by Farley Mowat
Father was able to paddle Concepcion (more or less) on the river, but that mean-natured trickle gave him no opportunity to sail. Since it was sailing he really craved, he was forced to look for other waters, and one week end he announced that we would visit Manitou Lake – a vast saline slough that lies some hundred miles from Saskatoon.
Manitou is one of the saltiest bodies of water in the world and Concepcion was not designed to float in a medium that was hardly more fluid than molasses. She would have no part of Manitou. When we launched her, she hardly wet her keel, but sat on the surface of the lake like a duck upon a slab of ice.
My father was annoyed by her behavior and set about forcing his will upon her by loading her with rocks. It took an unbelievable number of boulders to force her down to her marks, and when Father and I finally clambered aboard, it was to find her about as maneuverable as a concrete coffin floating in gelatin. The water in which she stuck was so thick with salt that I could almost hear the stuff rasping on her sleek sides. And when we hoisted the sail, the wind had as little effect upon her as it would have had upon the Carnegie-built walls of the Saskatoon Public Library itself.
My father was infuriated by Concepcion’s lack of response, and unwisely began to jettison the ballast. He had heaved half a dozen large boulders overside when the canoe decided she had had enough. One gunwale rose buoyantly while the other sank, and in short seconds we were floating on a serene sea, while below us Concepcion was slowly dragged toward the bottom by her bellyful of stone.
We were in no danger. It was physically impossible for an unweighted human body to sink in Manitou Lake. On the contrary, we rode so high out of the water that we had trouble navigating to the nearby shore. And when we came to salvaging Concepcion, who lay in some ten feet of water, the unnatural qualities of Manitou posed a serious problem. We found that we simply could not dive. It was a most eerie experience, for we could not force ourselves more than a foot below the surface. In the end, Father had to weight himself – like a South Sea pearl diver – with a basket full of stones. Clinging to this with one hand, he managed to reach the sunken ship and fasten a line to a thwart. Then he rather thoughtlessly let go of the basket. He came up from the depths like a playful salmon leaping after a fly, shot half out of the water, and fell back with a resounding thwack that must have hurt him almost as much as had Concepcion’s behavior.
But, in the end, the frustrations which beset my father’s desire to sail again were no match for his perseverance. In August of that memorable year we hitched the caravan to Eardlie, placed Concepcion on the roof, and went off on a dogged search for sailing waters. And we found them. Far to the north, in the jack-pine country beyond Prince Albert, we came to a place called Emma Lake, and it was an honest lake, filled with honest water, and caressed by amiable winds.
We launched Concepcion with trepidation – for there had been so many unfortunate episodes in the past. Then we climbed aboard, and hoisted sail.
It was the kind of day that graces the western plains, and only them. The sky was crystalline and limitless, and the hard sun cut the surface of the lake into a myriad of brilliant shards. Flocks of black terns swirled in the westerly breeze that came down on us from the pine forests and gently filled Concepcion’s sail, bellowing it into a curve as beautiful as any wing. She came alive.
We sailed that day – all of it, until the sun went sickly behind the blue shield of smoke from distant forest fires, and sank away taking the breeze with it. And we sailed aboard a little ship whose swift and delicate motion was more than sufficient reward for the rebuffs that we had suffered.
10
THE CRUISE OF
THE COOT
y father was not the only man in Saskatoon to know the frustrations and hungers of a landlocked sailor. There were a good many other expatriates from broad waters in the city, and he came to know most of them through his work, for on the library shelves was one of the finest collections of boating books extant. Some of my father’s staff – who did not know a boat from a bloat – were inclined to take a jaundiced view of the nautical flavor of the annual book-purchase list, but, after all, he was the chief librarian.
Aaron Poole was one of those who appreciated my father’s salted taste in books. Aaron was a withered and eagle-featured little man who had emigrated from the Maritime Provinces some thirty years earlier and who, for twenty-nine years, had been hungering for the sound and feel of salt water under a vessel’s keel. The fact that he had originally come from the interior of New Brunswick and had never actually been to sea in anything larger than a rowboat during his maritime years was not relevant to the way Aaron felt. As a Maritimer, exiled on the prairies, he believed himself to be of one blood with the famous seamen of the North Atlantic ports; and in twenty-nine years a man can remember a good many things that ought to have happened. Aaron’s memory was so excellent that he could talk for hours of the times when he had sailed out of Lunenburg for the Grand Banks, first as cabin boy, then as an able-bodied seaman, then as mate, and finally as skipper of the smartest fishing schooner on the coast.
Aaron’s desire to return to the sea grew as the years passed, and finally in 1926, when he was in his sixty-fifth year, he resolved his yearnings into action and began to build himself a vessel. He married off his daughters, sold his business, sent his wife to California, and got down to work at something that really mattered. He planned to sail his ship from Saskatoon to New Brunswick – and he intended to sail every inch of the way. He was of that dogged breed who will admit no obstacles – not even geographical ones like the two thousand miles of solid land which intervened between him and his goal.
He designed his ship himself, and then turned the basement of his house on Fifth Avenue into a boat works. Almost as soon as her keel was laid, some well-meaning friend pointed out to Aaron that he would never be able to get the completed ship out of that basement – but Aaron refused to be perturbed by problems which lay so far in the future.
By the time we arrived in Saskatoon, Aaron and his boat had been a standing jest for years. Her name alone was still enough to provoke chuckles in the beer parlors, even among those who had already laughed at the same joke a hundred times. It was indicative of Aaron’s singular disdain for the multitudes that he had decided to name his ship The Coot.
“What’s the matter with that?” he would cry in his high-pitched and querulous voice. “Hell of a smart bird, the coot. Knows when to dive. Knows when to swim. Can’t fly worth a hoot? Who the hell wants to fly a boat?”
Aaron’s tongue was almost as rough as his carpentering, and that was pretty rough. He labored over his ship with infinite effort, but with almost no knowledge and with even less skill. Nor was he a patient man – and patience is an essential virtue in a shipbuilder. It was to be expected that his vessel would be renamed by those who were privileged to see her being built. They called her Putty Princess.
It was appropriate enough. Few, if any, of her planks met their neighbors, except by merest chance. It was said that Blanding’s Hardware – where Aaron bought his supplies – made much of its profit, during the years The Coot was a-building, from the sale of putty.
When my father and Aaron met, The Coot was as near completion as she was ever likely to get. She was twenty-four feet long, flat-bottomed, and with lines as hard and awkward as those of a harbor scow. She was hogged before she left her natal bed. She was fastened with iron screws that had begun to rust before she was even launched. The gaps and seams in her hull could swallow a gallon of putty a day, and never show a bit of it by the next morning.
Yet despite her manifold faults, she was a vessel – a ship – and the biggest ship Saskatoon had ever seen. Aaron could see no fault in her, and even my father, who was not blinded by a creator’s love and who was aware of her dubious seaworthiness, refused to admit her shortcomings, because she had become a part of his dreams too.
Mother and I were expecting it, when one March day Father announced that he was taking a leave of
absence from the library that coming summer, in order to help Aaron sail The Coot to Halifax.
Saskatoon took a keen interest in the project. Controversy as to The Coot’s chances for a successful journey waxed furiously among the most diversified strata of society. The Chamber of Commerce hailed the venture with the optimism common to such organizations, predicting that this was the “Trail-Blazer step that would lead to Great Fleets of Cargo Barges using Mother Saskatchewan to carry Her Children’s Grain to the Markets of the World.” On the other hand, the officials of the two railroads made mock of The Coot, refusing to accept her as a competitive threat in the lucrative grain-carrying business.
But on the whole the city was proud that Saskatoon was to become the home port for a seagoing ship. Maps showing the vessel’s route were published, together with commentaries on the scenic beauties that would meet the eyes of the crew along the way. It was clear from the maps that this would be one of the most unusual voyages ever attempted, not excluding Captain Cook’s circumnavigation of the globe. For, in order to reach her destination, The Coot would have to travel northward down the South Saskatchewan to its juncture with the north branch, then eastward into Lake Winnipeg. From there the route would turn south to leave Manitoba’s inland sea for the waters of the Red River of the North, and the territories of the United States. Continuing southward down the Minnesota River to St. Paul, The Coot would find herself in the headwaters of the Mississippi, and on that great stream would journey to the Gulf of Mexico. The rest of the trip would be quite straightforward – a simple sail around Florida and up the Atlantic Coast to the Gulf of St. Lawrence.
Sailing time (announced by banner headlines in the local paper – MOWAT AND POOLE TO SAIL WITH MORNING TIDE) was fixed for 8 A.M. on a Saturday in mid-June and the chosen point of departure was to be the mud flat which lies near the city’s major sewer outlet on the river. The actual launching had to be postponed a day, however, when the ancient and gloomy prediction that Aaron would have trouble disentombing The Coot from his basement was found to be a true prophecy. In the end, a bulldozer had to be hired and Aaron, with the careless disdain of the true adventurer, ordered the operator to rip out the entire east wall of his house so that The Coot might go free. The crowd which had gathered to see the launching, and which at first had been disappointed by the delay, went home that evening quite satisfied with this preliminary entertainment and ready for more.
Father and Aaron had reason to be thankful for the absence of an audience when they finally eased the vessel off the trailer and into the Saskatchewan. She made no pretense at all of being a surface ship. She sank at once into the bottom slime, where she lay gurgling as contentedly as an old buffalo in its favorite wallow.
They dragged her reluctantly back on shore and then they worked the whole night through under the fitful glare of gasoline lanterns. By dawn they had recalked The Coot by introducing nine pounds of putty and a great number of cedar wedges into her capacious seams. They launched her again before breakfast – and this time she stayed afloat.
That Sunday morning the churches were all but deserted, and it was a gala crowd that lined the river shores to windward of the sewer. The mudbank was the scene of frantic activity. Father and Aaron dashed about shouting obscure orders in nautical parlance, and became increasingly exasperated with one another when these were misunderstood. The Coot waited peacefully, but there were those among us in the crowd of onlookers who felt that she hardly looked ready for her great adventure. Her deck was only partly completed. Her mast had not yet been stepped. Her rudder fittings had not arrived and the rudder hung uncertainly over the stern on pintles made of baling wire. But she was colorful, at least. In his hurry to have her ready for the launching, Aaron had not waited for the delivery of a shipment of special marine enamel, but had slapped on whatever remnants of paint he could find in the bottom of the cans that littered his workshop. The result was spectacular, but gaudy.
Both Aaron and Father had been the recipients of much well-meaning hospitality during the night, and by morning neither was really competent to deal with the technical problem of stowage. The mountain of supplies and gear which had accumulated on the mudbank would have required a whole flock of coots to carry it. Captain and mate bickered steadily, and this kept the crowd in a good humor as the hours advanced and the moment of departure seemed no nearer.
The patience of the onlookers was occasionally rewarded, as when Aaron lost control of a fifty-pound cheese – a gift from a local dairy – and it went spinning off into the flow from the sewer. The audience was entranced. Aaron danced up and down on the mud flat, shrilly ordering his mate to dive in and rescue the cheese, but the mate became openly mutinous, and the situation was only saved by the prompt action of two small boys armed with fishing poles who caught the truant cheese and steered it gently back to shore. They would not touch it with their hands, nor would anyone else, and long after The Coot had sailed, that cheese still sat on the mud flat, lonely and unloved.
Mutt was prominent during these proceedings. He had been signed on as ship’s dog and the excitement attendant on the launching pleased him greatly. When willing hands finally pushed The Coot out into the stream, Mutt was poised on the foredeck, striking an attitude, and he was the first part of the deck cargo to go swimming when the overloaded vessel heeled sharply to starboard and shook herself free of her encumbrances.
The Coot came back to the mudbank once again. Mutt withdrew under the growing mountain of discarded supplies for which there was no room aboard the ship. It was not so much the sewer that had discomfited him, as it was the heartless laughter of the crowd.
Just before noon they sailed at last, and The Coot looked quite impressive as she swung broadside-to under the arches of the New Bridge, accompanied by a flotilla of thirty-six sodden loaves of bread that had fallen through the bottom of a cardboard container which Aaron had retrieved from the wet bilges of the boat, and had incautiously set to dry upon the canted afterdeck.
Riding my bicycle along the shore path, I accompanied them for a mile before waving farewell and then returning to the city, where, with the rest of Saskatoon, I settled down to await reports of The Coot’s progress.
Our newspaper had outdone itself to cover the story properly, for it had enrolled all the ferrymen along the river as special correspondents. The ferries were located every dozen miles or so. They were square scows, fitted with submerged wooden vanes that could be turned at an angle to the current so that the water pressure on them would force the ferries back and forth across the river, guided and held on their courses by steel cables that were stretched from shore to shore just below the surface. The ferrymen were mostly farmers, with little knowledge of wider waters than their own river, so the newspaper representative who visited them (himself a fugitive from a seaport town) had given each of them a careful briefing on the proper manner in which to report commercial shipping.
When, for five full days after The Coot left us, there was not a single report from a ferryman, we began to worry a little. Then on Friday night the operator of the first ferry below the city – some fifteen miles away – telephoned the paper in a state of great agitation to report an object – unidentifiable due to darkness – that had swept down upon him just before midnight and, after fouling the ferry cable, had vanished again to the sounds of a banjo, a howling dog, and a frightful outpouring of nautical bad language.
The mysterious object was presumed to be The Coot, but the reporter who was dispatched to that section of the river at dawn could find no trace of the vessel. He drove on down stream and at last encountered a Ukrainian family living high above the riverbank. The farmer could speak no English and his wife had only a little, but she did the best she could with what she had.
She admitted that she had certainly seen something that morning – and here she stopped and crossed herself. It had looked to her, she said, like an immense and garish coffin that could never have been intended for a mere human corpse. When she saw it f
irst it was being hauled across a broad mud flat by – and she crossed herself again – a horse and a dog. It was accompanied, she continued, by two nude and prancing figures that might conceivably have been human, but were more likely devils. Water devils, she added after a moment’s thought. No, she had not seen what had happened to the coffin. One glance had been enough, and she had hurried back into her house to say a prayer or two before the family ikon – just in case.
The reporter descended to the river and there he found the marks left by the cortege in the soft mud. There were two sets of barefoot human tracks, a deep groove left by a vessel’s keel, and one set each of dog and horse prints. The tracks meandered across the bar for two miles and then vanished at the edge of a navigable stretch of water. All the tracks vanished – including those of the horse. The reporter returned to Saskatoon with his story, but he had a queer look in his eye when he told us what he had seen.
As to what had actually happened during those five days when The Coot was lost to view, my father’s log tells very little. It contains only such succinct and sometimes inscrutable entries as these: Sun. 1240 hrs. Sink. Again. Damn…. Sun. 2200 hrs. Putty all gone. Try mud. No good…. Wed. 1600 hrs. A. shot duck for din., missed, hit cow…. Thurs. 2330 hrs. Rud. gone west. Oh Hell! … Fri. 1200 hrs. Thank God for Horse.
But the story is there nevertheless.
It was in an amiable and buoyant mood that Father and Aaron saw the last of Saskatoon. That mood remained on them for three miles during which they made reasonably good progress, being forced to make for shore – before they sank – only four times. At each of these halts it was necessary to unload The Coot and turn her over to drain the water out. Aaron kept insisting that this would not be necessary in the future. “She’ll soon take up,” he told my father. “Wait till she’s been afloat awhile.”
