Beer And Engineering - The Perfect Dock

First published April 22, 2005

The Egyptians engineered the Pyramids. The Romans engineered the Coliseum. Somebody or other apparently engineered Stonehenge. And a couple of weeks ago, my friend Tom and I engineered The Dock.

For us The Dock represents a sacred ritual of spring – kind of like sacrificing a goat, only with a little less bloodshed, and you don’t get any lamb chops when you’re done. It’s a ritual we like to perform just as early in the season as we possibly can.

Now any rational individual – and by “rational individual” I mean “my wife” – might question the logic in putting on a pair of waders and spending hours splashing around in 40˚ water, when we could simply wait a few weeks until the water gets warm.

Huh!

So anyway, on the first halfway decent Saturday every spring Tom and I assemble all the essential dock-installing equipment – a couple of wrenches and a six pack – and go to work.

The first step is to lay out a careful plan. This consists mostly of gesturing with the neck of a beer bottle toward a pile of poles and saying, “I don’t remember those. Were they here last year?”

Next comes the installation of the ceremonial First Section. This always takes quite a while, because it requires leveling the bank and building a solid foundation of rocks and old coke cans, then firmly setting the first set of poles. After this, we often get as many as three or four additional sections put in before the whole deal collapses.

Gazing at the wreckage, we develop a theory that if we just had a different kind of bracket thingy and a better brand of beer, the whole job would be much more efficient. A trip to the store and several hours of changing bracket thingies later, we’re back in the water gazing at more wreckage.

Following much discussion and pointing with the necks of bottles, we discover that the new bracket thingies are the exact same kind we threw away last year because they kept making the whole deal collapse.

And so it goes. Finally, after many more hours and trips to the store, we have what might potentially be a sound dock structure. The only remaining step is to send one of the kids walking out there to test it.

Now you may wonder why this Beer and Engineering process remains so complicated year after year. If you don’t, our wives sure do. “It seems like you two idiots would eventually get a clue,” is how they express it. Our response is very simple – don’t hold your breath.

And so, in the gathering dusk the following conversation marks the end of every successful dock building project:

“Man, what a great dock,” I say.

“It sure is,” says Tom.

(The sound of bottles clinking together in a victory toast.)

“Let’s label all the parts so we know just how to do it next year.”

“Great idea! And we’ll take pictures of everything, so we’ll have a record of exactly how it all goes together.”

“Right. But we can do that later. We have all summer.”

(The sound of bottles clinking together in another toast.)

Send me your own Beer and Engineering story. My email is mike@learnedsofar.com.

Copyright © 2005 Michael Ball