A story written in wood

Back when they cut out cedar in basins of rivers north and south they'd float them down in log jams to the new ports built quickly from the timbers nudging down stream toward them. Once piered and poled those ports served new boats and big boats and saw Newfies and Scousers and Taffys and crooks. While upstream the men knew about it but stayed there to rip from the forests the great boughs they saw.

One of them they called King Billy and though no one had seen him for twenty years he was thought to be alive and living in the forests where the light of his fire would sometimes flick and his shadow flitted in front of the bullock teams. Archie Compton and Dennis Eves saw him one time they say, while they were digging out a wagon stalled with logs in a river bank turned to mud. The bullock were low snorting and had given up hope of jagging it loose. Arch had loosed the slack of the chains to give them a start and inspire them forward. They always put the dumb ones in the middle and they just followed and grunted in the directions the more wily leaders deemed fit. Those lead animals deflated would send the whole team into depression and the trick was to inspire them.

Like everything in life, belief is the key.

With the slack eaten up and the lead animals at pace and full of confidence that cart unbogged and Arch and Den looked up and seen old Billy the black who'd been in those forests since his birth and the birth of his father and pre that even.

But almost in the motion of seeing him was the sight of his disappearing too. Just the one moment of being and not being and all the while the wagon climbed the hill and the logs eventually left to float downstream and some of them logs onto a ship are probably there in Plymouth or New York even though I doubt it.

There's another story but it's written in wood.

Curiosity is a terrible curse

Long past the time that had done him his finest work, an old friend was offered a most unusual commission. A man - old himself, and bent - had thrown his ropes, tied up, and destroyed all his maps. He was going nowhere.

THis man found a cottage and began to empty his boat bit by bit into his new dwelling. To do it he rented a small van and a local lad to help him pack it and unpack it again later. There was memorabilia from all over the world: elephant's toes and emu feathers and hornback shells and it all tumbled out of the boat in the arms of the lad and into the truck. It took three loads because the truck was a wee bit small for the job, but cheap, and no complaints just an observation, they came down to the last load. In it, was a teak fridge, True story, a wooden fridge. the local lad felt it odd. The old man answered the expression:

During the shrimp boom in the Celebes all those years ago there was a lot of money and a lack of trust in the local finance industry. THe shrimp farmers were worried the local currency would bottom out, in the parlance of the times, and sunk all of their rupiah into kitchen appliances. They didn't trust paper money in the long haul, not even if it were green backed and stupid. SO they bought appliances.

They had hair dryers and toasters and microwave ovens, but the really prized appliance was the refridgerator. The only problem in Celebes that day of the year being that they didn't have enough ready power (they used a small generator) to use their appliances. SO the fridges and everything else was more or less just sitting there. It was nothing but stored wealth.

Anyway, with the fact of the matter being that fridges were so vaunted, but yet useless, it occured to one of the shrimp farmers to order a teak fridge from one of the local artisans. All told, it is only a small stretch to go from a useless but potentially useful fridge to one that is useless altogether as a fridge. That being true, the shrimp farmer in question had a teak fridge made. He was very proud of his teak fridge and invited people over to marvel at it. It was a very beautiful teak fridge in a way that you might imagine a teak fridge could be.

The man in our story, with the boat aground and the cottage to be filled, heard about this teak fridge and thought it sounded amazing. He wanted to see the teak fridge. So he asked about it. But it seemed the farmer was away. They all spent a lot of time in Korea during those days because that was where a shrimp farmers would buy his sacks of powdered oxygen which is a stark necessity if you haven't got enough wind powered aerators to keep the little crustaceans full of lung, so as to speak, and not gasping their hours away. So it turned out the fridge owner was in Korea getting his powdered oxygen supplies.

ANd again. ANd again. Whenever this man in our story called to see the teak fridge one of the other farmers would tell him about Korea and oxygen. This took months for our man. But eventually he managed to corner the returned teak fridge owner and forced him at the barrel of a load of liquid expletives to offload the fridge. It was a major coup for a man suddenly obsessed with the whole idea of this fridge.

The man in our story was so eager to find a place for the fridge he loaded his boat and set sail. It was weeks and months at the whim of his own skill and that of the sea before he landed, found his cottage and had his fridge unloaded in the last round of this little van. The terrifying thing though, was the cottage was at the crest of the hill and like the old van that it was it's clutch gave and it rolled aways and the fridge got beat against the back doors and suffered quite a fright.

They eventually loaded the fridge and amid the scowls and the tears of the newcomer and his well-wisher of a lad, and the brandishing of the fridge, it was all in need of a little repair. And this is where the commission came in and how I came to know of the man with the boat now at anchor that became sorrier each day in that dirty harbour out there.

The commission was to repair the broken hinge and one panel of the freezer compartment of the teak fridge that had come from the Celebes shrimp farmer. The old friend of mine may not be the artisan he once was himself but age gives you a way with minding people. He took a look at the fridge and the sea-farer and never said a word edgeways but yes and the cost of it all. He never asked the wheres and whyfores, just fixed hinge and panel.

This all wasn't so long ago although I believe the man might have died yet, and I drive past the cottage near daily. So I wonder if the fridge is inside. I presume it is. Certainly his boat is gone. Lost in the wheezer that sent Marty Engels boat down too.

I wish I knew more about that fridge though it's a damn shame about the boat. Curiosity is a terrible curse for some.

The Buldings Above

It's a fact to be believed at this time, and not mere, that whole towns were once built on boats.

You can read it if it's true, because it's written: during the rushes to gold, when half a village would empty to go looking for the necessaries that would build their futures in another place, they just upped and left boats. Big ones mind, not mine. Just left them at anchor and didn't think about coming back until all was over and the boats were gone.

Storms would pound them, and the wharves would clatter as the boats struck, clatter over and more, and filling the king tides and the streets with deck planking and ropes.

It all formed a kind of storm grid, a flotsam of sensible design. The men saw this, and the few of them that had arrived early and given sack to the gold at the earlier moment watched as the waters returned their foraging, and seeped into the sands and then brining back out to the open sea. Later, when all the gold was exhausted and the rest of the men too, they returned to see the town planning that nature does of its own and the men left abandoned there saw that it had logic.

They were smart men, and hard. They got to it and finished where nature had left off, and the streets were finished with the landfill of their diggings, and those cold and empty tailings were dumped on the carcasses of their vessels and their eagerness. They had the timbers of hundreds of deserted ships, and the words of their stories too. Some men found lamps and tea pots and shovels in the mess and kept them aside as they beat down their pasts and settled there with the sunken ships and abandoned future.

This is written now, but it's what my grandfather told. They were happy men there, and the storms let them be.

Hard Days Back Then

It was hard days back then, before the weir, or you might call it something more. Damn too, It was said. And I lost a lot of boats. They were small ones and they were testy ones, but I loved them still.

The thing is with a small boat, all the curraghs and coracles and baskets wove and tarred, they're a tippy craft. My grandson says he seen them in Asia. I think it was Vietnam. But I don't know who I'm writing this for. It must be myself. That being true, it needent matter, but I think it was there where they had those terrible wars. Vietnam.

I lost a good few of them and improved my swimming but did nothing for my tackle supplies, some of which cost me a load. Too much money to tip, but yet you can't think about it when you swim. The alternative of course is not too long-term. Still, I loved them boats and the spinning tops which bobbed and the feeling of being like a scoop on the crest of a tremendous depth and I think about them boats near daily when I chance upon the idea and I suspect I'll mention them as I die.

My own father talked about potatoes and seaweed and what kept him alive in the hard days back then.

He was dying and there was nurses and tubes and machines and instuments that measured the rate of his departure and there he was talking about seaweed and potatoes. So, I suspect I'll talk about wicker boats one day.