Dock Tales – The Fall

First published October 21, 2005

It’s October, so a lot of people around here have already taken their stuff out of the water and stored it away for the winter. These are the same people who didn’t put their stuff in until the weather was warm enough that there was at least a remote chance someone would want to use it.

Weird, huh?

My friend Tom and I have a slightly different philosophy. We like to think of ourselves as pioneers, braving the extremes at both ends of the season as our own modest way of pushing back the Boundaries of Human Endeavor.

Not procrastination – Boundaries of Human Endeavor. Honest.

As a side note, does it seem fair to you that our friends who live in Florida don’t have to take their docks in and out? This is because it doesn’t freeze in Florida. At any time of the year, all they have to do to enjoy their lakes is go out and shoo the alligators off the jet ski hoist.

Lucky devils.

Anyway, last spring when Tom and I put the dock in, we left a few small details that we knew were not quite perfect. There were a couple of cracked boards. A few of the poles were a little bent. The last fifty feet or so looked like we lined them up by tossing the poles and dock sections out of a helicopter.

“Relax,” we’d told each other, basking in the optimistic sunshine of the springtime afternoon, “we’ve got all summer to tidy it up.”

Well, sometime in June the cracked boards began to give way completely, so walking out to the boat became a little like playing a game of hopscotch in a minefield. In July the bent poles slipped, so from that point on you pretty much had to use climbing gear and safety ropes to traverse those spots. By about mid-August we’d come to think of the act of reeling down the zigzags toward the end of the dock as a sort of personal folk dance.

Around the beginning of September our rationalization had subtly shifted from “We’ve got all summer…” to “Well, the season’s almost over…”

And so, on a beautiful Saturday afternoon a few weekends ago we were standing on the dock, clinging to a pole to keep from sliding off, and Tom said, “You know, we really ought to think about taking the dock out.”

“Yes,” I replied, “we certainly should.”

“So, you want to go skiing?”

“Sure.”

As the autumn days rolled by we would spend more and more time each weekend carefully gauging the weather, monitoring the changing water temperature, calculating the lengths of the days, and discussing taking the dock out. Then we would decide to go and do something else.

And now we’ve started the job. So far we’ve spent one weekend dragging the hoists up on shore, then gesturing with our beer bottles at where we want to stack everything else. Next weekend the dock itself comes out.

You know, I think it’s that above-mentioned Boundaries-Of-Human-Endeavor thing that compels us, after waiting until the water is really, really cold, to tackle the job in leaky waders. These are the same waders, coincidentally, that we intended to replace after freezing in them last spring.

After all, we had all summer…

Copyright © 2005 Michael Ball