately with the volume of sweat running down his forehead and into his eyes.
With redoubled efforts, Karl managed to sling the hatchet’s head off of the handle on a backswing and send it spinning through the air until it smacked
Toby Lefkowitz right in the forehead and sent him running home with a big ugly blue bruise on his head. That was casualty one.
With Karl out of action, Larry Woicek stepped up to have a go at it with his tomahawk with identical results. After ten whacks or so, we were still looking at mangled bark with no sign of the wood under it. Wimpy Teddy was next. He got the saw going and we actually began to see some very small signs of progress. But his arms gave out after just a couple of minutes. Sid Rosenthal took over. Same thing. Five minutes at the most and he was gassed. Herbie, Shorty, Tommy Arnold, Stan, Bobby Fisher,, all those guys took a turn at the crosscut saw, and after what must have been an hour, you could see that the cut was a little more than half way through the tree.
It was slow going but at least you could see it was possible. Until it all went wrong. As the cut progressed it became ever more difficult to push and pull the saw back and forth. Eventually, it wouldn’t move at all. Scott Simis, the biggest kid in the bunch, grabbed the saw handle and yanked on it as hard as he could but it wouldn’t budge. It was hopelessly stuck.
Teddy had started the cut on the wrong side of the tree. He should have stayed with the hatchet-scarred side that the tree leaned away from. But he didn’t. He started on the back side and the tree leaned towards his cut. As the saw passed the halfway mark the tree had begun to sag and it clamped down on the blade with a death grip. We were done.
It was time to regroup and rethink the whole proposition. It didn’t require a Mensa-eligible IQ to realize we would all be old men before we managed to cut down ten or twelve tammy-trees with a hatchet or some wimpy hand saw. We needed some serious cutting tools.
Karl said he was goin’ home and got on his bike. Then one after another the other guys began to drift away. Teddy Lindauer was going nuts. ‘WHAT ABOUT THE SAW? My old man will kill me if I don’t put that saw back before he gets home.”
Tuna did a little palms up shrug. “So what do you want us to do, Teddy? That saw is now part of the tree. Ain’t nothin’ we can do about it.”
“Okay. To hell with you guys then,” Teddy stammered, his lower lip quivering like he was about to bust out bawling. “That’s all the help you’re gettin’ from me. I should’ a never got mixed up with you guys again anyway. You guys are nothin’ but trouble.”
So at the end of day one we lost Teddy Lindauer and Toby Lefkowitz and had yet to fell our first tree. It was not a good beginning.
So Tuna, Bonnie, Herbie and me was just kind of sitting around next to the half cut tree mumbling about our shortcomings when Clyde Gett came shuffling along the canal bank on that dirty old white gelding and asked us what we were up to. Clyde was a year ahead of me and had graduated from the eighth grade and would be starting high school in September at North Phoenix High.
“It’s a long story,” I said.
“I got time.”
So Clyde slid down off of ‘Powder’s’ back and sat down to listen to it. Clyde was good that way. He never butted in or said a mumblin’ word till I was all done. I didn’t leave anything out either. I started off by telling him about my plan to raft all the way down to Mexico and went all the way through it right up to the stuck saw.
He chewed on a Bermuda grass stem the whole time I was talking and when I wound it up he pulled the stem out of his mouth, wagged his head back and forth a time or two and allowed a little grin. “Well I can tell ya right now you ain’t never gonna cut down no tamarack tree with a damned hatchet. What ya’all need is a big old two-man fellin’ saw and a good sharp double-bit axe. My old man had me to cuttin’ enough fence posts to figure that out. Shaggy-bark juniper. Nasty stuff. Worser’n tamaracks even. Axe bounce right off those things if you don’t get a good angle.”
“What do you mean,” I asked. “What’s an angle?”
“You know. One stroke straight. Next one angled down to knock out the chip.”
“Well, no, I don’t know. And it don’t matter anyway. We ain’t got no decent axe and we ain’t got that saw you’re talkin’ about either. We are pretty much at a dead end here.”
“Well we got all that stuff. You round up your crew again and lemme know. I’ll bring the stuff you need and show you guys how it’s done. You can knock down this whole damned forest in a day if you’ve a mind to.”
I had a mind to. And on the way home I don’t think the Schwinn’s wheels even touched the ground. New hope! I felt reborn ! Maybe we could pull it off after all.
Good old Clyde. He was solid. We would be good friends for several years yet to come and he was a better friend than I probably deserved. It was not lost on me that he didn’t bust out laughing or tell me I was nuts when I went on and on about how I wanted to get to Mexico. If he did think I was nuts,, he kept it to himself.
 
Part Four
Raft Building 101
I fed Tommy a couple of moths I snagged off the front porch light and tried to go to bed. I didn’t sleep much that night. It was too hot in my room so I tried sleeping on the back porch but it didn’t help a lot. Toby joined me and that big fat cat felt like a hot rock. Phoenix summers were pretty tough in 1950. Air conditioning only happened in movie theaters and fancy hotels downtown. Some folks had swamp coolers that blew droplets of water through a window but we didn’t have one of those.
Our house was pretty weird when it came right down to it. I think it must have been built before the Apaches learned English. It had fat walls made of adobe that was plastered over and only the two bedrooms and the bathroom had wood plank ceilings. The living room and the kitchen didn’t have ceilings. You could look up and see the underside of the tin roof if you were in the living room. During the day that tin roof probably got up to around two-hundred degrees and the inside of the house functioned pretty much like an oven. A fly would land on the underside of that hot tin and become instant toast. It wouldn’t cool down again till early the next morning and then the whole cook-off would start all over again.
But it wasn’t just the heat that kept me awake. Getting the work crew back together again wasn’t going to be easy. I guess most of the kids figured nothing much was going to be accomplished and there was little romance in just hanging out in hot weather if there wasn’t anything constructive for them to do. It was pretty obvious also that hacking on trees had little appeal to any of them. When we had the logs cut and had something to work with, hammering nails might be a different story. Guys liked to hammer nails. Didn’t matter what into or why,, they just liked to hammer nails.
So it came down to me and Tuna again, with Herb and Bonnie and a reluctant Shorty Silva waiting for Clyde to show up with the good stuff on a Monday morning. When he did, I was a little surprised. It was the first time ever that I had seen Clyde ride Powder with a saddle on him. I didn’t know Clyde even had a saddle. We always rode Powder bareback with a simple, poor man’s nose-ring hackamore and an Indian-rig single neck rope. That was really all that was needed to manage a gentle old slug like Powder. I think that horse was probably older than both me and Clyde put together.
Clyde had some kind of a great big saw with a handlebar on each end of it draped over Powder’s butt and that double-bit axe he talked about was tied sideways under his right leg, along with another, smaller hand axe and a sledge hammer. Tied on behind the saddle was a canvas bag that held all manner of other serious looking tools.
I asked Clyde about the saddle.
“Had to saddle him so I could tie the tools on,” Clyde explained. “And besides that,, when we go to drag the logs up the bank, I’ll need a horn to dally to.”
I had no idea what Clyde was talking about. “Drag ‘em up the bank? Why do we need to do that?”
“Well you didn’t figure on building yer boat down here did ya?” he said, pointing to the grassy flat near the tammy-trees.
“Well, yeah. I kinda did. The trees are right here, ain’t they?”
“So after its built how did you figure on getting it up over the bank and down into the water ?”
“Couple of us pick it up and carry it, I guess.”
Clyde shook his head. “Don’t think so, Pete. Hell, you’d be doin’ good just to pick up one of the logs and carry it up there. You’ll see what I’m talkin’ about as soon as we get one of ‘em down. Them tammy-trees are heavy as concrete.”
We helped Clyde unlimber the tool bonanza and Clyde said he would take down the first tree so we could see how it was done. “But I ain’t about to cut down this whole forest for y’all. I’ll show you how to do it and you can take it from there.”
He was a good teacher. He took his time and with great patience explained each step as he came to it. “Now here’s what ya do,” he started, as he swung the big axe a mighty blow to cut a gash in the tree at about knee high. “Ya start a shark’s mouth cut on the side of the tree you want it to fall towards.”
The next axe blow struck the trunk just above the first horizontal gash at a slightly downward angle, and to the spectator’s amazement, a fist-sized chunk of wood flew off the tree. “WOW,” Tuna said. “Now we’re cookin’.”
To which, Clyde simply replied, “Juicy son-of-a-pup, ain’t it.”
That should have been a clue. But it sailed right over my head.
After about a dozen good whacks like that, Clyde had cut a neat gash in the trunk that went nearly, but not quite, half way through, and did in fact look something like a shark’s maw. Tossing the axe off to one side, he asked for somebody to pick up one end of the big saw. Tuna grabbed on to it before I could, and Clyde told him to hold the saw blade level and horizontal against the trunk on the opposite side of the axe cut, and about two inches higher than the shark’s upper lip.
“We could do this cut with an axe, too,” Clyde said. “But it’s faster and easier with the saw and it’s safer ‘cause we are just gonna let the tree hinge over and it won’t kick back on us and hurt nobody when it goes down. Now Tuna, all you gotta do is hold your end level and don’t hold it back or push on it while I drag it towards me. Then do the same when I push it back at ya.”
That saw was a wicked looking thing with big long teeth on it that didn’t even look like saw teeth. The teeth weren’t even real pointy but kind of rounded and I could not for the life of me figure out how it would even cut anything. But cut it did. It didn’t seem to take any time at all. With just a few strokes that saw had made it almost half way through the tree, throwing off a blizzard of saw chips as it went.
Clyde stopped and pulled the saw out before anything happened. We were kind of puzzled by that. Seems like just two or three more strokes would have done that tree in. “We’re gonna play it safe here, ‘cause there’s a little breeze blowin’ and we don’t want this to go wrong.”
With that, Clyde rummaged around in the canvas tool bag and pulled out a big, black iron wedge. He stuck the sharp end in the saw cut, tapped it a couple of times with the sledge hammer to set it, than hauled off with the hammer and drove the wedge in. KRRRRACK !
Pretty as you please, the tree just sort of leaned over and did a swan dive. It never came loose from the stump. Although it was down, the cut end still remained attached to a splintery looking hinge on the stump. Two axe whacks took care of that, and Clyde stepped back. “Okay. There’s your first tree,” he said. “Y’all see how it’s done. Next thing you gotta do is figure out how long you want it. Cut it there. Then limb it off with the hand axe to clean it up.”
“Holy cow,” Tuna said. “That didn’t even take ten minutes. Where’d you learn how to do this stuff so neat-oh, Clyde?”
“Last winter. My Pap showed me how. He worked my tail off cuttin’ enough juniper up there by Globe City and Payson to build a solid-wall training arena. If a colt can’t see outside, he ain’t got no choice but to pay attention to you. Hauled maybe six truckloads of juniper logs down from there. And I’ll tell ya what,, tree cuttin’ is a talent I ain’t gonna be sad to lose.”
I was glad he hadn’t yet lost it. The way I looked at it, he was capable of miracles. “You have any idea how we might be able to get Teddy Lindauer’s stuck saw out of that tree over there?”
Clyde didn’t even bother to answer me. He just walked over to the tree with that sledge and gave the stuck saw a few taps on its spine and it popped right out. Then he picked up the hand axe and put it to use trimming off the splinters on the stump he had just cut. He followed that up by cutting a wide notch in what remained of the hinge. “We can use this for a buck,” he said.
“What’s a buck?” I asked.
“A kind of a cradle. You can set the logs up on it to make it easier to saw ‘em off to length instead of tryin’ to work on ‘em in the dirt.”
The guy thought of everything. I was starting to feel inadequate. Stupid, actually. Clyde was only a year older than me at the most. How come I didn’t know any of this stuff?
So the next order of business was to figure out how long a log we needed to cut out of the tree Clyde had just felled. And it dawned on me that no thought had yet been given regarding the size our raft should be and what sort of dimensions might be involved. “So what do you think, Tuna?” I asked. “I guess it ought to be big enough to lie down on, don’t you think?”
“You said it would have a little house on it, didn’t you?” Tuna said. “So if we are gonna sleep inside the house, the whole thing ought to be twice as long as the house, I think, so there’s enough room to move around and paddle it.”
“Ya don’t ‘paddle’ a raft,” I said, trying to sound smarter than I was. “It just drifts along on the current. All you need is a long stick to push on the bottom when you need to steer it a little.”
“Well, okay then,” Tunas snapped back. “So you don’t paddle it. Ya still need to be able to move around to do the pushing then, don’t you?”
“Okay. Here’s what we do then,” I said. “C’mere and lay down here in this dirt.”
“WHAT?”
“Just lay down.”
“Ta hell ! I’ll get all dirty and Ma will have my but !”
“We’ll dust you off. Just do it. Don’t be so damned stubborn all the time.”
He mumbled some, but after a time he got down and very carefully stretched out on his back in a patch of powdery dust along the road’s shoulder. With a stick, I marked a square in the dirt that surrounded him. “Okay,, that’s how big the house needs to be. “
Tuna got up and we more or less dusted off his back side, while he studied the gouges in the dirt. “Alright. I see,” he allowed. “So if we scratch a big square around that little one then that’s about how big the whole shebang will be, right?”
“Right.”
The bigger square was probably on the order of eight feet wide and about twelve feet long and Clyde stood off to one side scratching his head. “Man. That’s gonna be a pretty big boat, don’t ya think? Shoot, y’all is gonna have to cut down thirteen or fourteen trees, looks like to me.”
And he was right. He was right about that and he was right about not being able to do anything with those logs without Powder, too. The trees we were cutting likely averaged seven to eight inches in diameter and trimming them to a nominal twelve foot length probably produced logs that weighed somewhere in the range of two-hundred pounds apiece, maybe more. Green tamarisk is not exactly what you would consider a lightweight wood. It took four of us, Tuna, me, Herbie and Shorty to get that first tree slid up onto Clyde’s “buck” so we could saw it off to the proper length.
With that first log cut, it was time to fell the next tree and that didn’t go well at all. To begin with, the tammy-trees were growing pretty thick and close together and they were not all the same size. Some were bigger and most were smaller than the first tree, and for some reason we all thought the logs that would go to make up the raft’s floor ought to all be about the same diameter. As a consequence, a good number of lesser trees had to be cut and cleared out of the way in order to get at good ones. And this was no small trick. Smaller trees acted like they were made out of rubber. They were whippy and flexible which made axe work nearly impossible.
As the day wore on, the crew wore down. It was hot, sweaty, hard work for a gang of kids who knew little about what they were doing. With my first turn with the axe, I came close to knocking my left leg off. On the first swing, I started with a downward angled blade and the axe bit glanced off the tree like a .22 caliber bullet skimming off flat water. Clyde just moaned. “Make your first cut flat and level,” he said. “Give the bit something to run into when you cut the chip.”
That kind of ‘woodsy’ talk went right over my head. I had no idea what any of that lingo meant. So I just bulled my way through and probably worked three times harder than I needed to for the desired result.
Around noontime we were all gassed and sat down to gobble down the peanut butter sandwiches Bonnie brought us. The water and a half-dozen big orange Nehi soda pops she had also brought along were gone and it was all you could do to get up enough spit to swallow the peanut butter. “I don’t know if I can do anymore today,” Tuna said, looking over the three logs we had managed thus far.
“Well you boys better be gettin’ with it,” Clyde said. “I can’t be leavin’ the tools with y’all. I gotta take ‘em back home with me and I can’t just wait around on ya all day.”
I was gassed out as much as anybody. “Take ‘em, Clyde. We can’t do no more today. We can try it again tomorrow.”
After Clyde loaded Powder up and left, we just sat there a while contemplating the folly of the whole grand scheme. Everybody had an opinion. “We are going about this all wrong,” Tuna said. “I say to hell with cuttin’ down trees. Why can’t we make a raft out of inner tubes? We can get five or six tubes and lay the three logs we already got on top of ‘em to tie it all together. ”
Shorty chimed in with, “That won’t work. You poke a hole in a couple of ‘em and you’re finished.”
“You can patch holes,” Tuna said.
“On top, maybe. What if the holes are on the bottom?”
“Never mind,” I said. “You need something stout if we are gonna make a two hundred mile voyage all the way to Mexico. We don’t know what kind of stuff we might run into. We might be banging into rocks and stuff. Maybe even go over waterfalls. You need something that will hold up to whatever bad stuff we run into. Its gotta be stout. Those trees over there are just the ticket. It will be okay. You’ll see. We got three logs already. We only need like ten more and we’re done. At least now we know what we are doing. It will go faster tomorrow. We just need to bring more water.”
“I’ll take care of that for you, Peteee,” Bonnie cooed.
Sweet kid. Making the raft a little bigger maybe and taking her along might not be such a bad idea after all.
 
All the Wordlings "knew" Petester back in the good ol' days. I have a clear picture of him in my mind that was posted on WW on the tiller of Tail Dragger as he was the first to cross The Cut one spring following new excavation. Wayne was his witness I believe. I don't remember who operates The Way Back Machine that may have those posts, Wayne, Bart, Tiff?
 
DaveW
The track chair was Pete's and he used it, in addition to other times, during at least two South Shad Rallys so there should be pictures somewhere. As things were concluding for him, he donated the track chair to Warriors and Quiet Waters. WQW is a Bozeman MT organization that brings physically and mentally impacted warriors to Bozeman for a week of fly fishing on Montana's blue ribbon rivers and streams. I had the chair reconditioned and new batteries before it went to Montana. The program has been very successful and is still going strong. They were donated a 120 acre former horse ranch which has been upgraded to accommodate the warriors while there. It's a great facility where warriors can kick back, be together, work with therapists and learn to fly fish. The chair is used by warriors who have trouble getting around the ranch or accessing some of the boat landing site along the rivers. It's a gold standard program.
Chuck
 
Part Five
Lessons in Marine Architecture
The work became ever more difficult with each passing day. As we worked our way deeper into the tammy-grove the trees became more densely packed together and, in order to net out our fourteen logs, at least fifty other trees had to be cleared away. Cuts, sprains, blisters and bruises took a heavy toll and a whole week passed before we at last had our fourteen logs trimmed and hauled up onto the canal bank top. As for the tammy-grove, it sort of looked like a squadron of B-29’s had used it for a practice bombing range. Some of the smaller trees that were straight and useable had also been hauled up onto the canal bank for materials to be used in the raft’s cabin and as push poles, but all of the rest of the cut up stuff looked like a big jungle laying down.
The raft’s floor logs were laid on the ground parallel to, and rolled tightly against each other, so that you could see right there in front of your eyes exactly what the raft would look like when it was finished.
“It don’t look right,” Tuna said. “It’s pointy on one end.”
“So?”
“It’s that way ‘cause all the logs are going the same way; pointy end that way and fat end this way,” he continued. “We need to turn every other log around to make it more square.”
“What are you talking about?”
“You can’t have ‘em all go the same way,” Tuna insisted. “They need to be fat end next to skinny end, fat end next to skinny end, fat end next to skinny end. They can’t all be fat end next to fat end.”
“Why not?”
“I told you, why not. To make it square lookin’ instead of “pointy.”
“So what’s wrong with pointy? All boats have a pointy front. Why can’t ours?”
“Because its not a boat. It’s a raft. A raft’s gotta be square or it don’t look right.”
Discussions such as this one served only to slow things down. Days were passing to draw us ever closer to the end of summer vacation. Tuna gave in on the idea of turning every other log end for end but it took a lot of time to talk him out of it.
Collectively, we probably had around close to 3000 pounds of logs layin’ there. I don’t know for sure. I’m just guessing. Maybe not quite that much. But still, it was a bit much for one kid to start pushing things around to rearrange the way they were laid and since nobody would agree to help, he gave up on the idea. Our raft would have a pointy end.
Next came the debate over how the logs would be fastened together. Actually, I had no idea how to do that myself. All I knew was that Tuna’s idea was pretty lame.
“We need to lash ‘em together,” he pronounced, his confidence in the offered solution apparent by his tone and tenor.
“Lash? What the hell does that mean, lash? When you “lash” something that’s the same as whipping, isn’t it?”
“No. It’s like tying. Except sailors don’t tie stuff. They ‘lash’ stuff. They LASH stuff together. Its just sailor talk, that’s all.”
It was a Friday night and Ma and Pa was planning on going to a movie after supper and were surprised to hear me say I didn’t want to go. I wanted to go to bed early instead. Ma had knocked herself out making a couple of fried chickens, green fried tomatoes, a mountain of fluffy mashed potatoes and a sea of scab gravy to slather over ‘em. My favorite. But I was so tired and achy I could hardly put fork to mouth.
“I figured we go fishing tomorrow and take the leftover chicken with us for lunch,” the old man said. “Get up early. Take a run up to Horseshoe Lake. You interested?”
I shook my head. “I don’t think so, Pa. Right now I’m thinking I’d like to stay in bed till noon or something.”
“What’s wrong with you, anyway?” he asked. “You look like crap. You’re all banged up and you got enough band aids on you to stock a Rexall drugstore. What have you been doing with yourself all week anyway?”
I decided to spill the beans and get it over with. It would come out sooner or later anyway. Might as well throw it out there now and see what kind of reaction it would draw.
“Me and Tuna is building a raft down at the canal. Kinda figured we’d see if we could make it down to Mexico.”
There was a moment of silence during which the old man just kind of looked sideways at me without any expression on his face to indicate he had even heard what I had just said. Ma reacted a little differently. “Mexico? Did you intend to tell us you were leaving?” She sounded slightly irritated.
The old man raised a finger and wagged it a little, telling her not to get too excited. “So that’s why you asked me where the canal went a while back?”
“Yep.”
“So what are you building this “raft” out of, anyway?”
“Tammy-trees.”
“Tammy-trees, huh? You think that’s a good idea?
“Well,, that’s all we’ve got down there to work.”
“And when you figuring on doing all this?”
“Pretty soon. We got all the logs cut. We just started “lashing” them together.”
“Lashing?”
“Yep. That’s sailor talk. Means tying the logs together.”
“I KNOW what “lashing” means. Doesn’t sound like the best way to build a raft, though.”
Ma slammed her fork down. “For heaven’s sake,, are you going to give him advice about how to build a raft so he can run off to Mexico?”
The old man chortled a little. “Relax, Lilly. It’ll be a good learning experience for him. I’ll walk down there Sunday and see how the Titanic is coming along. This ought to be interesting.”
It came off pretty much the way I thought it would and pretty much like I had told Tuna it would. You could come right out and tell your old man you were going to Mexico and he’d just think you were full of crap. After all, common adult wisdom held that thirteen year-old kids didn’t know their butts from page nine anyway. As long as you knew that and accepted it, you could work the system pretty good lots of times. There was no good purpose served by trying to convince your parents that you weren’t stupid. It was better to just let them keep believing that you were dumb as a brick. That let you get away with all kinds of stuff. When they caught you doin’ something bad, you could always just say you didn’t know any better and they’d buy that every time. After all, you can’t punish somebody just for being stupid.
I don’t mean it to sound like we were evil or devious or something. I know I wasn’t. Tuna, on the other hand, was another story. He had “devious” down pat. Here’s an example.
Tuna had swiped a pack of his old man’s Chesterfields and caught hell for smoking one. He was puzzled about how his folks knew he had smoked a cigarette, because nobody had actually seen him do it. He found out that they smelled it on him. So after that he figured out how he could smoke a cigarette without getting caught. He came up with a trick. He would lay down flat on his back on some grass and when he smoked he would blow the smoke straight up in the air so it wouldn’t get on him. Then after he got done with it he would eat an orange and get the juice all over his chin and stuff. He said they never could smell anything on him afterwards. Now that’s what you call, “devious”.
Sunday morning the old man walked down to the canal with me to check out the raft. When it came to the canal, Tenth Street curved around to the east and became Campbell Avenue. None of these streets were yet paved in 1950. As we started across Campbell, the old man stopped in his tracks. “Oh my God,” he said. “Did you guys cut down all these trees and make this mess? Does old Tony Succato know you did this?”
“Who’s Tony Succato?”
“He owns this property all the way back to Twelfth Street !”
“Somebody OWNS it?”
“Well hell yes somebody owns it ! What did you think it was? Some kind of no man’s wilderness ? Somebody owns everything around here. Its not like some kind of wild west frontier or something. You’re going to have to talk to Mister Succato about this and hope to hell he isn’t in a surly mood.”
Oh, boy. Just what I wanted to hear. Like this whole venture hadn’t caused enough grief already. Now I’d probably catch the dickens from some old geezer who hated kids. But I knew a kid from school named Succato. He had a weird front name. Gelsimino, I think it was. That was supposed to mean some kind of little flower in Italian. But everybody just called him, ‘Chic’. He lived over passed Twelfth Street on Highland. He was an okay kid. Maybe he was from the same family as the Succato guy that owned the tammy-forest and might be able to smooth it for me. I’d have to check into this.
So we get across Campbell and the old man is looking at the wasteland of cut slash, broken and scarred trees, scattered branches and piles of saw chips and he’s just shaking his head. “Geez, what a mess. When this stuff dries up its going to be a forest fire waiting to happen. Burn all the way to Twelfth Street if a wind blows. You guys are gonna have to do something about this mess.”
“Like what? What can we do?”
“Well, for starters you could gather up all this junk and at least get it into one neat pile. Do that first before you talk to Tony. Maybe he won’t get all in a snit if he knows you are trying to make things right.”
“Do you know Mister Succato?”
“Yeah. A little bit. He’s a concrete contractor. Pretty sharp old trader.”
“So, could you maybe talk to him for me?”
“Why should I talk to him? I didn’t make the mess.”
“Oh. Okay. So do you know where he lives maybe?”
“Yeah. Over on Highland passed Twelfth Street.”Bingo. So then it must be Chic’s old man, I was thinking. And that’s not all I was thinking. I didn’t say anything to the old man, but I already had figured out how we would go about cleaning up the mess.
“So where’s this raft?” the old man asked.
“It’s up there on top of the canal bank.”
So we scramble up onto the bank and the old man takes one look at our pride and joy and busts out laughing. “Well, hell, that ain’t gonna work. You’ve got a rope wrapped around each end and you think that’s going to keep the logs together? There’s nothing connecting the logs to each other. . There’s nothing to stop the logs in the center from slipping right out of that silly loop of rope.”
“Well, what would work better?”
“If it were me, I think I’d round up a bunch of two-by-sixes, lay ‘em across the logs, and nail ‘em down. Drive three or four sixteens into each log as you go across the two-by-six. That way everything’s tied together.”
“What are sixteens”?
“Big nails. There’s some in the garage you can have.”
Made sense. And when I told Tuna about it, he even agreed. Not because he thought it would work any better than his dumb “lashing”, but because driving nails sounded like it would be more fun than trying to figure out how to get another length of rope around the middle of the raft.
Gathering up an arm load of two-by-sixes wasn’t as easy as it might sound. It’s not like a kid could just walk into a two-by-six store and buy some. We had to scrounge and the scrounging wasn’t so good. Me, Tuna, Herbie and Shorty managed to come up with just one two-by-six and it wasn’t long enough to make it clear across the width of the raft. We had some luck with two-by-fours though, and managed to scrape together seven of ‘em. They were all eight feet long, too, which spanned the raft’s width just right without any need to cut anything.
That was excellent. Nobody much liked sawing wood. Like I said, guys just want to hammer nails into stuff. If you had to cut something first, it was just a delay before the main event.
I told Tuna what my old man had said about Tony Succato and the mess we had made, and that we were going to have to do something about cleaning it up before it all caught fire.
“Clean it up?” Tuna moaned. “How are we supposed to do that?”
“Don’t worry. I got a plan. Clean the whole mess up in no time at all. Keep the faith.”
 
Status
Not open for further replies.
Back
Top