We put in from a muddy side road with easy access to the water, then ran down the Tombigbee at a comfortable pace. River levels were up from a recent rain but not dangerously so. As captain, the Boy was rightfully cautious. He drove with deliberate care. I sat in the front seat the Old Man so long occupied while the Boy followed any line he chose, one hand on the tiller, the other resting on a knee. Here and there, trees leaned in from eroding banks, their leaves tickling surface tension on the move. I watched the birds and listened to the echoes of the engine, listened to the echoes of the years.
How many miles of water has the bow of the old boat seen? In how many adventures has it played its part? It’s not an antique by any means, no more than half a century or so old, but still, it’s passed many of its hours afloat, separating surface from crew.
The boat is a 16-foot aluminum flat-bottom, its power is a 25 horse Mercury. In its youth it was very quick, but age made a fiberglass keel coating necessary and now it’s slower than before. Before the Tenn-Tom was flooded its main haunts were all on Grenada, whose brown waters call its old crew today. Banging across many miles of wave tops must have flexed around the rivets though, because it developed the inconvenient habit of drawing water. Now several pounds of fiberglass intercede.
We’ve never thought of it in any sort of nautical parlance. It’s never referred to as “she” and certainly does not have a name. It’s just a conveyance, good access to small waters’ better places. But in a lot of ways it’s more important than a named vessel could be. It’s where the best days in many lives came together.
More than a vehicle, really, the boat was a place. I grew up there.
I remember a lot of humid sunrises, seats and ice chest lids coated with dew. I remember a lot of welcome sunsets, when the fresh burn felt tight on your neck, and you knew you’d done a good day’s work filling the box, and you looked forward to a big plate of purple hull peas and fresh sliced tomatoes and good sweet corn and string beans and fried okra once the evening’s fish dressing was through. I remember a lot of sweltering middays, when the air stood perfectly still and we’d crank up and run full out in the wide open water just to make the wind blow.
There were trotlines and catalpa worms and snake encounters too. There were tomato sandwiches under button willows we pretended were making good shade. There were glass bottles of Pepsi with screw tops and peelable styrofoam sides and a fish water coating because we’d already filled the other box. There was the Old Man hollering, “I found him!” when he picked up the last fish to be dressed for the night.
There were times on family trips when the boat carried three grown men and three boys all at once, barging from one trotline to the next. An observer would have thought us escaping from something, and might have doubted our chances to get away.
There was laughter, great laughter, just lots and lots of that. So, so much of that.
For me now, time on the boat has grown to become one long unbroken story whose telling seems to pick up speed as we go. Now weeks get away like minutes and months fall from the calendar like rain. Here and there, memories flash suddenly like diamonds in the dark—brilliant points of fire wrapped up in nothing.
Today, the Boy takes the boat out to hunt and to fish and, pretty often, just to ride. He takes friends and meets others and, sometimes, he goes out alone. What young captains on a boat alone get away with is surely thanks only to the abiding grace of Almighty God. For its part, the boat doesn’t know and doesn’t tell. It’s the primary co-conspirator after all.
The boat makes a good lesson about the continuous nature of history. When we read anything about notable events of the past, the chapters and pages sort what happened into neat order, outlining the who and the where and the when. Sentences grow into paragraphs, and paragraphs come to fill pages. The last sentence of the last chapter has a period at the end and that’s that. There was a beginning, a middle and an end. Whatever came next was next and is kept separate inside its own cover, in its own place further down the shelf. It’s easier to think about the world and our place in it that way, but all history is really a continuous flow. You can see that when you look the right way.
The life of a boat certainly has a beginning, there’s no doubt there’s a blank space before, but what happens past that point stays connected. From the boat’s point of view, just as the world’s, it’s all part of one very long day. Thankfully, sunset remains nowhere in sight.
Kevin Tate is a freelance writer. Email [email protected].
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