My Turn as Village Idiot - Saved by the Rotten Crumple Zone

 Who knew such a heavy ark of a boat could push up so f-ing hard? 

These days, the cage on Compass Rose's propeller area makes an excellent garden sculpture and place for pea vines to climb up. Its intended purpose, though, was to prevent rope and buoys from becoming entangled on the propeller shaft and rapidly creating a many layered bale of gnarled and fused plastic fiber around this important vessel component. 

The cage, made of rusted cast iron and even sturdier barnicles, also looked like something out of Game of Thrones, rather than a hydro-dynamically efficient part of a marine propulsion system. 

My first cruise last June on Compass Rose was at a stately pace; statelier than expected by several knots. This spring, I gathered my courage to take off this maritime equivalent of training wheels in hopes of going faster. Based on how it looked, I would've thought getting rid of the cage would make the boat leap out of the water and run like Forrest Gump with his leg braces off. 

As a result of my bravery, I may have picked up one nautical mile per hour truth be told. I also managed to back over my own buoy last week and picked up my very own many layered bale of gnarled and fused plastic fiber around this important vessel component. 

Having this extra cargo necessitated bringing the boat alongside of the Steamboat Wharf, tying up and waiting for the tide to go out in order to clean her up. Ryan came down and helped with some maintenance tasks, and later, he and Megan cleaned up the hull and attacked the fierce tentacles of the many layer plastic fiber bale. 

The watched tide never rises, so after staring at it a while, I went home. When we came back, the davit, or metal arm that holds the hauling block/pulley had lodged itself under the massive wharf timbers and was completely deaf to my hysterical profanity insisting it dislodge. The timbers were even less reasonable. Megan and I hopped up on the starboard washboard hoping to tip it far enough to slip out. I tried a monkey wrench and every other metal lever I could lay hands on.

Orris and Erin showed up to lend their support by joining us on the washboard, and got the vessel moving to and fro all to no avail. We were seriously stuck.

I've not felt that particular sort of panic before, having the boat stuck and the tide remorselessly inching higher. That panic turned to brickshitting as I watched the wheelhouse frame and fiberglass begin to open up and part ways. I saw the lobstering season over before it really got into high gear. As I wrestled with the stuck davit, I saw fingers amputated or my skull getting caved in from the thing finally letting go with me too close to too much pent up energy and heavy metal items.

The last resort was to fire up the boat, put her in gear and yank her loose, which, duh, I should've done in the first place. 

After safely getting out of the inner harbor, Megan and I went out to clean up and test the hauler. I hauled up a pair of traps which didn't pull the wheelhouse apart after all. 

Some nervous observation over the next day of hauling and several trawls through boxes of metal this and that in my barn, the Owen barn and Clayton's shop presented some solutions. A couple of 90° braces here, fresh screws there, tighten the steel plate holding the works together and a very stout piece of stainless steel running vertically up the length of the unhappy places and I think it's at least as sturdy as before the mishap. 

As much as the rotten spot on the wheelhouse frame has bugged me since I bought the boat, it may have acted as a sacrificial crumple zone and helped absorb some of the force. 

I will probably not stop looking at the cracked places, but for now, we're good again. 

Dark Objects Lurking in the Center of the Galaxy

 ‘If you want to make God laugh, tell him your plan.’ To which I say ‘if you want to make God piss her pants in hysterics, tell her your plan for fixing something in an old house.

For a couple years after moving in to the house at 33 South Road, I had no real idea what was in the barn. There was a canyon running through to the oil tanks and a little storage space on the right. 

The rest of the space was packed with scrap metal, furniture, tangled bits of dead fishing gear, lumber scraps and uncategorized debris. As I began picking through the periphery, I was unaware that lurking further in were dark, obscure and extremely dense objects at the center of the galaxy. 

These consisted of a half dozen steam power era woodworking tools. Not the brightly colored Ryobi, Makita or DeWalt types, but massively built planers, lathes, bandsaws and a drill press. I had no use for these things, which I believe were operated by a system of overhead belts and pulleys supplied with power at one source, perhaps a steam engine or team of oxen. I did, however, have plenty of use for the space they occupied. 

Some devices could be slid, walked, crowbarred or pried out of the barn, but a couple of them required an excavator to snake its hydraulic strong-arm into the barn and lift them out. 

When the floor was cleared, it was evident that even if these dense cores didn’t bend spacetime, they certainly bent the barn floor. Crushed would be more accurate. The deep divot also bounced a good bit. 

The floor has been bugging me for a number of years now and I figured (which is where God starts in to chuckling) that I could just pull up the broken floorboards, splice a couple of joists in, replace the floorboards and have a beer while admiring my fine work.

The first length came up easily enough, but only revealed another layer of planking running perpendicular to the upper layer. This may seem crazy, but pulling up other floorboards showed more of the exact same planking down below. 

Well.      Ok.      So I’ll take up some of both layers and fix the collapsed joists, right? Mmmm. Except that over here is a column on top of both layers of floor which seems to be supporting a carrying beam. And another one over here. So, if these were removed, I would a) have a lot more work just to get at the problem, and b) possibly find myself wearing the upper level of the structure.

Next is the search for a demo blade to fit my reciprocating saw, and some exploratory surgery on the worst affected area. The reveal was not encouraging. 

There is often a point in any challenging project where I think of just covering everything back over and quietly walking out backwards, whistling offhandedly and finding something else to do.  

What I found was that my forebears thought it was ok to just lay support beams on dirt, and that the support beams mostly didn’t exist any more. 

Longer pause this time. Yup, looks the same from over on this side. 

To filibuster, I started digging the dirt and rocks out and hoping the subconscious would craft me a plan. In addition to many five gallon buckets of dirt and good sized hunks of granite, there were an old drill bit, a number of bones, a vertebra section and what I believe was a horse’s tooth. 

Better has to be good enough this time. Short of rebuilding the entire bottom half of the structure, the best I could come up with was to prop the new joists up on bricks and roofing shingles and jack the floor up as far as possible, then nail it all together again. 

Once the new stringers were stood in place and elevated, everything else went back together in a half hour or so. I suppose to some extent I was just sewing the patient back together with a shorter term fix, but better is good enough.

The swooping contour is mostly straightened and the trampoline effect is gone. I wouldn’t want to set up a billiard table there or try to store a giant cast iron lathe, but balance has mostly been restored in the galaxy. 

Showers when one is caked filthy and sore are way more satisfying than ones before an office day. 

Nat & Megan’s Excellently Painful Bike Adventuree.

June 21, the first day of summer, 2022, started cold and drizzly. Our cabin on the southern shore of Prince Edward Island was dry and cozy with just a modest twist of the thermostat. Sounds came out of us as we loaded up; grunt-mutters of doubt and loathing about our plan to bike from Charlottetown in the center of the island to Georgetown on the far eastern shore. We’d booked ourselves at a historic inn there, imaginatively named the Historic Georgetown Inn. 

The route had seemed straightforward enough on one map I’d found online, and would be 30 some miles long, which didn’t seem terribly ambitious. We’d planned to take advantage of the lovely Confederation Trail- a network of repurposed railroad lines. Online literature and videos had the trails looking smooth and firmly packed, with no steep hills and kilometers of smiling enjoyment to come. 

The day before, we’d stopped into Outer Limits Sports to check on our rentals and the wisdom of our plan. The chap who assisted us was friendly enough in an offhand and slightly airhead manner. He failed to advise us of some key pieces of information, such as that we were stupid and destined for a lengthy, painful and tedious experience. He did, however, correct my map reading and, with the aid of a scalable online trail map, upwardly revise the kilometer count of our route from 50 to 71. This didn’t seem overwhelming from the comfort of the bike shop and the comfort of not having done it yet. Bikeshop Chap also failed to note that even though the trails are smooth, hard packed with very small bore gravel and never exceed a 3% grade, they are still considerably more laborious to travel than pavement. The cumulative drag of billions of sunflower seed sized pebbles will be felt in my ass for some time and my soul forever. 

Common sense deserted us, and we arrived at Outer Limits in the chilly drizzle at 9-ish. Chap quickly acquainted Megan with the operation of the electrically assisted bike she didn’t reserve; the different modes, what the buttons on the controller do, the LCD screen. He then started briefing me on the road bike that Megan didn’t reserve for me. With tires the width of my middle toe, I didn’t trust it on soft shoulders or retired railroad beds.

Having straightened things out and leaving the car in the Papa John’s parking lot where apparently there is good police camera coverage, we set off with that optimistic kid energy which typically lasts a good 20 minutes, or, until such time as one is crossing a busy 8 lane intersection frequented by large trucks and discovers a very flat tire. 

I pumped up Megan’s front tire after a good bit of quietly profane bewilderment about which tube and threaded bit of the pump went where, and suggested riding back toward the shop to see if it held air. A few minutes later and at regular intervals thereafter, the ritual was repeated.

Bike Dude offered no apologies but did want us to know that not only did he replace the tube and tire, but that he put a new wheel rim on as well because ‘something was up’ with the other wheel and he didn’t want to send us back out with it. 

An hour or so later and covering the same territory 3 times instead of once, we were off. Out of the city, past the sequence of city buildings to box stores to paving company tar pits and gravel yards, we cruised through the green tunnel of former rail line alongside potato, wheat, corn and hayfields and dark green woods full of mosquitos eager to demonstrate the vigor imparted by such a wholesome climate. 

The soil is just to the pink side of terra-cotta when it’s dry. The most accurate description I can come up with is those circus peanut marshmallow candies that mostly no one remembers until they’re trying to describe this color. 

The rail lines crossed roads every so often; some paved and some apparently surfaced with circus peanut candies, which are, as I recall, tough enough to stand up to tractor tires. I relished the sneakiness of darting across a civilized road into the next tunnel of isolated green and of hungry buzzing. 

I did not enjoy the fact that even though a kilometer is quite a bit shorter than a mile, pain has a telescopic effect on my perception of distance. 

Here I come to the not-so-fun truth. Even though biking fills you with feelings of freedom and youth, it hurts your ass. It hurts wicked, wicked fucking bad. Even with ridiculous looking gel-filled prosthetic ass cheek pants, it fucking hurts Wicked Fucking Bad. 

And so kilometers become Kill-Ass-O-Meters. As beautiful as the woods, fields, bogs and an endless salt marsh were, it was a great relief to reach the not quite half way point and scarf a very messy cheeseburger at the Mount Stewart Welcome and Interpretive Center and Snack Bar. 

Over the course of the afternoon and its additional 3 hours and 15 minutes of pedaling, I became highly attuned to tiny bumps, very minor grades, almost imperceptible if one was walking, and to which part of the trail might be the least resistant to forward motion. My favorite bit of scenery was the kilometer markers, passing in slow but regular torment. I also got intimately in touch with my sitting parts. Much experimentation with minute changes fore, aft, port, starboard and weight distribution would give a short bit of relief, say 45 seconds until it was time to adjust the rotisserie.

I made a discovery. I could put the bike in its highest gear, pedal standing up for a few revolutions, then stay standing up with the pedal cranks horizontal. This gave some actual relief to one section of my anatomy, but by the time we were down grading into Georgetown 8 hours after we’d first left, had transferred the screaming to my knees and leg muscles. 

We cruised over a deserted boardwalk into Georgetown and turned left toward the Historic Georgetown Inn. 

It was, as Megan observed, a Twilight Zone-ish town with very little sign of human life. I was seeing the seaside community in The Birds instead, but in any event, we coasted up to the Inn, which,  even with the signs taped to the door for offseason deliveries, appeared to be in operation. 

“Should we lock the bikes up?”

“No”

I didn’t want to do anything except      nothing. 

The Historic Georgetown Inn is what you’d expect in a remote seaside community plucked out of the 19-early somethings, except that it’s not made up to look old timey, it is old timey. And beautifully so. 

On the way to the Wheelhouse for dinner, I noted that Megan was walking funny.

A hot shower, a poorly seared piece of halibut with a nicely poured zinfandel followed up by a good night’s sleep did wonders. 

Here’s the other big problem with bike tours that bike shop sales representatives don’t ever mention: you have to get back. 

No way were we going to repeat yesterday’s ordeal. The road back over Route 3 and Route 1 was shorter and had the benefit of being paved. It was an easy call, and a much easier ride.

Prince Edward Island seems to be very trucky. After breakfast in Georgetown, we watched a tanker called the Algoma Mariner dispense concrete mix into trucks at the rate of about one semi tractor-trailer load every 30 seconds for longer than we had for spare time. It was one truck onto the wharf and one off every few seconds; a ballet of big, loud diesel propelled industriousness. 

Once on our way, big trucks hurtling past in our direction kept us alert and provided a small boost, while those going the other way created headwinds and gritty teeth. Between farms, logging, tankers full of concrete and the evident construction boom, there were more semis than cars.

All the same, the main roads had us cruising at twice our speed and two thirds of the distance of the railroad bed dirt tracks. 

Along the way the farmland was piercingly bright green with single fields seeming to be 50 or 100 acres lined with a few spruce trees at the margins. Closer to our terminus, the fields ran straight to the ocean.

Getting through road construction and 4 lane rotary, truck and potholed 4 lane bridge mayhem between Strafford and Charlottetown was an adventure of its own, requiring improvised circumnavigation of the strip mall access road maze. I’m writing this, so it came out alright.

The final phase involved first getting lost in a very busy truck rotary, warehouse and fuel station jamb-o-ree, and, after puzzling over the map in an industrial neighborhood, picking up a little section of the Confederation Trail to get us back to the bike shop. After every ass busting kilometer, truck and eye-popping pink field, green pasture and blue cove, and within yards of the tranquility of the dirt trail, I thought I’d hop onto the sidewalk to make the turn, noticed too late that the curb was suddenly 8 inches high instead of 2, changed my mind, but not my trajectory, and wound up dumping myself like an armload of too heavy firewood onto the sidewalk. Charlottetown, particularly the Kensington Street sidewalk now has a piece of me as a souvenir, and I have a bright red skid patch on my right calf in return.