Last week, I saved a boat during lunch.
It was a pretty pathetic boat though. It didn’t fit in with the other aluminum boats with their shiny motors and fancy green paint that surrounded it. It was just a small rowboat; it reminded me of the boat I used to row around a small cove in Maine , except this one didn’t have any oarlocks. Or oars. And it wasn’t painted. And its plywood sides were coming apart. And it had about 6 inches of water in the bottom. And there was nowhere to tie it on to anything.
I think maybe it had saved itself, as it was floating unattached in the water wedged between a boat and the pier. I just spotted it and realized it wasn’t attached, so I pushed it around a little with my foot (almost falling in the water in the process) and then decided to go find the elusive marina staff, who took care of the rest.
Today, it sat on the land right in front of me, and I sat and stared at it curiously, as I slowly ate my lunch. Where could this boat have come from? How did it end up here? Who would possibly use this boat? I wondered.
My first thought, admittedly, was images of Cuban refugees trying to survive the 90 miles of open seas that separate them with Florida . Being as I live in Northern Virginia, this is probably not the case – unless people are escaping the horrors of Fairfax County . I’m not ruling it out though. It is conceivable that the Cubans got swept off course and this is where they ended up… I mean, it is missing its oarlocks after all.
Then I thought it must be a ghost ship. Not in the sense that it’s captained by the dead who are now roaming the land, but maybe it had sunk somehow and something recently – a rain storm maybe – has unsettled it and it rose from the murky depths. The standing water, the damaged sides… it all adds up.
So my mind moved on and I started wondering if it had a name. All the other boats around there have names like PW13265 or PW13476… boring names, if you ask me. I figure I’m the one that found it so maybe the staff that I talked to would approach me in hopes of naming it after me, the John Duffy. I think I’d have to say no. Even the most pathetic of boats deserves to be named, but I’m holding out for nothing less than a bridge. The John Duffy Bridge . It would be great… although something tells me that perhaps the pathetic little boat would be more fitting.
It was a pretty pathetic boat though. It didn’t fit in with the other aluminum boats with their shiny motors and fancy green paint that surrounded it. It was just a small rowboat; it reminded me of the boat I used to row around a small cove in Maine , except this one didn’t have any oarlocks. Or oars. And it wasn’t painted. And its plywood sides were coming apart. And it had about 6 inches of water in the bottom. And there was nowhere to tie it on to anything.I think maybe it had saved itself, as it was floating unattached in the water wedged between a boat and the pier. I just spotted it and realized it wasn’t attached, so I pushed it around a little with my foot (almost falling in the water in the process) and then decided to go find the elusive marina staff, who took care of the rest.
Today, it sat on the land right in front of me, and I sat and stared at it curiously, as I slowly ate my lunch. Where could this boat have come from? How did it end up here? Who would possibly use this boat? I wondered.
My first thought, admittedly, was images of Cuban refugees trying to survive the 90 miles of open seas that separate them with Florida . Being as I live in Northern Virginia, this is probably not the case – unless people are escaping the horrors of Fairfax County . I’m not ruling it out though. It is conceivable that the Cubans got swept off course and this is where they ended up… I mean, it is missing its oarlocks after all.
Then I thought it must be a ghost ship. Not in the sense that it’s captained by the dead who are now roaming the land, but maybe it had sunk somehow and something recently – a rain storm maybe – has unsettled it and it rose from the murky depths. The standing water, the damaged sides… it all adds up.
So my mind moved on and I started wondering if it had a name. All the other boats around there have names like PW13265 or PW13476… boring names, if you ask me. I figure I’m the one that found it so maybe the staff that I talked to would approach me in hopes of naming it after me, the John Duffy. I think I’d have to say no. Even the most pathetic of boats deserves to be named, but I’m holding out for nothing less than a bridge. The John Duffy Bridge . It would be great… although something tells me that perhaps the pathetic little boat would be more fitting.
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