Bill's New Dock

 

 

I had long thought that having a dock on my pond would be a nice addition to my landscaping. Besides, my granddaughters would surely enjoy using it as they frolicked in the pond using the plastic raft that I inflated and floated in the center of the pond each summer. Unfortunately, it seemed as though I misplaced my round tu it: the dock became one of those things that I never quite got around to doing. That was the case until this summer when I saw an ad in our newspaper for an $89 dock, a ten-footer, completely assembled and made of pressure-treated lumber, a humdinger if I ever saw one. All I had to do was install it. I began to see myself enjoying an adult beverage in the shade while the granddaughters played in the pond enjoying my new dock. I got a sudden boost to my resolve about the dock idea and shortly thereafter, I found my round tu it. 

I went to the lumberyard to talk with the man about the $89 dock and ask his advice since I had never installed anything in a pond beyond a blow-up toy. I learned there was more to the dock business than meets the eye. First, the durn thing was heavier than a team of horses, and second, it needed a system of supports to keep it upright. “And I have just the thing,” the friendly salesman said, pointing to a collection of pipes, collars, pinions, crossbeams, and assorted fasteners. When I asked why I needed such extensive support for a ten-foot dock, he explained about winter’s ice causing lifting and damage and what kind of bottom did I have by the way? I thought he was getting a little too personal until I understood he meant the bottom of my pond. When we finally sorted out what he and I guessed that I needed, the $89 dock had become a $300 dock.

Two men from the lumberyard loaded my new dock and the assorted pipes in the back of my truck. While I drove home I planned my strategy for a one-man installation of the heavy and cumbersome dock with the care and precision usually reserved for brain surgery. I would wear my shoulder-high waders and auger the pipes into the bottom soil of the pond until positioning the supports above the high-water mark. I would carefully make the dock level to the water by positioning a 12-foot board extending from the high water mark at the shore. Once the pipes were set, I would fasten the crossbeams and then slowly slide the dock in place avoiding any lateral force that might move the supports. It would be a carefully planned and executed bit of construction, fitting to my engineering background.

The big day for dock installation arrived. I decided on a preliminary investigation of the site I had chosen. I waded out in the pond measuring ten feet from the high water mark on the shore. The bottom was steeper than I expected: the water came perilously close to the top of my waders as I reached the ten foot mark. Too deep for my safety, it seemed to me. I decided to creep back to shore. Suddenly, I was struck by the fact my feet wouldn’t move. I had sunk into the muck and I was stuck. Furthermore, the effort required to free my foot was causing me to lose my balance and cold water was seeping over the top of my waders. In my mind, I pictured a cold, lifeless body firmly planted in the mud, weaving back and forth in the wind like a giant cattail. After a moment of panic, I remembered the shovel in my left hand that I had carried in the unrealistic expectation of digging a hole for the support pipes. I used the shovel for leverage to free my foot and keep my balance. I managed to waddle toward the shore.

Once on shore, it took me a split second to decide that the brain surgery idea was a loser. I settled on the approximation approach for locating the pipes --not at the end of the dock, but somewhere closer to the eight-foot mark where the water was a bit shallower and the muck a little less like quicksand.

I spent the rest of the afternoon measuring, augering, fastening and tugging the damnably heavy, stupid dock so it would rest on the support system. The approximation method seemed to work and the assembly went tolerably well as it was interrupted only once when I dropped a nut into the water and had to drive to the hardware store for a replacement. The clerk didn’t seem too surprised to see a man searching for a nut wearing shoulder-high waders. As he took my money, he affirmed my choice of pants for shopping, “Installing a new dock? he asked.” I nodded, unwilling to look him in the eye.

I finished the job after a long day. I peeled off my waders and called my lovely wife Marjorie to see the results of my labor. “Here it is,” I said, “a perfectly serviceable dock just a few feet from our patio extending ten feet into the pond. Our granddaughters will love it.”

Her response was unexpected. “Why are you all wet? Do the waders leak?”

I was too tired to explain. “I’m sure our granddaughters will love it. I expect they’ll laughing up a storm as they jump off the end of the dock and swim to the raft.”

“What about the ladder?” she asked. “They will need a ladder on the dock to climb out. Surely you don’t expect them to wade through the weeds to get to the shore.”

I didn’t tell her that was exactly what I expected. “Oh no, of course not. I just thought that …well, I’ll get a ladder tomorrow.”

Did you know that the only place you can buy a ladder of the type I needed is at a marina? The marina people seem to think that if you need a ladder with an extension at the top for climbing out of a pond, then you can afford a ladder that is three or four times more expensive than one from the hardware store that doesn’t have a top part. I purchased a small ladder at the marina, spending $129. As soon as I got it home, it was apparent it was too small – an unexpected but gross failure of the approximation system. My lovely bride returned to the marina for the next larger ladder while I tried to dry the insides of my waders with an air hose.

It turns out that marina ladders come in $50 increments. My dock was becoming as expensive as a used car. The new, longer ladder was also too short to reach the bottom that I couldn’t see because of the muck. I decided that enough was enough and I could put some concrete blocks on the bottom and let the too-short ladder rest on it instead of buying a longer ladder that would have made a $500 dock seem cheap. I put on the still-wet waders and slowly waded to the end of the dock balancing a concrete block in one hand. Using the approximation system, I dropped the dock to the bottom of the pond at the location where I believed the ladder would rest. Since the turgid water prevented seeing the bottom, after dropping the block, I gingerly felt for it with my toes while I held onto the dock for support. The concrete block was nowhere to be felt. It had completely disappeared. I puzzled over the disappearing block until it hit me – the muck had adsorbed the block. “Aha,” I said aloud. “all I need is another block to rest on the first.” I slogged my way back to the shore, slurp, slurp, slurp, as the muck gave up on keeping me in place. I then slushed to the back of my lawn where I store assorted concrete blocks and other material for emergency use in cases like the too-costly dock ladder. I decided on an assortment of block sizes to reach the end of the ladder from the bottom and I slogged in the water again. No longer trusting the approximation system, I went underwater to place the new blocks and position the ladder. I felt like an underwater construction-man as I finished attaching the ladder to the dock. Finally, I was finished. Although the dock project had cost more than anticipated and the work was harder than I had imagined, I was pleased with the outcome. And besides, the granddaughters were coming to visit.

They arrived the following weekend. It was a perfect day for swimming and our blue plastic raft beckoned while the dock seemed to invite us to splash our way into the water. Only one of the two girls put her swimsuit on and my urging to the absent eight-year-old about her swimming and using the new dock seemed to be having no affect.

“So Shana, why won’t you come for swimming with Grandma and me?” I asked.

She looked at me as if it were unpleasant necessity to explain things to an older person. “Do you expect me to swim in a pond filled with frog poop?”

My breathing became audible like air escaping from a giant balloon. I decided to start drinking early that day.

My Neighborhood

My Neighborhood

 

It’s time for a giant ‘selfie’ of my neighborhood. The last time I covered this topic, Big-breasted Bertha and Bicycle Bill were the principal characters, but they are gone now, each having died within a few months of the other from liver disorders caused by their fondness for the frothy brew. Here is an update on the remaining characters and critters who call my neighborhood home.

In case you don’t recall, I live on a lonely road in the north woods. The road is ¾ of a mile long, paved most of the way to my house and in celebration of that fact, it has two names instead of one. The first name, Maple Valley Road, covers the straight portion of the road and then, just as the road makes a curve from its north/south direction to become an east/west road, its name changes. Isn’t that special! My part of the road has much less prestige than Maple Valley since it is less than a ¼ mile long and is paved only for the first 150 feet of its length. The end of the pavement occurs just before my driveway, thus I live on the coarser end of the two-name pathway. My part doesn’t even have the privilege of being called a road; it is a trail, named after a former physician who practiced in Roscommon, Dr. Curnalia, hence my address is Curnalia Trail.

Let’s start our inspection of my neighborhood at the tony end of Maple Valley where it intersects with the state highway, M 18. Here lives one of my coffee-drinking buddies, ol’ one-armed Marty. His house, a trailer really, is just now under siege as result of the recent rainstorm. The sharp point of a falling oak tree has perforated his front porch roof. The tree is now looks about his immaculate lawn from its upright position in his porch. Behind his trailer is another oak that is leaning precariously over his trailer roof. Marty called his insurance adjustor for a look. The insurance man told Marty that he, Marty, should pay for the porch repair and the removal of the leaning tree. “After that we can talk about how your insurance can help you.” I told Marty it would be risky to bend over while the insurance man was around.

Next to Marty is another coffee-drinking buddy, Jerry Boone, he who counts Daniel Boone as his ancestor. Jerry is a long-time north woods man devoted to fishing and all manner of do-it-yourself  projects. He lives alone, a self-sufficient man who is proud to shun computers, mobile phones, and most everything else invented in the last 40 years. Jerry says he does just fine without those irritations, thank you very much, and besides, they are no more than passing fads.

Moving south and across the street from Jerry is Butch and Kathy, an odd couple who are also products of the north woods. Kathy is the 70’s-something mom, Butch is her 50-something son and the pair seem to get on well in their small cottage that I walk by on most mornings. I suspect Kathy is hard of hearing; she doesn’t speak to me as I walk by, rather she shouts even if I am no more than a few steps distant. It was probably a result of all those years spent operating a chain saw along with her husband and sons who were wood-cutters. It shows. Kathy and Butch use firewood for heating and Kathy has her stove going much of the year. The pair use a small mountain of wood each year, and they have been accumulating their wood pile over the last several weeks for this winter’s use. Here it is.

South from Butch and Kathy on either side of the road are several cottages owned by trunk slammers – those absentee owners who arrive on the odd weekend to clean their guns or fire up their snowmobiles or whatever. We are always alerted when one of our trunk-slammer neighbors arrives because he spends most of the weekend firing an automatic weapon. Bam! Bam! Brrrrrretttt bam. Most times we don’t hear the bullets fly by so I assume he points his weapons towards the forests. I’ve been watching the woods between him and me to make sure that he doesn’t knock down so many trees that the bullets have a free flight in my direction. Of course, I can’t complain since firing a gun whose caliber is anything smaller than a tank is considered acceptable in our neck of the woods.

Some of our trunk slammers seem to be unaware of north woods mores. One new cottage owner’s weekend presence is announced on Monday mornings by a white bag of garbage that he leaves by the roadside before leaving for his downstate home. He assumes that the township will pick up his garbage intact. (He is lucky - the township on his side of the road provides garbage pick-up each Wednesday morning, while the township on the other side of the road doesn’t do garbage.) No one in their right mind in the north woods leaves garbage sitting in a plastic bag unless it is sitting in a container known to be bear-proof, raccoon-proof, crow-proof, squirrel … well, you get the idea. Several times, I have been forced to clean up his scattered garbage on my morning walk. To add insult to injury, last week I saw a car leave his driveway while a crow was attacking a white bag of garbage that some other critter had dragged to the road. It became another clean-up job for me. You can see how animosity between neighbors gets started. Over time, a proper north woods man can become a downright curmudgeon.

Continuing further south, six homes are scattered on either side of our road that contain full-time residents and several dogs. Only one house owned by an older lady is dogless, while three of other five have two dogs each and the other two have one dog. For some reason, our neighborhood is devoid of cute, little fuzzy dogs, tending instead to oversize monsters with exaggerated canines. All except one, that is. Here she is, my lady-friend pooch named Bailey, carrying a turkey feather that she found along the roadside during our morning amble.

Bailey is the only friendly dog in our neighborhood. The others are all large black dogs including two Great Danes and two other large black dogs of no particular pedigree. One of the large black dogs named “Blackie” acts as though he wants to eat me every morning what with his barking and running toward me with teeth barred and his hackles up. Fortunately, he is chained and I enjoy watching him get to the end at full speed. He never learns. “Zoie,” the other mean black dog, also acts out the biting scenario toward me but so far his owners have called him on it as I pass by. “Zoie’s” predecessor at the same house nipped me in the leg last summer before his owners sent him away. I think he gave instructions to Zoie before he left.

So, there you have it. My neighborhood seems a little less colorful today than during the former days of Bertha with the behemoths and Bill with the bike. In fact, you could say things have gone to the dogs.