(Note: The following essay is excerpted from Chapter 8 of the non-fiction book “Leftovers From the Feast”, which was published in 2013. That chapter was authored by James P. Blahnik and edited by Fred Blahnik.)
However, the one project which caused me to dream and scheme more than any other was to possess a boat……yes, Reader, you did hear me correctly—a BOAT!!!
But, y’know, this dream of mine was not as far-fetched and outlandish as it may sound at first blush. I suppose a little background information is in order at this point to clarify the issue:
There was a pond out behind the barn on our ostentatious hacienda back by Austin. It usually had at least some water in it, depending on the season and the prevailing weather patterns. The pond was about one hundred and fifty to two hundred feet in diameter during average times and swelled to two or three times that size during the spring thaw or after a notably heavy rain.
However, during dry periods the pond devolved into a bonsaied muddy mess where our herd of cows busily stomped about, trying desperately to keep their bodies cool at the same time they vainly attempted to thwart the ubiquitous flies which seemed to pester them unceasingly. The reader can probably readily understand how a Tom Sawyer/Huck Finn-thinking Jimmy Blahnik, who had already acquired a Paul Bunyan-sized reputation by blazing a trail through our impenetrable Blahnik jungle, saw this inconsequential body of water as huge and adventuresome……but also badly in need of a boat!
My first inclination was to obtain a boat that was already built. I was probably eleven or twelve years old when our Blahnik family visited the Ashton farm that was located near the small thorp of Ramsey. The rear of their farm abutted the “mighty” Cedar River.
At that point in my life, I considered the Cedar to be roughly equivalent to the not-so-distant Mississippi River in terms of sheer size and commercial importance. For all I knew, the one-of-a-kind Titanic, in all its glorious splendor, would have had plenty of “arm room” as well as sufficient draft to come sailing up the Cedar River’s main channel if it hadn’t first met its match against that rogue iceberg in the North Atlantic in April of 1912. Anyway, for some reason during the course of our visit we menfolk hiked back by the river; we also spent a small amount of time walking alongside an adjacent railroad track.
Lo and behold, I very nearly shit my pants and swallowed my tongue the moment I spied a half-submerged old wooden boat down amongst the weeds along the railroad—just lying there in shallow, swampy water!
I remember excitedly asking Ashtons if it belonged to anybody and they replied “No”–that it had only recently floated randomly into the area from points unknown.
A luminous light bulb immediately flashed on in my head. If this valuable boat I was staring bug-eyed at didn’t belong to anybody…….then that logically meant it could be mine to claim!!
But–and this was a really BIG but, I know–how on Earth would I ever get the prized watercraft back home to our farm–a distance of about a mile and half by way of the railroad right-of-way……before subsequently having to traverse the township road leading to our place?
I first thought about trying to build a crude trailer out of two tall steel wheels I had seen lying around our farm. I envisaged that I could push/pull my unique invention the mile and a half to Ashtons, somehow rescue the half-rotted, dilapidated boat from its watery grave amongst the reeds, load it onto the wheeled contraption unassisted using just my own two pre-teen hands, and finally haul it triumphantly home on the back of my innovative trailer.
By the way, I didn’t share this fabulous plan with my family, for I knew there would be an instant veto by the staid, overly conservative Mom and/or Dad if they ever caught wind of my audacious brainstorm. I might even have tried secretly facilitating my carefully considered scheme, too, had I not harbored an irrational fear of a train zooming by on the tracks just as I was in the process of crossing them during my journey home. I fretted that I wouldn’t be able to get my cumbersome, steel-wheeled conveyance bearing a rotten boat off the tracks quickly enough to avoid being hit by an onrushing mechanical monster.
And so, alas, that ingenious plan hatched in a young boy’s fertile mind died a tortuous natural death while still clinging to the vine…...
In the meantime, I had come into possession of an old woodworking book that I believe was going to be thrown away by our teacher at fabled School District #101, the rural lyceum I regularly attended as a young lad. This book contained multiple plans for items that could be built exclusively from wood, including the previously mentioned treehouse. There was one plan which really caught my eye, however–a boat. Yes, yes, an actual boat that could be readily constructed by a beginning woodworker.
EUREKA!!!!!
I rejoiced unrestrainedly inside as I hurriedly perused over the instructional diagrams; this…..THIS ethereal thing was definitely the answer to all my pre-pubescent dreams……
But Reader, make sure you bear this pertinent thought in mind before you start making false assumptions and get too hysterical over my unexpected good fortune: The plans in the discarded book didn’t call for a sleek racy boat, to be sure, but rather a simple utilitarian vessel that would be relatively easy to build. Having said that, the tiny boat in question would quite admirably serve my decidedly unpretentious maritime purposes.
Thinking back now from a salty old sailor’s perspective, that damned craft was admittedly pretty ugly–a flat-bottomed design featuring an identical blunt hull on both ends. In other words, the uber-elementary boat was little more than a plain rectangular wooden tub, and one didn’t want to accidentally misplace your bearings while captaining the floating crate lest you lose track of whether you were coming or going!
After copious reading, studying and then restudying the building plans, and considering every conceivable angle relative to the engineering design for weeks–it was officially time to begin construction!
One enormous problem manifested right away though. The same nettlesome problem that unwaveringly stood in the way of any boyhood project I ever considered back on our home farm: Building materials!
As I alluded to earlier insofar as my frustrating struggles to build a humble cabin on our backwoods farm, building materials were inordinately scarce around home, especially lumber. Yes, true, there were numerous lumber yards sprinkled throughout the immediate area that were stocked with all types of wood, but the acquisition of said required something which I had virtually none of, namely money. And about the only time Dad broke down and bought any new lumber was if we purchased a board or two for a 4-H project just before the Mower County Fair began its annual run in early August.
Ergo, I had to search and scavenge around our farm like a starving vulture in order to find somewhat suitable building materials for the dream boat I was envisioning.
For several years running, I had been ogling one particular board lodged within a partition in our upstairs granary which automatically captured and thereupon kidnapped my undivided attention. It was unquestionably the widest board I had ever seen; the hippopotamic piece of wood must have measured at least thirty inches wide by ten feet long. This outlandish specimen especially met my construction needs, because a board that wide would naturally result in a lot fewer joints between the individual components on the critical underside of the boat. And that point was crucial, after all, given the fact my primary and paramount concern was to make the craft I was building as watertight and seaworthy as physically possible.
Thus–without consulting Dad or asking his opinion (Only a darned fool would risk being turned down!)–I took a crowbar and the exquisitely wide board was henceforth liberated from its boring, unrewarding job in the granary and immediately promoted to the more glamorous assignment of becoming the nucleus for my new boat’s bottom. I subsequently scrounged around our farm and managed to locate a few more boards–again without soliciting Dad’s grumpy counsel–although they were of much poorer quality and much more diminutive than my prized ultra-wide one.
The plans in my woodworking book called for the boat to be about four feet wide and six and a half feet long. Those instructions stridently stressed the importance of making tight, concise joints and cutting the necessary boards with a bevel so they would come together at an angle, thus ensuring a greater surface-to-surface interface with correspondingly tighter fits.
Unfortunately, the only tools I had available in my limited arsenal were a hammer and a rusty cross-cut handsaw. I sighed despairingly to myself. Oh well, minus the unlikely event some Good Samaritan might drive into our remote Blahnik farmstead and gift me with a brand new complete set of tools, I grunted in displeasure and resigned myself to the fact my two basic woodworking friends would have to suffice for the job at hand.
So I next clandestinely gathered my few boards and tools together in the hay mow of our barn and began construction of the boat in earnest. I sawed as surely and as straight as I possibly could under the difficult circumstances I faced and fit the cut pieces together as tightly as I could squeeze them. Yet when I finished assembling the main structure of my watercraft, I could see a fair amount of daylight between its various joints.
Not good if I expected the thing to float!!
The plans did mention that one could caulk any exposed cracks by wedging oakum (an oily, ropelike, fibrous material) into them. It should go without saying by now we didn’t have any oakum lying around unused on our Blahnik farm either, so in lieu of that “expensive” luxury I substituted old rags wedged into the boat’s cracks and thereby held in place by nailing wooden laths over the top of them. I was not overly concerned about any tiny cracks that might be left, because I was holding in reserve my top-secret weapon: PAINT!!!
I knew from experience that paint applied liberally would really seal everything as tight as a bug in a rug. After much sleuthing and scrounging around the farm, I did somehow manage to find an unused gallon of old paint (Bless my lucky stars—I just found a needle in a fuckin’ haystack!!!), and to say I really slopped it on the exterior of my crude vessel would be a preposterous understatement.
When that thick “layer” of paint was finally dry, it was time for the official launching of the U.S.S. James Blahnik. I proceeded to surreptitiously drag my runty boat to the edge of our pond and shoved it into the muddy water with an appropriate flourish.
Guess what?
Not surprisingly, the craft wasn’t entirely watertight, but a couple more of my trusty laths nailed snugly to it in strategic locations limited that leakage to a nominal amount.
SUCCESS!!!!!!!!
Jim Blahnik—–you, my friend, my Einstein with a hammer and saw……..YOU are an undisputed woodworking genius and deserving of a patent on your magnificent rowboat design! Moreover, the company that makes wooden laths should automatically grant you a small ownership stake in their corporation considering all the business you have just given them. I very nearly dislocated my right shoulder that fantastical afternoon from patting myself on the back so strenuously and so often..…
Of course, following that historic maiden voyage any self-respecting sailor would demand a suitable dock for tethering his valuable watercraft to when it wasn’t in use. Hence, I went ahead and constructed about a ten-foot pier extending into the pond so my boat could be safely boarded in “deep” water–in this instance approximately two to three feet. There was something of a channel that ran from the pond toward the field to the north which served to drain water from the main body of water after a heavy rain.
In order to keep the pond as deep as possible, I next threw on my Army Corps of Engineers cap and dammed this channel with an array of old posts scavenged from around our farmyard, and then fortified them with a mess of mud and dirt which I carried to the immediate area. By this time–extraordinarily tired and physically exhausted–I knew exactly how an industrious beaver must feel at the end of a hard-working day!
Yet with periodic repairs, this improvised dam worked remarkably well. And to my complete surprise and to add icing onto the proverbial cake, Dad–who I never got the impression thought that highly of my pastime as a landlocked mariner, nor did he appreciate the glut of time I was devoting to highbrowed yachting when I could have been helping out substantially more around our financially-challenged family farm–even thanked me profusely for making the tract of land in question more easily farmed, since not as much water drained into the adjoining field and that section was consequently far less muddy and correspondingly more tillable.
I accepted the Old Man’s thanks graciously and with a straight face, of course, but didn’t bother telling him my real reason for the labor-intensive “conservation” project was only to acquire more water for my recreational boating. Truthfully, I could not have cared less about any serendipity that may have overflowed to him or his dreary farm!
My distinctive boat resided in the pond behind our barn through every season for a number of years after that. We older Blahnik kids would use a wooden pole to push ourselves around the picayune body of water from time to time, akin to the early nineteenth century party of Lewis and Clarke trailblazers who fought the powerful currents of the Missouri River on their historic upriver trek to the Pacific Ocean.
Fishing?
Nah, there weren’t any fish in that muddy little pond, because some years it damned near dried up if there was anything remotely approaching a drought.
Waterskiing? Kneeboarding? Inner-tubing?
No, we couldn’t afford the pricey equipment to do any of that extravagant stuff either. Like I said, we only used my one-of-a-kind miniature yacht for leisurely recreational sailing in the summertime, and it served that singular purpose meritoriously for myriad years.
As I aged and moved into high school, however, my interest in boating waned considerably. I grew to strongly prefer participating in the organized sports offered by the school I attended in the neighboring town of Rose Creek, as well as tooling around the Austin vicinity in one of the many cars I later owned (and which I discussed in detail in an earlier chapter of this book). And, you know, I don’t honestly remember exactly whatever became of my old homemade boat…..my prized youthful creation……
My best guess is the brutal Minnesota weathering process worked hard to accelerate its natural deterioration over time, and then the unassuming vessel probably met its ultimate demise under legions of trampling hooves fueled by the aforementioned cattle that were always jostling around the moist pond area during the dry “dog days” of summer.
Poor little thing. I imagine the Smithsonian Museum in Washington, DC is still ruing the fact they cannot display my classic watercraft within their hallowed halls……
Fred's Soapbox 